If I were advising President Obama, since he's the one running, I would have made his campaign very simple. I promise that in four years, I will get more Americans, as many as I possibly can, the opportunity and access to some form of post-secondary education. I want more of them to graduate high school with the skill-set of post-secondary education and I want more of them to be able to obtain that post-secondary education. This is the only way we are going to close the income gap.

I don't think a monarchy led by 75- and 80-year-old men [Saudi Arabia] in today's modern world is really sustainable.

America was the funder of petro-dictatorships. We treated all these countries as basically big, large gas stations: Libya station, Iraq station, Iran station, Egypt station, Syria station, and all we asked of them were three things: Keep your palms open, your prices low and don't bother Israel too much, and you can do whatever you want to your own people.

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed

I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear.

We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.

The great thing about cheap natural gas, again it's cheap, and it provides a cleaner alternative to coal. But it's still a fossil fuel, and because it's still a fossil fuel, it still emits carbon.