If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.

I think the one advantage to a failed - recovering, but a pretty broken - economy, and a lot of broken promises, is that we've pulled the veils from our eyes way earlier than most people do, and realize "Hey, you know what, maybe I should try do this thing that I really care about, and why not spend the time now during my best years to get into knitting, or coding, or swamp boat sailing." And there's this resource called the Internet that's going to provide you with a stage and a library for all of those things.

The problem is these politicians have very, very big interests in being re-elected, and the money that gets them there is provided by people who don't necessarily have the interest of the public in mind.

It turns out the Internet is this amazing resource for everyone who has access to it.

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

The weird thing about reddit is that, for a community its size - now I'm no longer at reddit, but the public traffic numbers that they put out are, I think with the site about eight million unique visitors a month, or every 30 days, which is a fairly big site.

If you imagine Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you can get all those requirements checked off and have all those amazing things that we need to just live lives, but actually get to do the thing that you're really passionate about.