00:00What a time to be writing about what maybe you're presenting as Masters of the Universe in some way here.
00:06How did this come to bear? How relevant is it for our time?
00:09I think it's extremely relevant, but it is one of these funny things with television.
00:13You write it a year or so before it actually airs, so you're guessing at what might be relevant.
00:21And it's a difficult thing to chase, obviously, with tech.
00:24It's just moving way too fast to try to anticipate what the next thing is going to be.
00:29I think we managed to do that.
00:31It's kind of like sometimes the Defense Department brings in screenwriters to say, like, what would a great weapon be
00:38of the future?
00:40In a lot of ways, that's what we did in terms of where we thought tech was going.
00:45The therapy bot, things like even aspects that were major news items, like what happened with the VA and Doge
00:53and everything like that is a major story point for us.
00:56But we wrote it before that actually happened.
01:00Life imitating art.
01:02Indeed.
01:02Billy, what's interesting is, well, the X-Prize actually is going out there at the moment wanting people to come
01:07up with more positive views of how technology is going to change because they want the next phone in the
01:13way that was inspired by Star Trek.
01:14But for you, how did you get into character?
01:16How did you think about this tension that we have of utopia versus, well, dystopia?
01:22Oh, that's quite interesting.
01:24You know, basically, as an actor, you know, you take in, you decipher what you see out there.
01:28We know all the people in the headlines.
01:30We know who is in the tech titans of...
01:33Who are you?
01:33Who are you most fascinated by?
01:34All of them, to tell you, I don't want to put names out there, but we know who they are.
01:38And then you just take the good, the bad, the ugly, and then you try to build a character through
01:42all that and make this melange of a character that I was like, okay, what's interesting to me?
01:47What's scary to me?
01:50Yeah, it's just, they're out there.
01:51We see them.
01:52We know who we are.
01:52And the best part about Jonathan Glatzer making the story, there's the tech titans, but Duncan Park is right under
01:59them and he is hungry for it.
02:01And it just kind of shows a little bit the toxic nature that can seep into these guys who probably
02:06genuinely, when they started, they had hope and had hope to build something positive for the world.
02:12And then greed, corruption, all the beautiful things that we see out there seeps in.
02:17So beautiful.
02:18Yeah.
02:19And I think it was important also for there to be, for him to be a wannabe titan, for that
02:25desperation to be there, to fuel the story.
02:28But also to not necessarily be influenced by the fame and the spotlight that the people at the very top
02:38of the ladder, we see them be like rock stars.
02:43And I feel like that desire to be amongst them, it was so important, but not actually being one of
02:50them was, I guess.
02:53It's a fun world he's created.
02:54Actually, it's not, it's just, again, our job is to show a little bit of a mirror to reality.
02:59Oh, hey, I hear you.
03:00No, I know you don't want to name names, right?
03:02So your character is an audacious data mining CEO.
03:07I can tell you having been in Silicon Valley for a decade.
03:09Would you agree that's like the oil of that industry?
03:12So how do you prepare for that character?
03:15So there are some real world examples out there of the audacious data mining CEO.
03:20Go through the process.
03:22The process of it, honestly, it's just looking and regarding what's out there.
03:27And then you slowly just pull back each little layer of it and you make a beautiful dish out of
03:32it.
03:32And I think that's the fun part.
03:34Again, the world was created in Jonathan Glatzer's mind and like to have one of the most, you know, profound
03:39writers of our time.
03:40And I'll quote me on that.
03:42I think he is absolutely exceptional.
03:44That playground then is created for me just to dance on.
03:48And I couldn't be more grateful to be a collaborator with this fine gentleman to my right.
03:53Likewise.
03:54Jonathan, I want to respect the specifics of the audacity and the distinction in genre almost.
04:01But I came to San Francisco in 2018 with several seasons of Silicon Valley under my belt.
04:07Right.
04:07And that show so closely aligned with the culture, satirical, poked fun at what it is to be maybe the
04:14lower end of the spectrum, the startup, small scale, early stage.
04:18How conscious of that were you, that that exists out there and how much you wanted audacity to to be
04:26representative of all of the capital that's here, intellectual and financial capital that underpins the technology industry?
04:32I think that I was a huge fan of Silicon Valley myself.
04:36It's brilliant, brilliant satire.
04:39It definitely is about a time in the valley that was a little bit more optimistic, the garage incubator type
04:50of culture and that that striving to, you know, make it to to to a place which is, as I
04:58said before, is is part of what what Duncan is is going through.
05:02But Duncan already Duncan Park, the character that Billy plays so brilliantly.
05:10He he he he he had a company prior to this called Fafa, which was about bringing people together and,
05:18you know, they would be trading candles and canoes and stuff like that.
05:21And then he became a data merchant, a third party type of data merchant.
05:28And I think that what we're showing in our you know, it's a very different show.
05:34It's a much more of a families interacting as a psychiatrist is the second lead of the show.
05:43But the idea that everybody back in the day was truly optimistic in a genuine way that they were going
05:51to be bringing people together, they're going to lower the barriers in terms of tolerance and people communicating together.
05:59And the idea that information is going to be something that's reliable and accessible and that all kind of went
06:07in the opposite direction for the most part, for the most part.
06:10Right.
06:10Right. And but they made a lot of money doing it.
06:14And so it was kind of like, wait, are we we're sort of tearing at society in a lot of
06:18ways here.
06:19And communication has been completely bifurcated and people don't seem to be any more tolerant, let alone all the other
06:28things that they that they talked about.
06:30But we're making so much money doing it.
06:32And maybe this is what people want, you know, and so that sort of cynicism and that that I think
06:39it just imbued a different chapter in the Silicon Valley story.
06:46And and hopefully there's a chapter coming up.
06:49I don't know when, but hopefully there will be one where they realize that the power that they that they
06:55have is also the power to do good.
06:58But also the characters he's created, it is the culture you're examining the culture that lives with inside Silicon Valley
07:06now.
07:06And I love that, that that dynamic of the whole whole project.
07:10I feel lucky to be part of this project, honestly.
Comments