What was the first piece of tech you remember playing with?

Gameboy. My parents would always say, “Why aren’t you looking out the window? We’re driving in Colorado through this beautiful landscape. Why are you just looking at your Gameboy?” And it’s because it ruled.

So yeah, Gameboy was the first thing. One of the biggest moments in my life was when my mother said, “I’m not sure you deserve this” — she always said that — “but you’ve been talking about it for a while. So we got you a Nintendo.” I lost my f-- king mind. That was a moment for me when I was like, you can carry video games with you?



And now we all carry phones. Do you want your next iPhone to be waterproof?

Do you want your next iPhone to be waterproof? I mean, when are they gonna do that? But they make so much money off, you know, toilet incidents.



How real are “Silicon Valley” and Erlich at reflecting the tech industry?

It’s pretty true to life. When I come across people who work in tech or know people that work in tech, not only do they interrupt my eating a burrito in the airport, they make sure to tell me — thinking that they’re the first person to enlighten me on this — but they say that it is almost “too real.” And that’s not a compliment to them. We try and reflect that there’s a lot of optimism, there’s a lot of positive things that are happening in Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of ideology, at least in the beginning, that we respect and almost venerate. But yeah, we’re satirizing how out of proportion their egos are to what they’re bringing to the table.



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After the TechCrunch awards, you’ve said Silicon Valley can’t take a joke.

Yeah. [They’re] having a tougher and tougher time taking a joke. A lot of them don’t get it. They kind of drank the Kool-Aid they made for themselves.



You’ve been pretty open about calling out the real Silicon Valley.

I consider everybody who takes themselves seriously to be a little bit off. And Silicon Valley seems to be the most effusive about how important their contributions are to society. It’s almost Trumpian. Let’s make that a word because he will forever be remembered as this hyper BSer who wants to “make America great again.”

It’s Trumpian, their delusional need to validate their contribution to America and globally. Our big joke in the show is making the world a better place. Really? How? How does Lyft help people in India?

They don’t have a sense of humor. That’s the problem. We’ve got a huge problem here in that the industry that should take itself the least seriously is not.

I look at anything Silicon Valley-related with sort of a smirk.



Do you think we’re in a tech bubble?

It might be. I mean, these valuations are getting really out of control. And even the idea of a valuation is kind of strange, but that’s how they got in trouble in the first place [during the first tech bubble in the late ’90s].

And they’re doing it again, but in the hundreds of millions or in the billions, instead of just millions. I don’t know when it’s gonna burst, but it definitely [will]. It’s a bubble that continues to inflate. And it’s less like a balloon and more like a soap bubble. You can stick a nail through it and, if the nail is the same temperature as the bubble, it won’t burst. But if you touch it, it will. So I think that’s almost a literal metaphor.

