'Mountainhead' Writer & Director Jesse Armstrong on Tech Bros, Murdoch and AI

From media moguls to tech billionaires, Oscar-nominated and Emmy award-winning writer, producer and director Jesse Armstrong knows how to tap into the psyche of the rich and powerful. In the “Succession” creator’s new HBO movie, “Mountainhead,” a tech-bro poker weekend turns into a life-or-death battle over who will control the future — in both business and the real world. From their isolated lair in Utah, four millionaire/billionaire friends (played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef) watch as deepfakes created on one of their platforms lead to massacres, assassinations, and government takeovers around the world. This sparks the friends’ imperialistic fantasies and some unfriendly inter-group competition. Kara talks to writer-director Jesse Armstrong about the real-world inspirations for these characters, how tech founders think about their own role in society, and whether the tech oligarchy has replaced legacy media giants like Rupert Murdoch. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram, TikTok, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm more eager to hear what you think about all this stuff than to hear myself.

• 0:04Kara Swisher?

  I have a lot of thoughts about your show.

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Can I interview you back?

• 0:06Kara Swisher?

  Yes, please.

• 0:19Kara Swisher?

  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, Mountain Head, was just released on HBO. It's about four tech bros whose poker weekend turns into a life-or-death battle of the wills.

• 1:03Kara Swisher?

  Cory 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's

• 1:47Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 2:15Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 2:40Speaker 02

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• 3:11Speaker 03

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 3:37Speaker 04

  You've been asked to run the company's social channels, but company content plays by its own set of rules. It needs a logo in the first three seconds, but it can't feel like an ad. It needs subtitles, except when it doesn't. It needs to run at two times speed and deliver a complex message, simply, of course, within nine by 16. Thankfully, your company has Canva, so you can easily edit your video and every version of it. What will you Canva today?

• 4:10Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  A total pleasure.

• 4:20Kara Swisher?

  For me, too. We're going to talk, though, about your latest HBO film, Mountain Head, 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. 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 cashmere prison, essentially, is what it felt like. And they

• 5:04Kara Swisher?

  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?

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, good. Yeah, 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

• 5:56Speaker 00

  of us face, to a certain degree, is really believing in the reality of the whole rest of the world. And, you know, the challenge, I guess, is, do I really, really believe that? And if I do, do I act in that way? And I think 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 on my meal last night on it? So, so, yeah, I have some charitable feelings about these guys, which I'm eager to hear whether there's how much of that remains in yourselves.

• 6:36Kara Swisher?

  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 Altman type character of Jaffar, 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, you could, that could be the beginning of any Bond movie, and this separateness, this creation of separateness from everything.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:34Kara Swisher?

  Amazing.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  So, and with this really tight time schedule, it was hard, 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 finding the location, which was was tough to find, somewhere that would have, you know, it's kind of like a play in that most of it, 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 moment 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 he was suggesting.

• 8:18Kara Swisher?

  Where was it set? Where did you?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  It's set in Utah, where, same as we shot it. There's reference made to Snowbird, which is a resort just over from Park City, yeah.

• 8:26Kara Swisher?

  So, when you, 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, all the horror happens off stage, and it's in a contained space. Talk about writing it like a play, because that's really.

• 8:44Kara Swisher?

  What's going on here?

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I grew up with those kind of TV plays in the in the seventies, eighties and nineties in the UK. That would be, you know, play for today. It was a, you know, 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 but the 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 timeframe and a condensed geographical frame.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  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, 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 though, you know, the the camera peeking around pine trees to see a gang and seeing who's going to survive is, yeah, something you everyone will be familiar with, right? From other kinds of work.

• 9:54Kara Swisher?

  Right, absolutely, absolutely. And the and the antisepticness of the place, you know, I always go to, I've gone to so many billionaires' houses and not all, 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.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they're interchangeable, right?

• 10:13Kara Swisher?

  A hundred percent.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  So it's like, iron is busting her way in here, whether I want it or not.

• 10:39Kara Swisher?

  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 Mark 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 ridiculous lecturing

• 11:22Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, great. And it's good to hear your versions of them. And it's, it's fun to, 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.

• 12:05Kara Swisher?

  Talk about the writing process a little bit. Did you piece it from real interviews? Or, I mean, the word salads are fantastic. You know, the word salads you make that these people go on. And, 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 then I was like, I'm back, like this. Like, oh, my God, I'm sitting here across from Mark Andreessen, listening to him lecture me about history, when he took no history courses, which is always a pleasure. Like, and I, 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 anal analysis is flawed in so many ways.

• 12:47Kara Swisher?

  But what did where where did you get this sort of word salads in research? Do you know tech billionaires?

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Not not no, not a, 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, like a lot of writers, I'm scared of other people. So I prefer to encounter them through the page and on podcasts. Yeah, like books were amazing, long form journalism, amazing. Podcasts were the 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,

• 13:37Speaker 00

  philosophical disagreements, as you know, but you do know so well, these people, there is, there seems to be a philosophical, kind of maybe pleasingly can do approach, but that 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 that feels, you know, really palpable in the world to increasingly to everyone, right? So.

• 14:04Kara Swisher?

  They were like that at the start, just. Gates.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  They knew it was all coming.

• 14:10Kara Swisher?

  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. And I was like, he wore khakis at the time, pleated khakis and had no muscles. It's very different from what he, I mean, they just, 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. They're obsessed with fitness at this point. Did you use AI at all? I'm just curious.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  No, no, I don't think so. I don't think we have any AI in the film. And we, 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.

• 14:46Kara Swisher?

  But you didn't dabble in it for putting like.

• 14:49Speaker 00

  No, I've not, I've sort of had a bit of a self denying ordinance.

• 14:51Kara Swisher?

  Give me a Marc Andreessen speech.

• 14:53Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 14:54Kara Swisher?

  Not at all.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  The only thing I've ever used it for is writing a, it's sometimes nice to write a resume in the third person because it can be a little bit embarrassing, right?

• 15:00Kara Swisher?

  Right, right, that's true.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  That's a suitable task for the AI.

• 15:03Kara Swisher?

  Okay, all right. So, well, you'll see there's more coming. The constant dunking and one-upmanship 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 it 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 things. 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?" And he was trying to make a baby go to the bathroom over a toilet when it was a baby, like saying it could happen. And I was like, "Give me that baby now, sticking away from you."

• 15:46Kara Swisher?

  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, that line was spectacular, by the way. So it seems to me that it's, they're deeply and fatally insecure in that regard. I mean, was that what you were going for there? Because the lack of relationship ability, including with staff, was really quite striking.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  I think I'm going to end up like defending these guys to you, Carrie. It seems like you're much more dyspeptic. I guess I'm curious to ask, do you, 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, initial impulses was reading the Michael Lewis, Sam Altman free book, which I enjoyed.

• 16:42Kara Swisher?

  Sure, it's a sad book.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  A sad book, right. And I guess I do think that although the effect of altruism became just some kind of bullshity 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. And Elon too.

• 17:07Kara Swisher?

  You know, I like Sam, I like Sam, just so you're aware.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  What do you think about their moral impulses, which I do believe are in there? Do you see them as being completely hollowed out?

• 17:17Kara Swisher?

  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. They have, so 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.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:00Kara Swisher?

  Ultimately, and that's why I'm not sympathetic.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I guess I'm talking sympathy on the most, on the more general human level. I have the, I have human sympathy for them. I feel pity on both sides, I feel pity for the politicians who, well, the ones who would, 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, regulate us, 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 becomes

• 18:46Speaker 00

  so overwhelming that they stop maybe wanting those, those guardrails, which is a, which is a dangerous moment.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 19:08Speaker 02

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• 19:38Kara Swisher?

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• 20:51Kara Swisher?

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• 21:34Kara Swisher?

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• 21:58Kara Swisher?

  One of the best scenes, which I think people will 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 the soup ladle.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that's craft, that's exposition, you know, I needed to, I wanted to make sure, because there's a somewhat pivotal moment in the film where there's a reversal of fortunes and the 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, 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

• 23:04Speaker 00

  to imperial monarchies, and, you know, 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.

• 23:24Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, the soup ladle was maybe, 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. Which, 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, like, or 600. Like, I don't know what to say to you. That's not a hoodie. It's something else. So one of the things that in that regard of sympathy is the lack of awareness. And I think

• 24:06Kara Swisher?

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

• 24:47Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, I guess there's, there's different spheres in the movie of stuff I'm positing. 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 certain number of other instances where social media has been implicated in inflaming bad situations. But what I paint hasn't happened, and hopefully, won't. So that, 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

• 25:52Speaker 00

  That this is how these people talk and this is how they see the world and this is their philosophical approach. We wrote for Rami's character, for Jeff, he says, you know, he compares Venice's tech to 4chan on acid and because he's a brilliant young actor and a totally imbibe the part, Corey let that hit and looked to the side and just said, awesome. And that, that, 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,

• 26:35Speaker 00

  you know, a phrase that has been used for book title, you know, that vast carelessness, which feels very scary.

• 26:43Kara Swisher?

  How do you think these overlords compared to previous oligarchs and leaders? Because this has happened.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  It's a great question that 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 writer, 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 might, I take some of your material for free, too.

• 27:22Kara Swisher?

  It's true. They, but in comparison, you're right, they didn't, although Murdoch was on Twitter for a New York minute there and they pulled it away, 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 is really means he's got an addiction. One of the characters, Steve Carells, as you noted, he was critically to get to it. And 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 pop- But they are the way you talk about this guy. And there's several of them in Silicon Valley like this.

• 28:06Kara Swisher?

  Bill Campbell, who was 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.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  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 Teal we thought about. A thing that, as far as I know, doesn't apply to either of them was that I also wanted this flavor of mortality. And, you know, it's obviously a thing, especially in tech world, that the hope that you might be able to defeat death. I just find that very, very funny and very, very human because, 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 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?

• 29:16Speaker 00

  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 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 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's.

• 29:57Kara Swisher?

  Because he wasn't a founder, he was a funder.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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. So, yeah, we want, there was that personal thing, there's that, you know, very precise. Non-founder but more VC kind of advisor, Y Combinator kind of accelerator guy.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then, you know, you get the brilliant thing if you you cast Steve Carell and he brings his his Steve Carell-ness to it and the and the character shifts in another direction. So that that was, you know, as a director, that was an exciting part for me.

• 30:34Kara Swisher?

  One of the things, there is a death element here and there is a big death element. And so my next book is all about the longevity movement among tech people and what it means and 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.

• 31:17Kara Swisher?

  Obviously, the death of Steve Jobs hung very heavily over a lot of Silicon Valley, the 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, the brain grid? I think that's what they called it, right?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess it's it's almost too banal to say like how much of a fear it is for all human beings, the sense of of of going and 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 are that they're that joke made real flesh and blood. And what who wouldn't? The moment you you start considering that you might not have to die, I can see if you see a pathway, however small, you know, there was a scene that we cut where Steve was talking to Cory's character about how It just seemed of overwhelming importance not to die.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  And and I I think I like the basic five year old plea, like, I don't want to die. Don't don't make me die. And so something about philosophizing around it. And also, you know, I think, right, so you 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 it doesn't strike me, it strikes me as much more Charlie Brooker than than sort of.

• 32:53Kara Swisher?

  I think they want to print. Well, I'm just starting the journey of this book, so I'm going to start doing.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  What do they want to do?

• 33:00Kara Swisher?

  Lots of things, print livers, create new bodies, put your head in a different Frankenstein-y kind of stuff.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  I wish I'd had, print me a liver for the when 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.

• 33:15Kara Swisher?

  I met with someone just recently and they're talking about senescent cells. And I'm like, well, as Scott Galloway tells 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 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 efficiency eating and stuff like that. But one of the 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.

• 33:59Kara Swisher?

  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, constant topping, essentially. So talk about that, because as much as they want to live and create and own and dominate, to what purpose?

• 34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess part of that is, you know, I've written, the thing that me and Sam, my old writing partner, wrote, 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, the 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? It is, there is a transaction involved in that, in those relationships. I guess most of us feel sad about that, or would dream of the kind of some, a platonic version of

• 35:04Speaker 00

  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 form of the relationship. So, I mean, I, I just find it funny and interesting and sad to a degree.

• 35:39Kara Swisher?

  Very much so.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Men's failure oftentimes to connect. I think it's culturally being remarked upon a bit, this sort of sadness that men have about not, sometimes not making good friends.

• 35:49Kara Swisher?

  That's also the next level because Correll's last look, he knows they're gonna 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.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  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, most of us don't feel like that most days. And to feel it and for there to be a four percent 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, this is, you know, Pompey and Julius Caesar. It's like, it's world historical. That's, that's pretty exciting for, for, for a mere mortal.

• 36:59Speaker 05

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• 38:10Speaker 02

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• 38:41Speaker 03

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 39:08Kara Swisher?

  I want to ask you in a sort of a creative sense, AI-generated video is getting good, is getting very good. And you've seen this new Google, these Google releases, you've seen the OpenAI 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?

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. You know, I've been asked this a bit a lot, and I 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, that I could play out, not the ones that I don't know how to answer. I have no, 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'll be able to create. I suspect, maybe, you know, maybe something will break and

• 40:22Speaker 00

  the hallucinations will go out of control. But I think that even those kind of things will get fixed eventually.

• 40:27Kara Swisher?

  Correct.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  As long as things are clearly labeled, you know, 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, 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 the book that I'm reading.

• 41:00Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  I'm only interested in other humans. And I think most humans are. But we may, that may change. So I have no consolation to offer.

• 41:10Kara Swisher?

  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?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 41:32Kara Swisher?

  So let's have, Jesse doesn't want to do them, but we do. That's, that's something you're going to face at some point.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think contractually now the WGA would still have my back and

• 41:41Kara Swisher?

  Yes.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  they wouldn't, or they offer me a new contract or, or the next thing. What do I think?

• 41:47Kara Swisher?

  You don't have to do it. It will do it based on your work.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  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, for a funny line that, 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 are hope, you, the tone of this movie is of a piece. Everything I'm saying an AI will be able to do. But I guess the multiplicity of available options means that, that you might be interested in the, in the taste of a human being. I don't know. I, I'm unwilling to offer any grain of hope.

• 42:33Kara Swisher?

  I think you'll be fine. I, I, I think you'll be fine. By the way, as an aside, one of the funniest things is the soup character running Argentina. Just, it never really went anywhere, but I loved it. Like that, because they do think this, just the way Elon thought he could run the government. Like it's kind of, ooh, aircraft carriers.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  I think they only really want him to invest in a power station. But yeah, they, they definitely give him that impression.

• 42:54Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, exactly. So a couple more questions. We've seen our sinistance amateurs 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?

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the, 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 wrote, started, I pitched this in December, wrote it in January, and we'd been making it, but Doge actually, it didn't exist when I pitched it, and when I first started writing, it was before the inauguration, and now it's, or 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

• 44:06Speaker 00

  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, I think people will be wary about taking such sort of political slash cultural dominant position, you know, Jobs obviously was a, was, had a much, much, much, much, much different public persona. There may be, there may be people who deserve as much a pro-cream. I don't think they'll draw it unless they're, unless they go down the Musk route, but he's been probably pretty salutary to people who've been, who think about going into, into the public sphere, don't you think?

• 44:43Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. Yeah, it didn't work for him, but, you know, he's irritating, I think, even the Trump people. 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 told you, 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, 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?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I guess there is no average tech billionaire, isn't there? But, but, that's a really great question. I mean...

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I still think most Americans get their, 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 also less so. Right now, I'd still plump for Fox power over, over any other power, but in it's 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, but the twilight is still quite strong, I think, of the agenda setting of print and the viewing numbers of TV.

• 46:00Kara Swisher?

  Do you, do you have any thoughts what will happen post Murdoch? Although he's got, I gotta tell you, killed off Logan Roy, you can't kill off him. I literally would not turn my back on to him until I saw him in the ground, that's my feeling on that guy.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  I think his mum was 107, 109.

• 46:16Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, something like that, yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  So, have I got any, no, I mean, I did think, forget AI, they were, they were writing an extra season of Succession for us out in the desert in Nevada, the, 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, the meetings that had gone on and the family movements behind the scenes were pretty extraordinary, but it's, it's, I think it's going to be a mess, isn't it? Dynasties often crumble when that, when there's a contest for power.

• 46:54Kara Swisher?

  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, they were, oh, we don't, we don't pay attention, they paid complete attention to Succession, which was very funny.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  I don't think Rupert did, I don't know.

• 47:11Kara Swisher?

  Oh, I bet he did, oh, I bet he did.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  I bet you turn it off halfway through, I don't think he gives a fuck.

• 47:17Kara Swisher?

  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. So, last two questions, are rich people inherently more interesting narratively in a story because they have more choices? What is about the, especially the American ultra-rich in particular, it's interesting to you? And would you ever make a TV show about poor people, or do you think?

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, I would.

• 47:40Kara Swisher?

  What is, what is, why is it interesting to you?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:58Kara Swisher?

  You love a helicopter.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  I don't, I've never gone in a helicopter and I hope never to. I'm scared of them.

• 48:03Kara Swisher?

  But you love having them. They're always in your.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Maybe I do. They look, they, they, they have a certain thing on camera and I don't, I don't know what to do about that. But I honestly, my, what I claim, and you tell me if you're calling bullshit on it, is I, I really don't think I particularly, I'm interested in rich people. I'm just interested in power, I think.

• 48:24Kara Swisher?

  Power, you are.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  And, you know, you, 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 gilt markets meltdown.

• 49:04Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, they had their New Zealand plan at the end.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  They can't get poor. And that's, that's a bit of a challenge for a writer. So I really think it's power. I don't, I wouldn't care to write just a bunch of rich folks.

• 49:14Kara Swisher?

  No, I think you're right. I think you got, I think one of the things, and one of the, is the loneliness that they have was really very clear. And one of the, the resonance from Succession was the last scenes of Succession where I was so obsessed with the antiseptic nature of, of, of the cushions they were in, in 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, 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.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:50Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and I think it is tough to form connections that I think rich, rich, 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, they're, 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 at the, in, in, you know, those, the three women in, in, in the White

• 50:44Speaker 00

  Lotus, and they sort of mean something. And even when everything else 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.

• 50:57Kara Swisher?

  True.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  And so that's something I have to, for them to play with.

• 51:00Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. And they need each other, like the last two, the, the two, when they're merging their companies, they kind of need each other.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:11Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Often people, 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. It's so sad. Like, people you would invite, I know, right?

• 51:28Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 51:29Kara Swisher?

  I was like, do you, they're like, I was like, do you know them? Like, met once. I was like, oh, ow, ouch.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  I've got, I've got the liver printing, I've got the holding a newborn over, over a B day, hoping for it to poop. And I've got inviting people to your wedding you've never met.

• 51:45Kara Swisher?

  Take it all.

• 51:45Speaker 00

  I've got, I've got another, I've got another episode. Let's take it to Casey.

• 51:49Kara Swisher?

  Right, it's true. All right, my last question. Is tech a winner take all, is, is life now a winner take all game? And if so, who wins?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Huh. Well, I guess, I guess that's the, it feels like the economy is a winner take all economy, right? And that's one of, that's part of the reason for the wave of populism we got all over the world. And tech, it is, right? It, I mean, do

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Probably, probably one of the AI firms or AI arms within a tech firm is gonna do it and is gonna come up with a model which is world beating and they probably will be the monopolist, don't you think so?

• 52:29Kara Swisher?

  I do. That's why they're sucking up to Trump, because it matters right now.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  It matters right now. Yeah, so, so I am scared of that kind of world, yeah.

• 52:38Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I don't want any of them to run. At one point, Mark Zuckerberg was talking about, you had, you did references in China about China, they always use China as 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? You know? And he goes, well, it is. I said, I don't like either choice. 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 gonna 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?

• 53:23Kara Swisher?

  Are you happy?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:36Kara Swisher?

  Perfect timing.

• 53:37Speaker 00

  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 to you about it.

• 53:46Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, I'm a little meaner to you, because, but I've had it with them, I've had to deal with them in real life. What are you working on next?

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Going back to the things I was trying to write before that, this sort of sideswiped me, so, bit of prose and a movie that I promise 90% won't be about rich people.

• 54:02Kara Swisher?

  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.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. Really lovely to chat.

• 54:20Kara Swisher?

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Geteri Okum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Allison Rogers, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. 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.

• 55:01Speaker 02

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