What I'm trying to do is teach people how to actually get individuals in organizations to do the kinds of things to make a difference. It starts with not just studying the mechanics but really understanding how people operate.

Our bureaucracy had excelled at compartmentalizing intelligence - we had a 'need to know' system - but by 2004, it was impossible to foresee what elements of our organization would and would not need to know a given piece of information.

In our society, I see public media as a lever. It pushes people by elevating them and their sights. It brings them into more thinking and understanding, and it brings us together.

The military likes to figure out how to do something, put it in a manual or an operating procedure, and perfect doing it, and have everyone do it the same way. I don't like that.

My advice would be to look at the things you do to make money as ways to inform your work in the end. If our work is to study the human condition, most humans that we are going to be playing aren't going to be artists, so go out and, as I did, learn what it's like to have a 9-to-5 job... Think of it as character study.

It is a career of make-believe, of masks. We all have masks in life.

It destroys the soul to hear that you're all hype, that you have no talent, and that your whole career has been contrived.

For me, it's beautiful when career and passion come together.