Cuba was fantastic, at least just in terms of... Not to romanticize or glorify it, but just seeing a place that had not really been touched by the hand of American capitalism. Because it's a genuinely different place. A lot of times when you travel, things start to feel the same from place to place to place, because the same people own everything all around the world.

It's difficult to overcome what you're getting beamed into your brain by the television every day. The worthlessness of journalism today is just making the country confused and bewildered and lost.

I don't know what the future holds. It seems to be going in a really bad, bad place really quickly, and I don't have the answers and I don't have the solutions and I don't know what's gonna happen to change it. But the continued apathy will only lead to a worse situation for everybody.

I think the two-party system is a complete sham; I think it is designed so that the voters can feel like they have the satisfaction of "throwing those bums out of office" every four to eight years, but without the direction of the country ever significantly changing.

I think revolution is always a little bit possible. I think it won't look or sound anything like what we would expect. But I think revolution is very difficult, and I'm not optimistic for any kind of dramatic change.

Anyone will acknowledge that there's a lot of people other than those who are elected who run the government, and who are in permanent positions, and long-term positions, appointed positions - not voted in by anybody. That kind of gnaws away, I think, at the idea of democracy. The two-party system, again, is an issue. What we see is no desire on behalf of anyone to begin to address these problems.

I think that's always been part of the thinking behind the script, that - and I really tried really hard to impress that upon the staff of the show, the animation staff - to try to get them to understand that we would only be able to get away with what we were writing if the visuals were appealing enough that it was like a balance, and even people who didn't like what they were hearing would still not want to turn away because what they were seeing was so nice. So that was kind of my hunch, and I think it worked.