I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

The thing you have to remember is, oil and gas are commodities, and the more we use them the more the price goes up, like any commodity. Solar, wind - they are technologies, so the more you use them, the more the price goes down.

The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect.

Even if America tomorrow - and it won't happen overnight - but if we did reduce our demand for gas and natural gas and crude oil by a significant degree, that does have an exponential effect on producers in the Middle East, everything else being equal. But if China's demand is growing and India's demand is growing, they are not going back.

Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.

Syria is on the back end of basically a decade-long drought. Over the last decade, farmers and herders have been ravaged in Syria forcing them to give up and move to urban areas. This has put a huge strain on urban resources, and it's surely one of the reasons for the uprising there.

America is the greatest engine of innovation that has ever existed, and it can't be duplicated anytime soon, because it is the product of a multitude of factors: extreme freedom of thought, an emphasis on independent thinking, a steady immigration of new minds, a risk-taking culture with no stigma attached to trying and failing, a noncorrupt bureaucracy, and financial markets and a venture capital system that are unrivaled at taking new ideas and turning them into global products.