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

Summary

Podcast Summary: Channels with Peter Kafka

Episode: What Happens When a “Succession” Writer Takes on Silicon Valley
Date: April 8, 2026
Host: Peter Kafka
Guest: Jonathan Glatzer (Showrunner, "The Audacity")
Network: Vox Media Podcast Network

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Episode Overview

Peter Kafka sits down with Jonathan Glatzer, the creator of AMC’s new series “The Audacity” and a veteran TV writer (“Better Call Saul,” “Succession”). The conversation delves into what it means to write a show centered on Silicon Valley without making it “about tech,” the real-life inspirations behind the show’s characters and stories, the challenges of satirizing a rapidly changing industry, and broader reflections on wealth, status, AI, and privacy in the tech world. Glatzer opens up about his personal ambivalence and critiques of technology, his focus on character-driven storytelling, and how the TV industry itself is changing in the era after Peak TV.

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Key Topics and Insights

1. Why Make a Show About Silicon Valley?

[02:00 – 05:55]

• Glatzer clarifies that “The Audacity” isn’t really about technology, but rather the people who create it and are shaped by it.

  "It's not about technology. It's about the people who happen to be making technology. Silicon Valley is the backdrop... But in front of that backdrop are the characters in the foreground." – Jonathan Glatzer [03:55]

• The series' genesis came from AMC’s Dan McDermott seeking a Silicon Valley-themed project, which led Glatzer to research and immerse himself in the area.
• Glatzer describes Silicon Valley as a place with deeply embedded, often unexamined rituals—a monoculture that thinks it’s unique and on the frontier.

  "It's weird how normal everyone there thinks it is. Whenever I parachute in...I'm like, wait, what is that? Like, oh, that's this thing that we all do." – Peter Kafka [06:06]

2. Blending Fact, Fiction & Satire

[06:49 – 09:34]

• Instead of thinly disguising real-world figures, the show uses fictional companies and characters (e.g., “Cupertino” instead of Apple).
• Glatzer is uninterested in doing “tech wall to wall,” focusing more on aspirations, failures, and the social stratification of the Valley.

  "He very much wants to be [a billionaire]. And that desperation fuels him. And that's a very Silicon Valley story." – Jonathan Glatzer [07:18]

• Writing for a fast-evolving topic means any attempt to portray “current” tech is often outdated by production time.

  "When we try to anticipate what tech might come up with, it's a fool's game and you'll just never keep up." – Jonathan Glatzer [09:02]

3. Real-Life Parallels—and Uncanny Coincidences

[09:34 – 11:10]

• Several show plot points (AI therapy bots, VA upheaval, wildfires) became realities shortly after writing.

  "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 burned down in a wildfire..." – Jonathan Glatzer [10:43]

4. Critiquing the “Tech Utopia” Narrative

[11:10 – 14:16]

• The show allows characters to voice serious critiques of tech’s social promises (“Tech changed the world, but so did the bubonic plague.”).

  "Tech changed the world, but so did the bubonic plague." – Jonathan Glatzer (via character monologue) [12:39]

• Glatzer feels tech has not improved everyday life as much as promised and may have even made things worse.

  "We have come to feel like all matter, all quotidian life is dependent on an app or tech in some fashion." – Jonathan Glatzer [13:22]

5. Class, Status & the Economy of Silicon Valley

[14:16 – 18:27]

• The show follows not just tech titans, but also service providers (therapists, public sector workers) to highlight the deepening economic gulf.
• Kafka notes the show’s nuanced look at “upstairs/downstairs” divides—people who are wealthy but feel poor in comparison to billionaires.
• The show’s therapist character justifies insider trading because of her role in helping clients (CEOs) generate massive wealth.

  "The injustice of getting an hourly wage when she is probably...created billions of dollars of wealth for others. The injustice of that really eats at her." – Jonathan Glatzer [18:09]

6. Human Problems, Not Just High-Tech Ones: AI & Empathy

[20:27 – 24:29]

• Unlike other recent portrayals, the show treats AI and tools like therapy chatbots with nuance, showing both potential benefit and risk.

  "For me, the problem isn't AI. The problem is the people who are promoting and making AI... Human beings are the problem." – Jonathan Glatzer [21:04]

• Glatzer expresses skepticism about grandiose tech promises and wants more evidence before new tech is adopted everywhere.

  "I'd like to see evidence of that before I invite it into my pocket, into my phone, into my child's education...” – Jonathan Glatzer [22:31]

• Worries center more on lack of accountability and power concentration in tech, rather than the technology itself.

7. The Changing Nature of TV Production

[26:51 – 30:13]

• The era of lavish, “prestige” TV production is over; budgets and opportunities have shrunk.

  "AMC is the only channel on the dial...not either owned by a tech company or Disney or now whatever they're going to call Paramount." – Jonathan Glatzer [27:35]

• Glatzer describes producing “The Audacity” as a rare opportunity, partly because most platforms wouldn’t dare satirize tech so directly.
• Some exteriors were shot in Silicon Valley, but most production took place in Vancouver due to cost and logistics.

8. Data, Privacy, and Lasting Concerns

[37:42 – 40:53]

• The show highlights not just the race for AI, but the persistent issues of personal data collection and monetization.

  "Private data is an evergreen topic as concerns tech. So that's probably more than any reason why I chose that and not AI..." – Jonathan Glatzer [39:13]

• Glatzer is alarmed by the collection and use of behavioral data, including children’s school records and online habits.

9. AI's Infiltration of Entertainment Work

[33:27 – 36:23]

• Glatzer sometimes uses AI for research but resists employing it for actual scriptwriting.

  "I don't think that AI is the right tool for writing this show or helping beyond help for research." – Jonathan Glatzer [33:36]

• He notes a cultural backlash brewing against AI-generated content, especially among younger people.
• Writers’ unions are also grappling with how to handle AI in creative work.

10. Looking Ahead: Audience, Criticism, and Season Two

[41:16 – 42:36]

• Glatzer tries to insulate himself from online feedback, focussing on character and thematic integrity as he writes the second season.

  "My fealty is to these characters and to the production...If you start hearing what lasagna come25 is saying about you on the comment section, I think it starts to get..." – Jonathan Glatzer [41:41]

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Notable Quotes

• “It's not about technology. It's about the people who happen to be making technology...Backdrop is not to dismiss it...But in front of that backdrop are the characters...”
  – Jonathan Glatzer [03:55]
• "He thought it was a movement. It was just a startup."
  – Character summary, via Kafka and Glatzer [07:36]
• "Tech changed the world, but so did the bubonic plague."
  – Jonathan Glatzer (via character monologue) [12:39]
• “We have come to feel like all matter, all quotidian life is dependent on an app or tech in some fashion.”
  – Jonathan Glatzer [13:22]
• “For me, the problem isn't AI. The problem is the people who are promoting and making AI... Human beings are the problem.”
  – Jonathan Glatzer [21:04]
• "Private data is an evergreen topic as concerns tech. So that's probably more than any reason why I chose that and not AI."
  – Jonathan Glatzer [39:13]

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Key Timestamps

• [03:55] – Glatzer on why the show centers people, not technology.
• [07:36] – The show’s fictional company “Cupertino” and its struggling founder.
• [12:39] – Stinging critique of tech’s impact.
• [18:09] – The therapist character’s justification for crossing ethical lines.
• [21:04] – AI isn’t evil, but the motives of those wielding it are suspect.
• [27:35] – The tougher realities of making a satire about tech on today’s TV landscape.
• [39:13] – Why privacy and data are at the heart of the show’s critique.

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Memorable Moments

• Glatzer’s story about writing a wildfire into the show—then losing his own home in one days later.
• The show's understated yet pointed satire: not naming real tech companies, inventing “Cupertino.”
• Conversation about the enduring, often invisible role of data collection, even for children in schools.
• Kafka and Glatzer’s commiseration over the odds and ends of Hollywood production as Peak TV wanes.

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Tone and Style

• Frank, witty, and skeptical—very much in line with the “plain, BS-free English” Kafka promises.
• Glatzer’s answers mix personal anecdotes, a sharp eye for irony (“I'm Ned Ludd and Don Quixote...writing a TV show about tech.” [14:02]), and a consistent concern for the social effects of technology.
• The discussion balances media industry insider talk, cultural critique, and relatable observations on everyday tech saturation.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

• "The Audacity" uses Silicon Valley as a rich backdrop to explore timely themes of wealth, ambition, disillusionment, and technology’s unintended consequences.
• The show is less about how specific technologies work, and more about the people, power structures, and personal compromises inherent in our digital era.
• Privacy, social stratification, and the human element behind “the next big thing” get more focus than cutting-edge gadgetry or corporate rivalry.
• “The Audacity” is both a satire and a character study, informed by real trends and events, but not shackled to the news cycle—a point that Glatzer and Kafka reinforce throughout.

Recommendation:
If you’re interested in how tech culture shapes ordinary (and extraordinary) lives, and how a seasoned showrunner approaches these themes with both skepticism and wit, this conversation is worth a listen—or a read.

Transcript

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[Jonathan Glatzer]

Foreign.

[Peter Kafka]

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 Silicon Valley. 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 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 is called the Audacity. You can start seeing it on AMC starting Sunday, April 12th. Did I get the date right?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Correct.

[Peter Kafka]

I got the date right. Thanks for coming.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah, thank you for having me.

[Peter Kafka]

Why make a show about technology in 2026?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I don't know. Well, 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, you know, 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. working for Veterans Affairs. And so it's a much broader swath than tech.

[Peter Kafka]

Yep.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

And that was by design. I did not want to do tech wall to wall.

[Peter 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

[Jonathan Glatzer]

always set 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, you know, Silicon Valley space. And I admitted to him that I am by no means an expert in tech, but it seemed like a really fascinating culture to try to capture. And so that's really from the start that.

[Peter Kafka]

So you were told, we've got an opportunity to make a show in tech. Do you have anything?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

It was, yeah. And I.

[Peter Kafka]

Or what can we place in Silicon Valley?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah, it was, it was. 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 research the place and get to know it and yeah, it's a weird place, man. It's got a lot of.

[Peter 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

No, I know. And that's, you know, 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.

[Peter Kafka]

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 there.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

That's right.

[Peter Kafka]

World. So we are the frontier. That's. They revel in that.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

All right. Unless I'm missing it, you are not naming names in this. There's a company called Cupertino. You call it Cupertino and 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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 the most. He's aspirational in that regard.

[Peter Kafka]

He only sold his company for nine figures instead of the billions.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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 onto 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

[Peter Kafka]

of the day, which is a failure

[Jonathan Glatzer]

for them, a failure.

[Peter Kafka]

Other shows that have satirized either Silicon Valley or just other real world places, and you've worked, again, you worked on Succession, where there's real characters or very identifiable real people. 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 character.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I'm definitely not. No, no, I'm definitely not. And Succession didn't either, by the way. And we did base it. You know, obviously the Murdochs informed a lot of that, but so did a number of.

[Peter Kafka]

Sumner Redstone. I had read Marissa Marr on this show talking about all the work she did making that a real thing.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

She was a huge force behind the show. Really genuinely, that's.

[Peter Kafka]

I would love to read whatever Bible she created. That's because she talked about how she created backstory for all this and all the mechanisms.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

I guess what I'm getting at is this is. This seems like it's in a world that's inflected by reality, but it's also broad. There's broad humor and broad jokes, and then there's. 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Definitely not the tech and how it works. Part of it is when you make a television show, writing it a year before it come. I mean, 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. You know, it's just. There's so much heavy lifting to do. So when we try to anticipate what tech might come up with, it's. It's a. It's a fool's game and you'll just never keep up.

[Peter Kafka]

Right.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

However, we did land on a bunch of things that became very quickly either, you know, at the center of news stories or whatever. Like, 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. And 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 Cordry, 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. And it was already hobbling along as it was. So all of that became very weirdly zeitgeisty. And I mean, 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 burned down in a wildfire

[Peter Kafka]

in the California fires last year.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah, yeah, In Altadena. So it's. You gotta be careful. I don't know, it started to get weird.

[Peter Kafka]

You don't wanna summon up reality. No. Did you have. So I've gone through three episodes. In the third episode, one of the characters has a monologue where she has sort of a 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?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

No, they've gotten only stronger. And this year and a half period has. We've all seen this exponential growth of, obviously, AI, but also the marriage politically between Silicon Valley and D.C. that is, I suppose, mutually beneficial, certainly at the moment. At the moment, yeah. Yeah, we'll see. 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, you know, 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, you know, thing after thing after thing, they failed miserably across the board. She says, you know, 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. If you. I mean, I think if you're. 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? Was I. Was I incapable of communicating with. With friends and peers? And was I. Was information being blocked from my.

[Peter Kafka]

How did I survive before tech made my life possible?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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.

[Peter Kafka]

But it turns out you. We could, in theory, manage without it.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Not only manage without it, I do believe from my own point of view that we are not better off with it.

[Peter Kafka]

But now it's here. You cannot, 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 iPhone.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I am Ned Ludd and Don Quixote and all of those guys rolled up into one who is writing a TV show about tech. But I, I do. And I, and I. I use tech to some extent myself, obviously. I mean, how can I not.

[Peter Kafka]

I'll come back to tech, but I want to ask 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 psychiatrists and therapist who doesn't even own home.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Right.

[Peter Kafka]

She has to rent. Whose kid goes to the fancy school but doesn't pay full freight. Scholarship, the school informs her.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

When they're having a fight. And so all. All these sort of upstairs downstairs things that again, you see some of in shows like Succession, you also see in Friends and Neighbors. But I mean, I think, I think that's what's most, 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Right. Yeah, I mean, I think. And it's also. You don't want to talk about tech, but Silicon Valley also has this dividing

[Peter Kafka]

line

[Jonathan Glatzer]

because the wealth that has accumulated there happened so quickly. And the amount of monies that we're talking about are just so astronomical. It 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. And it shows that a pixel or a little group of pixels is what the average household is like. Have you seen this before?

[Peter Kafka]

No, but I can imagine.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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. And 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?

[Peter Kafka]

But some of it that really resonated with me wasn't about look how much money billionaire has. It's, look what, look what, look what the struggle. But and also then there's stuff there that, that again, if you, if you're familiar with upper middle class people, you seem 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

[Jonathan Glatzer]

can discuss that offline.

[Peter Kafka]

Or maybe you know better than I do. You got a 17 year old, maybe it does get you in the Duke. But, but it's, it's, it's, it's a lot of travails of people that you aren't sympathetic for and maybe you're more sympathetic towards them just because they're in contrast to billionaires.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think the psychiatrist is somebody psychologist, technically PhD.

[Peter Kafka]

She

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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 who.

[Peter Kafka]

So it's high status but she's still a service provider.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

That's right. She's still getting an hourly wage from these people who and 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. She's got a good brain for finance. And the injustice of getting an hourly wage when she is probably, you know, created billions of dollars of wealth for others. The injustice of that really eats at her.

[Peter Kafka]

And there's a logic to it. Like she essentially engages in 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 like it's kind of just 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.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Support for the show comes from Amazon. There are the things you can plan for a first birthday party, a movie marathon, a renter friendly bathroom reno. And then there are the things you can never plan for. A surprise rainstorm, a Blu ray player calling it quits. Stick on tiles that looked way better on the package for all things planned and unplanned, Amazon has you covered. You'll find low prices on everyday essentials and last minute lifesavers. Shop Amazon and save on Essentials. Save the everyday.

[Peter Kafka]

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[Jonathan Glatzer]

Hi, I'm Brene Brown.

[Peter Kafka]

And I'm Adam Grant.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop, a podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree, but we almost never disagree. And we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.

[Peter 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. It is not foregrounded in your show.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

No.

[Peter Kafka]

When you sort of talked about why you weren't trying to write to the moment in the first episode, the third episode, where it comes up, really, they really spend some time talking about it. Yeah, 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Well, for me, the problem isn't AI. The problem is the people who are promoting and making AI you know, 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.

[Peter 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 gonna 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I think that, you know, what I say about AI is a lot of what I say about Silicon Valley, which is, you know, 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, you know, King Midas would be jealous of. But I think that what starts to get me very worried, you know, the idea of curing cancer with AI, or climate change for that matter, with AI, is very alluring. I'd like to see evidence of that before I invite it into my pocket, into my phone, into my child's education, into just what they're building for, what they're saying.

[Peter Kafka]

You'd like to opt in.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I'd like to opt in. But I'd also like to see them

[Peter Kafka]

earn that your choice based on their decisions.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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 thing that we touch, that we interact with. That is not a call for. I mean, it's just, you look at if it.

[Peter Kafka]

When the guy from the VA starts playing with the bot or starts interacting with the bot, I thought, oh, 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. And it does not, it seems to give him pleasure. And that is, I found that surprising. You expect a show like this that has a jaundice eye towards tech and towards the travails of rich people to go, ah, see, here's another fish.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

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 doctors. 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 is, it remains with the people who are in control of this. And there are not very many of them. And when they understand the profit potential of this technology and they still 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 coffee.

[Sponsor Announcer]

Are.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

There's 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.

[Peter 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's 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. And 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.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

And there was also an article this past weekend about the natural gas turbines that are completely polluting Loudoun county in Virginia. I think there's another area down in Mississippi that's being completely.

[Peter Kafka]

It's been very hard to find a pro data center constituency in this country.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Well, that's the essence of what AI is. That is the cost of AI and it is big. And it is happening at a time when the government has abandoned the idea of helping us with climate change. Climate change itself is just like, I don't. You don't even hear about it anymore. It's yesterday's news, but it's tomorrow's fucking reality. It's today.

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah, it's tomorrow though, so.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Well, it's not.

[Peter Kafka]

Kick the can down the road and let somebody else deal with it.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah, that's where we're at. Every time there's a polar vortex or a wildfire in California that burns down 9,000 homes, I think that we have to remember why that's happening. Why has the weather gotten so weird? We have a recency bias as human beings. It's built into us. It is one of the most dangerous things that we have. It is probably the greatest challenge of our species to get past the. I mean, we won't. But the whole idea of history repeating itself, the whole idea of learning, not learning the lessons of the past, of not Heeding the warning signs, et cetera. It's do or die for us on that.

[Peter Kafka]

Hard for me to pivot in my next question about Peak tv, but I'm gonna try it anyway.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

That's right.

[Peter Kafka]

This is a show that I think a few years ago we would have called Prestige tv. Definitely. We saw a lot of shows like this in the Peak TV E. You made a bunch of them. You worked on a bunch of them. Again, I mentioned Succession and Better Call Saul and Bloodline on Netflix, and those were all made while there was a ton of money moving around Hollywood to make this sort of stuff that has come to a halt. Things are retrenching. What is it like to make a show like this in 2026, 2025? How is it different to make a show like this in today's business environment as opposed to five years ago?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

What it's like is that it's a blessing and you do not take it for granted that you have this platform that has shrunk. AMC is the only channel on the dial at this point that is independently owned, that's not either owned by a tech company or Disney or now whatever they're going to call Paramount, et cetera. So I don't think any of those companies would have had frankly the balls to do something that really was a satire about the most powerful industry on the planet right now, the biggest money maker on the planet right now. And while I will again say this is about the people there, it's about the effect of this bubble of Silicon Valley living inside this bubble on these, these, these people, these human beings.

[Peter Kafka]

Were there resources that you would have had. Did you think you would have had five years ago that are less available now? Just because everyone's got a more realistic sense of what it's going to cost to make something and what you're going to get back on that.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

The numbers are. Are the numbers. I mean, yeah, Succession had had more time and money to. To get.

[Peter Kafka]

Flew all over the world.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yep, yep. It was. It was fun.

[Peter Kafka]

You guys film. You guys substitute Vancouver for Silicon Valley?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

We do, yeah.

[Peter Kafka]

Is that something. Do you. Different show. Same show in a different time. This would have been filmed in Los Altos.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Probably not, actually. I think the Canadian or the tax credit chase started many years ago.

[Peter Kafka]

So that is not a budget crunch thing. That is new.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

That is not new. It heralded an age of flight from Los Angeles in terms of production. Something that every governor of California says that they're going to reverse. But.

[Peter Kafka]

But now they're asking the federal Government for help.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

So that's, well, that'll go great.

[Peter Kafka]

Were there parts of Silicon Valley's topography or any landmarks? You said, well, I gotta have this. Yeah.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

And we shot for a week in Silicon Valley. We shot in Palo Alto. And so the opening shot is of the old satellite dish on Stanford campus. And a lot of, you know, we, man, did we pack that weekend. Drone shots, car shots, driving shots.

[Peter Kafka]

You do a pretty good job. I kept thinking, oh, they did a nice job of this seems like Silicon Valley. Then they must have filmed it here. And then I wrote it to Vancouver. I'm like, well, they obviously got some shots of the actual stuff we did.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

And you see Woodside where the famous Bucks is and the general store that's up there?

[Peter Kafka]

Yeah.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I mean we drive around the Meta campus and the Google campus and couldn't get near the Apple campus. But that's by design by them, not by us. But yeah, Vancouver actually worked out quite well. I mean, it's also the Pacific Northwest, so there's some similarities there.

[Peter Kafka]

We'll be right back. But first a word from a sponsor.

[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

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[Sponsor Announcer]

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[Jonathan Glatzer]

It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have

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[Peter Kafka]

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[Jonathan Glatzer]

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[Jonathan Glatzer]

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[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

@mintmobile.com it's today explained President Trump has not made a coherent case for his war in Iran. And last night he said he's not ending it yet.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

His ally Tucker Carlson has been making a very coherent case against the war because it doesn't serve American interests in any conceivable way. And, and let, let me just say that if it does in some way serve the interests of the United States, I, I'd love to hear it. I, I haven't heard. On Tuesday, we asked Carlson about his break with Trump and about how the Trump coalition is sp. As some young conservatives abandon the president and embrace something darker, it becomes like all of a sudden like, hey you kids, why you listen to Elvis Presley and that rock music is bad. Like all of a sudden Fuentes controls the conversation and becomes the cool kid. And the net effect is to make the Holocaust a joke. Today explained every weekday wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in

[Peter Kafka]

2016, I've had a front row seat.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I am officially running for President of the United States. It's going to be only America First. America First.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

Thousands of supporters of President President Trump stormed the U.S. capitol building.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm going to ask in our new show from vox.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

The idea of like a post Trump or not exactly Trump focused show can

[Sponsor Announcer]

exist because he's not really driving any agenda items.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

It really does feel like so reactive.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

You know, I think this Iran thing is also going to cause a big split in the gop. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump. But like for the first time you see on a major issue to open opposition from the start of this war. I'm Estet Herndon and welcome to America actually.

[Peter Kafka]

And we're back. Do you use AI in any part of the production, whether it's ideating, writing, production?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Well, I will sometimes look up terms of art in tech to try to get that right. We have consultants as well though, so usually I'll turn to a human. But if it's two in the morning and I'm writing, I know where to go. But for better or worse, I don't think that AI is the right tool for writing this show or helping beyond beyond help for research.

[Peter Kafka]

Would you look at askance as someone that said, yeah, yeah, I do it for research and all that stuff. And also I kick ideas around and I got to this better. I had a block here and I bounced different ideas. I went with this one and ChatGPT helped me figure that out.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

You're feeling a shift already in the conversation. I think that there was a kind of adamantine public facing thing for writers to say no, never ever, never.

[Peter Kafka]

And now what you hear is they're all lying. Everyone's playing with it. They won't admit to it, but they're playing with it.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I would imagine it could be helpful for some shows that are more like a procedural where there's a pattern. I mean there are shows that have been on the air for 20 years that's a lot of data to feed into AI, make me a new SVU. I will admit that there are times again that 2 in the morning moment when it's like, like, wouldn't it be great if I can snap my fingers and this thing could just be written, but it's not gonna be written in a way that I would ever find. Serves these characters as they need to be served. They just, it's, you know, it's not. I hope it never gets to that point where it's.

[Peter Kafka]

I mean, where do you think it goes? Do you think there's gonna be a certain kind of audience that says, you know, the same way I wanna go to a farm table restaurant and I know that they knew where the pig was slaugh. And I want. And I want Jonathan Glatzer's original work and I'm going to seek that out. And I understand there's other stuff that is mass produced and uses AI and I distinguish that.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I mean, the WGA writers union, they are working very hard to try not to allow AI to be a writer. But they've also done some end runs as well. I think that you can use AI, but you have to pay a writer, which I think is frankly a little bullshitty. Might have been just the best that they were able to get from the studios and the negotiations. But I do think that it is a slippery slope. But I also think that by and large, it's not cool. AI is not cool. I mean, you feel the backlash happening.

[Peter Kafka]

My 15 year old is sitting outside. I said I used ChatGPT to help kick around ideas for this.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

What?

[Peter Kafka]

What?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yeah. Are you talking about 17 year olds? These are the same. And you know, these are kids who have grown up now.

[Peter Kafka]

He'll fully use it to cheat on his next term paper too.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Okay. Yeah, okay.

[Peter Kafka]

But thinks that it's a terrible idea.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I never took a Latin test where I did not have a cheat sheet in my hand, so I can't exactly complain. But yeah, I mean, I think that we really do have to ask. We have for me my sense. I consider time to be a wonderful commodity that we undervalue all the time. And rushing to the finish line or whatever it is that we're rushing to is an attribute that is valued far more than careful consideration. As I was saying before about slow down with AI and why, why don't you cure a cancer first before you recommend my whatever. Whatever it is. It's everywhere. You can name anything and it would apply. But I do think that the way that we Interact with tech. There's a storyline in the second season. Now you've been renewed for second season

[Peter Kafka]

even before this one started airing. You're writing it literally right now

[Jonathan Glatzer]

where one of the kids, well, the kids at the private school, they're given a new computer tablet to do their homework on. And it's the learning LMS Learning model system maybe. And this is something my son got fairly early on. Kids now are getting them in kindergarten, public schools too. And what we just need to stop and remember is everything is going through, whether it's Google Classroom or what have you, everything. All that data is contributing to a profile that is associated with that student. Every behavior assessment is in there, hoovering

[Peter Kafka]

up all your data.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

No wonder they give these computers for free to schools. It's like the British system. They decide who's going to work in the coal mines and who's going to be a doctor. That's happening.

[Peter Kafka]

Privacy and who controls the data. Big theme.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yes.

[Peter Kafka]

And this was, I think, a big deal a few years ago in the US that was a big concern. I think we've moved to AI now and are the robots going to kill us or just make us unemployed? But it seems to be the animating thing for you, at least in the first season, that you are concerned about who has access to the data, how do we give it to them, what do we get in return?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Private data is an evergreen topic as concerns tech. So that's probably more than any reason why I chose that and not AI, because AI is evolving so quickly. Private data has been the profit center of Silicon Valley companies other than the hardware that we buy mostly through one or two companies, smaller Chinese, Chinese companies perhaps, but basically the collection of data, the advertising that comes out of that, how they sell it to political organizations, how they sell it to insurance companies, all of that, that is in fact the profit center of Silicon Valley. Us. What we do when we touch our phone, how long we linger on a photo or an article or an ad, how, how we shop, how we eat, how we masturbate. All of it is gathered and they are watching. They really are. Now it's anonymized, you know, with your ip.

[Peter Kafka]

And they also oversell what they can do. Right? That's part of the, like the Cambridge Analytica story is everyone wanted us. They had said, oh, we have all this information. We're able to figure out how people are going to vote and we can manipulate that. And that turned out not to be true. And people wanted to. Wanted it to be true. They wanted a reason to blame.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I think that Facebook's influence on the election had. Even if it just had.

[Peter Kafka]

Oh, I'm not saying there's no effect. Right. That's the reason they're giant advertising businesses, because they are good at getting people to behave a certain way.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Any effect in a Democratic election is too much. And if Cambridge Analytica was the harbinger of how much it can be affected as we go forward, as you keep building these data centers, making the processing power more and more powerful for future elections, I think that it doesn't augur well.

[Peter Kafka]

You're writing a second season now. You're gonna go do that after you finish talking to me in a minute. Are you gonna gauge people's reactions and feedback to season one as you're writing season two? Is that gonna get into your head one way or the other?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

I'm going to bravely say, no, don't read the comments. I don't read the comments.

[Peter Kafka]

You might still read the comments.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

It is tempting. It is really, really tempting to read reviews and things like that. I don't think it's particularly helpful. At the end of the day, I have a season of television to write. My fealty is to these characters and to the production and to the network. But it is to make the best show possible with these themes and these people. And so that's a big fucking job as it is. If you start hearing what lasagna come25 is saying about you on the comment section, I think it starts to get.

[Peter Kafka]

Is that lasagna?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Cunt. Sticky. I did not say cunt. I said come.

[Peter Kafka]

Okay.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Cunt is not a word that one can use.

[Peter Kafka]

No, I was. That's why I was surprised. But I think, well, we'll see what my editor thinks of that. Should we leave it on that? Should we leave this conversation?

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Should lasagna come? I don't think we should.

[Peter Kafka]

Okay, how about this? You can watch season one on AMC and you can stream it and not AMC plus.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Yes. Which anybody who's listening, still listening, has hopefully got some interest in this thing. I would say probably a better experience watching it without commercials. And AMC is a bargain again.

[Peter Kafka]

Okay, I watched. I watched a screener of it with no commercials, but had my name emblazoned across, so that is less than ideal. So AMC plus is the way to go.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Your name will not be emblazoned on other people's stuff.

[Peter Kafka]

Go watch the Audacity since season one. Now.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Season two will be out in about a year.

[Peter Kafka]

In about a year. Jonathan Glatzer. Great to meet you.

[Jonathan Glatzer]

Thank you, Peter. Appreciate it.

[Peter Kafka]

Thanks again to Jonathan Glatzer for coming in in studio to talk about the show. Thanks to Charlotte Silver producing and editing the show. Thanks to our advertisers for bringing it to you guys. Thanks to you guys for listening. We'll see you next week. Maybe a day or two later than we normally come out, but it'll be worth your time. See you soon.

[Additional Advertiser/Voiceover]

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