I think if you're too concerned with being cool or hip or liked, you can't really make good TV because sincerity and coolness are opposites.

I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.

In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.

Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.

I love crazy names. It comes right from Monty Python and Woody Allen - nothing in the world makes me giggle more than a funny name. It became a thing I started doing when I wrote. If a person came into a store and said, "How much is this apple?" that person would have an insane name.

Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.

Rule number one for the writers when we committed to the jump was: no hoverboards. No one is allowed to pitch that everyone is on hoverboards. It's going to be very very gently sci-fi.