♪ emily: it is a show about a bunch of geeks locked in a house, writing code. a most unsexy, un-hollywood premise that is now an hbo hit. the show is named after the world it lampoons -- "silicon valley." it pokes fun at the absurdities and ideosyncrasies behind the place where people can make millions overnight. behind the show, two people that brought us some of the greatest satire in entertainment history. mike judge of "office space" and "beavis and butthead" fame, and alec berg, a top writer on "seinfeld." joining me today, "silicon valley" creator mike judge and executive producer alec berg. thank you so much for joining

us. very excited to have you. mike: thank you. emily: i am a big fan. i have seen every episode. i know you have both written, produced, and directed several different episodes. so what is different about season two? mike: alec? alec: well, the biggest thing we have had to deal with is the loss of christopher evan welch, who played peter gregory. and he was kind of the cornerstone of season one. and he was the guy richard ended up going with, financing-wise. and that was a huge, huge hole sort of to fill. and just writing-wise, a challenge to try and figure out what the hell we're going to do with him. emily: he was terrific and i understand he is being replaced by a woman? mike: not necessarily replaced. well -- his firm, she becomes the lead partner, this new character that was not in season one, played by suzanne cryer. but he is -- it is not necessarily one for one kind of

-- we did not really think of it as you can replace him with anybody. but we had to write around that. you know, this is kind of -- second season is the story about what happens to a company. it is them going to the next level. emily: everybody wants to know, is there a good dick joke in this series? i mean, that is -- mike: there is at least one, yeah. i think it is a good one. emily: is it a dick joke worthy of the one in season one? alec: look, we love all of our babies. [laughter] alec: it is hard to say which dick joke is better than another dick joke. emily: but seriously, that moment is probably one of the most talked about if not the most talked about moments of season one. and i feel like it is indicative of how you guys put this show together. because it is technically correct. and i know you spent a lot of research on the technical part of things. so tell me, actually, about how that came to be. alec: when mike and i first

started talking about working on the show, we bonded over the fact that we said that what we hate more than anything is technically incorrect dick jokes. so we just decided, we vowed from that point forward, if we do dick jokes, they are going to be technically correct. mike: yes. [laughter] alec: they may not be funny, but they will be correct. and so far i think we have stayed with that. emily: and mike, actually, you are an engineer. mike: that is right. emily: you worked in silicon valley, once upon a time, yourself. so you know a little about this world. mike: i had fun on that one. believe it or not, this guy who got his phd after he finished season one was sort of our compression consultant. we asked him, for that dick joke -- we had a lot of our technical stuff about, you know, the various angles and whatnot. he kind of went to town on this. and it came out of one of the writers, matteo borghese. he was just completely separately talking about, a discussion with his roommates about how you could -- i don't know what you can say on this show.

alec: manipulate? mike: manipulate four men at the same time. and alec overheard this and said, i think we have got it. [laughter] alec: that was like my own personal "beautiful mind" moment. [laughter] emily: i just got spit on. i just got spit on. mike: i am sorry. are you ok? emily: no, i am good. it is very meta. mike: i just did a spit take on bloomberg. alec: they call it a classic for a reason. emily: so really -- mike: i will take a real drink of water. emily: you guys do a lot of research for this show. i know you come up here often. tell me a little bit about that. mike: a lot of what we -- our stories just come from real stories that are up here. i think we both have this desire to really just dig in and find out more about the real world, what these people really do. they just kept occurring to us, i do not know what these people are doing. i mean, i used to program a little bit, but i wasn't

building apps and platforms, i was doing a different kind of test engineering thing. and so, yeah, the more we dug into it, the more great stuff we found. emily: tell me about your time in silicon valley. mike: it was a long time ago. i was -- i worked -- my first job up here was for a company called parallax graphics. they made what would be called a gpu now, graphics interfaces. but this was in 1987. i worked there for a few months. emily: why did you leave? mike: i didn't enjoy it too much. i think -- emily: you thought you might write a show about it instead? mike: yeah, well, the movie "office space" was kind of more about why i would leave that job. [laughter] mike: i don't know, i just wanted to do something else. emily: the hot shows used to be about doctors and lawyers. why write about silicon valley and computer geeks now? [laughter] emily: like, where does silicon valley fit in this arc of entertainment history? mike: you don't think these guys are hot? emily: maybe if they are worth a billion dollars.

alec: we kind of ask ourselves that on a daily basis. like, why did we decide to do a show that is about people who sit and type all day? and what they do literally 16 hours a day is inherently unfilmable. it is a challenge. emily: i said it was unsexy. alec: mistakes were made. emily: 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 life. mike: yeah, i think hollywood has always been very puzzled about -- like when the internet first just exploded and was everywhere, they tried a movie called "the net." they tried to make it all sexy and intriguing. and it just was kind of ridiculous. this was an interesting challenge just because, as alec says, it is unfilmable. but it is also, that challenge can lead you to do more interesting stuff that has not been done in television. so it seems like a good time to take a look at the people who are getting rich off of it and building all these things that we use every day. emily: when you ask doctors about "grey's anatomy," i feel

like they always say, oh god, it is nothing like that. what do you want engineers to say about "silicon valley"? and how important is it to you to get it right? mike: i always like it when they say -- we have a lot of people saying that we have gotten it right, for the most part. alec: yeah, i think it is truthful. mike: that is what we want. alec: we try to get the technical details right. we do a lot of research and have a lot of consultants who ask a lot of questions. but i think it is also just the personality types and that world. mike was an engineer, and my dad is a biophysicist. my brother is a computer guy. his wife works at microsoft. i feel like i know those personalities and he knows those personalities, so it is really about that -- that attitude. mike: i also feel like it is good if we can make the actual people who work in this world actually laugh and enjoy it on that level, that is good too. so far, it seems like for the most part, that has been the

case. i mean, there are a few -- few haters out there. emily: well, i have to mention elon musk. because -- mike: nice segue. [laughter] emily: he did at one point say, he told "recode," "none of those characters were software engineers. software engineers are more helpful, thoughtful, and smarter. they are weird, but not in the same way. i really feel like mike judge has never been to burning man, which is silicon valley. if you haven't been, you just do not get it." have you ever been to burning man, first of all? to get the record straight. mike: i have not. he is right about that. alec: he did though, just last week, light a man on fire. so -- [laughter] emily: that has to count for something. mike: one step at a time. emily: but how do you respond to that? mike: elon musk is at the top of the game here. he is not -- he might see things a little differently. i mean he, you know, i am not going to ever say that elon musk -- that i know silicon valley better than elon musk. we are looking for comedy here. we are not to just glorify and put it all up on a pedestal. emily: mark andreessen is a huge

fan. peter thiel, another venture capitalist, also a huge fan, even though you perhaps may poke fun at him a little bit in season one with a guy named peter gregory. and i know that some of these people you talk to on a regular basis. so who did you talk to make sure you were getting it right? to make sure you had geek cred? mike: oh, lots of people. well, early on, i didn't -- you know, before this went to series, i didn't have quite the resources, so one of my best friends from high school, his nephew is a top programmer at google. there was a lawyer we had a connection to who works with startups. but once we got going, i mean, we went to -- we went all over the place. went to google, facebook, yelp, dropbox. emily: larry, sergey, and mark zuckerberg, were they happy to talk to you? mike: we have not met them yet. alec: no. though we did see -- we saw that

larry and sergey were wearing our shirts when they did the ice bucket challenge. emily: oh, ok. mike: yeah, they had a houli and a pied piper shirt on. emily: what is your take on the sexism issue in silicon valley? mike: it is kind of surprising to me that it -- that it took this long for anything like this to happen. ♪

emily: i wonder, is it at all 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, you know, entrepreneurs pitch startups to seed investors. and we do season one, they do series a. so it feels natural, and there is no shortage of ego or, you know, or, you know, pompousness in either business. emily: you often hear entrepreneurs and c.e.o.s say they are trying to change the world.

and make the world a better place. 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. but i am sure that the top people -- successful people in hollywood, like j.j. abrams, chuck lorre, are not saying, my shows are making the world a better place by making people laugh. it's -- you know, you just want to make good stuff. it is just a different culture. they just have more money up here. that is all. emily: a lot. mike: they do not flash wealth in silicon valley the way they do in hollywood. or especially they way they used to like 20 years ago. alec: yeah, it is an interesting code that you cannot drive a car because it is pompous, but you can fly 50 of your friends to france for the weekend and have a million-dollar party. emily: or burning man, right. mike, your movie, "idiocracy," portrayed a future in which people are getting stupider because everything is so easy, and they are so lazy. and now we live in a world where

we don't have to drive, thanks to uber, we do not have to cook things to muncherie. my groceries get delivered to me by amazon and instacart. are we on a path to a real-world "idiocracy?" mike: yes, probably so. [laughter] mike: i don't know. that -- i would not take that movie too seriously. i was just sort of exaggerating things the way they are. so -- but, i don't know, maybe it is making the world a better place. not -- i like uber. emily: who in tech is most overdue for lampooning? mike: tom perkins. [laughter] mike: if i can name names. alec: it is funny. because there is so much lag time between when we write the show and when it airs, it is almost a full year -- we started writing in june and it does not come on until april. so it is, you know, 10 months from when we start writing to when the shows start to hit air -- so much of what happens that we want to sort of go after happens after we have written shows but before we have aired.

so it always feels like there is a stockpile. emily: you're writing history before it happens. mike: sometimes we have gotten lucky -- or unlucky, depending on how you look at it -- where we do something on the show and in between the time we shoot it and it comes out, it has happened in the real world. emily: what would you like to happen in the real world silicon valley? like, it would power the show for three more seasons? alec: honestly, just keep doing what you are doing. it just seems like, you know, every time we try and make up what is the crazy next thing, the real crazy next thing happens and it's even crazier than what we could make up. emily: so in the next season, all the unicorns are going to blow up, and the bubble is going to burst, and you guys will already have already written it? mike: yeah, we were talking about that. we would be taking these meetings, and people would be describing deals that happened. saying oh, this is like, i do not know, 50 million users from this app were worth this much. and we flipped it. and we found ourselves going is there a giant bubble that is

about to burst here somewhere? like it -- i would like to see the bubble not burst. that wouldn't be good for anybody. emily: but do you think there is one? alec: one of the things we wanted to do was make it hard for them to get money to fund this company, because that is more compelling. and we kept asking people, okay, what are the reasons that they could not get $10 million or $15 million in funding, and the people we talked to kept saying, there is no reason. [laughter] alec: well, if you had to invent, if you made up a reason why, hypothetically, so the show was more interesting, what would that reason be? oh, no, there is no reason. emily: the show has been criticized for the portrayal of women. amanda crew, who plays the only recurring female character up to this point, said, "we are not trying to change silicon valley, we are trying to be a commentary on silicon valley, and that is what exists." do you agree? mike: yes. i mean, we are doing satire about it. i mean, it's -- i think if we just came out with the show and it was every company was 50% women, 50% men, we would kind of

be doing a disservice by not calling attention to the fact that it is really 87% male. i think vc firms, partners are 94% male? alec: yes. mike: one of the guys i actually talked to early on was this guy, andrew frame, from -- a system architecture guy on facebook. he said, by the way, there are no women. i said, it is still like that? it was like that when i was here. but i mean, if you're not -- you know, we are doing satire. we are taking jabs at them for it. it is different than endorsing it, i think. emily: have you been following the ellen pao versus kleiner perkins trial? mike: yes. yeah. emily: well, now lawsuits have been filed with facebook and with twitter. it certainly seems to be -- i mean, 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. i mean, it has been male-dominated for as lon as i -- i mean, i am old. i was in it, you know, in the 1980's. i am not surprised. i think engineers -- and this is, i am making a broad statement here -- but a lot of male engineers have this thing about women that probably goes back to women treating them badly in high school or something. and maybe there is a little bit of that. alec: anything that is ripe for satire, obviously, i think 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 an amazon studios? would you work for a netflix? ♪

emily: i wonder, how does "silicon valley" compare to the other things that you've done?

"seinfeld," "beavis and butthead," office space." mike: "king of the hill," "beavis and butthead" were -- there was really no overall arc there. so that is different. i also have never done live-action television. i have done movies. but you got 40 crew people standing behind you. and i always have this feeling that like, oh god, what if this thing sucks, and they are all snickering. alec: season one, it is like if we screw it up nobody will notice. now that people are watching and we have got a little buzz, we cannot fail quietly now. emily: the entertainment landscape is so fragmented. it is certainly so different from the days of "seinfeld" and must-see tv on nbc. i wonder, it is so different for viewers, how is it different for writers and creators? alec: from the writing side, it doesn't feel much different to me. it is still -- you've got 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 just different is the nature of hbo. almost no interference from the network. it is helpful when they give us notes. it is not bad. with networks, it is just all kinds of notes and things that you can't say and very weird standards. i mean, not that i am always trying to be foul-mouthed and vulgar or anything. it is just -- doing pay cable is just different, i guess. alec: they do not have advertisers. so that is a whole huge thing -- they do not have to worry about offending anybody. they do not have to worry about, we take money from that airline, so we can't mention that airline. emily: what does hbo care about? what do they say they want from you? mike: they said they wanted something that seemed like it was -- originally, something that is uniquely yours. your own voice. that kind of thing. they have really just -- it has been nothing but 'let's get you what you want.' emily: would you work for an amazon studios? would you work for a netflix?

mike: sure. not for the next year or two. i am under contract still. [laughter] emily: but have you been impressed with what they are producing? alec: well, i think when you're not making that many shows, like amazon isn't or netflix isn't, there is an emphasis on quality because they have to put something out that people are excited about. and for us, that is the greatest thing in the world. they want to spend a lot on something and their only stipulation is that it has to be really good? ok, sign me up. emily: so should, like, a comcast, be worried? mike: probably. i guess they should be worried. if they are not worried, they should be. i am sure they are. who knows. emily: so what is next for you guys? is this it? are you having fun? how long do you want to keep doing this show? alec: well, it is funny. when we wrap the shoot -- we write for four or five months and then we shoot for about four months and then we edit for another three or four months, and then it is basically time to start writing again. so when we wrap the show, there is this thing going around the crew the last couple of days, of people going, what is the next

gig, and they always ask us, what are you working on? i am working on this. when i am done working on this, i am going to start working on this again. [laughter] alec: there is nothing else at this point. mike: i get like two weeks off. alec: it is embarrassing that it takes us as long as it takes to do 10 episodes of this jerky show, but that is the reality. it takes a year. mike: yeah, it is weird. this is more like doing three movies in a year. that is what it feels like. but it is 10 episodes. that is -- i don't know. seems like it should feel easier, be easier, but it's not. but i love doing it. emily: so when do you have to start thinking about season three? mike: june. alec: we may be gathering material as we speak. [laughter] emily: ok. i think we have a good spit up moment. i think that could be written in to season three. alec: season three, season of the spit take. emily: all right, mike judge and alec berg, thank you so much for joining us. ♪

♪ john: welcome to this edition of the best of "with all due respect." it was a we do it hillary clinton and donald trump inched closer to becoming the nominees while the remaining rivals through everything but the kitchen sink right at them. mark: ted cruz and john kasich try teaming up to put wins on the board in the upcoming contest. cruz also took the unusual step of naming a running mate before the convention, hoping to promise and put it carly fiorina will tantalize voters to join team ted. john: and bernie sanders talking tough about hillary clinton, even though he is laying off ser