Fresh Air - The Talented Mr. Vance

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

The Atlantic writer George Packer calls JD Vance the most interesting figure in the Trump administration: "He's capable of complex thought, and I also think he may be the future of the MAGA movement."Also, David Bianculli reviews the HBO movie Mountainhead, written by Succession writer/creator Jesse Armstrong.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley, and today my guest is George Packer from the Atlantic. His latest story, The Talented Mr. Vance, offers a sharp portrait of Vice President J.D. Vance, tracing his journey from a childhood shaped by poverty and the Appalachian hills of Kentucky and the industrial decline of Middletown, Ohio, to the rarefied worlds of Yale Law School, Silicon Valley venture capital, and now the White House. In recent weeks, Vice President Vance has found himself in the international spotlight after he briefly met with Pope Francis the day before he died, followed by a high-profile

meeting with Pope Leo at the Vatican several weeks later, where the two discussed pressing global concerns, including immigration and artificial intelligence and the war in Ukraine. In his article, George Packer examines the contradictions at the heart of Vance's meteoric rise, how the thoughtful, searching voice of Hillbilly elegy turned into a politician known for inflammatory rhetoric. Someone who, as Packer writes, sneers at childless cat ladies, petals lies about pet-eating Haitian immigrants, and sticks a finger in the face of the besieged president of Ukraine. Packer covers American politics, culture, and foreign

affairs for the Atlantic. He's also the author of several acclaimed books, including The Unwinding, An Inner history of the new America, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2013. George Packer, welcome back to the show. It's good to be back with you. Thank you, Tanya. Well, George, the name of this article, The Talented Mr. Vance, is this clear play

on the talented Mr. Ripley. And that is a story about a man who is brilliant and charming, but deceitful in his quest to become someone entirely different from who he once was. And he's willing to portray nearly anyone to preserve that new identity. Is that how you see Vance? To some degree, it is, yeah. He's gone through some dramatic transformations, even in the way he looks and the way he talks and the way he writes, as if there's no solid core to hold him to who he really is. So Vance immediately for me raises a question of who authentically

is he? What does he believe? Have his changes been owing to some deep inner rethinking of his values and his politics? Or is he like Mr. Ripley, someone who becomes what other people want him to be to serve his own interests? And I don't think there's a simple answer to that. I don't think he is simply a con man. He's not. I think he's the most interesting figure in the Trump administration. He's more interesting than Trump. Vance has reflection, and that's evident on every page of Hillbilly Elegy. He has complexity. He's capable of complex thought. And I also think he may be the future of the MAGA movement and the Republican Party.

Danielle Pletka You make the point to say the problem with Vance is a question about his character. I'm just wondering what makes the way Vance has moved over the last two decades maybe different than your average politician who kind of moves through different worlds and is different depending on the environment and the circumstance. Vance is actually less of a chameleon than a lot of politicians and if you wanted to write a novel about, I would call it, the decline of the American Empire, you could not do better than to create a protagonist like JD Vance because he begins in southwestern Ohio in a declining industrial town, but he has roots in Appalachia, which has also gone through

tremendous impoverishment and decline. And he calls his culture Hillbilly culture. And he's one of the guys who gets out. He's really talented. He's really talented. He's really smart. And once he gets into high school and gets away from his abusive and addicted mother to his more caring grandmother, he thrives in high school

and joins the Marine Corps. And in the Marines, he learns self-discipline and gains a sense of purpose. He does a lot of reading. He's actually not in combat. He's in public affairs in Iraq. So he's sitting on a giant air base in Anbar province talking to his best friend about Christopher Hitchens and Ayn Rand and you know, the other figures of those early 2000s who have fascinated mainly young men, I would say. But he also became disillusioned with a war that he had thought was a war of high purpose,

and he came home one of many disillusioned veterans. And then he gets into Ohio State, graduates in two years. He's working incredibly hard, and he's just found this optimism because he's gotten out of this really traumatic childhood and the energy propels him through Ohio State to Yale Law School. And that is one of the biggest leaps, as I say in the piece, in some ways it's a bigger leap from southwestern Ohio to Yale Law School than from a lot of foreign countries to Yale Law School.

Going back to his time in the military, he went there as an idealist. What did he witness or experience during that tour, which was, it was around 2006 that kind of shifted his perspective about war? Well, his friend in the Marines told me that on their way in, passed through Kuwait where there's a major American base. And there were these guys, these officers on their way out who had just served a tour. I think Marine tours are basically seven months. And the guys coming out were saying, it's ridiculous. We go into a city, we clear out the insurgents, we leave, and in a few weeks they're back. And it's just this Sisyphean task that never ends and it never succeeds. So there was a

sense already before he got there, there was a futility to the idea that we were bringing democracy and human rights to this country that didn't seem to want us and where the insurgents seemed to have a hold on the population that the Americans didn't have. I don't think he saw much of that firsthand because he was not in a combat unit. He wasn't doing either civil affairs in Iraqi towns or raids on Iraqi cities. So I think a lot of it was secondhand, but you didn't have to get too close to the fighting to realize that the American strategy was failing. So I think he came home after his seven months quite disillusioned. He was a conservative

at that point already. He had been a fan of the Bush administration, and so it had to have been a pretty deep disappointment, maybe even a sense of betrayal, to come home and find that this was a war Americans weren't interested in, didn't understand, that very few of us were fighting it, that most of us were simply going on with our lives. I think from there, Vance's view of America's role in the world was almost fixed, which was to say a cynical view of any pretense to being a force for democracy around the world. And instead maybe a skepticism that said we should just mind our own affairs and take care of our own people. You track his skepticism and also kind of a cycling through a range of belief systems

around that time period and identities in his twenties, which like many of us do as we're trying to find ourselves. But what stands out to you the most about that evolution during that time period? What makes this more than a young man simply trying to find himself? He was not only trying to find himself, but he was trying to remake himself as someone who had come out of this small and, as he says in Hillbilly Elegy, rather hopeless world to which he remained very attached. He didn't cut himself

off from Middletown, Ohio or Eastern Kentucky. He stayed close to his sister, to his friends, to his grandparents, and even on and off to his very troubled mother. But he was getting away and he says in one of his essays, and he's left quite a long written trail, he says that at that time, he lost his Christian faith and became an atheist and a libertarian. And he says those belief systems were convenient for the world he was trying to get into. They were quite acceptable in the elite world of the Ivy League. There were a lot of atheists. And if you were a conservative, to be a libertarian was sort of like being an acceptable conservative, whereas being maybe a social conservative

was a little harder to justify. Danielle Pletka Did you find or learn from anyone you talk to any contradictions between the man that he describes himself as in Hillbilly Elegy and some of the realities that people responded to once that book came out? Well, one thing I heard from several friends of his from Yale was that they were surprised by the degree of trauma and deprivation he described in Hillbilly Elegy. They weren't the poorest of the poor, but they were poor people who, few of whom had

regular jobs and his mother had a series of partners who cycled through and none of them seemed to be particularly interested in her young son, J.D. And his mother began to take prescription drugs and then finally heroin. So, this was a tough background and his friends in New Haven really didn't quite know how bad it had been. He didn't advertise it. And the other thing was they said, you wouldn't have known that he was in any way disadvantaged by his background. He came into Yale and was immediately popular, charismatic, intelligent. As one friend said, not having gone to Harvard or Yale as an undergraduate did not seem to make

any difference in his ability to succeed. As you mentioned, J.D. Vance went to Ohio State University. He went on to Yale Law School. That time at Yale was a transformative time. He arrived there and made friends very quickly, was very popular, as you stated. He also met his wife, who is now the second lady, whom he called his life coach.

Can you remind us of her background and how she helped him navigate that world? Yeah, he called her his Yale Spirit Guide. Her name was Usha Chilukuri when he met her. She is the daughter of immigrants from India, from southern India, Hindu immigrants who settled in Southern California and rose quickly to become very successful academics. And Usha was one of these daughters of immigrants who are just strivers, who rise, who work hard, who know what they want, who do a lot better in some ways than the kids who've been handed lots of advantages by generations of American citizenship. So she was already a creature of that world, the Ivy League.

She had gone to Yale as an undergraduate. She got a master's degree from Cambridge in England. And so even though she was the immigrant daughter and he was the son of hundreds of years of native-born white Christian Americans, nonetheless, she was the one who became his guide about how to move in this world. Like, how do you do that? Were there really basic things that she taught him about moving through the world? So basic, Tanya, so basic. For example, he goes to this recruitment dinner at a fancy New Haven restaurant with these

white shoe lawyers. And he's just undone by the tableware. There's so many knives and forks and spoons. He doesn't know what they're for. He leaves the room and calls her and she starts giving him very terse and exact instructions. Move from the outside to the inside. For the soup course, use the fat spoon. She has plans for him. She has spreadsheets and whiteboard instructions. She gets him to stop reacting with rage when he's cut off in traffic or flipped off in traffic.

And at one point, she congratulated him on having successfully, quote, course corrected his life. I mean, there's of course a love affair and there's a deep relationship and they clearly fell madly in love and that was it. They were on their way to marriage and children. But the fact that because he came out of the Midwest and in some ways out of Appalachia and she came out of this world, the Ivy League, she had to translate it for him. And that tells you something about how alien Americans have become to each other when they come from opposite sides of the education line. Danielle Pletka George, has Vance ever talked about or written about maybe the moral or emotional cost to that kind of class mobility he experienced

at Yale. I mean, he basically, which millions of people do, assimilated in order to be a part of that class of people, because we see what he gained, access to the people-empowered and elite education, but what did it require him to shed? That's a great question. He has written about it. And what he's written is that while he was making it, while he was getting the right interviews and the right job offers, he had this growing sense of emptiness,

of what am I doing it for, as if he was working his butt off for a job and a life that meant nothing to him. And one day when he was still at Yale, he went to hear a talk by Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and right-wing contrarian, controversialist. And what he said to Vance and the audience was, you are working like crazy for meaningless jobs. You're competing with each other. It's cutthroat competition. And you'll find that it's all for a kind of taste of ashes in your mouth. That's my phrase, not his. And why is this happening?

Well, it's happening because our society has become stagnant and decadent. And all of our supposed technological breakthroughs, like the smartphone, are actually very small. They're not revolutionary, they're not changing things. And instead, we're becoming a stagnant society with a declining working class and this intensely competitive elite class where people are fighting for jobs that don't really mean very much to them. And all of this just hit Vance hard enough that he later wrote it was the most significant

moment in his career at Yale. And I think even though it didn't change his course completely, it stuck with him. And he later, when he, and we could get to this, when he converted to Catholicism, he traced part of the motive back to this time when he began to feel that his values had become hollow ones, the values of the meritocracy of an elite class that simply wanted professional success and moral and other values fell by the wayside. So yeah, it absolutely cost him. And I think the other thing it cost him, Tanya, was the sense of who he had been.

Assimilation is a very painful thing and it requires a kind of remaking of your psyche in order to be acceptable to a new class. And that, I think that's true of people from all kinds of backgrounds who are not part of a dominant group and he was not. And so I think resentment of the group that is requiring him to assimilate was part of the psychological toll it took. And that comes into play in a big way later on. Can you explain really briefly, we know that Peter Thiel is a billionaire, but can you explain why he's so influential?

He's just had this huge influence on some key figures in the conservative world, partly because of his money, which is from PayPal and Facebook and Palantir and a lot of very shrewd investments, but also because of his thinking and writing, which is extremist, which has a very pessimistic view of latter-day America as a country in decline, stagnant and overrun with immigrants and losing out to China and essentially giving into its own weaknesses and in need of some kind of jolt of dynamism from politics or from technology that will restore it to greatness. And so he's a really smart, erudite provocateur who has had a lot of influence on a lot of people including JD Vance. Danielle Pletka Vance has a law degree from Yale.

Right now, his priorities seem to be attacking the courts. What do you make of that? I don't think he got a whole lot out of his law degree other than skill at networking and climbing through the meritocracy. He doesn't seem to care much about due process. He thinks of it as an expedience that can be dispensed with if it gets in the way of large-scale deportations. He seems to think of the judiciary as serving at the pleasure of the executive and if they get in the way, well, let them enforce their decision as he famously, apocryphally quoted Andrew Jackson. So he doesn't seem

to think too much of the rule of law. It seems to exist as maybe a safeguard for some people at some time. But when it gets in the way of what he wants and what his administration wants, there are higher priorities than upholding the Constitution, which he took an oath to do. How do you think that younger Vance, who wrote Hillbilly Elegy, would think of Vice President Vance? I think he'd be very skeptical of him. He would think of him as maybe the kind of politician who says what he has to to get power, who uses the working class to justify his own power and some policies that are going to hurt people. Vance is constantly invoking the working class as a justification for lying about Haitian immigrants,

for cruel policies toward immigrants, et cetera. And I think young JD Vance would wonder if he isn't being used by this vice president who claims to be speaking for his people. Our guest today is Atlantic staff writer George Packer. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley and this is Fresh Air. On the Indicator from Planet Money podcast, we're here to help you make sense of the economic news from Trump's tariffs. It's called in game theory a trigger strategy or sometimes called grim trigger, which sort

of has a cowboy-esque ring to it. To what exactly a sovereign wealth fund is. For insight every weekday, listen to NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. Great conversation makes for a great party. But how do you ask the questions that really make the room come alive? Well, you're at LifeKit, we've got you.

What is a path you almost took but didn't? On our latest episode, how to ask the magical questions that'll make your party sparkle. Listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Vance went on to work for Peter Thiel and during that Silicon Valley phase, Vance has talked about being at dinners and explaining the struggles of people like him to billionaires.

And has he talked about how he reconciled those encounters? Did you find signs that it actually troubled him that even among those that he admired that spoke of the ideologies that he now like really accepted and felt found himself in actually also didn't really know much about him and where he was from and people like him. Yeah, I think it's even more acute than that because his politics at that time and this is an important part of the story were basically those of a moderate Republican who wanted the party to become more inclusive and more concerned with the plight of the working class

and the poor, but who was a conservative and therefore skeptical of government and of big government programs. So he had a kind of nuanced complex view of what it would take to bring more people like him out of the decline into which they'd fallen in places like his hometown. And so when he published Hillbilly Elegy, which is the story of his upbringing, his childhood, his youth, and it's a remarkable book, but his role became, when Hillbilly Elegy came out, it became to explain his world, which was about to become the world of Trump voters, to the elites who came to the Aspen Ideas Festival and the Sun Valley conferences and who went out to dinner with CEOs and celebrities. And that was his ticket to fame, but it was a kind of tarnished ticket because what's

he doing? He's telling these sort of curious but also rather smug and complacent people, why his people have these pathologies. And these things stuck with Vance while he was on this circuit. And later, I think he used them and maybe even exaggerated them a little bit to justify his turning against this class that he had fought so hard to join. The thing about Hillbilly Elegy, I mean I want you to delve a little bit deeper into this,

because you write, while that memoir really did speak to his life in really deep and profound ways in the lives of many, many people. The memoir belongs in an era that no longer exists. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So, Tanya, it came out in the summer of 2016. And at the beginning, like many memoirs by completely unknown writers, it went nowhere. And then through an interview and then maybe another interview, it began to catch on with certain readers. And then on election

night 2016, Vance is in a studio of Yahoo News, not the prime place to be, but he's already become kind of an informant on the world of Trump voters and suddenly Trump and inform it because he's speaking he's speaking about the working class through his own experiences exactly the The interviewers assume that the people Vance grew up with are Trump voters and that's actually a fair assumption And so they want him they're not that many people at that point who can be considered what anthropologists call native informants, people who can speak from their own authentic experience about a whole tribe. And suddenly he's in demand because this tribe seems to have come out of nowhere to elect Donald Trump. And that night, ABC News says,

we need JD Vance to explain this. So they pull him into their main studio and George Stephanopoulos is sort of almost begging him to explain them. What do they want? Why are they voting for him? And Vance is sort of careful not to say too much. But so suddenly he is one of the most visible spokesmen, not on behalf of Trump,

because interestingly, he himself despised Trump at that point. He wrote in the Atlantic, my magazine, that Trump was cultural heroin, this irresistibly addictive drug that would end up destroying his people, Vance's people. He thought Trump was despicable, his moral values were wretched, and he was offering, he was a con man, he was offering a con to the people Vance had grown up with that would end up betraying them. Well, at that same time period, I mean, we're talking like 2016, 2017. I want to actually play a clip of Vance speaking at the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics.

This was a year after the release of his memoir, where he also then started to talk about the appeal of Trump in other ways, in more and deeper ways. Let's listen. It's very easy for somebody like me to watch the sources of news that I watch and to only see the really offensive stuff that Trump did replayed over and over again. But if you go to one of his rallies,

it's maybe 5% him being really outrageous and offensive, and 95% him talking about, here are all the things that are wrong in your community, and 95 percent him talking about, here are all the things that are wrong in your community, here's why they're wrong, and I'm going to bring back jobs. That was the core thesis of Trump's entire argument. Lyleen O'Hara-Klein So as we can hear there, that was JD Vance speaking in 2017, and he's interrogating the mainstream media.

He's kind of digging at it, which will become a talking point later. But you also noted around this time, he also began to view the policy intellectuals that were around him differently. What changed during that time period for him personally as well? Well, I think the biggest change was that Trump won the election. And if you are a young, ambitious, would-be politician, which most of the people around him assumed he would become, and you're a Republican, that's a problem. And I think that clip you played from the University of Chicago was crucial because that's very early. I think February of 2017, Trump has just become president,

and Vance is now tacking a bit away from cultural heroine. And instead, he's saying, well, look, the really awful stuff that we all hate is 5% of his rallies, and the other 95% is policy. It's about jobs. It's about trade. First of all, that's a wildly wrong calculation if you sit through a Trump rally or through a video of a Trump rally. It's a far different balance than Vance was claiming. And it's also the wrong analysis because Trump's policies were inextricable from his vitriol and hatred. When Vance said in that little clip that Trump was talking about what's wrong with your community and I'm going to fix it. Well, what is wrong with your community is them. It's those people and we're going to get rid of them. So the hatred, the demonizing of whole groups is absolutely inseparable

from the vision Trump is offering to places like Middletown, Ohio. And I think Vance knew that. Vance is way too smart not to have known, but I think at that moment, you begin to sense a certain falseness coming in where his analysis is not as honest and not as deep as it used to be. And why is that? Well, one reason has to be that Trump is now president. And if Vance is going to have a future in politics, he might need to find a way to make his peace with that fact.

Did you try to talk to Vance for this article? And did they respond? I tried many times. I was in touch with his press secretary, but whenever I asked for an interview, I got no response. And when I sent a list of questions that I thought he would be interested in discussing, mostly about his ideas and where they come from, I got no answer. So to me, that was the answer. They didn't want to talk to me. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, I'm talking to George Pack, our staff writer at The Atlantic, about his story, The Talented Mr. Vance, about Vice President JD Vance. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

Let's talk a little bit about Vance's conversion to Catholicism. This came around the same time as this pivot towards what I guess some might call kind of like a political aggression around 2019-2020. And of course, we don't know someone's heart. I certainly would never question someone's faith. But his conversion, from your view, was it more spiritual, more intellectual, more strategic. Matthew 16 He wrote an essay about his conversion that was published around Easter 2020 in a Catholic journal called The Lamp. It's quite an interesting essay. And it's all three of the things you said, Tanya. It is spiritual. There are moments where he opens St. Augustine's City of God to a passage that stirs him and speaks to him. It's also political. The piece is called How I Joined the Resistance. Now, why would it be called that? Maybe he didn't have control over the headline, but to me, that means I'm not just converting to Catholicism, I'm converting to conservative

Catholicism, which is at the moment a rising intellectual movement in revolt against classical liberalism, against the ideas of the Enlightenment, against the idea of the autonomous individual with rights and freedoms as the key focus of politics. And instead, he's saying, I am embracing a different Christianity, a different Catholicism that is communal. And he cites Tolkien. All of these guys love the Lord of the Rings. He cites C.S. Lewis. And it's a kind of post-liberal Christianity that lots of other famous and leading conservative politicians and intellectuals seem to be moving to at the same time. So there's a political implication.

And strategically, well, what happens around that time? That's 2019, 2020. That's the moment when publicly Vance begins to say, essentially, Trump is right. And I was wrong about Trump. He doesn't go quite that far in his public speeches at that moment. He doesn't have to, but he gives a series of speeches in which he says, let's get past this Republican libertarianism, tax cuts, deregulation. That's not helping my people, free trade. That's not what working class America needs. The

real problem is the family and immigration. And what we need is a politics that supports families and that supports native-born Americans, not all these newcomers coming into the country. And he even begins to soften on tariffs, which he had been against before, and suddenly all the policy items of MAGA, of the Trump agenda. You know, up until he entered politics and very specifically until he became vice president, he was a very eloquent speaker, the ability to speak in a way where people from different backgrounds and political ideologies could actually maybe hear some of what he was talking about. But since then, I mean, he has really said some very inflammatory things.

There's this Fox interview where his wife spoke in defense of him calling Democratic leaders, childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made. He actually points out that he believes that they don't have a stake in the country's future because of their lack of having biological children. And I want to play a clip of Usha Vance making a statement about this on Fox in August of 2024. Let's listen.

The reality is he made a quip in service of making a point that he wanted to make that was substantive and it had actual meaning. And I just wish sometimes that people would talk about those things and that we would spend a lot less time just sort of going through this three-word phrase or that three-word phrase because what he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be apparent in this. And sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. And we should be asking ourselves, why is that true? What is it about our leadership and the way that they think about the world that makes it so hard sometimes for parents? And that's the conversation that I really think that we should

have. And I understand why he was saying that. That was JD Vance's wife, Usha Vance, on Fox in 2024, speaking about her husband's statements about childless cat ladies. George, how do you assess her role here? She's navigating and mitigating his words, the controversies around the things that he said. How do you assess that?

Yeah, I watched that interview. It's just utter nonsense. It is so false. And all you have to do is go back to the clip where Vance said it, which was to Tucker Carlson, and to a speech he gave before that, where he certainly mocked Democrats in the media and in politics for being childless and therefore having no stake in the future of the country. That was his point, that if you don't have children, why would you care about the future? And therefore, why should the country give you any power, either as a politician or as a journalist, to determine the future. That's the point he was making. It had nothing to do with the difficulty of being a parent in

America. And so, Usha Vance, nice try. She was pretty good. She was showing that she's learned how to twist the truth on TV in service of her husband's political ambitions, but it doesn't pass the laugh test. Because Vance had begun, as you suggest, to sound a very different note as soon as he was running for Senate in 2021. Suddenly there's this kind of snarling, aggressive, mocking, taunting tone that we have not heard from him. It's as if he's emerged after a kind of four-year hibernation, cocooning, conversion period as this rather harsh and taunting politician or would-be politician, not the guy who wrote

Hillbilly Elegy or spoke so eloquently about the book and about his own upbringing. And so you have to ask yourself, where did he come from? Who is that? AMT. SIEGEL Some of the people that you talked to for this piece, who are friends with Vance, said that they still believe that he is motivated by his loyalty to the working class. But you show how many of his actions, repeating election lies, mocking marginalized groups, really contradict that.

Who and what do you think he's actually loyal to? Yeah, I think at the moment, he's loyal to Donald Trump, above all. And because he had all these sins to atone for, cultural heroin, even privately comparing him to Hitler at one point in 2016, that's a lot of no-nos that you have to try to atone for. He will not allow any daylight between him and Trump. And he makes a point whenever he opens his mouth to say, well, as the president said, well, I'm gonna praise my boss here. Of course, vice presidents do that. That's part of their job. But Vance is doing it with a kind of assiduousness, a kind of energetic

focus that suggests that he's still slightly on probation with MAGA, although he's become extremely popular. George Packer, thank you so much for this article and for this conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Tanya. George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews a new HBO movie from the creator of Succession. This is Fresh Air.

Jesse Armstrong, creator of the popular HBO series Succession, has a new drama, this time a comedy, about powerful and wealthy people vying for power and control. It's a made-for-TV movie called Mountainhead, and it centers on a quartet of very rich tech wizards who gather at a private home in a remote area of Utah to play some poker and also dream and scheme. The stars include Steve Carell and Jason Schwartzman,

and it premieres on HBO this Saturday. Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review. It's winter in Utah, and snow is everywhere. The man who's hosting a very exclusive remote poker weekend at his just-built mountaintop chateau is Hugo, played by Jason Schwartzman. His friends call him Super for reasons we'll learn eventually. But as Mountainhead, the new HBO movie written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, begins, all we know is that Hugo, or Super, is ridiculously rich, with a net worth estimated above $500 million.

Yet at this particular poker table and this gathering of titans from the tech industry, Super is the low man on this financial totem pole. Yet at this particular poker table, and this gathering of titans from the tech industry, Super is the low man on this financial totem pole. Steve Carell plays Randall, an old school software and hardware tycoon in the Bill Gates mold. Rami Yousef plays Jeff, who made his fortune designing sophisticated AI programs.

They're both worth more than 50 billion each. And Corey Michael Smith plays Venice, a sort of loose-canon Elon Musk type who's the richest man in the world. His company, Tram, has just unleashed upon the world a program guaranteed even designed to wreak havoc. At the very start of Mountainhead, a news report lays out the basics. Political turmoil escalated again today across Central Europe and South Asia, with several more outbreaks of violence being directly attributed to new features released in limited beta form last week on social media platform Tram. Tram founder Venice Parish has pledged his company will act with all due consideration

before launching the final release version of the new tools to its four billion users globally. As the others arrive for the weekend, Super welcomes them to his brand new home and instantly is ridiculed by the much wealthier and more sarcastic Jeff. All right, come on in, come on in. Look at this place, Superman. Thank you. Wow. No, no, no, come on in. Look at this place, Superman. Wow. No, no, no. I just said look at it. No compliment implied. It was an incredible value proposition.

Had to shoot a few puppies to get Mountain Head ready for the weekend, but, you know. Mountain Head? Yeah. Oh, like Fountain Head, Mountain Head? Was your interior decorator Ein Bland? Oh my gosh, here we go. Alright. Here we go. All right. Here we go indeed. As the tech titans keep checking their phones, news keeps arriving about chaos generated globally by the program Venice has unleashed,

which allows users to create deep fake images, even news reports, that most viewers perceive as real. Instead of feeling alarmed or guilty about what he's done, Venice is proud and defiant. Look, first time people saw a movie everybody ran screaming because they thought they were gonna get hit by a train. The answer to that was not stop the movies. The answer was show more movies. We're going to show users as much as possible until everyone realizes nothing's that serious. Yeah, nothing means anything.

And everything's funny. The movie seems to be heading towards a Black Mirror type of futuristic parable. But then Armstrong, whose gift for twists and turns and shifting alliances was so key to the success of succession, takes a sharp left turn into Dr. Strangelove territory. The four technical wizards look at the global unrest and start musing about how, if they pooled their technical and financial resources,

this might be a great time for them to make a power move and overthrow the United States. Jeff doesn't like the idea, but Venice is all for it, and even Randall warms to the possibilities. Like a coup d'etat, coup. The U.S. It would be challenging. Yeah.

Meow meow meow. Technoautocrats have stolen my NPR. Oh, but then guess what? Schools are working and crime's way down and oh my god, I think I like these guys. And we're talking about the US, right? With the military, the aircraft carriers, the Marines, and how do we take them on exactly?

We slap them with soups, turbot? I'm pretty deeply embedded in terms of hardware, software, payment rails, wages. Yeah, right. What military operational capabilities does the US state have absent our cooperation if we went back, Goblin? If I pulled the plug, open the back door, nothing flies. Nothing moves.

Uncle Sam is left with a few unpaid grunts and they're pea shooters. Yeah, we'd swarm them with their own kill drones in 20 minutes. With that, Mountainhead becomes a completely different type of movie. And in Armstrong's hands, it's not through yet. The surprises that follow are too good and too unexpected to reveal.

But you'll want to see them for yourself. Mountainhead, like its quartet of central characters, is extremely unpredictable and very, very rich. David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the upcoming HBO movie, Mountainhead. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, comic actor and writer Sarah Silverman. Whether she's tackling sex, abortion, being Jewish, or everyday absurdities, she's known for pushing boundaries to land a deeper truth

and a laugh. We'll talk with her about her new comedy special Postmortem, which is a bold and moving exploration about the deaths of her father and stepmother, just nine days apart. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at nPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Ngachundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.