No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it.

Encryption...is a powerful defensive weapon for free people. It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless of who is running the government... It's hard to think of a more powerful, less dangerous tool for liberty.

The inner sort of consumer identity got the best of people. And everybody just wants things for free. And that's created this strange kind of cheapness to everything, where everything becomes throwaway. And people, I think, have started to undervalue things, maybe because there's too much, maybe because it's too easy to make, but I think mostly just because, somehow, that's the pattern that got set. And I think that's regrettable.

We invented our computers in the '80s. We networked them together in the '90s. Now we're giving them eyes, ears and sensory organs. And we're asking them to observe and manipulate the world on our behalf.

It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at the three of us on this show, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.