Silicon Valley finally has its 'Succession'
'The Audacity' showrunner Jonathan Glatzer has a message for the tech industry about fallibility. Also: Anthropic needs more TPUs, Elon v. OpenAI goes to trial, a hedge fund run by AI, and more.
Happy Friday. This week’s podcast was one of the most fun ones we’ve done yet. It’s an experiment in having more non-CEO/founder types on the show. We also changed the structure to lead with the interview. Would love your thoughts.
“They have denied fallibility entirely”
The Audacity is AMC’s new dark comedy about a flailing tech CEO, a therapist who gets caught up in white-collar crime, and the ecosystem of wealth, paranoia, and complicity that surrounds them in Silicon Valley. It premiered on April 12th and has already been renewed for a second season. The cast is killer: Billy Magnussen, Sarah Goldberg, Zach Galifianakis, Lucy Punch, Simon Helberg, Rob Corddry, and more. Its creator, Jonathan Glatzer, is an Emmy winner who previously wrote on Better Call Saul and Succession. He has a message for tech leaders.
“They have denied fallibility entirely,” Glatzer says on this week’s podcast episode. “They have so bought into the idea that certainty is the way to look at the world that one should have a worldview and stick to it and not apologize ever.” He believes fallibility is not something to fear or engineer away. “It is, in fact, what makes us great ultimately. We learn from fallibility. We are humbled by fallibility.”
The show zeroes in on private data and how tech companies treat it as their central throughline, but not in a way that, in my opinion, will feel cartoonish to those who work in tech. The characters also aren’t just the tech executives. They’re the therapists, family members, private school parents, employees, and the entire ecosystem of people who enable their power. “Sarcasm is the protest of the weak,” Glatzer says, quoting the writer John Knowles. “And it might just be what we’ve got left.”
Jonathan joins this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger. You can watch the conversation above or listen to it in your podcast player of choice by clicking this link.
Three things that stood out from the conversation with Jonathan:
Glatzer calls himself a Luddite, and it shows in how he approached the material. He didn’t know much about tech when AMC’s president, Dan McDermott, first pitched him on the idea. He consulted with people like Josh Marcuse, who worked for Eric Schmidt and on Obama’s defense council. But the biggest unlock was learning to research it himself at the cost of “totally destroying your search history.” He’s not on social media.
Season two is already underway. Glatzer’s writing team uses AI for quick factual lookups but refuses to use it for actual writing. “This is a tone that I think AI is not capable of and hopefully never will be of emulating.” He’s currently in New York running the season two writers’ room while season one is still airing, which means writing without knowing how audiences will react. An LLM storyline is coming, and it ties back to private data.
Kids are the real stakes of the show. He made the point that children are both the prime demographic for data collection and the people who will live with its consequences the longest. Kids born today will have a data footprint that stretches from birth onward. He pointed to school tablets handed out for free that mine student data and sell it to brokers who aggregate it with social media activity, shopping habits, and behavioral reports. “I’m going to be dead sooner than these kids are,” he said. “My data is less valuable.”
Listen or watch wherever you get podcasts.
Feed check
Anthropic is going to buy many more TPUs. That’s how I read today’s main news: Google is investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic, starting with a $10 billion tranche. This is on top of the roughly $3 billion that Google has already invested. Even with how friendly Demis Hassabis and Dario Amodei are, I imagine there are folks at Google DeepMind wondering why they can’t just get all the TPUs for their models.
The Elon Musk versus OpenAI trial kicks off next week. Monday will be for jury deliberation, and I expect Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday to feature some of the highest-profile witnesses. I already did a big roundup of the most interesting nuggets from the lawsuit, but there are also a lot of good curtain raisers out this week if you want a deeper refresher on the trial and what’s at stake: The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Verge.
The founder of Instacart is launching a hedge fund controlled by AI agents. This idea is being discussed a lot privately in tech circles. I know Travis Kalanick has been experimenting with something similar. From Apoorva Mehta's announcement: “We’re starting in public markets, where feedback is fast and unforgiving. Over time, we expect to extend the same system across other asset classes. We don’t intend to sell or license this technology. We plan to use it ourselves. That also means we’ll be much more private than a typical startup.”
Sports teams will escape the permanent underclass. An interesting line from Josh Kushner’s explanation for why Thrive is taking an ownership stake in the San Francisco Giants: “These are assets with qualities that cannot be replicated by technology. Iconic franchises and cultural institutions rooted in tradition, identity, and shared experience. In a world shaped by abundant intelligence where creation scales and distribution fragments, we believe they will matter even more.”
RIP to “the everything app.” X launched XChat, its standalone private messaging app for mobile. It looks very well-designed, but it also goes against the narrative Elon Musk put forward about why he was buying Twitter.
“Stanford is an incubator with dorms.” The Atlantic has a very good deep dive on what’s actually going on at tech’s preeminent university these days.
ICYMI
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