What Happens When a “Succession” Writer Takes on Silicon Valley

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0:40Peter Kafka:From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels. Peter Kafka, that is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And today we are talking about Silicon Valley and TV and how you make a TV show about Silicon Valley. even if you think the show really isn't about Silicon Valley. That show is called The Audacity. It premieres this Sunday on AMC. It comes to us from Jonathan Glatzer, who has written a lot of great TV shows, most notably Succession and Better Call Saul. I've seen three episodes of The Audacity. I'd describe it as a middle ground between Succession and HBO's Silicon Valley.

1:18Peter Kafka:Sometimes it's a pretty broad farce, poking at the weirdness of our tech overlords. Sometimes it's a pretty nuanced look at the people who live near and with those tech overlords and how they get by. And as you'll hear in our discussion, Jonathan Glatzer says he's not interested in tech per se, but the people who make the tech and the people who deal with tech's effects. But it is still a show where one character is trying to sell his stalled out company to a big company called Cupertino, or at least convince other people that Cupertino wants to buy it so he can juice his stock price. It's also a show where kids have to put their iPhones into yonder pouches before they can enter school, which is a super duper real thing.

1:59Peter Kafka:You do not have to be in Silicon Valley to see. And as it turns out, once you get Jonathan Glatzer talking about tech, he does have a bunch of opinions about tech. So let's get to it. This is me talking to the Audacity's Jonathan Glatzer. Jonathan Glatzer, you have made many excellent shows. Some of my favorites, Better Call Saul, Succession. You are now out with your first show. you have made yourself. It's called The Audacity. You can start seeing it on AMC starting Sunday, April 12th. Did I get the date right? Correct. I got the date right. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you for having me. Why make a show about technology in 2026?

2:36Peter Kafka:I don't know.

2:40Well, it's not about technology. It's about the people who happen to be making technology. Silicon Valley is the backdrop, and it's a big backdrop. And we do a lot with it. Backdrop is not to dismiss it by any means. It fuels the show and fuels the story. But in front of that backdrop are the characters in the foreground. And they are a crazy group of people that's quite diverse. The lead character, played wonderfully by Billy Magnuson, is a tech guy. But the second lead is a psychiatrist. And, you know, there's her family and her kid and the school that the kid goes to. And there's a couple of guys that come in from D.C.

3:30working for Veterans Affairs. And so, it's a much broader swath than tech. And that was by design. I did not want to do tech wall-to-wall.

3:43Peter Kafka:Was this always going to be a show that was set in Silicon Valley, or did you come to that later once you had the idea? It was always said in Silicon Valley, the head of AMC Networks, Dan McDermott, wonderful man, he grew up there. And so he'd been looking for some time to do something that was in the tech world or Silicon Valley space. And I admitted to him that I am by no means an expert in tech, but it seems like a really fascinating culture to try to capture. And so, that's really from the start. So, you were told, we've got an opportunity to make a show in tech. Do you have anything? Or what can we place in Silicon Valley?

4:29Yeah. It came from that. Nothing was born beforehand, before that ask. So, it all sort of happened when I went up there for a couple of weeks, just kind of researched the place and get to know it. And it's a weird place, man. It's got a lot of...

4:47Peter Kafka:It is weird. It's weird how normal everyone there thinks it is. Whenever I parachute in, visit friends, family, go do for work, I'm like, wait, what is that? Like, oh, that's this thing that we all do, and they don't think of it as weird. No, I know. And you could say that, I guess, about any culture or society or whatever, they have their rituals and things that are not fully understood by outsiders. But it is much more of a monoculture than you would think it would be. And it thinks of itself as sort of on the bleeding edge of where things are. It likes the idea that it is separate from, they especially hate the East Coast, their old world.

5:27Peter Kafka:So, we are the frontier. They revel in that. Unless I'm missing it, you are not naming names in this. There's a company called Cupertino. You call it Cupertino, not Apple. There's other made-up names. How much time do you want people to spend thinking, oh, I wonder if that guy is supposed to be Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs? I think they won't be able to... Certainly, Duncan Park is the main guy. He's a wannabe titan. He's a couple rungs down the ladder. He's not even a billionaire, right? So, he very much wants to be, and that desperation fuels him. And that's a very Silicon Valley story. And probably, you know, he's aspirational in that regard.

6:13Peter Kafka:He only sold his company for nine figures instead of the billions. Well, he was offered billions for his first company and stuck by it because, as one of the characters says, you thought it was a movement. It was just a startup. So, he holds on to it thinking that the movement would last, but it does not. And he ends up selling it for a couple hundred million at the end of the day, which is - A failure for them. A failure. Other shows that have satirized either Silicon Valley or just other real-world places, and you've worked on Succession, where there's real characters or very identifiable real people.

6:49Peter Kafka:This one, it seems like you're going out of your way to say it. I'm not saying this character is this person or this thing is that. I'm definitely not. And Succession didn't either, by the way. And we did base it... Obviously, the Murdochs informed a lot of that, but so did a number of others. I had Marissa Mar on this show talking about all the work she did, making that a real thing. She was a huge force behind the show, really, genuinely. I would love to read whatever Bible she created, because she talked about how she created them. The backstory for all this, all the mechanisms. I guess what I'm getting at is this seems like it's in a world that's inflected by reality, but there's broad humor and broad jokes.

7:35Peter Kafka:It's doing a bunch of different things. but one thing it doesn't seem like it's trying to do is to tell you, this is how Silicon Valley and specific kinds of tech work today. Definitely not the tech and how it works. Part of it is when you make a television show, you're writing it at least a year before it comes out. In our case, about a year and a half. I think it's about as quick as you can go, honestly. There's so much heavy lifting to do. So, when we try to anticipate what tech might come up with, it's a fool's game, and you'll just never keep up. However, we did land on a bunch of things that became very quickly either at the center of news stories or whatever.

8:26Like, you know, the AI therapy bot was not really a thing a year and a half ago, which is an astonishing fact in and of itself that, of course, it's something that everybody knows what I'm talking about when I say AI therapy bot. Those stories started to come out maybe about two, three months after I wrote the pilot. But there's a number of things. Even the VA guys that are coming in, when I wrote the pilot and sort of started to carve out the story for the VA, played by Rob Corddry, the Trump administration wasn't in yet. Doge hadn't happened yet. And the VA was one of the main targeted... hundreds of thousands of layoffs happened at Veterans Affairs, making the task of helping the vets who served our country that much harder.

9:17And it was already hobbling along as it was. So, all of that became very weirdly zeitgeisty. And more than that, there's a wildfire that burns down the main character's house in episode three, which I wrote just a few days before my house burnt down in a wildfire. In the California fires last year. Yeah, yeah, in Altadena. So, you got to be careful. I don't know. It started to get weird.

9:50Peter Kafka:You don't want to summon up reality. No. Did you have... I've gone through three episodes. In the third episode, one of the characters has a monologue where she has sort of an overriding... She's high up in the tech world, but then she says, here's my criticism of the tech world. You don't know whether to take her seriously or not. Did you have notions of your critique of tech before you went into this? Did those change while you were writing it? No, they've gotten only stronger. This year and a half period, we've all seen this exponential growth of obviously AI, but also the marriage politically between Silicon Valley and DC that is, I suppose, mutually beneficial.

10:40Certainly... At the moment. At the moment. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. But yes, the monologue that you're talking about, she was the chief ethicist at this Cupertino company. And she says, what have we actually changed? What has tech actually done? We set out to lower barriers to information. We tried to increase tolerance between people. We talked about helping climate change. We talked about providing a better education situation for our kids. And thing after thing after thing, they failed miserably across the board. She says, tech changed the world, but so did the bubonic plague. And it is, I suppose, something that when you break it down, when you really, I mean, I think it helps to be of a certain age, to have lived many years prior to all of this, and to look back at those years and wonder, was I living in a cave?

11:49Was I incapable of communicating with friends and peers? And was information being blocked from my -

11:59Peter Kafka:How did I survive before tech made my life possible? Right. And I think that that is this brainwashing that has taken place, whether deliberately or not, where we have come to feel like all matter, all quotidian life is dependent on an app or tech in some fashion. But it turns out you could, in theory, manage without it. Not only manage without it, I do believe, from my own point of view, that we are not better off with it. But now it's here. You can tell yourself you could live without an iPhone, and it would be very, very difficult for you to get through your day without an iPhone. I am Ned Ludd and Don Quixote and all of those guys rolled up into one who is writing a TV show about tech.

12:51And I use tech to some extent myself. obviously I mean how can I not

12:56Peter Kafka:I'll come back to tech but I want to talk about money and how people live because I think you can watch this show and have zero interest in tech and still be very interested in it because it's showing you how people live and how status works and how money works and like you said at the beginning you've got you've got the big swinging dick CEOs but you also have their psychiatrist and therapist who doesn't even own her own home Right. She has to rent. That's right. Whose kid goes to the fancy school but doesn't pay full freight. That's right. Scholarship, the school informs her. Yeah. When they're having a fight.

13:31Peter Kafka:And so, all these sort of upstairs, downstairs things that, again, you see some of in shows like Succession that you also see in Friends and Neighbors. But, I mean, I think that's what's almost more interesting to me than any of the tech stuff is how do these people live in a world where some people have enormous amounts of money, some people are only well off. Right. Yeah. I think it is also... you don't want to talk about tech, but Silicon Valley also has this dividing line because the wealth that has accumulated there happens so quickly. The amount of monies that we're talking about are just so astronomical.

14:14It really is. One of the most fascinating apps that I came across was this thing that showed a graph of how much Elon Musk is worth. It shows that a pixel or a little group of pixels is what the average household is like. Have you seen this before? No, but I can imagine. You swipe and you swipe and you swipe and you swipe and you swipe endlessly until you reach each of these pixels. Then each of those screens is about a billion dollars. So I guess you're swiping for some time to reach his level of wealth. And it is just – it's boggling that when you graphically see the difference between what an average family makes and what he has.

15:07And I guess that the show is holding up a mirror in a lot of ways and just kind of asking, is this what we want?

15:16Peter Kafka:But some of it that resonated with me wasn't about, look how much money this billionaire has. It's, look what... The struggle. But also, there's stuff there that, again, if you are familiar with upper middle class people, you've seen, like, we have a team of people to help strategize getting your daughter into college. And here's how we're going to do donations. And here's the SAT prep guy. And I don't think 1300 gets you to Duke, by the way, but we can discuss that offline. Or maybe you know better than I do. You got a 17-year-old. Maybe it does get you into Duke. But it's a lot of travails of people that you generally aren't sympathetic for, and maybe you're more sympathetic towards them just because they're in contrast to billionaires.

15:59Yeah, I think that's fair. I think the psychiatrist is somebody who's a psychologist, technically, PhD. She has a very high-profile clientele of a lot of billionaires who come to her, and she's sort of a popular therapist in the area, her and her husband. So it's high status, but she's still a service provider. That's right. She's still getting an hourly wage from these people who, in many occasions, and completely believe this, she has helped them make more money. She has helped many people who work underneath that individual make more money or keep their jobs or keep the company aloft. And she realized through the process of helping these other people that she's got a very keen mind for this sort of thing.

16:49She's got a good brain for finance. and the injustice of getting an hourly wage when she has probably created billions of dollars of wealth for others, the injustice of that really eats at her.

17:08Peter Kafka:And there's a logic to it. She essentially engages insider trading. We find that out in the first episode. And some of the other episodes, she doesn't ever say this, at least in the episodes I've seen, but in her mind it's justified. I have created this value. I should partake in the value. We'll be right back with Jonathan Glatzer. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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19:03Peter Kafka:And we're back. I was expecting, just because we're in an AI moment, I just spent an hour reading the Ronan Farrow, Sam Altman profile in The New Yorker, and just the world I live in, AI, AI, AI, AI. It is not foregrounded in your show. No. When you sort of talked about why you weren't trying to write to the moment. That's right, yeah. In the third episode where it comes up, they really spend some time talking about it. Yeah. And surprisingly, I thought, you were surprisingly empathetic to the idea that AI can be helpful. That therapy chatbot, at least in the episode I've seen, provides real connection and therapy to someone who needs it.

19:39Well, for me, the problem isn't AI. The problem is the people who are promoting and making AI, putting it into your phones, putting it into your refrigerator, putting it into everything. They're the problem. We are the problem. Human beings are the problem. The technology in and of itself is neither good nor evil.

20:03Peter Kafka:I sort of expected you to go, oh, here are all the problems with AI. And maybe, again, I'll keep watching. Maybe that guy's going to be terribly misled by his therapy bot. But you really, it seemed like you took a real beat to go, no, this stuff really could at least temporarily help someone. I think that what I say about AI is a lot of what I say about Silicon Valley, which is it's admittedly and it's all said with a wink that we're going to make the world a better place while we make enormous profits that King Midas would be jealous of. But I think that what starts to get me very worried, the idea of curing cancer with AI, or climate change for that matter, with AI, is very alluring.

20:53I'd like to see evidence of that before I invite it into my pocket, into my phone, into my child's education, into what they're building for, what they're spending. You'd like to opt in. I'd like to opt in, but I'd also like to see them earn that trust.

21:11Peter Kafka:It's like your choice based on their decisions. It's not just opting in, though. It's just the idea that it should, at this juncture, with all that is unknown, by not just the consumers, but by the creators themselves, they don't know what they have. That's not a call to me for insinuation into every fucking thing that we touch, that we interact with. That is not a call for... I mean, it's just you look at... When the guy from the VA starts playing with the bot or starts interacting with the bot, I thought, I know where this is going to go. The bot's going to tell him to do something to self-harm or it's going to fail in some obvious way.

21:54Peter Kafka:And it does not. It seems to give him pleasure, and I found that surprising. You expect a show like this that is a jaundiced eye towards tech and towards the travails of rich people to go, ah, see, here's another fail. Well, I think that when you watch, say, Frankenstein, there is sympathy for the monster. It is not the monster's fault. It is Frankenstein's. It's the Doctor's. That's genuinely... And there's nothing... As you said, I mean, it is here. It is here. The technology is here. If there's any shaping or shaving that can be done with that reality, it remains with the people who are in control of this.

22:37There are not very many of them. When they understand the profit potential of this technology, and they still... Even Even the most ambitious and gung-ho AI proponents, when they come on and they say, well, yeah, there'll probably be some bumps along the way, you better fucking believe that those bumps are going to be potholes that would swallow your whole fucking car. There is nothing more frightening to me than when you hear the spin of any individual who controls that wealth and that much power and that much tech that is in all of our lives saying, yeah, there might be a bump.

23:20Peter Kafka:There's another document for you out this morning. It's from OpenAI. It's a public policy pitch where they're like, there could be some risk here and some downside. We should think about restructuring our government and social safety nets. And maybe they believe it, maybe they don't. When you start talking about that sort of stuff, some people are cynical and they say, well, they're actually hyping the impact of what they're doing and won't be that transformative. but they need to say it will be to justify all the fundraising. Other folks say, yeah, they're really underplaying it, and this is a real problem, and we're fundamentally not suited to deal with it.