In the '30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That's not going to work today.
I think society is both something that's very real and very powerful, but on the whole quite problematic.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
Men and machines are good at different things. People form plans and make decisions in complicated situations. We are less good at making sense of enormous amounts of data. Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing but struggle to make basic judgments that would be simple for any human.
When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.
Every time you write an email, it is in the public domain. There are all these ways where security is not as good as people believe.
Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
How to teach people to do what hasn't been done is a great riddle.
People are worried about privacy, and its one of the reasons people are using a service like SnapChat.
Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that's very different from the present - and that's not fully valued.
I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.
One of my friends started a company in 1997, seven years before Facebook, called SocialNet. And they had all these ideas, and you could be, like, a cat, and I'd be a dog on the Internet, and we'd have this virtual reality, and we would just not be ourselves. That didn't work because reality always works better than any fake version of it.
