After 'Punk'd,' my company Katalyst did a deal with AOL to produce short-form content for the Web. At that time it was a different game. If you got front-page coverage on any popular website, you could probably get a push.

The power of a handwritten letter is greater than ever. It's personal and deliberate and means more than an e-mail or text ever will. It has a unique scent. It requires deciphering. But, most important, it's flawed.

The bigger thing with bitcoin is not bitcoin itself, but what does that decentralized technology really do?

I wanted to be a genetic engineer. That was my goal in college. I wanted to figure out what the codon sequence was that causes replication in a cardio myopathic virus. That was my goal.

I really think that technology has the greatest potential to accelerate happiness of most things in the world

I didn't really go the starving-artist route. I kind of went and did massive, commercial things.

In the movies, you want a good story and characters that are honest, but you are also looking for a good director who can lead the ship. That's how we look at business. Everybody has a great idea for a start-up, and so do their relatives, and they tell me, 'You gotta build it.' I say, 'I have to believe in it.'