♪ emily: it is a show about a bunch of geeks writing code. abn unsexy would premise that is now an hbo hit. "silicon valley" pokes fun at the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of a startup. behind the show, people that brought us some of the greatest satire in entertainment history. mike judge of office space and beavis and butthead fame, and

alec berc of seinfeld. thank you so much for joining me. i am a big fan and i have seen every episode. you have both written, produced, and directed several different episodes. what is different about season two? alec: the biggest thing we have had to deal with is the loss of christopher evan welch. he was kind of the cornerstone of season one. he was the guy that richard went with financing wise. that was a huge hole to fill. writing wise, it was a huge challenge to figure out what we would do without him. emily: he was terrific and i understand he is being replaced by a woman. mike: not necessarily replaced. at his firm she becomes the lead , partner, this character that was not in season one. played by suzanne pryor.

it is not necessarily a 1-1, you cannot replace him with anybody. we had to write around that. the second season is the story about what happens to a company. it is then going to the next level. emily: everybody wants to know, is there a good dick joke in this series? [laughter] mike: there is at least one. i think it is a good one. emily: it is as worthy as the one in season one? alec: we love all of our babies. it is not our place to take what worse.kes are best or [laughter] emily: that is one of the most talked about moments of season one. i feel like it is indicative of how you put the show together because it is technically correct. i know use spend a lot of research on the technical part of things.

tell me how that came to be. alec: when mike and i talked about working on the show, what we bonded about is that we hate dick jokes, and we wanted them to be technically correct. funny, but they will be correct. emily: mike, you are an engineer. he worked in silicon valley once upon a time yourself. mike: i have fun on that one. we actually, believe it or not, the sky who got his phd after we finished season one was the compression consultant. we asked him for that joke. we have a lot of technical stuff about the various angles he went and whatnot. it came out of one of the

writers, completely separately talking about a discussion with his roommates. i don't know what you can say on the show. emily: manipulate? mike: manipulating four men at the same time. alec said i think we have it. alec: that is my own personal "beautiful mind" moment. [laughter] emily: i just got spit on. no, i'm fine. very meta. you guys do a lot of research for this show. you come up here often. tell me a little bit about that. mike: our stories come from real stories that are up here. we both have a desire to dig in and find out more about the real world and what these people really do. it kept occurring to us that we do not know what these people are doing.

i used to program a little bit , but i was not building apps and platforms, i was doing a different test engineering thing. the more we dug in, the more we found great stuff emily: tell me about your time in silicon valley. mike: it was a long time ago. my first job was for a company called parallax graphics. they build what is called a gpu, graphics interfaces. this was in 1987. i worked there for a few months. emily: why did you lead? -- why did you leave? mike: i did not enjoy it too much. the movie "office space" was more about why i would leave that job. i don't know, i just wanted to do something else. emily: hot shows used to be about doctors and lawyers. why write about geeks? where does silicon valley fit in this statement? mike: you don't think these guys

are hot? emily: maybe they were worth $1 million. alec: we asked ourselves that on a daily basis. why did we decide to do a show about people who sit and type all day. and what they do 16 hours a date is literally unfilmable. it is a challenge. [laughter] emily: unsexy. unglamorous. unfunny. alec: it could not be more relevant. you look at the speed at which tech is moving and the role that it plays in our lives. mike: hollywood is always very puzzled. when the internet first exploded, they tried to do a movie called "the net," trying to make it sexy and intriguing. it was ridiculous. this was an interesting challenge because it is not only unfilmable, but it leads you did you more interesting stuff that has not been done in television. it seems like a good time to take a look at the people were getting rich off of it and

building the things that we use everyday. emily: when you ask doctors about gray's anatomy, they always say, it is nothing like that. what do you want engineers to say about "silicon valley?" how important is it that you get it right? mike: i like it when they say -- we have a lot of people saying that we have gotten it right for the most part. alec: we try to get the technical details right. we do a lot of research and have a lot of consultants that ask a lot of questions. it is mostly the personality types. mike was an engineer and my dad was a biophysicist. i feel like i know those personalities and he knows those personalities so it is really about that attitude. mike: i also feel like it is good if we can make the people who work in this world actually laugh and enjoy it on that level, that is good too.

for the most part, that seems to have been the case. there are a few haters out there. emily: i have to mention elon musk. alec: nice segue. [laughter] emily: he did at one point say none of those people are software engineers. software engineers are more thoughtful, helpful, and smarter. they are weird, but not in the same way. i feel like mike judge has never been to burning man which is silicon valley. if you haven't been, you just don't get. have you ever been two burning man, first of all? mike: i have not. he is right about that. alec: he did just last week light a man on fire. [laughter] emily: well that has to count for something. mike: one step at a time. emily: how do you respond to that? mike: elon musk is at the top of the game so he may see things differently. i am not going to ever say that elon musk, that i know silicon valley better than elon musk.

we are looking for a comedy, not to just glorify and put it up on a pedestal. emily: peter thiel, another venture capitalist, is a huge fan. perhaps you might poke fun at him in season one with a guy named peter gregory. i know that some of these people you talk to on a regular basis. who did you talk to make sure you were getting it right? that you had geek cred? mike: lots of people. early on, before this went to series i did not have the resources so one of my best friends from high school is a top programmer at google. we had a lawyer who has a connection to startups. once we got going we went all , over the place. google and facebook and yelp. dropbox. emily: was mark zuckerberg happy

to talk to you? mike: we have not met them yet. alec: we saw that larry and sergey were wearing our shirts when they did the ice bucket challenge. ♪ emily: what is your take on the sexism issue in silicon valley? mike: it is kind of surprising to me that it took this long for anything like this to happen. ♪

emily: i wonder, is it strange critiquing silicon valley from hollywood? which is its own epicenter of anxiety and ego. alec: i think there are actually a huge number of similarities. we pitch pilots, entrepreneurs pitch startups to senior investors. we do season one and they do series a. it feels natural and there is no shortage of ego in either.

emily: you often hear entrepreneurs say they are trying to change the world. what do you think they are doing? mike: some of them are making the world a better place. not to say that hollywood is better. i am sure that the top successful people in hollywood, j.j. abrams and chuck lorre are not saying that their shows are making the world a better place by making people laugh, they just want to make good stuff. it is a different culture. they just have more money of yourup here, is all. emily: a lot. mike: they do not flash wealth in silicon valley the way they do in hollywood. alec: you cannot have a car because it is pompous but you can fly 50 friends to france and have a million-dollar party. emily: your movie, "idiocracy," portrays a future in which

people are getting stupider because everything is so easy. now we live in a world where we don't have to drive, thanks to uber, we do not have to cook. my groceries get delivered to me by amazon. are we on a path to a real-world idiocracy? mike: yes, probably so. [laughter] mike: i would not take that movie too seriously. that is just exaggerating things the way they are. maybe it is making the world a better place. i like uber. emily: who in tech is overdue for lampooning? mike: tom perkins. [laughter] alec: there is so much lag time between when we write and when it airs -- we write in june and it does not come on until april. 10 months from when we write to when it hits air. so much of what happens that we

want to go after happens after we have written shows but before we air. so it always feels like there is a stockpile. emily: doesn't you like you are writing history before it happens? mike: sometimes we have gotten lucky -- or unlucky, depending on how you look at it. we do something on the show and then it happens in the real world. emily: what would you like to happen in the real world silicon valley? something that would power the show for three more seasons? alec: keep doing what you are doing. it seems like every time we try to make up what is the crazy next thing, the real crazy next thing happens and is even crazier. emily: so in the next season, all of the unicorns are going to blow up and the bubble is going to burst. mike: we have been talking about that. we would take meetings and people would describe deals that have happened.

50 million users from this app are worth so much. and we flipped it and sold it. -- isd of sums going there a giant bubble that is about to burst? i would not like to see burst, that would not be good for anybody. emily: is that happening? alec: they wanted it be hard to get money to fund this company, because that is more compelling. and we were thinking what are , the reasons that they could not get $10 million or $50 million in funding and they kept saying that there is no reason. if you had to make up a reason why, hypothetically, so the show was more interesting, what would that be? no reason. emily: the show has been criticized for the portrayal of women. amanda, who plays the only recurring character up to this point says we are not trying to change it silicon valley, and rather be a commentary on it. do you agree?

yes we are doing satire , about it. i think if we came out with the show and every company was 50% women, 50% men, we would be doing a disservice by not calling attention to the fact that it is 87% male. and i think d.c. firm partners are 94% male? one of the guys that we talked to was a system architecture guy on facebook. he said by the way, there are no , women. and i would like, is it still like that? when you're doing satire, you are taking jabs at them for it. it is different than endorsing it, i think. emily: have you been following the lawsuits? facebook and twitter.

what is your take on the sexism issue in silicon valley? mike: it is kind of surprising to me that it took this long for anything to happen. it has been male-dominated for as long as -- i was in it in the 1980's. i think engineers, and i am making a broad statement here but i think a lot of male , engineers have this thing about women that goes back to women treating them badly in high school or something. alec: anything that is right for satire, we have a duty to the show to go after. if we can figure out an inspired way to hit it, absolutely. emily: would you work for amazon or netflix? ♪

emily: i wonder, how does

silicon valley compare to the other things that you have done? mike: "king of the hill," "beavis and butthead," there was no overall arc. i have also never done live-action television. i have done movies, but you always have 40 crew standing behind me. and i always wonder, what if this sucks and they are snickering behind me? alec: season one, it is like if we screw it up, nobody will notice. now that people are watching and we have a little buzz, we cannot fail quietly. emily: the entertainment landscape is so fragmented. certainly so different different from "seinfeld" and must-see tv. i wonder it is different for , divorce how is it different , for writers and creators? alec: it does not feel that different to me. you have to do something that is good and make it as funny as you

can, and you can't listen to people who want to make it something it is not. mike: one thing that is different is the nature of hbo with almost no interference from the network. it is helpful when they give us notes. with networks it is just all kinds of notes and things you cannot say. very weird standards. not that i am always trying to be foul mouthed and vulgar. doing paid cable is just different. alec: they do not have advertisers. they do not have to worry about offending anybody or taking money from that airline, so we can't mention of that airline. emily: what does hbo care about? what did they want from you? mike: they wanted something that --originally, something that is uniquely yours. your own voice, that kind of thing. they really just want, it has been nothing but let's get you what you want. emily: would you work for amazon

studios? would you work for netflix? mike: sure. not for the next year or two. i am under contract. [laughter] emily: but have you been impressed with what they are doing? alec: when you're not making that many chose, like netflix or amazon isn't, there is an emphasis on quality because you have to put something out that they are excited about. and for us, that is great. sign me up. emily: should comcast be worried? mike: probably. i guess they should be worried. if they are not, they should be. emily: what is next for you guys? is this it? are you having fun? how long do you want to keep doing this show? alec: we write for four or five months and shoot for three months and edit for four or five months and then it is time to

start writing again. when we wrapped the show, there is this thing going around the crew about what is the next year and they always ask us this and the question is, what are you working on? the answer is, i am working on this. and then when i am done working on this, i'm going to start working on this again. [laughter] mike: i get two weeks off. alec: it is embarrassing but that it takes us as long to do these episodes of this jerky show. mike: this is one like doing three movies in a year. that is what it feels like. but it is 10 episodes. it seems like it should feel easier and be easier but it is , not. but i love doing it. emily: when do you start thinking about season three? mike: june. alec: we might be gathering material as we speak. emily: i think we had a good sit in moment.

alec: season three, season of the spit take. emily: thank you so much for joining us. ♪

emily: is uber charting its course to ipo? app mightde ahailing be asking wall street for a $1 billion line of credit. ♪ i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." coming up, a special report -- a sublet fight in san francisco's tech community. we talk to experts about what the trend means about a possible tech bubble. plus, down to the wire, the senate works into the weekend debating that controversial bill that would rein in the nsa's dragnet. we will look at the risk on both sides. and twitter cofounder ed williams raises over $100 million for his debut fund.