“Mountainhead” Writer/Director Jesse Armstrong on Tech Bros, Murdoch and AI
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I'm more eager to hear what you think about all this stuff than to hear myself. I have a lot of thoughts about your show. Can I interview you back? Yes, please. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Oscar-nominated, Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, producer, and director Jesse Armstrong. He's best known as the creator of Succession, the series about a family that's strikingly similar to the Murdoch clan.

I did a podcast about Succession, and I had a great time because I love the show. And I talked to Jesse a lot throughout the process and interviewed him many times about his work. I've always thought it's amazing, and the teams he brings together are top level.

Jesse's film directorial debut, Mountainhead, was just released on HBO. It's about four tech bros whose poker weekend turns into a life-or-death battle of the wills. Corey Michael Smith plays Venus, a tech renegade whose AI is allowing users to create undetectable deepfakes. Venus is desperate to convince his buddy Jeff, played by Rami Youssef, to sell him his, quote, good AI to flag the deepfakes before Venus's app gets shut down.

Meanwhile, Randall, the philosopher wannabe investor Papa Bear, played by Steve Carell, is fighting cancer. He's willing to do anything to help Venus so that his AI will help him stave off death. And the host and poorest friend, Super, played by Jason Schwartzman, just wants them to invest in his meditation lifestyle app so he can finally cross the $1 billion net worth mark.

The friends watch on their phones while Venus' AI deepfakes lead to massacres and political assassinations around the world, sparking the friends' imperialistic fantasies along with some unfriendly intergroup competition. It's very funny, very dark, and a sharp analysis of how founders think about their role in society.

Any resemblance to current tech founders like Marc Andreessen or Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman is completely intended. I'm going to talk about all that with Jesse and whether the techno-oligarchy has replaced legacy media giants like Murdoch or not. This is a fun romp with a very smart man, so stay with us. ♪♪♪

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Bye.

Let me start by saying thanks for coming on On. I know Jesse, for people who don't know, I did the Succession podcast, and Jesse was on it several times, which was wonderful. A total pleasure. For me, too. We're going to talk, though, about your latest HBO film, Mountainhead, which is also about the very wealthy, this time the tech bros, which I call technically broken, is what it stands for. And that is what this show is about, technically broken people. Absolutely.

I think the strongest line, and I'll get into more specifics about the movie itself, but I think the strongest line of the entire movie, of which there are many amazing lines, is do we believe in other people?

I know it's not the flashiest line, but it really got me. It got me because they don't, because they don't believe in other people. You also really created this antiseptic world that they live in. And you did that on Succession, Cushions of Wealth, like Kashmir Prison, essentially, was what it felt like. And they live in this universe apart. It's essentially a horror movie, Cabin in the Woods comedy, somehow. Talk about do we believe in other people, that line. Yeah.

Yeah, good. You packed a lot in there and I'm glad you picked up on that and felt it was real. I mean, the phrase I didn't use, which is very current, right, is NPC, non-playing, non-playable characters. And that's almost, it's almost too on the nose to put in, to see the world, a version of the world where you, whether people who are playing and people who aren't, and the people who aren't don't count, is...

Well, that did feel beyond satire, so I didn't put it in. But the, do you believe in other people, I think is a sort of more direct expression of it. I guess I'd also say it's a little bit of a more sympathetic version because I think it is a problem that all of us face.

um to a certain degree is really believing in the reality of the whole rest of the world and um you know the challenge i guess is do i really really believe that and if i do do i act in in that way and i think though the tech

Guys probably don't act in that way, but I'd have to point the finger at myself as well and say, yeah, could I give some more money to charity? Did I need to spend everything I spent on my meal last night on it? So, yeah, I have some...

feelings about these guys, which I'm eager to hear whether there's how much of that remains in yourself. I agree with you. I think they're far too charitable because I don't think they are charitable. I don't think you were. They were empty and empty vessels and non-sympathetic, actually, even though they were trying for it, including the most

possibly sympathetic character, I suppose the Sam Maltman type character of Jaffer, in that I think he's one of the worst characters, actually, because... We'll get into that in a second. But talk about this idea of creating, though you do create a layer, you create sort of...

a Bond look to it. You know, that could be the beginning of any Bond movie. And this separateness, this creation of separateness from everything. Yeah. Finding the location was an absolutely crucial part of the film. And until we got it, nothing really felt like it worked.

Also, nothing could happen. We couldn't hire anyone. We made this on a really tight schedule because I kind of wanted the audience to be in the same bubble of time as I was when I wrote it, which is just earlier in the year, in January, I started writing. Amazing. So, and with this really tight time schedule...

It was kind of hard for me and the rest of the people making the film to believe it was going to happen until two things. One was us finding the location, which was tough to find somewhere that would have, you know, it's kind of like a play in that most of the action happens in one house. So I knew with a little bit of my developing director's brain that I needed a lot of different spaces to be able to shoot. And the other thing was when Steve Carell said yes, which was another thing.

when I was able to sort of convince myself and people who were trying to bring on as everything from caterers to cinematographers, but that this is actually going to happen in like four weeks or whatever crazy timeframe you were suggesting. Where was it set? Where did you? It's set in Utah, same as we shot it. There's reference made to Snowbird, which is a resort just over from Park City. So when you think

about that idea of a play. You just said that. I was going to ask you about it because it's a play. All the horror happens offstage.

And it's in a contained space. Talk about writing it like a play, because that's really what's going on here. Yeah. I grew up with those kind of TV plays in the 70s, 80s and 90s in the UK. That would be, you know, Play for Today. It was a venerable tradition and where a lot of great writers worked. So I admired it. I knew that I wanted to, for the production requirements,

I wanted to try and make it fast. I selfishly didn't want too much of a burden of budget on me, although we do have helicopters and some scale, so the budget grew. But that scope I found...

Thinking of it as a low-budget movie took the pressure off me a little bit. And I just like, by temperament, a condensed time frame and a condensed geographical frame. It personally gets my kind of creative juices going to feel you're going to be in the space and see something develop there.

So, yeah, a bunch of things conspired. And also, exactly as you said, which hasn't been mentioned that much as I've been chatting to people, it is sort of a horror movie. And the camera peeking around pine trees to see a gang and seeing who's going to survive is something everyone will be familiar with from other kinds of work. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the antisepticness of the place. I've gone to so many billionaires' houses and

Not all of them are. They're all beautiful, but most of them feel like a Four Seasons. And I always go, ah, the Four Seasons again. Like, here I am. Because they're comfortable. It's crazy, yeah. And they're interchangeable, right? A hundred percent. And, you know, it's called Mountain Head and references made to Ayn Rand. We did a lot of location scouting. And Ayn Rand, a little bit like NPCs, felt almost too on the nose. But the amount of places that that was the only work of fiction...

on display was truly odd. So it's like, Ian is busting her way in here, whether I want it or not. She is, she is. I've always, I'm often at people, some of these people's houses early in the year and they're like, have you read The Fountainhead? I'm like, no. Like, of course, I'm an educated person and it's not a good book.

So your four main characters here, Randall, Venus, Jeff, and Hugo, also known as Soup for Soup Kitchen because he's the poorest, are very much Silicon Valley archetypes. The philosopher king kind of thing who...

doesn't know a lot, honestly, or mutates history who I've dealt with, I would say that would be Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel. Feels very like that. The main character is Venus, is a Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk character. The manicness of Musk and the

lecturing of Zuckerberg, as I recall. The tech for good guy who is not maybe so good is Jeff, sort of an Altman kind of character maybe. And then the wannabe of which there are so many. That's who I think they remind me of. Yeah, great. And it's good to hear your versions of them. And it's fun to hear

to figure out their different attributes and divide them up. And yeah, there's a lot of people and I've read plenty, including your own work. In fact, I think with There Must Be a Pony and Burn Book, I think you've probably been a leading research font for two projects. So that's notable. Talk about the writing process a little bit. Did you piece it from real interviews? I mean, the word salads are fantastic. You know, the word salads you make that these people...

Go on. And actually, what was striking for me was often I would tune out when they were doing those, when I was talking to them. And I was like, I'm back like this. Like, oh, my God, I'm sitting here across from Mark Andrus and listening to him lecture me about history when he took no history courses.

Which is always a pleasure. Or having the Holocaust told to me by Mark Zuckerberg when I was a Holocaust studies minor. Like, oh, really? You don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Nor did you read the source material. Nor do you, your analysis is flawed in so many ways. But where did you get this sort of word salads in research? Do you know tech billionaires? No, no, no. No, I've got like just a passing acquaintance with a little bit of tech.

personal knowledge but very little and almost everything from this is secondary reading I'm a real secondary reader I'm like a lot of writers I'm scared of other people so I prefer to encounter them through the page and on podcasts yeah books were amazing long-form journalism amazing podcasts with a thing which meant I couldn't get these guys and as you know they're mostly guys voices out of my head and and

So a bunch of the vocabulary I find fun to mess around with, but it's particularly a tone of voice. And as you know, there's like bitter, bitter rivalries and different approaches, philosophical disagreements, as you know, but you do know so well, these people, there seems to be a philosophical...

kind of maybe pleasingly can do approach but that can do confidence as I guess their cultural centrality and the amount of money that they control has I would say moved into a kind of arrogance cultural and political and financial arrogance

that feels really palpable in the world increasingly to everyone, right? They were like that at the start. They were at Gates and the rest of them. They knew it was all coming. In my book, I noted the first word I wrote down when I met Jeff Bezos was feral.

He's feral. He was wandering around like a wombat throughout this. He wore khakis at the time, pleated khakis and had no muscles. It's very different from what he... I mean, they manifest themselves physically now the way they were mentally, which I think is really interesting, the physicality. I think you have that actually down the fitness line.

They're obsessed with fitness at this point. Did you use AI at all? I'm just curious. No, no, I don't think so. I don't think we have any AI in the film. No, I mean, the visual effects, you'd have to talk to the studio what tools they use nowadays, but that's all people doing. But you didn't dabble in it for putting like... No, I've not. I've sort of had a bit of a self-denying ordinance. Give me a Marc Andreessen speech. No, no, no. Not at all. The only thing I've ever used it for is writing. It's sometimes nice to write a resume in the third person because that can be a little bit embarrassing, right?

So that's a suitable task for the AI. Okay. All right. Well, you'll see there's more coming. The constant dunking and one-upsmanship that you mentioned and the lack of real relationships is a really interesting thing. And I think you nailed that perfectly. And a lot of it has to do with wealth because of the changes.

Once they become wealthy, everybody's licking them up and down all day, and it creates a very different dynamic. Even the inability to hold a baby correctly was really, that was possibly one of the more disturbing scenes. It's something I've seen. I saw Sergey Brin hold a baby, and I, coming up the stairs of my house, and I was like, put that baby down. What are you doing? He was trying to make a baby go to the bathroom over a toilet when it was a

A baby, like saying it could happen. And I was like, give me that baby now. I'm sticking away from you. And then I should have put that in the book. I didn't do that. Nature also, the way they relate to nature is to say something like, so beautiful you could fuck it, which is like,

I couldn't believe that line was spectacular, by the way. So it seems to me that they're deeply and fatally insecure in that regard. I mean, is that what you're going for there? Because the lack of relationship ability, including with staff, was really quite striking. Yeah.

I think I'm going to end up defending these guys to you, Carrie. It seems like you're much more dyspeptic. I guess I'm curious to ask, I feel critical of them. I feel scared of the world which we live in with them having so much power over it and a lack of interest from the political sphere. I guess I would say, you know, one of my impulses really

was reading the Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried book, which I enjoyed. Sure, that's a sad book. A sad book, right. And I guess I do think that although the effect of altruism became just some kind of bullshitty part of his, I think he was interested in it as a way through the world. And I do believe Sam Altman is scared about AI and that might have been his initial impulse. Indeed.

And Elon, too, to a degree. I like Sam, just so you're aware. What do you think about their moral impulses, which I do believe are in there? Do you see them as being completely hollowed out? I think that they shouldn't be in these decision-making roles. I think they're inadequate to the task, as anyone would be. But they, in particular, they have no sense of history. They have no sense of education. Many of them have difficult relationships and should have sought therapy a long time ago. And they're...

I think Peter Thiel is very smart. That is someone who I do think is very smart. I remember talking to one of them who was lecturing me about politics, and I kept thinking libertarian light. You have no sense of what a libertarian is or Rand or anybody else, but you've just decided to do the Cliff Notes version of it or, you know, politics for dummies. So I think I don't really care if they're sympathetic or not. They're in a position to really hurt people. Yeah. Ultimately. And that's why I'm not sympathetic. Right.

Yeah, I guess I'm talking sympathy on the more general human level. I have human sympathy for them. I feel pity on both sides. I feel pity for the politicians who, well, the ones who might seek to create a framework that could help us manage these incredibly powerful technologies. And I feel a bit of pity for the...

they make it increasingly hard but they themselves right up until 18 months a year ago seem to be saying regulators like help us with this fucking stuff which we know how potent it is and so I do have a degree of pity I think the money has become so available and the sense of your own abilities become so overweening that they stop maybe wanting those guardrails which is a dangerous moment We'll be back in a minute

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One of the best scenes, which I think people probably comment on, is this dick measuring scene on the top of the mountain where it's about money. It's clearly a ritual. They put the amount they have on their chests with lipstick, essentially. Explain that and the hats, the laurel wreath, the captain's hat, the sailor cap, and of course, the thick hip hop chain with a soup ladle. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's craft, that's exposition. You know, I needed to, I wanted to make sure, because there's a sort of somewhat pivotal moment in the film where there's a reversal of fortunes and the sort of usurper takes over from the old king in financial terms, which, as you say, are really, really important or is a big measuring stick for these people. So that was just a craft job of like, how can I make this work?

how can I feed some medicine to the audience in a more palatable fashion? And I guess if you get a really successful version of that, you end up forgetting that you're giving any medicine at all and it becomes its own piece. And yeah, you know, as you've mentioned,

There is a desire to have a relationship, especially to imperial monarchies. Rome is often there, right, as you know, wearisomely so. And so the diadem and the ranking, the mixture of high and low culture appealed to me as something which I didn't actually read about but seemed very plausible.

Yeah, the soup ladle was my favorite. And the lipstick writing on the thing. I could see them doing that. I could see them. They would do that. They would do something like that. It's more about, they talk less about money, but they're always aware of the money they have, which is interesting. They pretend they don't care about money. And one of the first articles I wrote for the Wall Street Journal was how much they talk about not caring about money. And then they all had the most expensive hoodies, which were cashmere.

And they're like, oh, I just wear hoodies. I'm like, that's a $400 cashmere hoodie or $600. I don't know what to say to you. That's not a hoodie. It's something else. So one of the things in that regard of sympathy is the lack of awareness. And I think that was sort of very clear throughout that the lack of self-awareness is rather significant in these characters and in real life.

and lack of relativism, I think. You had a scene that was really interesting to me, which was Venus was talking about the benefits of his new system of creating content that was just...

just information overload, fake information. And he was talking about a horny Snoopy, you know, with a heart on. Except there was also murderous imagery, too. And he was putting them as relatively equal. Like, well, you get the murder, but you also get the horny Snoopy. Isn't it fun? And you said everything is a moment, and you could not ask for better marketing.

Talk about that lack of like the comparative realism, because it even applies to the good AI person. I'm sitting on a cure for info cancer when everyone is dying. But that's also he sees as an opportunity. Right. It's like I can make a killing stopping the killing. Yeah. You know, I guess there's different spheres in the movie of stuff I'm

The crisis in the world, the killing that's going on in the world is the most sort of black mirror-y and hypothetical, right? We know about Myanmar. We know about a number of other instances where social media has been implicated in flaming bad situations. But what I paint hasn't happened and hopefully won't.

So that in a way is a backdrop and it could have been replaced with a 2008 financial crisis or a different geopolitical crisis. I guess what I know is I really believe...

that this is how these people talk and this is how they see the world and this is their philosophical approach we wrote for for rami's character for jeff he says you know he compares um venice's tech to 4chan on acid and um because he's a brilliant young actor and a totally imbibed the part cory uh let that hit and look to the side and just said awesome i

And that, to me, spoke to him having fully imbibed these characters, which is that kind of bright-eyed, mad zealotry for the possibilities of the future. And also, you know, a phrase that has been used for book title, you know, that vast carelessness, which feels very...

How do you think these overlords compare to previous oligarchs and leaders? Because this has happened. It's a great question. Practically speaking, from my point of view, the big difference is that, you know, Redstone, Murdoch and Rockefeller and JP Morgan did not go on each other's podcasts the whole time, giving me their whole vocabulary and sort of a pretty rough and ready version of their philosophy. So from my point of view, as a as a

satirist comedy guy it's just a gift that they're out giving you know they're taking a lot of my material for free so hey fuck you I take some of your material for free too it

It's true. But in comparison, you're right, they didn't. Although Murdoch was on Twitter for a New York minute there, and they pulled his iPad away from him, for what I understand, because it was crazy. You do get a vision into people's personalities. This week, Elon is on another PR tour. As much as he hates media, he won't get off of it, which really means he's got an addiction. One of the characters, Steve Carell, as you noted, he was critically to get to it. He's been playing a lot of pretty heinous characters recently, which is great. He's good at it.

In The Morning Show, he was just in the Four Seasons, not a great guy in that one, too. But he's perfect here because one of the things he does, and there is a person like this, the papa bear, the way you talk about this guy, and there's several of them in Silicon Valley like this. Bill Campbell, who is lovely, by the way, would be one of them. But there was a lot of people they rely on. But he uses these philosophical quips to justify anything and everything, including murder.

You know, and he says, I know everyone and can do anything, which is something is true, which is absolutely true. Talk a little bit about using this character because he's a critical character and an influence on all these other characters. And he's sort of a bad mentor, a bad teacher. Yeah.

Yeah, there were a few things that were crucial for me. Some of them are, you know, drawn from life and, you know, yeah, Andreessen and Thiel, we thought about a thing that, which as far as I know, doesn't apply to either of them was the, I also wanted this flavor of mortality and, you know, it's obviously a thing, especially in tech world, the hope that you might be able to defeat death. I just find that very, very funny and very, very human because yeah, yeah.

Great. Who wouldn't want to do that? So he's a vessel for that anxiety and it provides a plot motor in that he's trying to beat the clock. So there's that element to him. There's also, it was Andreessen, wasn't it, who talked about the deal going wrong and that there was a certain point between rich people and the culture, this kind of philanthropic, we give you this and we get

that which would be like a claim or if it was in the uk a night and a knighthood or if it's in the us maybe it's a wing of the met or some other museum and somewhere along the line i don't exactly see when this happened but he apparently feels that they stopped getting their dues and that's a strong that's a strong feeling for for randall you know he and it's expressed in the negative you know someone says to him but you never got your flowers and he demurs but i think you can see from steve's performance that he strongly believes like somewhere

somewhere he didn't get his due that he's changed the world and he wasn't a founder he was a funder i think that's that's part of it right in the micro level of the plot but maybe culturally on a wider level he feels he hasn't been rewarded um so yeah we want there was that personal thing there's that you know very precise non-founder but more vc kind of advisor um y combinator kind of um

accelerator guy. Yeah, and then, you know, you get the brilliant thing of you cast Steve Carell and he brings his Steve Carell-ness to it and the character shifts in another direction. So that was, you know, as a director, that was an exciting part for me. One of the things, there is a death element here and there is a big death element. My next book is all about the longevity movement among tech people.

and what it means and the lack of understanding of what they're doing here. But I've talked a lot about how AI, especially artificial general intelligence, is a means to avoid death at all costs.

Larry Ellison has an institute and they all have like moved into this space. You can see them morphing their bodies in ways. And I'm going to explain to you what they've been doing and where it's going. It's also a lot about birth to me. These are all men, as you noted, and they can't have children. This is their version of pregnancy. I feel like this is my new theory.

Talk about that idea of death. Obviously, the death of Steve Jobs hung very heavily over a lot of Silicon Valley, the early death of Steve Jobs, who talked about death quite a lot, you know, in his life.

Why make it that idea that this guy wants to upload his intelligence into the brain grid? I think that's what they called it, right? Yeah. I guess it's almost too banal to say how much of a fear it is for all human beings, the sense of going and, you know, like the Woody Allen joke, I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. They're that joke.

made real flesh and blood. And who wouldn't? The moment you start considering that you might not have to die, I can see if you see a pathway, however small, there was a scene that we cut where Steve was talking to Corrie's character about how

it just seemed of overwhelming importance not to die. And I think I like the basic five-year-old plea, like, I don't want to die, don't make me die. And so something about philosophising around it. And also, you know, I think, right, you tell me, but so far, biologically, no one is living forever. The idea of some kind of digital...

You tell me whether you fancy it being, as they say, hung up on a stairmaster while your brain's on the grid. It doesn't strike me as much more Charlie Brooker than sort of... I think they want to print... Well, I'm just starting the journey of this book, so I'm going to start doing... What do they want to do? Lots of things. Print livers, create new bodies, put your head in a different body, Frankenstein-y kind of stuff, etc.

I wish I'd had print me a liver for that when I was doing the film. If only we'd spoken before I'd made the film, print me a liver would be in there. I met with someone just recently and they're talking about senescent cells. And I'm like, well, as Scott Galloway says all the time, biology is undefeated, you know, so far. And so you could see, I think you see it manifested in their bodies right now, whether it's Zuckerberg cells.

doing the fighting or Bezos doing whatever he's doing. I have a sense of what he's doing. But, you know, they all have some hack, body hacks, you know, and I think that's why it's attractive to them. And it started with Soylent and

efficiency eating and stuff like that. But one of the things is, even though they're trying to constantly be living or doing or creating or dominating, they're in terror of being overshadowed and overtaken in this movie. And every friend is a competitor, and even worse, a mortal enemy. They have to screw each other over in a lot of ways. The very last lines of the movie are about screwing each other over. Talk a little bit, because this was a sense in succession, too. Like, who knew who your friend was? There was a constant...

a topping, essentially. So talk about that because as much as they want to live and create and own and dominate, to what purpose? Yeah, I guess part of that is, you know, I've written the thing that me and Sam, my old writing partner, wrote. The peep show was two guys living in a flat in Croydon and so I'm a bit of a connoisseur of male friendships and the complexities of them. You know, all friendships, you get different things and they're not

Who would remain friends with the person who never asked them how they were doing, who never called them, who never invited them out for dinner, right? There is a transaction involved in those relationships. I guess most of us feel that.

sad about that or would dream of the kind of some a platonic version of friendship where you would be there for your best friend forever whatever happened and whatever they did for you I guess this is just a bit of a it's rather a tough version of friendship where the the sort of contract is rather clear and rather near the surface and the bit of men maybe all people but you see it especially in men of competitiveness

It is just coded right into the very fall of the relationship. So, I mean, I just find it funny and interesting and sad to a degree. Very much so. Men's failure oftentimes to connect. I think it's culturally being remarked upon a bit, this sort of sadness that men have about sometimes not making good friends. That's also the next level because Carell's last look, he knows they're going to fuck him, right? He sees it. He knows it. They have to because that's what he's taught them to do.

Right? He's the father figure, presumably. Yeah. And also the thing that most of us don't have, most men don't have, most people don't have,

is the extraordinary excitement of feeling that this moment is, you know, like Sam Altman told the FT, I've got the, maybe the coolest, most important job in the history of the world. Most of us don't feel like that most days and to feel it and for there to be a 4% chance that it's true is pretty remarkable. And therefore, if you feel like the hug that you give this guy, it's not just you hugging him. It's like,

this is, you know, Pompey and Julius Caesar. It's like, it's world historical. That's pretty exciting for a mere mortal. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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I want to ask you in a sort of a creative situation.

AI-generated video is getting good, is getting very good, and you've seen these Google releases, you've seen the open AI releases. How worried are you about these implications of generative AI, not just for the real world, but also what you do? Because they just made a commercial that looks like pretty much most of the mundane commercials that are made by just about anyone. What saves people here, being super creative like you or what?

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You know, I've been asked this a bit a lot and I'd refer them to you because it's a sort of journalistic question, a tech question. It's a forefront of what's happening question. I inform myself enough to be able to make the movie. And partly I poured my anxieties into jokes and scenarios that I could play out.

not the ones that I don't know how to answer. I have no answer. It's just going to get better and better and better and better. And any limit you set on what it can't do, I think will be surpassed. So there is no limit to the creative material it will be able to create. I suspect maybe something will break and the hallucinations will go out of control. But I think that even those kinds of things will get fixed eventually. As long as things are clearly labelled,

I'd watch a Volkswagen ad by AI and I would watch a certain amount of CGI, as you already do, done by AI. I will read once every five years a short story or a poem by AI to see what they're doing and what they're thinking. But I don't want to read...

more than one and I don't want to read more than a few pages I want to know what you think and what my friend thinks and my the friend who I imagine knowing who's the author of of the book that I'm reading right I'm only interested in other humans uh and I think most humans are but we may

that may change. So I have no consolation to offer. For someone, I think the very talented people are fine. I think the marginally talented are fucked. And I think the medium talented people are fucked because, but in your case, for example, what if they said, you know what?

"Jesse, you don't own your stuff anymore. We're going to make many more seasons of Succession by feeding in the past seasons of Succession." And they'll be able to do it and it won't be bad, right? So let's have... Jesse doesn't want to do them, but we do. That's something you're going to face at some point. Yeah, I think contractually now the WJ would still have my back and they wouldn't. Or they offer me a new contract or the next thing. But you don't have to do it. It will do it based on your work.

Yeah, I think that's going to happen. I don't have a good answer to that. I think one thing is, you know, I already, with my fellow writers, I have like six alts for a funny line that we're going to throw in. And in the end, I need to choose which is the best and which fits with the rest of the show. I mean, an AI will be able to do that and make a choice. I think you...

I hope the tone of this movie is of a piece. Everything I'm saying in AI will be able to do. But I guess the multiplicity of available options means that you might be interested in the taste of a human being. I don't know. I'm unwilling to offer any grain of hope. I think you'll be fine. I think you'll be fine. By the way, as an aside, one of the funniest things is the soup character running Argentina just now.

It never really went anywhere, but I loved it. Because they do think this, just the way Elon thought he could run the government. Like, ooh, aircraft carriers. I think they only really want him to invest in a power station. But yeah, they definitely give him that impression. Yeah, exactly. So a couple more questions. We've seen our citizen saboteurs mess with Tesla, speaking of Elon Musk, and there have been protests around the country. It's certainly affected his business, although I think the real reason his business is suffering is because he makes shitty cars and he should make good ones. That's all.

There hasn't been very much large-scale anger at tech bros yet, although Musk has certainly become very disliked and in a very short time. Do you see that happening? Any kind of people being angry at this power these people have?

Yeah, I mean, I guess Musk has been very unusual and the people in my film are different, right, in that they don't have Doge kind of weirdly. I pitched this in December, wrote it in January, and we've been making it. But Doge actually didn't exist when I pitched it and when I first started writing it was before the inauguration. And now it's Elon's involvement in it and effectively it feels like it's popped as a political moment. So...

That's unusual. His visibility was unusual and it's had unusual level of effect, right? He's more famous than anyone, partly because of his Twitter usage, but he's put himself in the forefront of the popular imagination. And I think people will be reluctant to do the same. He's a very particular individual, isn't he? Who, as you said, like seems to feed on it. So I think if I think people will be wary about taking such sort of political slash cultural stance.

dominant position, you know, Jobs obviously was a, had a much, much, much, much, much different public persona. There may be people who deserve as much opprobrium. I don't think they'll draw it unless they go down the Musk route, but he's been probably pretty salutary to people who think about going into the public sphere, don't you think? Yeah. Yeah, it didn't work for him, but, you know, he's irritating, I think, even the Trump people.

So initially they called me and said, oh, you're just mean to him and he's great. I'm like, you'll see. And then they called me later and was like, he's a fucking irritating person. I was like, I don't, he's just a person and he's irritating and he talks too much and he doesn't know what he's talking about. But, you know, good for you. You got the money. So speaking of succession, who do you think now has more influence over our politics right now? Murdoch or your average tech billionaire in that regard? I guess there is no average tech billionaire, is there? No.

But that's a really great question. I mean, I still think most Americans get most of their news from local news, that the balance is going to go. And Facebook is obviously unbelievably important in that. Twitter less so, but culturally, because of all the journalists on it and whatnot.

Also less so. Right now, I'd still plump for Fox power over any other power. But in its where we're going and in its generality, yeah, we're in a tech age. We're in a social media age, aren't we? That's where it's happening. That's where people's where everything's forming. But the twilight is still quite strong, I think, of the agenda setting of print and the viewing numbers of TV. Do you have any thoughts what will happen post Murdoch?

Although he's got, I got to tell you, killed off Logan Roy. You can't kill off him. I literally would not turn my back onto him until I saw him in the ground. That's my feeling on that guy. I think his mom was 107, 109. Yeah, something like that. So, so,

Have I got any? No. I mean, I did think, forget AI, they were writing an extra season of Succession for us out in the desert in Nevada. The reporting out of that trial was, I get a bit bored of like, oh, you couldn't write it. I often feel like, hey, give us a try. I think I could write it. But the meetings that had gone on and the family meetings

movements behind the scenes were pretty extraordinary. But I think it's going to be a mess, isn't it? And dynasties often crumble when there's a contest for power. Yeah, that's how they go. It's so funny. I love that they all pretended. Several of them pretended to me they never watched Succession and they all did. Like, that was my favorite. I almost wrote you like, see, I told you they read. Oh, we don't pay attention. They paid complete attention to Succession, which was very funny. I don't think Rupert did. Why wouldn't they? I don't know.

Oh, I bet he did. Oh, I bet he did. He reads everything. I bet you turn him off halfway through. I don't think he gives a fuck. Well, that's true also, but he pays attention to everything. I've never seen someone who pays so much attention to gossip and everything else. Oh, yeah. So, last two questions. One,

Are rich people inherently more interesting narratively in a story because they have more choices? What is about the – especially American ultra-rich in particular that's interesting to you? And would you ever make a TV show about poor people or do you think? Yes. Yeah, I would. Why is it interesting to you?

You know, I try to be honest about this because, you know, rich people have helicopters and fancy windows that you can shoot big mountains out of. So there is some attraction to it, maybe particularly actually for a director even more than a writer. You love a helicopter. I don't. I've never gone in a helicopter and I hope never to. I'm scared of them. But you love having them. They're always in your mind. Oh.

Maybe I do. They have a certain thing on camera and I don't know what to do about that. But I honestly, what I claim, and you tell me if you're calling bullshit on it, is I really don't think I particularly...

I'm interested in rich people. I'm just interested in power, I think. Power, you are. And, you know, you writing about poorer people, you know, the stakes are actually much higher and easier to write in some ways. These people who you, who we're portraying, in some ways they don't,

care about much right everything is kind of going to be fine for them and that was i mean some people felt that about succession when they came to it and some people continued to feel it and tuned out pretty fast it is a challenge to make people care about them because the worst things well a bad thing happens in this film that could could have impacted their lives but most of them nothing they're going to be unbelievably rich forever

even if the economy goes into recession and the markets melt down. Yeah, they had their New Zealand plan at the end. They can't get poor. And that's a bit of a challenge for a writer. So I really think it's power. I wouldn't care to write just a bunch of rich folks. No, I think you're right. I think you got it. I think one of the things is the loneliness that they have was really very clear. And one of the resonance from Succession was the last scenes of Succession where –

I was so obsessed with the antiseptic nature of the cushions they were in and the sealed environments, which I think they got smaller and smaller over time. And so the last scene of Tom and Shiv was in a sealed car with them set like they're protected. And then you have the other character by himself by the river. And then every character was by themselves except for one who was in a bar.

With people. You never saw them with other people. And so I think one of the things that carried over for me was that these people were alone, which I thought was very, I don't know if you meant it or not. Yeah. I mean, and I think it is tough to form connections that I think rich, rich connections.

The kids of very rich people have particular problems, right, figuring out what their friendships mean, who they should be friends with and why, and why people want connections with them. I think that's a particular form of insanity-inducing paranoia and double-think that they're subject to. These guys, you know, they're friends.

The one thing that they have going for their friendships are, and why I think there is something to this group, is years. You just get those years, right, accumulating a bit like in, Mike White has his character say in, you know, the three women in The White Lotus. And they sort of mean something. And even when everything else is,

is a load of bullshit. The fact that they have known each other and have known each other when they were a little bit less successful, that is the one thing that is true about their relationship. True. And so that's something I have for them to play with. Yeah. And they need each other. Like the last two, the two, when they're merging their companies, they kind of need each other. They need each other because who do you call? Who do you go and have a drink with? Who do you invite to your fucking barbecue? You need a list. Right. Right.

I won't say there's a billionaire who's having a wedding soon, but several people have been invited who they don't know. And they called me. They're like, why was I invited? I've never met them. I'm like, it's so sad. Like people you would invite. I know, right? That's great. I was like, do you know them? They're like, met once. I was like, oh, wow.

I've got the liver printing. I've got the holding a newborn over a bidet hoping for it to poop. And I've got inviting people to a wedding you've never met. Take it all. I've got another episode. Let's take it to Casey. Right, it's true. All right, my last question. Is tech a winner-take-all? Is life now a winner-take-all game? And if so, who wins?

Well, I guess it feels like the economy is a winner-take-all economy, right? And that's part of the reason for the wave of populism we've got all over the world. And tech, it is, right? I mean, probably one of the AI firms or AI arms within a tech firm is...

is going to do it and is going to come up with a model which is world-beating and they probably will be the monopolist don't you think so i do that's why they're sucking up to trump because it matters right now it matters right now yeah so so i i am scared of that kind of world yeah yeah yeah well i don't want any of them to run one at one point um

Mark Zuckerberg was talking about, you did references in China about China. They always use China as the excuse, right? Always. And Mark Zuckerberg, he was doing that. Oh, if the Chinese get ahead, if this and this and that. And I said, oh, is this a Xi or me argument? And he goes, well, it is. I said, I don't like either choice. Yeah.

I mean, I guess you if I had to pick, you know, but I really don't want to pick. But yeah, you're right. One of them is going to be the most powerful. And that's troubling because they're so flawed as people, as anyone would be. There's not a person who should have that power. And there will be, unfortunately. Anyway, on that happy note, it was wonderful, wonderful movie. Are you happy with it? Are you happy? I am. Yeah, I'm sort of...

wary of looking at the response i'll be interested once i once it cools down and i feel able to check it all out i'll be i'll be really interested you make of it but you but you're the way you talk about the movie is how i hope people would think and talk about the movie and you know this world as well as anyone so i'm very that's nice and lovely to chat yeah i'm a little meaner dukes but i've had it with them i've had to deal with them in real life um what are you working on next

Going back to the things I was trying to write before this sort of sideswiped me. So a bit of prose and a movie that I promise 90% won't be about rich people. Oh, okay. Great. I don't really care. It's fine. As long as it's flawed people who are sad and troubled, I like it. And funny. Anyway, a comedy about the end of the world. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Really lovely to chat.

On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Alison Rogers, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Arruda, and our theme music is by Dracademics.

If you're already following the show, you wear the Laurel crown. If not, it's the soup ladle chain for you. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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