It is extraordinary how safe flying has become. You are now statistically more likely to be elected president of the United States in your lifetime than you are to die in a plane crash. What an amazing achievement as a society! But what we end up focusing on are the catastrophic failures that are incredibly rare but happen every now and then.

I love those stretches where I've just been a writer - when I haven't been doing Internet start-ups - where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life.

Nothing really says ... interactivity - which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 - than 'Click here for a picture of my dog.'

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities—a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity—but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.

Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas.

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.