Latest news with #TheFountainhead
Politico
06-06-2025
- Business
- Politico
Playbook PM: The next stage of the Trump-Musk breakup
Presented by THE CATCH-UP THE RETRIBUTION PRESIDENCY: 'Trump preparing large-scale cancellation of federal funding for California, sources say,' by CNN's Annie Grayer and Gabe Cohen: '[It] could begin as soon as Friday … Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. On Capitol Hill, at least one committee was told recently by a whistleblower that all research grants to the state were going to be cancelled.' BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: After initial rumblings of a detente last night between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the president and his White House had some sharper words today for the wealthiest person in the world. Don't let the door hit you where the Lord split you: After Musk started attacking Republicans' reconciliation bill and the administration he just departed, Trump referred to Musk as 'the man who has lost his mind' in an early-morning call with ABC's Jonathan Karl. 'He's got a problem. The poor guy's got a problem,' the president told CNN's Dana Bash on the phone. 'I'm not even thinking about Elon.' (Shades of 'The Fountainhead' there — 'But I don't think of you.') Twisting the knife: Top White House officials made sure to spread the news to all manner of mainstream news outlets — which Musk hates — that Trump intends to sell the Tesla that he got in March and that he doesn't plan to call Musk today. Whither DOGE? Beyond the personal stakes, one big question is how this week's falling out will affect the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, which despite Musk's drama has already had a transformative effect on the federal workforce and millions of lives worldwide. James Fishback, a prominent supporter who came up with the idea of 'DOGE checks,' told POLITICO's Sophia Cai that he's leaving the movement due to Musk's 'baseless personal attacks' on Trump. Then there's the clean-up: Across the federal government, agencies have scrambled to rehire thousands of fired workers, WaPo's Hannah Natanson and colleagues report. And ProPublica's Brandon Roberts and colleagues reveal that a DOGE employee set up an AI tool to figure out thousands of contracts to cut — but it contained errors, sometimes inflating the value of a contract by the power of 1,000. 'Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says,' the engineer says. At rallies on the National Mall and across the country today, thousands of veterans will protest VA cuts, WaPo's Olivia George reports. Nonetheless: The administration went to the Supreme Court today with an emergency appeal to try to hollow out the Education Department's workforce, per POLITICO's Josh Gerstein. Solicitor General John Sauer asked the justices to undo a federal judge's order that barred the firings of nearly 40 percent of the agency. On the Hill: Despite Trump's comment, Republican leaders in Congress were eager to downplay his tensions with Musk and emphasized that they want everyone on the same page to pass the reconciliation bill, POLITICO's Gigi Ewing and colleagues report. Speaker Mike Johnson said on CNBC and at the Capitol that he hopes for quick resolution: 'I believe in redemption.' Says one top administration official: 'We're just gonna move along and pass the bill. And that's kind of the feeling of everyone right now.' Interesting wrinkle: Advocates for the NASA moon mission are hopeful that the Trump-Musk rift will give the moon a boost relative to Musk's Mars dreams, Sam Skove writes for the new POLITICO Pro Space newsletter. Happy Friday afternoon. Thanks for reading Playbook PM. Drop me a line at eokun@ 8 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW 1. JOBS DAY: You can see the ongoing impact of DOGE in the latest May jobs report, which shows that the federal government lost 22,000 jobs last month. As NYT's Eileen Sullivan and Lydia DePillis report, hundreds of thousands of workers forced out of the government en masse are struggling to find new opportunities, with the D.C. area hit especially hard. But the jobs data overall showed a still-solid if cooling labor market: At 139,000, the topline number again came in a bit ahead of economists' predictions, while the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.2 percent, per Bloomberg. Inside the report: The strength was especially concentrated in health care and leisure/hospitality, while manufacturing ticked down. The big picture is that the economy is holding fairly steady, despite some cooldown and ongoing caution in a period of major uncertainty. The numbers for March and April were also revised downward by a collective 95,000 (the kind of routine change that then-Sen. Marco Rubio last year alleged without evidence was a sign of the Biden administration cooking the books). 2. TO RUSSIA, WITH LOVE: 'White House Quietly Pressures Senate to Water Down Russia Sanctions,' by WSJ's Lindsay Wise and Alex Ward: 'A key provision in the legislation, backed by more than 80 senators, is the imposition of sanctions on key Russian officials and sectors, as well as penalties for countries that do business with Moscow. That, President Trump fears, could harm his goal of reviving relations between the U.S. and Russia … [A]dministration officials have quietly contacted [Sen. Lindsey] Graham's office, urging him to water down his bill, namely by inserting waivers that would allow Trump to choose who or what gets sanctioned … Another way to weaken the legislation would be to turn the word 'shall' into 'may.'' 3. RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: The Senate Banking Committee has released the text of its portion of the megabill. And House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) is projecting confidence about the prospects of the legislation overall. He tells POLITICO's Mia McCarthy that he expects the reconciliation package can still be passed through both chambers by July 4. But he's urging senators not to mess with the state and local tax deduction in particular, given how difficult it was for House GOP leaders to nail that down. Emmer also said he's ignoring Musk's continued attacks. The politics: There are warning signs for Republicans in the latest KFF Health poll, which finds that more than 70 percent of Americans are worried about the impact of Medicaid cuts in the bill leading to more people uninsured and hurting hospitals. But some Senate Democrats are warning that they can't just go negative — they need to tell working-class Americans what they're for, too, like Sen. Jacky Rosen's (D-Nev.) support for axing taxes on tips, Punchbowl's Andrew Desiderio reports. The impact: If the Senate retains the bill's defunding of Planned Parenthood for all health services because it provides abortions, the organization says roughly one-third of its clinics could be in danger of closing, NBC's Kaitlin Sullivan reports. That would have a big impact on women who rely on the centers for health care. 4. CLIMATE FILES: 'Planet-warming emissions dropped when companies had to report them. EPA wants to end that,' by AP's Melina Walling and colleagues in Leopold, Indiana: 'Trump's EPA argues [the Greenhouse Gas Reporting program] is costly and burdensome for industry. But experts say dropping the requirement risks a big increase in emissions if companies are no longer publicly accountable for what they put in the air. And they say losing the data — at the same time the EPA is cutting air quality monitoring elsewhere — would make it tougher to fight climate change.' 5. OUT AND OUT: As WorldPride gets underway in D.C., today is the deadline for active-duty transgender troops to voluntarily leave the military. After that, the Pentagon plans to force out any who remain. For thousands of trans service members, it's a brutal parting 'as they mourn years of service and reimagine lives that have been built around the military,' CNN's Elizabeth Wolfe reports. As of this week, there were about 700 voluntary separation requests just in the Army; other branches haven't released numbers. 6. TRAIL MIX: In Tuesday's New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary, Rep. Mikie Sherrill is seen as the favorite. But with scant independent polling, likely low turnout and the disappearance of the old party-machine 'county line,' this six-way race has the potential to surprise, POLITICO's Madison Fernandez and Ry Rivard report. A few thousand votes could decide the result, and Sherrill's fellow contenders are hoping to turn out unconventional voters. Sherrill has plenty of establishment support: Will that still be enough? The next big primary: NYC's mayoral race was jolted by the news that state Sen. Jessica Ramos, a candidate herself, is endorsing frontrunner Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary, NYT's Emma Fitzsimmons reports. Ramos was outright questioning Cuomo's mental abilities — which prompted his spokesperson to ask if she was sober — as recently as April and was among the state leaders who pushed him to resign in 2021. But Ramos has more recently been frustrated by the ascent of Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani in her progressive lane. Coming in November: In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears' strong social conservatism — to the right of incumbent Glenn Youngkin on same-sex marriage and abortion — could make it tougher for her to replicate his success in the purple state, NBC's Adam Edelman reports. 7. DISCRIMINATION DIGEST: Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) decried the fact that a Muslim had led prayer in the House today, saying it 'should have never been allowed to happen. America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth, not drift further from it.' Upon realizing that the man was actually a Sikh, not a Muslim, she edited the post to change the word to Sikh. Then she deleted it. More from POLITICO's Aaron Pellish 8. MIX AND MATCH: 'Cards in deck: Trump keeps stack of orders ready to play as needed,' by WaPo's Natalie Allison and colleagues: 'White House staff have maintained a stash of executive orders and proclamations they can deploy depending on the themes of the moment and the narratives they want to shape … Some orders are put into the calendar well in advance … Others are teed up the night before they are signed depending on impulse, political strategy and the overall mood within the White House … Wednesday evening was the time the president and his team chose to hit the go button on the long-planned travel ban.' TALK OF THE TOWN Donald Trump is the protagonist of a Cantonese opera in Hong Kong, whose latest iteration incorporates the Oval Office blow-up at Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the assassination attempt. Bruce Springsteen's diehard fans in Republican politics — from Chris Christie to Chris Pack to Mike Marinella — are sticking by his music, though not his feud with Trump. IN MEMORIAM — 'Marina von Neumann Whitman, Who Carved Path for Women in Economics, Dies at 90,' by NYT's Clay Risen: She was 'an expert in international trade who in 1972 became the first woman to be appointed to the White House Council of Economic Advisers and who later was one of the few women to join the executive leadership at General Motors.' BATTERING RAHM: Rahm Emanuel is this week's guest on 'The Conversation with Dasha Burns,' where he discussed his reputation for being 'kind of an asshole' and whether he wears that badge with pride. Emanuel said he understands how the perception came about through his years of taking on powerful institutions. 'Yeah, I am tough,' Emanuel tells Dasha. 'Because guess what? The interest groups are pretty powerful and they do need sometimes somebody that's willing to take a two-by-four and smack them upside the head, and I make no bones about that.' The full episode drops Sunday. Watch the preview clip … Subscribe to the pod OUT AND ABOUT — Meridian International Center held its fifth annual 'Culturefix' event yesterday, including awards that honored Roger Goodell, Anna Deavere Smith, Sanford Biggers and Mark Sikes. Also SPOTTED: Irish Ambassador Geraldine Byrne Nason, Austrian Ambassador Petra Schneebauer, Reps. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) and Gabe Amo (D-R.I.), Ashley Davis, Elizabeth Duggal and Alain Taghipour, Marlene Malek, Luke Frazier and Robert Pullen, Stuart and Gwen Holliday, Michael Bidwill, Geoff Bennett, Grace Bender, Heather Florance, Jessica Glass, DeDe Lea, Fred Hochberg and Tom Healy, Fred Humphries, Stephanie and Mark Robinson, Roy and Manisha Kapani, Randi and Jeffrey Levine, Jonathan Nabavi, Brendon Plack, Jeff Miller, Peter O'Reilly, Samia Farouki, Thomas Lloyd, John McCarthy, Efe Obada, Donté Stallworth, Omar Vargas, Rosie Rios, Jim Sciutto and Gloria Riviera, Rina Shah, Jennifer Griffin and Greg Myre, Lee Satterfield, Lisa Ross and Gordon Sondland. TRANSITIONS — Gustavo Torres is retiring as executive director of CASA, after more than three decades in the role. … Jerzy Piatkowski is now counsel at Fenwick. He most recently was VP of contracts and associate general counsel at General Dynamics Mission Systems. … Kevin Orellana will be a legislative assistant for Rep. Vince Fong (R-Calif.), handling his financial services portfolio. He previously was a legislative aide for Rep. Young Kim (R-Calif.). BONUS BIRTHDAY: Jordan Finkelstein Send Playbookers tips to playbook@ or text us on Signal here. Playbook couldn't happen without our editor Zack Stanton, deputy editor Garrett Ross and Playbook Podcast producer Callan Tansill-Suddath.
Irish Independent
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Mountainhead: More fast-talking billionaire backchat from the ‘Succession' creator leaves nothing unsaid
The Emmy Award-winning scribe doesn't mess about. Six months ago, Armstrong hadn't yet developed a working script for Mountainhead. Shooting commenced in March, wrapped in April, and the film was completed in May. A phenomenally quick turnaround, then, even by today's speedy industry standards. Why the sudden rush? Beats me, but Mountainhead imagines a world where troublesome online platforms spread toxic lies, and where greasy billionaires interfere in global politics. Sound familiar? Armstrong takes aim at icky tech bros and problematic investors. His film is funny and scary, a ballsy, blistering satire that practically goes out of its way to match and indeed mimic the brilliant chaos of Succession. This, I suppose, is a good thing. There are shades of Dr Strangelove and – much later – The Shining. Unusual comparisons, for sure, but Mountainhead is an unusual film, and it doesn't always stay inside the lines. We begin and end in the mountains. Traam, the fictional social media platform that makes the world go round, has recently introduced new features that allows users to create and disseminate AI-generated, deepfake 'news' reports, the kind that might cause a riot or start a war. It's all under control, says Traam CEO Venis 'Ven' Parish (Cory Michael Smith), but the rest of us know the truth. Things are spiralling, governments are panicking, and Hugo 'Souper' Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) is starting to worry about his big weekend plans. He's invited his filthy rich pals to stay at a swanky new pad in Utah he calls 'Mountainhead'. It's the kind of place that has a bowling alley in the basement, where everything is overpriced, but nothing ever works the way you want it to. Souper picked the name as a sort of tribute to Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead – but really, he should have gone with something else. ADVERTISEMENT Ven is impressed. So, too, is Traam investor Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) and AI specialist Jeffrey 'Jeff' Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), who mocks Souper for his latest idea, a 'lifestyle super app' named Slowzo, which he hopes the other boys will pay for. If they do, he'll make his first billion. If they don't, the lads will keep on calling him 'Soup Kitchen' (Armstrong deserves an extra star for that wickedly funny nickname). Here's what we know: the world is on fire; Randall is terminally ill; Ven is single-handedly responsible for an impending global conflict; Jeff runs a company that could fix everything; and Souper is starting to believe the others when they tell him he should run for power in Argentina (don't ask). When the US president starts calling, Randall and Ven allow themselves to imagine a new world under their leadership. You wouldn't trust these men to run a bath, much less a planet in peril. But the 'Brewsters' believe their own hype. Except maybe Jeff, who's worried about what his girlfriend is up to on her holliers. Where is all this going? And is there a lesson to be learned at all from Armstrong's intricate and, occasionally, impenetrable chamber piece? Maybe. The relentless tech-bro babble will do your head in, and that's probably the point. Succession wasn't subtle, and neither is Mountainhead, a talky, operatic film where everything is a joke and nothing is left unsaid. Tiresome? A bit. Frustrating? Sometimes. But the conversation changes so much that there's no time to be bored. You won't always know what Ven and the other space cadets are talking about. Like other Armstrong shows, the trickier details take a while to settle – but it's fun to watch cranky, callous billionaires squirming and squabbling about matters that really shouldn't concern them. Carell, meanwhile, is so good as the slippery elder statesman of the pack that you wonder if Armstrong should have built an entire series around him. Who wouldn't want to watch a show about a terminally ill Steve Carell-shaped plutocrat with wacky ideas about how to prolong his life? This will do, for now. Three stars
Scroll.in
02-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Start the week with a film: ‘Mountainhead' is a grim satire about tech billionaires
The world hasn't yet recovered from the blockbuster series Succession. Meanwhile, the show's creator Jesse Armstrong has moved on to films, making his directing debut with a grim satire about tech billionaires. Mountainhead, which is out on JioHotstar, is a tract for the times. Written and directed by Armstrong, Mountainhead has characters who breathe a rarefied air that lets them believe that they can run the planet. Spoiler alert: they actually do. Four very rich men visibly modelled on Silicon Valley luminaries gather at a mountainside retreat for what is meant to be an 'intellectual salon'. The house is owned by lifestyle app founder Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who is worth only $521 million, not as much as his 'best buds' Venis (Cory Michael Smith), Randall (Steve Carell) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef). It's a 'no deals, no meals, no high heels' occasion, Hugo says, one of the many hollow statements made over two days. The world beyond the mansion is spiralling out of control, thanks to artificial intelligence-powered disinformation flowing from Venis's social media site Traam. As riots rage and countries are pushed to the brink, Venis smirks, while Hugo and Randall debate the possible benefits. Only Jeff appears to be concerned about the real-world consequences of deepfakery. Or is Jeff's dissenting views, which lead to him being labelled a traitor, a reflection of the quartet's tendency to roast each other whenever they assemble? Words fly thick and fast, with enough insults to fill a book. Extraordinarily entitled, self-obsessed and rude as a result, the men speak their hearts out on bothersome government regulations and the inability of mortals to understand what they have created. The film's title is a play on Ayn Rand's libertarian bible The Fountainhead, which is namechecked by Jeff at one point. Despite the carefully controlled temperature on the inside, the thin air on the outside seeps into the house, setting off chaos. The veneer of friendship barely conceals competitiveness between the men, for whom comparing net worth is serious business. The confined setting plays to Jesse Armstrong's strengths. The 109-minute film's critique of amoral Silicon Valley culture, while a bit overstretched, is carried out through strongly etched characters and superbly judged performances. Ramy Youssef is brilliant as the casually dressed, politically aware Jeff, who appears to have wandered in from a jog. Cory Michael Smith nails the smooth-faced and soulless social media site owner whose resemblance to a certain someone is chilling. The savage exchanges are initially hilarious, but the humour is soon overtaken by tragedy, and then fear. That too is intentional in a movie in which grandiose pronouncements have the ring of shocking truth about the world inhabited by billions but controlled by the billionaires. Play Also start the week with these films:
Arab Times
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab Times
A tech bro-pocalypse in ‘Mountainhead'
LOS ANGELES, June 1, (AP): 'Succession' fans rejoice. Jesse Armstrong has again gathered together a conclave of uber-wealthy megalomaniacs in a delicious satire. 'Mountainhead,' which the 'Succession' creator wrote and directed, is a new made-for-HBO movie that leaves behind the backstabbing machinations of media moguls for the not-any-better power plays of tech billionaires. Or, at least, three billionaires. Their host for a poker weekend in the mountains at a sprawling estate named after Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead' is Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the solo member of the group not to reach, as they say, 'B-nut' status. His net worth is a paltry $521 million. The others are three of the wealthiest men in the world. Randall (Steve Carell) is their senior, a kind of Steve Jobs-like mentor they all call 'Papa Bear.' Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who runs the world's leading AI company, calls Randall the 'Dark Money Gandalf.' Lastly, but maybe most notably, is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), whose social media platform boasts 4 billion users globally. But the latest update to Venis' platform, named Traam, is causing havoc. As the four gather at Hugo's isolated perch in the Utah mountains, news reports describe violence sweeping across Asia due to an outbreak of deepfakes on Traam that have wrecked any sense of reality. Yet what's real for this quartet of digital oligarchs - none of whom has a seemingly direct reallife corollary, all of whom are immediately recognizable - is more to the point of 'Mountainhead,' a frightfully credible comedy about the delusions of tech utopianism. Each of the four, with the exception of some hesitancy on the part of Jeff, are zealous futurist. On the way to Mountainhead, a doctor gives Randall a fatal diagnosis that he outright refuses. 'All the things we can do and we can't fix one tiny little piece of gristle in me?' Dialogue But together, in Armstrong's dense, highly quotable dialogue, their arrogance reaches hysterical proportions. While the cast is altogether excellent, this is most true with Smith's Venis, a tech bro to end all tech bros. As the news around the world gets worse and worse, his certainty doesn't waver. Earth, itself, no longer hold much interest for him. 'I just want to get us transhuman!' he shouts. Progress (along with net worth) is their cause, and much of the farce of 'Mountainhead' derives from just how much any semblance of compassion for humanity has left the building. It's in the way Venis blanches at the mention of his baby son. It's in the way, as death counts escalate in the news on their phones, they toy with world politics like kids at a Risk board. In one perfectly concise moment, Venis asks, sincerely, 'Do you believe in other people?' If 'Succession' filtered its media satire through family relationships, 'Mountainhead' runs on the dynamics of bro-styled male friendship. There are beefs, hug-it-out moments, passive-aggressive put downs and eruptions of anger. Part of the fun of Armstrong's film isn't just how their behavior spills into a geopolitical events but how it manifests, for example, in which room everyone gets. All of 'Mountainhead' unfolds in the one location, with white mountaintops stretching in the distance outside the fl oor-to-ceiling windows. It could be a play. Instead, though, it's something that either hardly exists anymore or, maybe, exists everywhere: the made-for-TV movie. There's no lack of films made for streaming services, but many of them fall into some in-between aesthetic that couldn't fill a big screen and feel a touch disposable on the small screen. But 'Mountainhead' adheres to the tradition of the HBO movie; it's lean, topical and a fine platform for its actors. And for Armstrong, it's a way to keep pursuing some of the timely themes of 'Succession' while dispensing lines like: 'Coup-out the US? That's a pretty big enchilada.' 'Mountainhead,' an HBO Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association. Running time: 109 minutes. Three stars out of four.
Indian Express
01-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
‘Jesse Armstrong injects steroids into how people use and abuse power': Cory Michael Smith, Ramy Youssef on working with Succession creator in Mountainhead
Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, who produced and wrote the Emmy Award-winning show, is all set to make his directorial debut with Mountainhead, a film also about a pack of crazy, perverse, self-consumed billionaires. Four of the wealthiest billionaires of America meet at a weekend villa on a mountain head as the world goes to war, thanks to their capitalistic excesses. The title is a cheeky take on Ayn Rand's 1943 seminal book The Fountainhead, and a character even refers to the interior designer of the mountain-head villa as Ayn Bland. In an exclusive interview with SCREEN, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef, who play two of the four billionaires, talk about working with Jesse Armstrong, the tone-deafness of the modern billionaire, and how Elon Musk-like tech billionaires are shaking things up. I love the scene in which the four of you, all billionaires, scale up a snow-clad mountain, write your respective net worth on your bare chests, and then scream that at the top of your lungs. Do you feel like a billionaire needs to have a bit of crazy in them? Cory: (Laughs) That's a great question! Do they need to be? No, they can be. That much money just protects you from your own behaviour and failures. Not physically, if you mess up your money, otherwise in terms of personal behaviour, you're allowed to do a lot, which is a problem. Ramy: Ya, you're allowed to remain a child or whatever it is that you want. And I just want to tell you that the scene, that you describe so brilliantly, it was so cold! And I just want you to know that. After watching Succession and working with him in Mountainhead, what is it about Jesse Armstrong that he gets the elite, the entitled, the wealthy so right? Ramy: He knows how people talk. That's really interesting because that's not how he talks. He's not writing what he knows. He's one of the kindest people I've worked with, especially considering how brilliant he is. It's all in the dialogue. We get scripts all the time to act in, and usually it takes what, 15 pages to figure out what it is. With Jesse, you'll have it known in five minutes. Because it's so clear. Cory: Yeah, and he injects steroids in the way people use and abuse power. He's able to write it in a really disturbing and entertaining way, unlike anybody else. I read a review which referred to Mountainhead as 'White Lotus winter retreat.' Do you see that parallel? And how do you think the singular setting of a luxurious villa atop a snow mountain add to the film's themes? Ramy: People just tend to compare things with other things that just came out because our memories are getting shorter by the moment. So I don't see that link, but what I do see is the isolation allows these guys to not want to confront their feelings. But because there's an actual and a metaphorical blizzard around them, they're confined to face their feelings in a way they don't want to. That makes the pressure cooker really unique and fun. Cory: And unlike The White Lotus, and to the disappointment of a lot of viewers, it's also not very romantic (laughs). Also Read | Succession: Bidding goodbye to one of the greatest television dramas of our time Cory, your character in the film defends the misinformation on his social media platform Tram (Twitter + Instagram?) by arguing that when movies were first made, the audience thought the train on the screen is going to hit them. But the solution was not to stop making movies, but make as many, and of different kinds. Do you agree with that justification? Cory: Generally, if you barrage people with so much information, it confuses, scares, and irritates them. They get a little sensory overload. They can't process all of it. Ya, we see that happening in our culture in a lot of respects. Ramy: Yeah, and I don't believe in trying to stop technology, mainly because that's impossible. So I'm an accelerationist to a level. But we'll have to figure out our own boundaries in terms of technology. We needed to do that even before this AI boom anyway. I think people will look back at this time and get shocked at how much we were on our phones because there'll be a new etiquette, a new way of interacting with these things. Hopefully, in a place where there isn't any tech at all. That's the best option! Cory: That's so optimistic I may have to choose not to believe it. Mountainhead drops on Jio Hotstar this Sunday on June 1.
