I love that India has declared dolphins non-human people with all laws that apply to human. I'm fascinated with the alien-ness of that.

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

Anybody who is capable of doing terrible things, you don't want them out in the world, but you can't help but respect their ingenuity and their savvy and their intelligence as they go about their dastardly deeds.

We're looking at a lot of race cars as inspiration for our starships. It's wonderful. It's surreal. I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be a Star Trek writer, so to be able to craft a new iteration of the show with new characters and a whole new adventure and whole new way of telling stories that you haven't been able to tell on Star Trek is honorable and it's a dream come true. It's hard to articulate that.

I think if you are writing something that you are trying to design for someone else to like that is not necessarily you're demographic, it is a much harder road.

I went to school to be a psychiatrist. That's where I was going until I had a teacher-student conference with one of my teachers and there were film school pamphlets, and he said, "You don't belong here. Get out. Go to film school."

I'm always looking for the idea in a scene or the philosophy that makes a scene worth existing beyond exposition.