Show Notes
Jonathan Glatzer has written for shows like Succession and Better Call Saul. Now he’s got his own: The Audacity, a new AMC drama set in Silicon Valley.So why make a Silicon Valley show right now — and what, exactly, is he trying to say about tech?
Glatzer tells me he wasn’t interested in making a wall-to-wall “tech show,” or in doing spot-the-billionaire satire. Instead, he says, he wanted to focus on the people living inside that world: the strivers, service providers, almost-rich neighbors, therapists, and families orbiting vast amounts of money and power.
We talk about why privacy and data collection still worry him more than AI hype; why he thinks tech has failed to deliver on many of its biggest promises; and why he’s more interested in the human consequences of Silicon Valley than in explaining how the industry works.
Plus: what it means to make a prestige-style TV drama in a post-Peak TV market, why AMC was willing to take a swing on this one, and how you fake Silicon Valley by shooting in Vancouver. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from Channels with Peter Kafka
It feels like 2022 all over again: Netflix has hit a wall, and is scrambling to respond. That means layoffs, a purge of its top content people and… what else?
Most of us stopped watching traditional TV a long time ago. Political campaigns, meanwhile, still spend most of their ad money there.Rob Flaherty has been trying to change that from inside Democratic politics. He’s been the digital guy for Hilary Clinton, and then Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. (Here’s his post-mortem of that one.) Now he runs a political shop of his own.
Larry Ellison bought his son a media empire. What does he want from it? Vanity Fair’s Tom Dotan joins me to talk about the billionaire behind Paramount and Warner Bros., his connection to TikTok, and his politics. Tom’s reporting suggests there may be less of a master plan than you’d think. We also discuss why even Ellison’s enormous fortune has limits—and how his media bets are tied to Oracle’s AI gamble.Then, Kevin Roose joins me to discuss his new book, The AGI Chronicles, and a question I keep coming back to: Why did people who think AI could destroy humanity work so hard to build it? We talk about whether those same people can be trusted to slow things down, and I push Kevin on the gap between AI’s promises and what most of us experience. Plus: Why he left The New York Times to build a media business with Casey Newton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
David Ellison has won Warner Bros. Discovery. Now he has to figure out what, exactly, to do with it.
I went to Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters to try Mark Zuckerberg’s newest face computer: a $1,300 pair of virtual-reality glasses that are much lighter and cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro, and still make you ask a very basic question: What am I supposed to do with this thing?So I asked my pal Mike Isaac, the New York Times tech reporter and longtime Meta watcher. We talked about why Meta keeps spending billions trying to put computers on our heads, why this version might have a better shot than the last ones, and where Meta’s fast-growing Muse AI agent fits into the company’s plan.Then we turn to the much bigger—and darker—AI story Mike has been reporting on: The fight over whether the companies racing to build more powerful AI systems can actually control them. What are the real risks? Who gets to decide what counts as “safe enough”? And what happens when the people building this stuff say they can’t afford to slow down? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices