What made so many people so upset when Steve Jobs died was that he was a kind of combination of daddy - in this relationship between the machine and ourselves - and also he was our guide. He was the one who led us to look into the mirror. He created these devices that became extensions of ourselves. Suddenly, he wasn't going to hold our hand as we went from product to product, which became increasingly about who we were.

I feel that Julian Assange came to be both paranoid and self-regarding in ways that ultimately undermined his own mission.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

In many ways, I'm a big admirer still of Julian Assange. He had balls to do what he did and his motivations in terms of holding the powerful to account are tremendously inspiring to me.

One of the things about Steve Jobs is that he gives us an opportunity to look at the disjuncture between that world and the world he claimed that Apple represented, the "Think different" world of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Gandhi.

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.

In a busy world, even as information is moving so rapidly, we have to learn who to trust in that regard even as we ourselves have to become more critical of the people who we want to trust. It's a weird situation.