For me, it works best to plan just enough to come up with a good direction to head out in. Then I start down the path as soon as I can, without a very clear idea of what exactly I'm going to end up with. I try to leave a lot of time for flexibility and play and changing direction.

I'm very active in pushing for net neutrality and an open Internet. There are countless other causes I support personally and privately, but I try to keep my public activism fairly focused.

A lot of things get made this way: someone imagines what they want to make, then very carefully plans every step of the process, then sets about making it. That's usually the efficient, reasonable way to get something done, but it limits you to ideas you can think of in advance.

Actually, here is something I'm passionate about that, looking around me, seems like the world at large must not care about as much as I do: craft.

I can have fairly crippling self-criticism. It doesn't really put me in a vulnerable state, I just get glum and intolerable, but it certainly is a vulnerability.

What we did is we went on those parabolic flights, which people like to call the vomit comet. Basically, the plane throws you up into the air and catches you. And for about 30 seconds, you feel like there's no gravity. So what we did was we did a series of eight of those in a row. And every time we landed, we stayed perfectly still for the five minutes in between while the plane is setting up so that we could just continue the routine where we had left off. So the final video you see is all one take. And we seem to be weightless the entire time.

It's the good old paradox of democracy. We are individually pretty small drops in the bucket, but collectively we are all powerful.