Big Intv: Fallout Director Jonathan Nolan Says He's Still a Techno-Optimist

I recently onboarded for a new job and it took hours to get access to email to get on slack. Just the basic things I needed to do to get on with my day. And the IT team? Well they were lovely, but it did take up a lot of their time. Time that they could use actually doing their work. That's where Serval comes in. Servil guarantees to cut 50% of your help desk tickets by week four of your free pilot. Things like password resets, access requests, onboarding. Serval takes care of it. Serval was built for AI agents from the ground up. Your IT team describes what they need in plain English and Serval generates production ready automations instantly. And that means I could have been onboarded in minutes instead of hours. Servil powers the fastest growing companies in the world like Perplexity, Merkur, Verkada and Klei. Get your team out at the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot@servl.com uncanny that's S-E-R-V-A L.com uncanny I'll confess, I try to be organized when it comes to my business expenses, but it's really easy to lose track of things and I know a lot of other small business owners out there can feel me. You have a bank account here, an invoice there, a pile of receipts in the corner taunting you. But not anymore. With Found. Found eliminates the clutter by giving you one platform that handles all banking bookkeeping, invoices and taxes. You can even pay contractors for free. No more paying for multiple subscriptions and dealing with clunky, outdated apps. Found has identified the tasks that create the most hassle for small businesses and built an app that does it all directly from your business checking account. And they've automated things like tracking expenses, finding write offs and budgeting for tax season so I can focus on the fun parts of my job. Take back control of your business Today. Open a Found account for free@found.com that's f o u n d com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with Found.

0:00

From Wired. This is the big Interview. I'm Katie Drummond. I'll admit I don't have a ton of time for TV binging, but recently I've gone all in on Fallout. So it's based on a series of video games, of course, and is set in post apocalyptic Los Angeles where citizens are forced to live underground. Fallout is among a series of projects that director, writer and producer Jonathan Nolan has helmed or worked on his IMDb is a list of some of the most prescient representations of where we may be headed. From Memento to interstellar, from Westworld to now. Fallout. Jonah is one of few creatives in Hollywood who consistently evolves how tech, science and AI are portrayed in film and tv. Despite, or maybe because of all this, the Oscar and Emmy nominated multi hyphenate tells me he's still a techno optimist, although he will never use AI to write for him. Here's our conversation. Jonathan Nolan, welcome to the big interview.

2:14

Thank you for having me.

3:17

Delighted that you're here and here in person. We're sitting together.

3:18

It's very cold.

3:22

If you can't tell if you're listening, it is. You're in New York right now. You're not always here. Yeah, it's like. And I'm from Canada, so my barometer is a little off.

3:23

I'm from Chicago.

3:30

Oh, yeah, you are from Chicago. I tend to think of New York.

3:31

As wimpy cold, but this is real cold.

3:33

No, no, this is real. And also, the older I get, the weaker and more frail.

3:35

Yeah.

3:38

So I just. I can't tolerate it.

3:38

I've been in LA for 25 years, so I'm completely useless.

3:39

So we're both totally useless. It's gonna be a great conversation and we always like to start these conversations. Actually, this might help today of all days with some very fast questions. So, like a warmup for your brain.

3:43

I like that.

3:53

And maybe the rest of you, given how cold it is. Are you ready?

3:54

The reason I became a writer is because I was no good at answering fast questions.

3:57

Oh, good.

4:01

Take them aside and think about them for a while. So I'm just gonna flub this.

4:02

What is the most overused sci fi trope?

4:05

Ooh. Faster than light travel.

4:09

Why?

4:13

Because it's a sort of story convenience, I guess. We use it in interstellar, but we use it in a slightly backhanded way, which is a wormhole which doesn't quite feel the same, but effectively it's the same thing. And it's just a way to skip the boring bits.

4:15

Right. Accelerate the plot. What's a book you go back to over and over?

4:29

Of late, I go back to all of the Iain Banks culture books.

4:36

Why?

4:41

Those years ago, I was looking for positive portrayals of AI in science fiction.

4:41

Oh, interesting. We're going to talk all about this. Yeah, keep going.

4:50

And there was almost nothing. Really nothing. I mean, it's kind of James Cameron on one side and no one on the other side of the roster. And Ian Banks, who wrote those books over the course of 20 years. They are the most fully realized and brilliant depiction of a hybrid civilization where you've got people and you've got AI and they. They have sort of figured it out.

4:52

What is the weirdest app on your phone right now?

5:14

Ooh, it's going to be a good one. Certainly the one that has captured the most of my attention, and it's disastrous is. Is an app called Bring a Trailer, which is buying classic cars. I immigrated to the States when I was 11, and when I got my driver's license, I became an American. I was like, never going back to always love cars.

5:18

So you're a car guy. Yeah, I did this. I did not know. This did not come up in my research.

5:38

Yeah, yeah.

5:42

So you're using an app to look at cars to potentially acquire.

5:43

Yeah.

5:47

Sounds very dangerous.

5:48

Classic, old cars, those sorts of things. You know, I love electric cars. I've driven electric cars for years. They're fantastic. But it's very clear we're in this moment. Like, I miss the sort of the. The Cretaceous cell phone age, right? When you. You had like a million different shapes. You had the ones that flipped and rolled and did all that stuff. And then the iPhone came, and that's just this banal, incredibly functional. That's what's happening in cars very soon, like, vanishingly quick. Like, Trump is trying to hold on. I mean, if you look at China, like the, you know, the barn door is wide open. This is.

5:49

Oh, for sure.

6:19

Yeah. So you're.

6:20

But you're looking for the eclectic, the.

6:21

Diverse older internal combustion cars with manual transmissions.

6:22

Wow.

6:28

Okay. Well, that is a weird app. What's harder to write, a perfect ending or a perfect pilot?

6:28

Perfect pilot.

6:35

Why?

6:36

Perfect endings are more important, and so you ascribe value to them because if you don't have an ending, you don't have anything. But in truth, a beginning without an ending is like a joke without a punchline. Right. And I walked into J.J. abrams office one day, we talked about movies for a while, and I walked out as a showrunner, kind of. I liken the experience to getting my tie caught in a shredder. Right. Like, oh, I'll do a little bit of, oh. And you know, 15, 16 years later, here I am. But writing pilots was a maddening experience. As a film writer, you, like, look at all this cool stuff I have. And you'll probably have to cut a few things Out. Don't hit the car on the floor with a pilot. It's okay. I got 100 cool things. I'm going to show you four.

6:36

And I have to pick the most strategically sound combination of those things.

7:17

Very, very difficult.

7:21

If you had to be trapped in one digital simulation, which would you choose?

7:23

Oh, wow.

7:27

We had fun with these.

7:30

Yeah. No, no, no, absolutely. A digital simulation of my creation or a digital or an extant digital simulation. I'm picking a sort of a universe. The Fortnite universe, which is.

7:31

Exactly.

7:45

Hard pass.

7:46

Exactly. But if you're like Westworld, I'm all in.

7:46

You know, I think being able to at every age is amazing. But being able to access honestly these years right now, your kids, you're still. You're so close and they're relying on you for everything, but they're filled with fascinating insights and it's just incredible. And my brother's kids are older. I see how this goes. It's wonderful the whole way through. But you never quite get this moment again.

7:50

Well, don't make me cry right now. It's been like five minutes. So you would wanna live in a digital simulation of your reality with relatively young kids who still love and adore you and think you're the best thing ever.

8:13

Well, let's not get carried away. I'm not sure if they love and adore me, but they tolerate me.

8:25

You wanna live in a digital simulation where your kids still tolerate you?

8:30

Yes. I'll take it.

8:33

That hits. I would too. I would love to live in that world forever.

8:35

Yeah.

8:40

Ugh.

8:40

For sure.

8:41

Google Search or ChatGPT?

8:42

Google Search, for sure.

8:45

Agree. Now, you wrote the short story that became the film Memento. Do you have any tattoos? And what are they?

8:47

My sister in law, Emma and I, who produced that film were talking during the production about getting tattoos.

8:53

Yeah.

8:58

And then we chickened out and I.

8:58

Was like, come on.

8:59

Well, if you don't get one when you're making that movie, you're never getting a tattoo.

9:00

So. Never.

9:02

We're done. Yep. A blank slate, as they say.

9:04

What is the most Luddite part of your creative workflow?

9:07

I wouldn't categorize it as Luddite, but we're still shooting everything on film.

9:10

You are? Yes. You're very well known for this and the commitment remains.

9:14

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we can come back to this later because it relates to the AI of it all, but the promise of digital cameras was that they would save enormous amounts of money.

9:17

Yeah.

9:27

My contention is, and this relates to AI as well, there is no technology that I've ever been presented with, and I've been doing this for 25 years, that has made anything that we do, film or television, cheaper ever. And if you plot the economics of film or television over the last 50 years, I would challenge anyone to point to the inflection point where digital cameras came in and democratized it, because they never did until we shoot it on film because it costs the same and it looks better.

9:28

Cost the same and looks better.

9:51

Yeah.

9:52

Lastly, what is one must have for your doomsday bunker?

9:53

Oh, Nintendo Switch.

9:56

And some games, I assume.

10:01

Yeah, for sure.

10:03

Do you have a doomsday bunker?

10:04

If you have a doomsday bunker, I think, like Fight Club, the first rule is you don't tell people if you have a doomsday. I don't have a bunch.

10:06

You don't have a. There's no bunker. Not yet.

10:12

I'm a techno optimist, sort of.

10:14

We're gonna talk about that too. So let me ask you when I was getting ready to meet you and sit down and talk and thinking about your career. Right. Person of interest. Reading about that really took me back. I was like, how many years ago was it since I watched that show? My husband and I used to watch it every week.

10:16

Oh, no kidding.

10:33

Oh, ye. Interstellar fallout. But there aren't many people, I would say, in film and TV who have so consistently approached tech and science and AI with the consistency and the breadth that you have. Like, you have stuck with these themes. And I'm wondering why, like, what keeps you coming back to those subjects, to those questions in all sorts of. Right. Different formats and different approaches and different. Very different stories often. But what is it about that genre, so to speak?

10:34

It's a very. It's a very flattering way of maybe saying that I get a little stuck or repetitive.

11:03

No, I don't. Come on.

11:09

But no, it's a. It's a big field to us, AI in particular. And I think it started for me. I wrote a film for my brother and David Heyman at Warner Brothers that never got made, but it was about AI. It was about a sort of AI as a bad guy.

11:10

And is this sort of like early 2000s, 2005 that you were writing about AI 2005? Yeah.

11:25

I got fascinated by the subject. I did a lot of research and a lot of looking into it. The next hit for me was the robot characters in Interstellar, which were being developed just shortly after that. I went from one project to the next, and I was like, wouldn't it be fun to write robots. The tension of the robot crew member, whether it's alien or pretty much any version of this, is that they will eventually mutiny and murder everyone and they have a secret agenda. But what if they didn't? What if they were brave, self sacrificing, sarcastic and funny, amazing leaders. What if they've just embodied those values the whole way through? And maybe you'd give the audience a slightly discomfort at first. Then this kind of interesting feeling of like, oh, okay, that's one path. Right, right. It's not written. The path has to be this sort of, you know, I think a lot of that is rooted in sort of, you know, the usual human kind of xenophobia or read movies about Terminator, sell more tickets. That idea I'm fascinated with, where you have this fire hose of data that's out there. What if something could pick through it and find patterns and find meaning?

11:31

The surveillance idea, that proved certainly to be very prescient, I must say.

12:41

Snowden on the wall, there he is. We wrote an episode in the first season that sort of had a very Snowden like figure and debuted about six months before we learned over the patriarch in the Dark Knight. There is a plot twist about mass surveillance and pulling it all. You know, Batman kind of Bruce Wayne builds this sort of very ethically challenged system of stealing information. And it was sort of wrestling with this idea of how much do we entrust the people protecting us outside of the complex universe that were the government to surveil us and what good could they put that to? And I think it definitely wasn't treated as an unalloyed like, oh, it's a wonderful thing. It was, you know, Lucius is kind of horrified when he sees that. So the idea of mass surveillance being sort of organized into and filtered into something that could help people was something I've been fascinated with. And that is an origin point for AI Felt like a, like a natural one. But I wrote a letter when we were trying to put together Westworld. Anthony Hopkins was interested. And then as you know, as always happens, the studio and the agents sort of kind of battle back and forth for a little bit too long. And he started to, you know, we started to get a sense like, okay, we're losing Tony on this one. So I wrote him a letter. And the letter that I wrote had a line and it was a thought that had occurred to me walking home one night and it went like this. It said, we live before. Before what is a little harder to define. But you can feel it. You can Feel this bump in the road, this inflection point. It's a really big one. You feel it coming very, very quickly. You can't quite figure out. Picture a big wave. You don't know what's on the far side of it, but you know it's coming. And for me, that has been about this moment that we're now standing in the middle of. So a little bit, for me, we started writing these films and watching what was happening in the series. This is the story of our time. So the question for me would be, like, why would you write about anything else? Really?

12:46

When you think about writing that letter and sort of feeling like you were on the precipice maybe of something that I think a lot of people had no idea they were on the precipice of.

14:43

Right.

14:53

But you felt it.

14:53

Yeah.

14:54

And it shows through in your work now, to your point, we're standing in the middle of it, I think. So how do you feel standing in the middle of it, having been someone who years ago was pointing at it like, what is that experience like for you? Because I can't say I relate as. I'm sorry, as the editor in chief of Wired to be saying that, but I was doing other stuff before this. I wasn't necessarily thinking about the inflection point with artificial intelligence all the time.

14:54

Yeah, there's no trace of I told you so because I didn't know what to say, and I still don't know. I think we're in the middle of that wave, but because, of course, a lot of what's happening right now is salesmanship. Right. A lot of what's happening right now is hype. We're dealing with that in our business. We are very scared in film and television about what was right around the corner. And a lot of that was hype. We're two years into it now. We're up against the next contract negotiation, and it's like, okay, well, how much fruit has that borne? How much does that really change what we do? I think when we actually sit down to use these tools and think about what these tools do, I'm almost completely riven between two totally opposing worldviews. One, that this is really just these tools are really just sort of a glorified browser search function. Right. With the right economic activity and brilliance being applied to them, I never imagined that consciousness. I don't believe that there's something specific or privileged about human consciousness. This is something. You know, we spent a lot of time thinking about this for Westworld. The flip side of that belief is that, yeah, something as simple as an LLM could give rise to cognition on a level that becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from human cognition, at which point we are certainly in the middle of the thing that I was. That I was seeing. Absolutely. Because there've been so many false starts with AI over a hundred years.

15:22

So many, so many.

16:38

This is so called sort of silver age of gold. These moments where it was like, here comes, here comes, and everyone kind of braces for it. We have a lot of conversations like this, and then a couple of years later, it sort of. It peters out a little bit. And you started hearing that around the release of GPT5. It was like, oh, you know.

16:39

Oh, right. It was a huge bummer. Everyone was. Was very disappointed. But it has been, I would say it was sort of right around when I started my job here at Wired. So, like two and a half years ago, it was just all of a sudden the only thing anyone could talk about. And of course, a lot of that was genuinely fascinating advances in this research and in these tools. And then to your point, it was marketing and hype and hyperbole and commercialization. Right. The need for some of these companies to show a return on their investment. How did they do that? Well, they released things like Sora 2 that are really sort of like, wild and fun and crazy. But in terms of, like, does that have staying power? In 20 years, will we all be sort of like generating little. Little videos, you know, and sharing them on a social network like tbd? So it's really hard to make sense of it. How do you educate yourself when this is all moving so quickly? Especially as someone who you don't want to be saying, I told you so, you don't seem like you feel the need to be prescient. Right. You're just trying to tell great stories and sort of interrogate these questions. But obviously you want to stay ahead of the curve here. How do you try to distill hype from reality?

16:53

It's tough. It's tough. One of the ways, and it wasn't anything we set out to do, but because of the success of Westworld and it's, you know, HBO at the time was positioning itself as a tech company to try to get sold and compete with Netflix. And so the first time we showed that pilot was an event with Yuri Milner at his enormous house. And we showed the pilot and then did a Q and A afterwards. And Sam Altman was the emcee. He had all his Y Combinator folks were there watching I mean, so from the beginning, we were sort of picked up and tossed into that group of people. And so we wound up, in the course of making that show, wound up becoming quite close with some of the people kind of leading the charge here and, you know, sort of hearing stories about 15 years ago and what was happening at DeepMind before Google acquired it, you know, and there's sort of criteria for when to terminate an experiment. Went straight into Westworld, getting kind of a weirdly, unintentionally winding up in a front row seat to a lot of what has transpired in the last 10 to 15 years. So staying close to it and listening to it. But even now, the pace, the pitch, the tenor of things is moving so quickly. We're in such a frothy moment, which I immediately distrust because I'm like, oh, this is.

18:08

Yeah, I don't love froth.

19:16

Yeah, no. And it usually means a bubble burst or a lot of sleight of hand. But staying, you know, we're still invited to these conversations, closed door conversations with. With people who are, you know, again, leading the charge here. And so you are still very close.

19:17

To that industry, sort of the people leading the charge.

19:34

Yeah.

19:36

So you're getting a front row seat.

19:36

Yeah.

19:37

Must be very interesting.

19:38

It is fascinating.

19:40

And I know these are closed door. I assume they're off the record.

19:41

Yeah.

19:43

Has anything come out of them, even. Even a notion or something that nudged you in a certain direction or changed the way you were thinking about the.

19:44

Technology 100% now that it's here, or at least one version, and all the conversations about LLMs versus world models versus. There's a lot that's going to happen in the next few years and we may really wind up in a very different place to where we expect. I mean, almost certainly we will. I think an observation that I sort of started and then was bounced back and forth with a friend who's leading one of the leading companies was. We'd spent a day working with this team talking about what you can do with these things, what are the applications for it. Because I think that is one of the bigger questions. And it occurred to me, it's like, I think for the first time in a very long time, there may have been moments like this in the middle of the Second World War with so many technologies just kind of pouring out of the war effort. But this feels like one idea obviously expressed the amount of brilliance over 40 years to get to this place. It's kind of like the overnight success. Right. The actor ingenue Singer who finally gets the Oscar, Grammy, whatever. Been doing this for 20 years. So these neural nets have been around for a very, very long time. Not an overnight success, but pretty much to your point. Two and a half years ago suddenly went from an obscure talking point for computer scientists to an everyday fact for all of our kids. Everyone, everyone. All over the place. And it occurred to me that unlike some of these technologies over the years, this is more like an alien spaceship crash landed on the face of the planet and each of these companies and all of us are exploring the ruins of it. And we kind of walk into one room and we're like, oh shit, I can do teleportation another room. And it's like, okay, make movies, right?

19:50

Yeah.

21:26

It's less like we're making these things and more like we're sort of stumbling upon them because we've created something so powerful and so recursive that it can spew out almost weekly or monthly these wonders. I remember first time I saw videos from Veo and we spent an awful lot of money to build shots in VisFX that look that good. I have a lot of friends in the gaming space. I know how much money they're spending to do stuff. And then you've got a product that's like, oh, it's a $10 subscription and you can make this, this, this thing, you know, it is this extraordinary moment where instead of thinking of an application and then chasing it down over the course of years, and I think beyond the hype, these technologies are genuinely transformative. There's no question about it. They're going to transform culture. They're already in the middle of doing that. We haven't reckoned with the social consequences or the forget the genie back in the bottle. How do we convince the genie not to destroy whole segments of the of the economy? One of the smartest things I've ever seen in business was Zuckerberg going before Congress and saying, regulate me. And then Sam Altman did the same thing and then their share price went boom like that, Right?

21:27

And yet we're still waiting. You know what I mean? And yet we're still waiting.

22:29

Yeah.

22:32

Ready to save on new tech. It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event, celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. As A listener of Uncanny Valley we know you want to stay on top of today's biggest stories in tech. And if you're curious about how tech and innovation are changing the healthcare landscape, check out Mayo Clinic's chart topping podcast, Tomorrow's Cure. Back for a brand new season, host and award winning journalist Kathy Werzer dives into the breakthroughs, challenges and human stories shaping the future of medicine, from advances in AI and cancer research to the rise of chronic disease and autoimmune disorders. Not sure where to start? We Recommend the season four premiere where dermatologist Dr. Saranya Wiles and biomedical engineer Dr. Adam Feinberg explore how 3D BioPrint is revolutionizing medical research and accelerating breakthroughs in healthcare. Whether you're a healthcare professional, patient or simply curious about what's ahead, Tomorrow's Cure invites you to imagine what healthcare could look like and shows you the future is already here. Find Tomorrow's Cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening Now.

22:39

When I listen to the news, here's what I want to why this story matters, who's at the center of it, and how the reporters uncovered it. And as a journalist, I want to make sure that's what you get too. I'm Elahei Izadi, co host of the podcast Post Reports. Every weekday, my colleagues and I at the Washington Post give you the context you need on the biggest stories.

24:12

Healthcare tariffs, artificial intelligence.

24:34

We've got you covered. Look for Post Reports wherever you listen to podcasts. Going back to sort of your analogy about the spaceship and you're going into different rooms and discovering. And what I was thinking about as you were saying that is what worries me is who has the keys to those rooms, right? And who doesn't? Who can unlock the door and who can't? Who can tell the genie what to do and what not to do and who is choosing to do it and not do it. Yeah, and that I'm sure is of top of mind for you.

24:37

100%.

25:13

Even just in the context of your own industry, but much more broadly. I mean, again, you're a parent, you're thinking about what this means for your kids in 20 years or next year. Or next year. Exactly.

25:14

Yeah.

25:24

Scary.

25:24

It's scary. It's exciting. And certainly some of these folks and some of the products give you lots of good reasons to be cynical. But I've had a couple of conversations with people who are at the forefront of these things who really have a very clear and very compelling humanist perspective on this. They think about kids who are disadvantaged, who don't have access to the kinds of things that our kids may have access to. You know, the idea that these tools could be used to be, you know, a tutor who never forgets a question they've asked you, who, while you're sleeping, researches scholarships that might be the perfect way to get, you know, these sorts of things, especially for kids who don't have those advantages, might really be leveling. Right. In terms of the playing field. And these tools are largely free. So the paradox of this thing is you say, who has the keys to these things? And I am very concerned about that. But one of the interesting things that's happening is that these tools are being given away, essentially free to everyone. And I think that's a possibility I didn't quite see coming.

25:25

I mean, you can see the promise so clearly, even just thinking about kids in education. Right. You want so desperately. I want so desperately for that to, like, come true.

26:28

Yeah.

26:36

And it's almost like waiting to see if it does. Right. One of the interesting comments that you made about AI this was in an interview, I think, with Semaphore maybe last year, which was around how you use it. You reacted very viscerally. You said, quote, oh, God, no. That's crossing the Rubicon in terms of using AI to write.

26:37

To write, yeah.

26:57

Do you draw sort of a hard line in the sand there and just say sort of? Absolutely not. Like, where do you see AI in terms of art and creativity? How does that sit for you?

26:59

Yeah, I guess there's one way to take that quote, which is that it's sort of a political thing and it's not at all. It's more superstitious. Right. I find writing. There are writers who love to write. I suffer through writing. I find writing exceptionally difficult. I love having written. There's nothing like the feeling of having written something and feeling, you know, that.

27:07

You got it exceptionally difficult. How does that look for you?

27:25

A lot of sitting there and kind of bashing my head against the wall. A lot of pacing, a lot of chocolate, a lot of walks. And that's the problem. Right. I was writing the first movie I ever got paid to write, which is the prestige, and we wrote it. I wrote that in 2001 and I started out smoking and I realized that if I finished that script and I was still smoking, I would never quit. Right.

27:29

Because it becomes a good crutch that you use to. I think many writers, if you're listening to this, you know exactly what he's talking about.

27:50

And so I managed to Quit cold turkey halfway through the script so that I could never point to that script. If it was a good script, if it worked. It was a pretty good script as like, no, no, no. I've really got to go back. It would just pull you in every time. And I think about AI the same way. It's no assessment of its virtues as a writer, although I would happily dive into that topic. I just think if I let it into my creative process, which is already so fraught, that I would never find my way back. But it's terrific for research, right? It's amazing for researching, you know, say you're doing an adapt or a reboot or something like that. You can get into it and you can ask you questions like, okay, tell me the book, either series of books, where's the book? Where such and such character first. What do they talk about their childhood? Extraordinary. On that level. Visifex. Visifex is in my business where we're probably going to see some significant enhancements. I'm not interested. I'm in this position right now with AI in terms of what I do. There is a wonderful notion that we're going to save money somehow. Again, point to the moment in the history of film and television where it ever got cheaper. Right?

27:57

Right.

29:01

It's sort of like AAA productions, big movies, big shows, it's never gotten cheaper. I was talking to Todd Howard about this on the gaming side of things, right. Those games have just like big movies have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. Nothing ever makes it cheaper. Digital cameras didn't make it cheaper. You know, the digital post production process didn't make it cheaper.

29:01

So you think the idea that artificial intelligence could wipe out a bunch of jobs and just take costs down for film and TV production is a non starter?

29:17

No, no, no. It's entirely possible if. And there's this wonderful quote from the New Yorker a few months ago where it was about the gullibility of management of these companies if they think, right, that these tools can replace everyone because they've been overhyped. Because these folks have showed up in front of Congress and being like, please regulate me. Which is like the greatest PR boon ever, right? And scared the crap out of everyone and managed to scare all of us during the strike. I mean, this is why, you know, this is part of the reason that strike went on so long. If they make bad decisions, it will absolutely, you know, it'll be. The consequences will be catastrophic for what we do. But assuming that the folks who are running things, assuming that people still want A certain number of big movies every year and a certain number of big shows every year. You know, there've been a lot of conversations in my town, and God bless them, the technology companies will come down to sort of make nice. I mean, it's literally like the delegation from Northern California comes to visit with the Southern California delegation. And we'll sit. Right.

29:27

I mean, they barely bother with the New York delegation of journalists anymore. So I'm glad to hear they're still talking to you guys.

30:24

For now. For now. And sometimes those meetings are somewhat contentious. The last time I was one of those, someone sort of trotted out this metaphor of like, oh, they're Uber and we're taxi drivers. So okay, maybe. But maybe they're Uber and we're Formula one drivers.

30:29

Oh, I like that.

30:44

Not to sound self aggrandizing.

30:44

Oh, seize the power.

30:46

Uber has no relevance to Ferrari, to. You know, I'm a car guy, right? Uber has no relevance. Maybe Uber helps the fans get to the race, but it's not the race, right? Those technologies have nothing to do with the race. What these technologies will do, and I think they're incredible on this, is the next generation of filmmakers who don't even have access, but a tool that allows you to make a whole film, just yourself sitting in a room, prompting. That's extraordinary. And I think what it will do, and this is where I'm excited about these tools. Is there a generation, a generation of filmmakers who would never have got to Hollywood. And I think, and I hope that Hollywood will remain an important epicenter of culture creation and filmmaking, because these people will eventually get fed up with the prompt version of filmmaking. And they will come, and they will, as so many of us have done for 100 years now, try to convince someone to give them some money to hire a proper Hollywood crew and go make a real move. And I would point to, you know, Sean Baker, terrific, terrific filmmaker. And after he made Tangerine on an iPhone, famously on an iPhone, the next year I was watching the Florida project and I was taken aback. I was like, I gotta reconsider my whole position on film because this movie's beautiful. And then I got to the end and I googled it, and of course he shot it on 35. He got there with an iPhone. And his last three films have been shot on film because you use the tools that allow you to raise your hand and say, hey, look at me, look at what I'm doing. And this is my fervent hope. Not because I love Hollywood or all of the gatekeeping and all the. I think to myself, if I'd arrived at a moment where I'd be defending the status quo in Hollywood, I would be shocked. But just the ability to have a place, a locus of talent where people come. Because film is ultimately a collaborative medium. I think that's maybe the scariest part to any of these technologies. They're not collaborative.

30:47

The isolationist aspect.

32:31

Yeah, that's like writing. Writing sucks.

32:33

It does suck.

32:35

Filmmaking is amazing because it's me and 800 of my friends.

32:36

It's a team sport.

32:40

It's amazing. Yeah.

32:41

But it's sort of this idea of like, well, how did you get your big break? Oh, I made a film with AI, you know what I mean? And someone saw it. Sort of like more of the future.

32:42

No, I think that's awesome. As long as it doesn't replace it. And as long as we don't go through this moment where people think, oh, we can do all this content for Peanuts, it's like, well, no, you've always had the ability to do that. It's called B movies. B movies have always been there. Right. They've always been an independent film, which is where I started. Right. You've always been able to make the lower cost version of it, but then there has always still been the AAA version of it. Movie stars. You know, I sometimes describe my job as photographing beautiful people in beautiful places. Right. And the people part is important. The fact that the actors are real people.

32:51

You think it matters to audiences?

33:25

I think that matters a lot. The whole idea, the culture of celebrity, the idea of that connection you have to them. I then started working television and the bond that people have with television actors is different and much deeper. And that's crazy. You hang out in the airport with a movie star, Hang out in the airport with a TV star. The way that people interact with you is completely different. This is a long lost member of their family. Oh, wow. Yeah.

33:26

Well, you hang out with every week.

33:45

You are creating an extended family for millions of people.

33:47

Yeah.

33:50

And I hope that that institution, that ability remains, and I trust it will. And I think part of the reason it will is for a million different things that touch on the midbrain rather than the, you know, the neocortex.

33:50

I want to ask you about Fallout in a minute, but a few things you have said reminded me to make sure to ask you about this. You seem very sensitive about cost and the idea of spending less money to produce great work. And you gave a speech at the Saturn Awards. I think it was last Year.

34:01

The speech landed me in a little bit. Yeah.

34:21

You said, quote, as producers, we are not just here to save people money. The Times didn't include the expletive you apparently added to that line in a very times Ian move that just said he also swore something like that. And you're like, of course New York Times is not going to print whatever bad word he said. But you were talking there in the context of bringing production back to California, which you did with the second season of Fallout.

34:24

Yeah.

34:46

But I'm curious about how you think about the financial pressures of your industry and sort of the. You mentioned gatekeeping a minute ago. Right. And sort of, what kind of fight are you fighting to try to get the resources that you need to do the work you want to do? You know what I mean?

34:46

It's funny. It's a great question. And it reminds me that there is one technology over the years that has radically altered the economics of film. And that technology is the tax rebate, Right?

35:03

Yes.

35:14

Not a technology.

35:15

An incredible innovation. Yeah, yeah.

35:15

And look, you know, as. As the recipient of funds from the great state of New York, the great state of California, the United Kingdom, Utah. You know, everywhere we go, if there's a rebate, we'll try to take advantage of it, because, you know, this is. This is how it works. You know, you want to put as much money on the screen as you can. But I do think that that is an example of an idea kind of run amok. Part of the reason I was so worked up at that speech was not just a fire which had destroyed the homes of 10 of our crew members on Fallout and a dozen of our friends. A lot of them are folks who worked with us on Westworld. So we worked with some of these folks for a decade or more, and these folks are the very best at what they do. Usually when we have a wrap party, you know, not so many people can make it because they're already. They're in such high demand. They're already onto the next thing. And we went to the wrap party for the second season of Fallout. I was like, oh, no, this is a problem. Everyone's at the wrap party because they.

35:18

Had nowhere else to go.

36:11

They hadn't been hired. There's no production. I mean, it's been a catastrophe, an absolute catastrophe. And it's almost like a textbook example of watching not a new technology, but just government incentives from around the world and the complicity of studios and studio physical production heads and producers being willing to go along with, like, okay, well, look, we could make this in California or New York, but we're gonna make it in Hungary because, you know, we'll be able to do it for 30 or 40 million dollars less and that'll make the studio happy. And I think that's been an incredibly shortsighted and foolish thing for us to do. The reason why Hollywood was such a force to be reckoned with. I mean, there's so much, you know, and your latest issue, all these questions about China and the US and who has cultural. Thank you for reading. Of course. Cultural dominance.

36:12

Yeah.

36:59

Can you imagine a dumber move than to gut Hollywood?

37:00

Just give it all away.

37:05

Yeah. For just this gradual marginal thing of like, oh, we saved a little money here, we saved a little money there. We love. I love. My brother loves, my sister in law. All of us love on location shooting. We shot part of Fallout Season one in Namibia. It was extraordinary. It was an extraordinary experience for us, for the cast, for the crew. Working with the South African, Namibian crew. We shot Westworld in Singapore and Spain. Shooting around the world is fantastic when you're there for a reason. We're in Namibia because it's the Skeleton coast and they have all these abandoned German diamond factories that look nothing like anything else in the world. We shot in Spain for the architecture. Singapore, same reason. But shooting somewhere just to save someone else money is cynical. I understand it if, look, if you've got a great movie and there are great filmmakers who are fighting to get things that were not terribly commercial and this is one of the, the tools they had in their, you know, one of the arrows in their quiver was, okay, I can go make it somewhere else. But I think if you, if you extend that logic across the entire industry, you take something that's the center of, you know, American. Again, I don't mean this in just real politic terms. I mean this in creative terms. Right. When you have these places, Silicon Valley being another great example just up the road, or Taiwan for semiconductors or, you know, you get in the process of how these places get so good at what they do. It is intensely local and it is the collision of all these people who came to this place because they wanted to do this one thing and they're talking to each other and they're collaborating with each other and letting that go would be, you know, you can't just have LA as the center of like finance for film that doesn't work.

37:05

It sounds very boring. The New York Times story I'm referring to, by the way, is actually about you bringing the second season of fallout to California. You move production back and you were really vocal about pushing for the industry to do the same with more projects. Right. Have you seen progress in that direction since that push?

38:35

It was following the fires. And that gave the state legislators. I met a lot of them. I was very impressed. I think it's very easy to be cynical about state politics. And they were incredibly thoughtful and smart. And in a year in which you. Enormous challenges, the incoming Trump administration, enormous challenges for the state of California's budget, they cleared a much bigger incentive to try to make sure that California remained competitive. It's not big enough. Right. You could almost never be big enough.

38:57

Sure.

39:28

Atlanta, you know, Georgia essentially has an uncapped one. I mean, you know, but it was a huge shot in the arm. These things move slowly. It's a really big cruise ship. It turns really slowly. I think culturally it's sort of become how you make movies. You're making a really big movie. You're certainly not making Los Angeles, which is crazy. So I think it'll take a while to undo some of the damage. But I'm hopeful that what the state legislator, what the governor was able to pass, will give us the best shot for keeping Hollywood for another hundred years.

39:28

Yeah.

39:58

If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be. Peruse endless styles in our stores or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store, head over to warbyparker.com that's warbyparker.com A website.

40:06

Should help your business grow, not slow it down. If you still struggle to make small changes and simple updates, you're leaving opportunity on the table. That's why so many companies, from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are turning to Framer, the website builder that takes your.com from a formality to a tool for growth. Helping businesses build better websites faster. Framer is an enterprise grade no code website builder that gives designers and marketers the ability to provide fully own their dot com without relying on engineers. Whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages or migrate your full dot com, Framer has programs for startups, scale ups and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a framer specialist or get started building for free today@framer.com Uncanny for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com Uncanny for 30 percent off framer.com Uncanny rules and restrictions may apply.

40:37

You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney or the godfather of Artificial intelligence Jeffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

41:47

I have to ask you about Fallout.

42:21

Yeah.

42:22

So as listeners probably know, but in case you don't, the show is, of course based on a video game franchise that has many, many decades of history. The second season, though, of the show premiered about a month ago, right. Mid December, and new episodes are now coming out on Amazon every week. How do you describe the show to people who aren't familiar with the game, who maybe don't have the years of lore and history and maybe haven't watched yet?

42:23

I don't think I ever quite dialed in the elevator pitch, but it is along the lines of what if the world ended? But it didn't completely end. I started as a fan of the games.

42:45

I heard you. Yeah. You've said that you played, I think, Fallout 3 and it destroyed a year of your life. Consumed a year, year of your life. Maybe it didn't destroy your life.

42:57

It's the Annie hall thing, right? There goes another novel.

43:03

Yeah. Yeah.

43:06

These games are incredible. And one of the things about the games that Todd makes, and Todd Howard is this sort of creative mastermind behind the latter day Fallout games, they're essentially infinite, right. I mean, you can just play them and play them and play them and play them. There's no end to these things you can continue to explore. I mean, you have sort of seen the scripts of these things at thousands of pages long, and it really is a simulated reality that you can just kind of jump into and you can steer it any way you want. You can be the, you know, the proverbial bad guy or the good guy or anyone in between, and our ensemble kind of tries to capture that. One of the things they had that I thought was very unique about them, and it was a bit of a stretch for me as a filmmaker, was that they are this combination of darkness and violence and interesting questions about technology and identity, but they're also really weird and funny and gonzo and strange. There are lots of shows about the end of the world, but these ones are weirdly optimistic. Right. It feels like they're more about the beginning of a new world. They're more about, okay, well, you know, culture would rebuild itself. Right? How would it rebuild itself? And let's play in the mess that ensues.

43:08

It's like a retrofuturistic world. I'll just describe it that way. Resembles the 1950s. Right? Like the music, the imagery, this focus on traditionalism. You didn't make that choice. Right. It was inherent in the franchise. But why do you think it's set in that time period? Which I think is not representative of the experience of all Americans in the 1950s. Right. I think it was actually, like, a very dark time. But there's this fixation on, like, the Pollyanna aspects of that, like, 1950s Americana as this, like, perfect moment for the United States, at least in hindsight.

44:18

Do you.

44:53

How have you thought about that in working on the show?

44:53

The sort of common lore is what defines the fallout universe. They're all connected by this world, the world that was before. And I think that world. Look, you've seen a whole political movement built out of the nostalgia for that world. Right. That world had a coherence and an appeal, even if it was rooted in all kinds of ugly, terrible shit. There was an unadulterated vision of America as the victor in the Second World War and this force for good. Was it true? In so many ways, no. But in several important ways, yes. They hadn't yoked the entire world under a Pax Americana. They found maybe a sneakier way to do it. Right. They pulled everyone into. Under the Bretton woods system. They pulled everyone in this kind of, like, free to play, free trade system, which American culture predominated. And American culture, again, had a lot of darkness in there, but largely spoke to values that I think a lot of us can get behind in terms of freedom and equity. And even if it was hypocrisy in the beginning, it's easy to be nostalgic about, and I think it's therefore kind of ripe fruit. But that moment extended. And one of the fascinating things. What if you extended that for 100 years and you took the promise of nuclear technology seriously? You had a nuclear powered car, a nuclear powered blender, and you had this kind of, you know, this kind of idealized version of it. What would come out of that? And I always thought that was such a. Such a lovely and incisive and satirical place to start.

44:57

Was anything surprising to you about how the show has been received when it's based on this franchise that has such a fandom and lore and such history? It's a lot of pressure.

46:21

A lot of pressure. I sort of trained at the D.C. school of fan pressure with the three Batman movies that I worked on with my brother, and I learned a lot of lessons there in terms of come at something because you love it, not trying to figure out why someone else loves it. And you have to trust that, that hopefully you're finding the right things in there. You're never gonna please everyone.

46:34

Don't read the comments as a general rule.

46:56

Oh, God, no. Yeah, I gave up on that a long, long time ago.

46:58

Yeah, I think you talked to gq. You said your disappointment with the Internet over the last 20 years is fucking bottomless. So I had to assume that you were no longer reading Reddit threads about your show.

47:01

No, sadly, because I really love that community.

47:10

I wanted to make sure to ask you a little bit about the politics of it all, which is to say that there are a lot of political themes that emerge in your work.

47:20

Oh, dear. Right. Yep.

47:29

There's a lot there. In fallout, we talked about surveillance, the tools of the state. Right. The apparatus, all of that. When you are working on a show and you're weaving these themes in, how do you make determinations about how overt and obvious to be right, as opposed to how much to weave those themes in. In a more nuanced way, if that makes sense.

47:30

100%. I felt for a long time, and it was never clearer than on Batman. Look, fundamentally, philosophically for me, I do not feel qualified to tell anyone how to believe. Right. I'm much more interested in poking and asking questions and saying, well, should we believe this? Should we question this? I remember working on Batman and I made this analogy to a friend with regards to politics and engaging with it. Working on Batman felt like being a Yankee, right? You don't play for the Yankees necessarily as a Democrat or Republican, you're a Yankee. And taking an American, 60 year old American icon and pressing that character into service for a specific, timely political point felt like a very fast path to losing relevance for the story. You want to be kind of looking beyond that a little bit. You know, if you're reading Dante's Inferno, it's kind of amazing. Look, it's to the test of time, but it's kind of amazing how much regional politics is still laced into the first three chapters, right? He's still pissed off with, like, his landlord is in the third level of hell, right? You're like, oh, my God. Okay, come on, let's get on to the next part. So for me, there was always felt like a bit of a responsibility asking questions, not giving answers. But I have strong political beliefs, and I think as the world has started to feel more and more incoherent and making some of these things so hard to wade through and so hard to just talk to each other, it was really nice to work on a project like Fallout, where from the very beginning, I mean, Graham Wagner, one of our showrunners, is joking. The first game could have been written by Adbusters. Right. There's a strong point of view there, and it's a strong political point of view. This is the beauty of working in speculative fiction or in apocalyptic fiction is, you know, the world's gone, right? So we're not talking about this president. We're talking about a fictitious world 100 years in the future, and 200 years after that, everything has been blown to hell. But you get to pick up the bits, the detritus of our present political situation potentially, and kind of look at it. And that gives you that longer view, which I think allows you to engage. You know, I would challenge anyone to watch both seasons of Fallout and not find a group that doesn't come in for a drubbing. Right. You know, there's this sort of like nativist progressivism of the vault, right? Where it's like, you know, freedom and safety for everyone, except we're not letting anyone in. And it's the kind of lifeboat progressivism. And then you have the wild libertarianism of the wasteland, so we get to look at all these different things. And again, I don't have any answers, but it's really fun at this moment in time to be able to poke a little more aggressively at some of these things.

47:52

I wanted to ask if that was fun, and I don't wanna put too much on you, but, you know, we're talking about this show that looks at the world after collapse at the hands of, you know, a very powerful, you know, conglomerate. Seeing some themes, maybe some other shadowy players there. Yeah. To the world that we live in now. So you're out there, you're talking about this show, you're working on the show, you're thinking about it all the time. You read the news. Is it hard for you as someone who you describe yourself at the start of the conversation, as an optimist, is it hard not to see collapse everywhere?

50:17

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of what we do, right? We look for the signs. I'm hopeful that we will pull ourselves back from the edge. We've managed to. I thought my brother's movie, Oppenheimer, ends brilliantly with that warning, right? It's not over yet. We haven't solved this problem yet. We may still yet destroy the world. And I think it's incredibly important for us to. To remember that always. And that's why working on a show like Fallout, the timing, sadly, felt good, because as a gentle reminder that, okay, it may be amusing to live in the wasteland. I don't think any of us watch that show and wish to live in that world, or I hope no one wishes to live in that world. And so I think, you know, with some thoughtfulness and a little compassion and maybe some slightly better heuristics for social media, we might make it.

50:52

We shall see. Before we end, I would love to play a very quick game if you have 60 seconds. It's a game we came up with. It's very powerful. It's called control, alt, delete. So I want to know what piece of technology you would love to control. What piece would you alt. So alter or change? And what would you delete? What would you vanquish from the Earth if given the opportunity?

51:42

Got it. I would control, AI generated video, all of it. Like I said, I think that I'm so excited for not necessarily what we can do with it. However, we want these conversations with the folks who come down occasionally to check in with us. When asked, they pointed out they're like, no, we watermark very carefully every piece of video we generate, but it's totally invisible and no one could see it.

52:07

Sure.

52:30

Yes, I said, probably the biggest social problem right now is that you need to make it extremely visible.

52:31

Extremely simple.

52:35

The fact that we have met in these technologies. You go back to Blade Runner, right? I always thought to myself, God, it's so weird that they don't let the replicants live on Earth, which is tragic. And now I totally understand, right? Like, if you can make a video of the President saying whatever you want, and it's indistinguishable from reality, if the.

52:37

President can make a video of himself saying whatever he wants, that has to.

52:52

Be regulated yesterday, it will create absolute chaos. And I think if we don't get a handle on that, but imminently, we're in very, very serious trouble.

52:55

Well, we're going to hand it to you, so you'll solve that one.

53:03

Done. Done. Alt Gene therapy, crispr. Based tools coming online. Lisa and I are very engaged with someone very close to us in our lives who has a condition caused by a novel onsense gene. There are thousands of these sorts of conditions. They can have devastating results. And we're getting close enough to see. I think there's an assumption with everyone that, that, you know, hey, once we got the crispr, we just control control V and, you know, away, you know, away we go. Right. And that's not how it's going to happen. You have these, you know, catastrophic diseases where the tool will be there, but the funding won't be there, the resources won't be there. And that's really the game that this, the boring bit is just getting the business model right or abandoning the business model and saying, okay, is the government going to start funding some of these things? You know, delete. I would say social media, all of it. But I have enough conversations with friends who have kids who have special needs, and this is their community. And, okay, so maybe the algorithmic feed.

53:06

Yeah.

54:04

Gone. Dumpster fire. Dumpster fire. That's like trans fats or ringtones or all these things that.

54:05

Trans fats, ringtones, and the algorithmic feed. Jonathan Nolan's three agents of destruction.

54:12

That's it.

54:19

I love it. Thank you so much. This was such a fascinating conversation.

54:20

Thank you. Likewise.

54:23

Thanks for checking out the show. We're taking a short break and coming back with a second season of supercharged guests. And we're adding all new video episodes. So now you can see me all the time and I still won't be wearing makeup. We're still releasing new weekly episodes of Uncanny Valley on Thursday. And if you haven't listened to all my interviews, you should start. We're talking Margaret Atwood, Melinda French Gates, Matthew Prince, Hasan Piker, Matt Garman, Kara Swisher, and a whole lot more. This show is produced by Jessica Alpert with help from Adriana Tapia and Sam Egan. Sound design, mix and original music by Pran Bandy. Kate Osborne is our executive producer and I'm, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's global editorial director.

54:29

Thank you.

55:10

Thanks for listening.

55:11

I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.

55:18

Claire Duffy was one of the best.

55:20

I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living, and even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all. So I'm starting a new show where together we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them. It's called Terms of Service.

55:22

This technology is so crazy powerful.

55:40

Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

55:43

Museums are more than places we visit on a field trip across the country. Museums protect our shared history, care for wildlife and collections, strengthen local economies, support job training, and spark curiosity in people of all ages. Right now, you can help make sure museums stay strong for future generations. Museum Advocacy Day is a national moment when people contact Congress to ask for continued support for museums and the federal agencies that fund them. Learn how to take action@aam-us.org and tell your representatives that museums matter to education, to communities, to the economy, and to our democracy.

55:49

From PRX.

56:34