February 13, 2026 • 24 mins
Theatre and tech don't usually share the same stage. But that's changing. This season, two plays caught our eye: Data, a play about the inner workings of a data mining company, and Marjorie Prime, a play where grief, family, and AI collide. Karah interviews both playwrights: Matthew Libby (Data) and Jordan Harrison (Marjorie Prime). They discuss the origins of their plays, from failed collabs with AI chatbots to the internship with Palantir that never was. And how plays about technology can teach us about our humanity.
Data runs through March 29th. Tickets are at lortel.org
Marjorie Prime runs through February 15th. Buy Tickets at 2st.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm Cara Price, and today I have two very special
interviews from an unexpected place, the theater world, for those
of you who don't know. In addition to being a
tech enthusiast, I'm also a very passionate theater goer. And
this season I noticed quite a few shows opening on
and off Broadway that grapple with the moral quandaries of
our tech fueled world.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
So I went and saw two of them, Data and
Marjorie Prime.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Data focuses on some of the darker sides of Silicon
Valley behemoths, while Marjorie Prime considers what it would be
like to use grief tech to preserve a loved one's memory.
I sat down with both playwrights and I wanted to
share those conversations with you today. Just a warning, both
conversations have some spoilers, but don't worry, we'll tell you
when that happens. Let's start with Matthew Libby. He wrote Data,
(01:02):
which is currently running off Broadway through March twenty ninth.
Matthew wrote the play eight years ago, but it is
all too relevant today. You'll see what I mean.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Take a listen. Welcome Matthew Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So, without giving away any spoilers, can you just give
us an overview of the play for those who haven't
seen it.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
So Data is set in a Silicon Valley tech company,
a data mining company called Athena Technologies.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
And it follows a young entry level.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Employee named Maniche who works on the user experience team
at this company. He's an entry level employee just out
of college, and at the beginning of the play, he
gets an offer to transfer to the more central, more
shadowy data analytics team and learns the true nature of
the company's work. And the rest of the play is
(01:52):
a moral thriller about what Maniche does with this information,
about what the super secret project at the core of
the company is.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So why was this?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It's an interesting story for you to tell as someone
who who's.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
A writer and not in technology.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I write a lot about about tech, you know. I
did my undergrad at Stanford, so I came of age
in Silicon Valley, and I think a lot of what
the play is about is about the experience of coming
of age in Silicon Valley. And I think to young people,
especially people young people in the Bay Area, the tech
industry does a really good job of not just presenting
(02:27):
itself like the best option for your future, but kind
of the only option. There's a way of thinking about
it that's like peer pressure, but I think it's more
complicated than that, you know, It's it's one of these
things where it's like when you're a freshman, there's a
there's a class at Stanford called CS one or six A,
which is introductory Computer Science.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
You code Java, you like code Brickbreaker and other.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Games, and it's just one of these things that like
everyone does. Computer science is just part of the kind
of like social fabric of life as a student there.
And so anyway, that's all to say that I always
knew I wanted to do this be an artist right
for film and TV and theater and create art, but
I kind of ended up on this detour while I
(03:06):
was at Stanford, and I ended up in this cognitive
science major, and that was not It also meant that
at a certain point towards the end of my time
in college, all of my friends were starting to like
get these internships, which we're going to segue into another internship,
which we're going to segue into a job. And by
the time I got to my late junior year, early
senior year, I started to feel very directionless because I,
(03:30):
you know, wanted to go to Hollywood and moved to
New York and like be a writer, and that didn't
have the same sort of like X to Y to
Z path. And so I had a bit of a crisis,
and I started asking friends to get me interviews places.
And one of the places I ended up applying to
and ended up getting a final round interview was Palenteer
(03:52):
And this would have been the fall I think it
would have been late twenty fifteen for an internship. In
the summer of twenty sixteen, I was in for a
technical writer internship, which felt me to be perfect right.
It's like it's writing, but it's about tech, and a
lot of what I'm interested in is like how to
distill complex ideas about tech into you know, very human,
(04:13):
present tense language. So I went to Pollenteer and I
did an on site interview and then I left, and
I found out a couple weeks later I didn't get
the internship.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
But were you happy that you didn't get it at
the end of.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
The day, Well, you know, I had had this was
it was an interesting time. And again this is part
of what's in the play too. But like I kind
of knew what Palateer did. This was before the first
Trump administration, and so I knew that they had government contracts.
I knew that, but they didn't quite have the reputation
that they do now. And so I was already starting
(04:45):
to feel myself have to do a little bit of
cognitive dissonance of like, what would it have meant for
my value system to work at a company that that
would have challenged that value system in some ways? And
that a couple of years later, you know, after I
graduated from school and I was re the news and
reading how a Nesh Palenteer was with the first Trump administration.
A lot of what I was feeling at that time
(05:08):
was just this sort of like hypothetical of how would
I be different if I had gotten that internship?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Right? What?
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I still would I still be the same?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
What?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I still think the same things I'm thinking now? What
I what? I would I be the same person even?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Right?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So one of the things I really like to ask
playwrights is like, where did you start?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Where did this begin? Was it the characters? Was it
the plot?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (05:29):
A lot of times when I write plays, I begin
with an image or a kind of specific theatrical conceit,
and I so I knew I wanted to write something
about Pallenteer or about about a Palneer like company. And
I was sitting I was living back home in LA
and I was sitting in my dad's you know, office study,
watching the TV. And I was watching the Camerage Analytica hearings. Yeah,
(05:52):
you know, Cambridgealytica being a data mining firm that improperly
or illegally used Facebook data for targeted advertising. And it
was this It felt like the sort of watershed moment,
at least to me, looking at the scope of Silicon
Valley and in the scope of Facebook as a company,
where people were kind of aware for the first time
that these companies had more power. I think it wasn't
(06:15):
all fun in games anymore. And I think I think
you can kind of trace back the sort of end
of the wild West in Silicon Valley to that. In
some ways, I feel like that, plus the pandemic and
a bunch of other economic factors obviously have driven the
companies into a little bit more of a like we
are actually the corporate bureaucracies that we swore we would
never be sort.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Of sort of vibe.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
And I remember sitting there watching these hearings at the
time and recognizing them as this sort of big turning point,
and especially recognizing that, like I knew people who worked
at Facebook, and I was wondering if they were having
the same sort of quarter life crisis that I was having.
And I wondered if the fact that they were working
at these companies that were so powerful and demanded so
(06:58):
much of their time and energy kind of identity was
changing or complicating that quarter life crisis in any way.
And I had this image of two people at a
ping pong table playing ping pong.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Which is not a spoiler alert, which is how we
start them.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, exactly is there's a bunch of live ping pong
throughout the play, and that was that was the first
image I had. And it's also not as spoiled to
say there are scenes in the play where they're having
conversations of moral philosophy while playing ping pong. And that
was the first image I had for the play, was
this idea of a world in which the fun in
(07:35):
games of it, like the ping pong of it, was
butting up against the weight and the power in the
and the potential darkness of it, you know, And so
a lot of the play was about how do you
create a story where the sort of yeah, the bright
sunny sheen of Silicon Valley can be at odds with
the sort of nature of the work, or you know,
(07:59):
them of the play can be in conflict with the
content of the play in some ways.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So you started writing this play in twenty eighteen, it's
taken eight years to get off Broadway.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
But can you tell us what the big super secret
project is that sits at the center of this play?
Speaker 4 (08:16):
Yeah, I mean I I wasn't necessary like it's it's
in the structure of the play. That thing is there
is a reveal in that like it a lot of
the time elicits a reaction from the audience, but it
is not. It was not necessarily written to shock the
audience because I think it is. It is something that
(08:38):
has happened before and will is happening now and likely
will happen again.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And you can also spoil it if you want to
tell us, you can.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Spoil it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Maybe we shouldn't get spoil it, yeah, yeah, yeah, spoil
it skip Hey, Yeah, we're going to put a spoiler
section here, No, I mean, so, yeah, when I you know,
when I first started writing the play, I started I
started working on it kind of right out after Kids
in Cages, that sort of immigration policy in the first
rom of administration, and very specifically, I'd read this article
where the headline was, you know, meet the company building
(09:12):
Trump's deportation machine, and it was about Palenteer. And again
this goes back to what I was saying before, of
like there was a real world in which I would
have been an employee of Palateer while all that was happening,
and it was just this thing of like what would
I have done if I was there?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (09:31):
And so the play obviously then takes that to an
extreme of again in spoiler territory, sort of whistleblowing plot.
But the idea of like of immigration being the sort
of hot button issue is like, you know, if I
had known at the time that when the play finally
got put up that that would elicit gasps of recognition,
(09:53):
you know, it would have been It's upsetting, right, It's
not right, Yeah, I mean, it's just all I can
say is that I find it upsetting that the play
is still relevant, you know, like it's one of those
things where it's like I long for it not.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
To be you long for the play not to be relevant.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Can you talk a little bit about ma Nation, talk
about how he is the sort of moral center of
the play.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
The whole kind of design of the character is that
he's at this place that a lot of people I
think are at right out of school, and that I
was definitely at right out of school, which is I
don't really know who I'm going to be as an
adult in the world, right, I don't really know.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I don't really know.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I think I know what I believe in, but I
don't really know how to implement that in the world.
I don't really know how to implement that in my work.
And I'm and I'm like, I'm now I'm out of
the structure of school, and I'm staring down the barrel
of the next fifty years of my life and just
trying to figure out who I want to be, right,
And so that was the that was the kind of
initial design of the character. Part of the goal then
(10:56):
was how do I surround that character with a bunch
of people who have very different viewpoints to answer those
questions of what it means to be a good person,
you know, what it means to do the right thing.
All of the other characters in the play, Riley, Jonah,
and Alex, they all at some point in the play
invoke this vision of what it means to do the
(11:18):
right thing. And the goal there is that Miniches is
sort of ping pong throughout the story, is being constantly
sort of convinced by different people in the company about
what the right thing to do is. And one of
my initial intentions with this play was, how do you
tell a story about Silicon Valley that's not about the
founder and that's actually about the entry level employees. What
(11:42):
is their relationship to the people at the top of
the company, right? And I'm very interested in that of
just like the way that the kind of values of
the company trickle down to the employees, even if the
company claims to have, you know, to foster open dialogue
and to welcome all viewpoints of opinion and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Do you think people are more or less willing to
accept that tech companies can be bad actors as opposed
to maybe how they felt eight years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
If Silicon Valley used to be this sort of again
like libertarian utopian bubble off in the Bay Area. The
sort of ethos of Silicon Valley is kind of broken
containment in some ways, Like there's just been a lot
of very public battles that have involved tech companies over
the last eight years, and maybe a way that in
a way that there wasn't before, you know, Facebook's relationship
with elections, TikTok, you know, open Ai, like in the
(12:30):
Sam Altman drama. You know, the Silicon Valley's problems have
become the world's problems in some ways.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Right, it can't be you can't live in the world
without caring about this stuff exactly.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Maybe in maybe a way that in twenty fourteen you
could just use Facebook and not really think about its impact.
It feels like the impact is I'm possible to avoid now.
And I think and I think, you know, I think
people do have will come into the play with a
certain amount of like judgment or you know, I think
that they'll come into it. They might come into the
play with a certain belief system. I think the play
(13:05):
does hopefully push people into a slightly more complicated, nuanced
position on these tech companies and specifically on like you know,
we have a character explain why it's a good thing
to be working with Ice, right, And again, the goal
is not to like make people sympathetic to palent Heer.
It's more just to identify that, especially as these conversations
(13:32):
enter the public sphere, that we have to remember that
what we're talking about are not black boxes. We're talking
about tools that are the response to human decisions and
human values and human biases, and that the system, and
that the system is ultimately more complicated than any one
individual story or narrative. And so yeah, I mean I've
(13:55):
seen people's response to a change, just as people have
started to gain a i think a consciousness of if
it's not even a moral valance, it's just the power
of these companies and these technologies in our world.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, this has been a wonderful interview. It's so great
to talk to you and to get a better sense
of just where your mind was at when you were
writing this show. So I really appreciate it, Matthew.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
After the break, we hear about Marjorie Prime, which was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama back in
twenty fifteen, the playwright Jordan Harrison and I discuss why
it's even more relevant today. Stay with us, Welcome back.
My next guest is Jordan Harrison. His play Marjorie Prime,
(14:45):
which premiered in New York ten years ago, was made
into a movie starring John Hamm and Gina Davis, and
is now back on Broadway until Sunday, February fifteenth. What's
incredible is that Jordan kind of predicted the growing grief
tech industry that now exists thanks to Jeneral AI and
companies like Here After AI and story File. I'll let
Jordan explain the plot in his own words.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
It's about an eighty five year old woman who has
an AI version of her dead husband from when he's
a handsome thirty something, and kind of the flight of
fancy was making AI almost a member of the family,
like a person in the living room.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
With the rest of the characters.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
And ten years ago when it premiered had its New
York premiere off Broadway, that was exactly as I described it,
a flight of fancy.
Speaker 6 (15:35):
It was kind of a fantastical thing.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
And now people, I don't think audiences have any trouble
imagining that AI is playing a personal role in their lives.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Prior to writing this play, what has your relationship with
technology been, and like specifically your relationship with AI. Because
you're a writer, you know, you're not a technologist, so
I'm curious.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
Yeah, I guess it's been an anxious and wary relationship
with technology. Like I'm starting from that place. But the
first thing that I knew when I, you know, I
opened the blank document and started Marjorie Brime, was that
I was interested in writing the play with the chatbot.
And in twenty twelve, that was a relatively exotic thing
to want to do. And I think maybe I thought, yeah,
(16:20):
I think I thought, oh, I'll only have to write
half the play.
Speaker 6 (16:24):
So I thought that What I.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Tried to do is I downloaded whatever free chatbot program
I found and just had a conversation with it. And
I imagined that then there would be two human actors
on stage performing that conversation, and the audience would have
to figure out which was written by the computer. The
play itself would be a kind of touring test. And
(16:48):
in twenty twelve, I don't think I lasted two hours
writing with this chat pot. Everything was tell me more
about your mother. That sounds difficult, you know, it truly
was almost never not a back board, and so I
had to go about actually doing my job and creating
a play on my own. But the sort of chilly
(17:09):
experience of talking with a twenty twelve era chatbot and
it's misunderstandings or something that I kind of wove into.
Speaker 6 (17:18):
The finished play.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Every now and then, you know, you think you're having
an intimate conversation with the Primes, which is what the
chatbots are called in the play, and then suddenly it'll say,
you know, I'm afraid I don't have that information, and
the rug gets ripped out from under you.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Because you're told, you're reminded that you're not actually talking
to someone. You started this as a project to kind
of test audiences to see if people could tell what
the difference, which is so unbelievably at the time prescient,
because like I would say, like one of the main
folk guy of our time is like being able to
(17:54):
tell the difference between human and machine.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
Well, I mean, it's incredible how much it's a part
of our daily life lives now.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
Like I guess on the topic of.
Speaker 5 (18:02):
Marjorie Prime, as I wonder whether eventually we will get
comfortable with dead people still being in our lives, you know,
in the form of avatars.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
That's a spooky thought because.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
In my experience, we don't have much of a choice,
you know. The new gadgets come around the bend and
suddenly that's just part of the texture of life, you know.
And I should check this first, but before making this
brazen declaration. But I don't think that the term AI
ever appears in it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
I don't think it does.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Like, Yeah, and without being too spoilery, there are there
isn't just one AI character. People die in the play
as people do, and are replaced with AI versions of themselves,
and then the audience in our own lived experience for
an hour and twenty two minutes and sitting in our
theater seats like feels the difference between the real person
(18:55):
they knew and the AI in front of them.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, I think we're still like watching Marjorie Prime, because
I mean I think about this constantly. I had a
parent that passed away when I was very young, and
also I saw Marjorie Prime, and I think he would
be okay with me saying this. I saw Marjorie Prime
with someone who has Alzheimer's and I think we were
(19:21):
both on different ends of the spectrum thinking about what
it's like to have a living memory in your life
past the point of that memory's like corporeal existence, you know,
and like what that means and is that I think
the question that comes up in the play is like,
(19:46):
I guess there's the morality question, but there's also like
the humanity question, like is that human? And I and
I guess my question for you is like.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Would you have a prime yeah or not? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (20:01):
I would, but yeah, that's something I get asked and
something I have to think about now. The test I
put myself to is like I lost a dear friend
in nineteen ninety eight we were in college, and like, it.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
Would be so delicious to talk to her again.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
But when I think of whatever app could assemble out
of like old video and photographs, it could only be
grotesque the distance between her, the real friend, and the
avatar friend. I think I would end up feeling farther
from her than when I started.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
You know.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I think the question, certainly a big part of the
play is what does grief do to a family?
Speaker 6 (20:40):
Unprocessed grief?
Speaker 5 (20:41):
The generation before the play takes place, there's this terrible
tragedy and no one talks about it, and it continues
to be a big part of who they are and
who they are with each other. So I think the
way I think of it as if we had the
option of this really realistic version of our dead mom
and dad, our dead spouse, like, and we could talk
(21:05):
to it. Then is that confronting the grief or is
that being in denial of the grief? You know, and
I don't even mean denial, Like you would talk to
it and think that your spouse is still alive, but
you wouldn't feel the absence of them, And maybe that's
an important part of being a human.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
So Jordan, obviously a lot has changed in the world
of AI since your play premiered ten years ago, But
has that changed the play at all for you?
Speaker 5 (21:34):
You know, it's just tough, Like I guess, I don't.
Maybe this is a boring answer. I don't feel different,
I feel if anything. Like I used to say that
part of my project as a playwright is to track
the transition from the analog world to the digital world,
those growing pains, And now I'm a little closer to
saying that I'm tracking the transition from the.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Human age to the post human age.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
And I guess I bring that up to say I'm
getting close to acclimated to the idea that we won't
be around forever, and that it seems to me it
seems likely that our inventions will remember us, and so
I'm interested in how they'll remember us, accurately, flatteringly, unflatteringly,
all the above.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
What is the role of the playwright? Then, as we
move into mes human age.
Speaker 5 (22:27):
I'm more confident in the role of the playwright than
I am in the role of the screenwriter or even
the novelist.
Speaker 6 (22:34):
You know, I have a little more confidence in my jobs.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
I mean, I do all those things, and I feel
like more confident in my job security as a playwright
because I see five year olds put on a play
without knowing that that's what they're doing every day.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
So I do think as long as.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
We have limbs and beating hearts and so forth, we're
capable of doing that in a way that our technology
is not.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Thank you, Jordan, Thank you so much for speaking to
me about your play today.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
That's it for text Uff this week. I'm Kara Price.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me oz Va Lashan, Julia Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our
theme song.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Please rate, review, and.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail
dot com.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
We want to hear from you.
Welcome to tech stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
I'm Cara Price, and today I have two very special
interviews from an unexpected place, the theater world, for those
of you who don't know. In addition to being a
tech enthusiast, I'm also a very passionate theater goer. And
this season I noticed quite a few shows opening on
and off Broadway that grapple with the moral quandaries of
our tech fueled world.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
So I went and saw two of them, Data and
Marjorie Prime.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Data focuses on some of the darker sides of Silicon
Valley behemoths, while Marjorie Prime considers what it would be
like to use grief tech to preserve a loved one's memory.
I sat down with both playwrights and I wanted to
share those conversations with you today. Just a warning, both
conversations have some spoilers, but don't worry, we'll tell you
when that happens. Let's start with Matthew Libby. He wrote Data,
(01:02):
which is currently running off Broadway through March twenty ninth.
Matthew wrote the play eight years ago, but it is
all too relevant today. You'll see what I mean.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Take a listen. Welcome Matthew Hi.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
So, without giving away any spoilers, can you just give
us an overview of the play for those who haven't
seen it.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
So Data is set in a Silicon Valley tech company,
a data mining company called Athena Technologies.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
And it follows a young entry level.
Speaker 4 (01:32):
Employee named Maniche who works on the user experience team
at this company. He's an entry level employee just out
of college, and at the beginning of the play, he
gets an offer to transfer to the more central, more
shadowy data analytics team and learns the true nature of
the company's work. And the rest of the play is
(01:52):
a moral thriller about what Maniche does with this information,
about what the super secret project at the core of
the company is.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
So why was this?
Speaker 2 (02:00):
It's an interesting story for you to tell as someone
who who's.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
A writer and not in technology.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
I write a lot about about tech, you know. I
did my undergrad at Stanford, so I came of age
in Silicon Valley, and I think a lot of what
the play is about is about the experience of coming
of age in Silicon Valley. And I think to young people,
especially people young people in the Bay Area, the tech
industry does a really good job of not just presenting
(02:27):
itself like the best option for your future, but kind
of the only option. There's a way of thinking about
it that's like peer pressure, but I think it's more
complicated than that, you know, It's it's one of these
things where it's like when you're a freshman, there's a
there's a class at Stanford called CS one or six A,
which is introductory Computer Science.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
You code Java, you like code Brickbreaker and other.
Speaker 4 (02:46):
Games, and it's just one of these things that like
everyone does. Computer science is just part of the kind
of like social fabric of life as a student there.
And so anyway, that's all to say that I always
knew I wanted to do this be an artist right
for film and TV and theater and create art, but
I kind of ended up on this detour while I
(03:06):
was at Stanford, and I ended up in this cognitive
science major, and that was not It also meant that
at a certain point towards the end of my time
in college, all of my friends were starting to like
get these internships, which we're going to segue into another internship,
which we're going to segue into a job. And by
the time I got to my late junior year, early
senior year, I started to feel very directionless because I,
(03:30):
you know, wanted to go to Hollywood and moved to
New York and like be a writer, and that didn't
have the same sort of like X to Y to
Z path. And so I had a bit of a crisis,
and I started asking friends to get me interviews places.
And one of the places I ended up applying to
and ended up getting a final round interview was Palenteer
(03:52):
And this would have been the fall I think it
would have been late twenty fifteen for an internship. In
the summer of twenty sixteen, I was in for a
technical writer internship, which felt me to be perfect right.
It's like it's writing, but it's about tech, and a
lot of what I'm interested in is like how to
distill complex ideas about tech into you know, very human,
(04:13):
present tense language. So I went to Pollenteer and I
did an on site interview and then I left, and
I found out a couple weeks later I didn't get
the internship.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
But were you happy that you didn't get it at
the end of.
Speaker 4 (04:25):
The day, Well, you know, I had had this was
it was an interesting time. And again this is part
of what's in the play too. But like I kind
of knew what Palateer did. This was before the first
Trump administration, and so I knew that they had government contracts.
I knew that, but they didn't quite have the reputation
that they do now. And so I was already starting
(04:45):
to feel myself have to do a little bit of
cognitive dissonance of like, what would it have meant for
my value system to work at a company that that
would have challenged that value system in some ways? And
that a couple of years later, you know, after I
graduated from school and I was re the news and
reading how a Nesh Palenteer was with the first Trump administration.
A lot of what I was feeling at that time
(05:08):
was just this sort of like hypothetical of how would
I be different if I had gotten that internship?
Speaker 2 (05:13):
Right? What?
Speaker 3 (05:13):
I still would I still be the same?
Speaker 1 (05:15):
What?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I still think the same things I'm thinking now? What
I what? I would I be the same person even?
Speaker 1 (05:20):
Right?
Speaker 2 (05:20):
So one of the things I really like to ask
playwrights is like, where did you start?
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Where did this begin? Was it the characters? Was it
the plot?
Speaker 3 (05:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (05:29):
A lot of times when I write plays, I begin
with an image or a kind of specific theatrical conceit,
and I so I knew I wanted to write something
about Pallenteer or about about a Palneer like company. And
I was sitting I was living back home in LA
and I was sitting in my dad's you know, office study,
watching the TV. And I was watching the Camerage Analytica hearings. Yeah,
(05:52):
you know, Cambridgealytica being a data mining firm that improperly
or illegally used Facebook data for targeted advertising. And it
was this It felt like the sort of watershed moment,
at least to me, looking at the scope of Silicon
Valley and in the scope of Facebook as a company,
where people were kind of aware for the first time
that these companies had more power. I think it wasn't
(06:15):
all fun in games anymore. And I think I think
you can kind of trace back the sort of end
of the wild West in Silicon Valley to that. In
some ways, I feel like that, plus the pandemic and
a bunch of other economic factors obviously have driven the
companies into a little bit more of a like we
are actually the corporate bureaucracies that we swore we would
never be sort.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Of sort of vibe.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
And I remember sitting there watching these hearings at the
time and recognizing them as this sort of big turning point,
and especially recognizing that, like I knew people who worked
at Facebook, and I was wondering if they were having
the same sort of quarter life crisis that I was having.
And I wondered if the fact that they were working
at these companies that were so powerful and demanded so
(06:58):
much of their time and energy kind of identity was
changing or complicating that quarter life crisis in any way.
And I had this image of two people at a
ping pong table playing ping pong.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Which is not a spoiler alert, which is how we
start them.
Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, exactly is there's a bunch of live ping pong
throughout the play, and that was that was the first
image I had. And it's also not as spoiled to
say there are scenes in the play where they're having
conversations of moral philosophy while playing ping pong. And that
was the first image I had for the play, was
this idea of a world in which the fun in
(07:35):
games of it, like the ping pong of it, was
butting up against the weight and the power in the
and the potential darkness of it, you know, And so
a lot of the play was about how do you
create a story where the sort of yeah, the bright
sunny sheen of Silicon Valley can be at odds with
the sort of nature of the work, or you know,
(07:59):
them of the play can be in conflict with the
content of the play in some ways.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
So you started writing this play in twenty eighteen, it's
taken eight years to get off Broadway.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
But can you tell us what the big super secret
project is that sits at the center of this play?
Speaker 4 (08:16):
Yeah, I mean I I wasn't necessary like it's it's
in the structure of the play. That thing is there
is a reveal in that like it a lot of
the time elicits a reaction from the audience, but it
is not. It was not necessarily written to shock the
audience because I think it is. It is something that
(08:38):
has happened before and will is happening now and likely
will happen again.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And you can also spoil it if you want to
tell us, you can.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Spoil it a little bit.
Speaker 4 (08:49):
Maybe we shouldn't get spoil it, yeah, yeah, yeah, spoil
it skip Hey, Yeah, we're going to put a spoiler
section here, No, I mean, so, yeah, when I you know,
when I first started writing the play, I started I
started working on it kind of right out after Kids
in Cages, that sort of immigration policy in the first
rom of administration, and very specifically, I'd read this article
where the headline was, you know, meet the company building
(09:12):
Trump's deportation machine, and it was about Palenteer. And again
this goes back to what I was saying before, of
like there was a real world in which I would
have been an employee of Palateer while all that was happening,
and it was just this thing of like what would
I have done if I was there?
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Right?
Speaker 4 (09:31):
And so the play obviously then takes that to an
extreme of again in spoiler territory, sort of whistleblowing plot.
But the idea of like of immigration being the sort
of hot button issue is like, you know, if I
had known at the time that when the play finally
got put up that that would elicit gasps of recognition,
(09:53):
you know, it would have been It's upsetting, right, It's
not right, Yeah, I mean, it's just all I can
say is that I find it upsetting that the play
is still relevant, you know, like it's one of those
things where it's like I long for it not.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
To be you long for the play not to be relevant.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Can you talk a little bit about ma Nation, talk
about how he is the sort of moral center of
the play.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (10:16):
The whole kind of design of the character is that
he's at this place that a lot of people I
think are at right out of school, and that I
was definitely at right out of school, which is I
don't really know who I'm going to be as an
adult in the world, right, I don't really know.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
I don't really know.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
I think I know what I believe in, but I
don't really know how to implement that in the world.
I don't really know how to implement that in my work.
And I'm and I'm like, I'm now I'm out of
the structure of school, and I'm staring down the barrel
of the next fifty years of my life and just
trying to figure out who I want to be, right,
And so that was the that was the kind of
initial design of the character. Part of the goal then
(10:56):
was how do I surround that character with a bunch
of people who have very different viewpoints to answer those
questions of what it means to be a good person,
you know, what it means to do the right thing.
All of the other characters in the play, Riley, Jonah,
and Alex, they all at some point in the play
invoke this vision of what it means to do the
(11:18):
right thing. And the goal there is that Miniches is
sort of ping pong throughout the story, is being constantly
sort of convinced by different people in the company about
what the right thing to do is. And one of
my initial intentions with this play was, how do you
tell a story about Silicon Valley that's not about the
founder and that's actually about the entry level employees. What
(11:42):
is their relationship to the people at the top of
the company, right? And I'm very interested in that of
just like the way that the kind of values of
the company trickle down to the employees, even if the
company claims to have, you know, to foster open dialogue
and to welcome all viewpoints of opinion and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Do you think people are more or less willing to
accept that tech companies can be bad actors as opposed
to maybe how they felt eight years ago.
Speaker 4 (12:06):
If Silicon Valley used to be this sort of again
like libertarian utopian bubble off in the Bay Area. The
sort of ethos of Silicon Valley is kind of broken
containment in some ways, Like there's just been a lot
of very public battles that have involved tech companies over
the last eight years, and maybe a way that in
a way that there wasn't before, you know, Facebook's relationship
with elections, TikTok, you know, open Ai, like in the
(12:30):
Sam Altman drama. You know, the Silicon Valley's problems have
become the world's problems in some ways.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
Right, it can't be you can't live in the world
without caring about this stuff exactly.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Maybe in maybe a way that in twenty fourteen you
could just use Facebook and not really think about its impact.
It feels like the impact is I'm possible to avoid now.
And I think and I think, you know, I think
people do have will come into the play with a
certain amount of like judgment or you know, I think
that they'll come into it. They might come into the
play with a certain belief system. I think the play
(13:05):
does hopefully push people into a slightly more complicated, nuanced
position on these tech companies and specifically on like you know,
we have a character explain why it's a good thing
to be working with Ice, right, And again, the goal
is not to like make people sympathetic to palent Heer.
It's more just to identify that, especially as these conversations
(13:32):
enter the public sphere, that we have to remember that
what we're talking about are not black boxes. We're talking
about tools that are the response to human decisions and
human values and human biases, and that the system, and
that the system is ultimately more complicated than any one
individual story or narrative. And so yeah, I mean I've
(13:55):
seen people's response to a change, just as people have
started to gain a i think a consciousness of if
it's not even a moral valance, it's just the power
of these companies and these technologies in our world.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Well, this has been a wonderful interview. It's so great
to talk to you and to get a better sense
of just where your mind was at when you were
writing this show. So I really appreciate it, Matthew.
Speaker 3 (14:19):
Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
After the break, we hear about Marjorie Prime, which was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama back in
twenty fifteen, the playwright Jordan Harrison and I discuss why
it's even more relevant today. Stay with us, Welcome back.
My next guest is Jordan Harrison. His play Marjorie Prime,
(14:45):
which premiered in New York ten years ago, was made
into a movie starring John Hamm and Gina Davis, and
is now back on Broadway until Sunday, February fifteenth. What's
incredible is that Jordan kind of predicted the growing grief
tech industry that now exists thanks to Jeneral AI and
companies like Here After AI and story File. I'll let
Jordan explain the plot in his own words.
Speaker 5 (15:06):
It's about an eighty five year old woman who has
an AI version of her dead husband from when he's
a handsome thirty something, and kind of the flight of
fancy was making AI almost a member of the family,
like a person in the living room.
Speaker 6 (15:23):
With the rest of the characters.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
And ten years ago when it premiered had its New
York premiere off Broadway, that was exactly as I described it,
a flight of fancy.
Speaker 6 (15:35):
It was kind of a fantastical thing.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
And now people, I don't think audiences have any trouble
imagining that AI is playing a personal role in their lives.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Prior to writing this play, what has your relationship with
technology been, and like specifically your relationship with AI. Because
you're a writer, you know, you're not a technologist, so
I'm curious.
Speaker 5 (15:58):
Yeah, I guess it's been an anxious and wary relationship
with technology. Like I'm starting from that place. But the
first thing that I knew when I, you know, I
opened the blank document and started Marjorie Brime, was that
I was interested in writing the play with the chatbot.
And in twenty twelve, that was a relatively exotic thing
to want to do. And I think maybe I thought, yeah,
(16:20):
I think I thought, oh, I'll only have to write
half the play.
Speaker 6 (16:24):
So I thought that What I.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Tried to do is I downloaded whatever free chatbot program
I found and just had a conversation with it. And
I imagined that then there would be two human actors
on stage performing that conversation, and the audience would have
to figure out which was written by the computer. The
play itself would be a kind of touring test. And
(16:48):
in twenty twelve, I don't think I lasted two hours
writing with this chat pot. Everything was tell me more
about your mother. That sounds difficult, you know, it truly
was almost never not a back board, and so I
had to go about actually doing my job and creating
a play on my own. But the sort of chilly
(17:09):
experience of talking with a twenty twelve era chatbot and
it's misunderstandings or something that I kind of wove into.
Speaker 6 (17:18):
The finished play.
Speaker 5 (17:19):
Every now and then, you know, you think you're having
an intimate conversation with the Primes, which is what the
chatbots are called in the play, and then suddenly it'll say,
you know, I'm afraid I don't have that information, and
the rug gets ripped out from under you.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Because you're told, you're reminded that you're not actually talking
to someone. You started this as a project to kind
of test audiences to see if people could tell what
the difference, which is so unbelievably at the time prescient,
because like I would say, like one of the main
folk guy of our time is like being able to
(17:54):
tell the difference between human and machine.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
Well, I mean, it's incredible how much it's a part
of our daily life lives now.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
Like I guess on the topic of.
Speaker 5 (18:02):
Marjorie Prime, as I wonder whether eventually we will get
comfortable with dead people still being in our lives, you know,
in the form of avatars.
Speaker 6 (18:12):
That's a spooky thought because.
Speaker 5 (18:14):
In my experience, we don't have much of a choice,
you know. The new gadgets come around the bend and
suddenly that's just part of the texture of life, you know.
And I should check this first, but before making this
brazen declaration. But I don't think that the term AI
ever appears in it.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
I don't think it does.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
Like, Yeah, and without being too spoilery, there are there
isn't just one AI character. People die in the play
as people do, and are replaced with AI versions of themselves,
and then the audience in our own lived experience for
an hour and twenty two minutes and sitting in our
theater seats like feels the difference between the real person
(18:55):
they knew and the AI in front of them.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
Yeah, I think we're still like watching Marjorie Prime, because
I mean I think about this constantly. I had a
parent that passed away when I was very young, and
also I saw Marjorie Prime, and I think he would
be okay with me saying this. I saw Marjorie Prime
with someone who has Alzheimer's and I think we were
(19:21):
both on different ends of the spectrum thinking about what
it's like to have a living memory in your life
past the point of that memory's like corporeal existence, you know,
and like what that means and is that I think
the question that comes up in the play is like,
(19:46):
I guess there's the morality question, but there's also like
the humanity question, like is that human? And I and
I guess my question for you is like.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Would you have a prime yeah or not? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (20:01):
I would, but yeah, that's something I get asked and
something I have to think about now. The test I
put myself to is like I lost a dear friend
in nineteen ninety eight we were in college, and like, it.
Speaker 6 (20:12):
Would be so delicious to talk to her again.
Speaker 5 (20:15):
But when I think of whatever app could assemble out
of like old video and photographs, it could only be
grotesque the distance between her, the real friend, and the
avatar friend. I think I would end up feeling farther
from her than when I started.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
You know.
Speaker 5 (20:34):
I think the question, certainly a big part of the
play is what does grief do to a family?
Speaker 6 (20:40):
Unprocessed grief?
Speaker 5 (20:41):
The generation before the play takes place, there's this terrible
tragedy and no one talks about it, and it continues
to be a big part of who they are and
who they are with each other. So I think the
way I think of it as if we had the
option of this really realistic version of our dead mom
and dad, our dead spouse, like, and we could talk
(21:05):
to it. Then is that confronting the grief or is
that being in denial of the grief? You know, and
I don't even mean denial, Like you would talk to
it and think that your spouse is still alive, but
you wouldn't feel the absence of them, And maybe that's
an important part of being a human.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
So Jordan, obviously a lot has changed in the world
of AI since your play premiered ten years ago, But
has that changed the play at all for you?
Speaker 5 (21:34):
You know, it's just tough, Like I guess, I don't.
Maybe this is a boring answer. I don't feel different,
I feel if anything. Like I used to say that
part of my project as a playwright is to track
the transition from the analog world to the digital world,
those growing pains, And now I'm a little closer to
saying that I'm tracking the transition from the.
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Human age to the post human age.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
And I guess I bring that up to say I'm
getting close to acclimated to the idea that we won't
be around forever, and that it seems to me it
seems likely that our inventions will remember us, and so
I'm interested in how they'll remember us, accurately, flatteringly, unflatteringly,
all the above.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
What is the role of the playwright? Then, as we
move into mes human age.
Speaker 5 (22:27):
I'm more confident in the role of the playwright than
I am in the role of the screenwriter or even
the novelist.
Speaker 6 (22:34):
You know, I have a little more confidence in my jobs.
Speaker 5 (22:38):
I mean, I do all those things, and I feel
like more confident in my job security as a playwright
because I see five year olds put on a play
without knowing that that's what they're doing every day.
Speaker 6 (22:50):
So I do think as long as.
Speaker 5 (22:51):
We have limbs and beating hearts and so forth, we're
capable of doing that in a way that our technology
is not.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Thank you, Jordan, Thank you so much for speaking to
me about your play today.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
That's it for text Uff this week. I'm Kara Price.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, and Melissa Slaughter.
It was executive produced by me oz Va Lashan, Julia Nutter,
and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our
theme song.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Please rate, review, and.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
Reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail
dot com.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
We want to hear from you.
TechStuff News
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