What Is P(doom) and Why Is Jesse Armstrong Laughing About It?

What Is P(doom) and Why Is Jesse Armstrong Laughing About It?

After the Succession series finale in 2023, creator Jesse Armstrong was happy to step away from the high-pressure world of producing award-winning TV (75 Emmy nominations, 19 wins). He passed his time noodling at a novel and penning the occasional book review for The Times of London. But, as he explains to The Hollywood Reporter, one of those book reviews sent him down a tech-world rabbit hole — and out the other end, in record time, came Mountainhead.

Emmy-nominated for outstanding TV movie, the 2024 HBO feature follows a boys-will-be-boys ski weekend. Only these boys — played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef — are the richest men in Silicon Valley. The results are dark, nasty and wincingly hilarious; in other words, everything you’d expect from an Armstrong production.

The screenwriter and producer who hails from Shropshire, England, spoke to THR from his current home in London about Mountainhead‘s inspirations, its admonitions and his own particular take on the American dream.

After Succession, where did your mind go in terms of an encore? And how did it end up at Mountainhead?

I had been working on some longer-term projects. I had a screenplay I have been working on, and I’ve been working on some prose. And I did a couple of book reviews. One of them was for Michael Lewis’ book on Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. I began reading more and more in the tech area, and I started listening to podcasts as well. Podcasts are an unusual resource that writers haven’t always had — but those people go on each other’s podcasts. You can hear leading tech figures talking to each other about how they feel about the world, about tech, about politics. Hearing that vocabulary and hearing their sense of assurance clicked something in me. Since I did have the deal at HBO, it was quite a straight shot.

A lot of the terminology in Mountainhead is being employed here for the first time, at least in a scripted format. “P(doom)” caught my ear, for example.

We did put together a lexicon that was circulated with the actors. There were a few coinages in the script, but 90 percent of the language is real. And P(doom) refers to the probability of doom. It’s a pretty common, maybe slightly tongue-in-cheek tech-world shorthand for your estimation of the probability of the end of humankind coming from AI. Even the people who are pretty sanguine boosters about AI are still in double figures about their P(doom). Sam Altman and Elon Musk have dooms above 10 and into the 20s. I don’t know why I’m laughing as I say that.

I mean, what else are you going to do? So that would be the percentage likelihood of the world ending?

Of AI bringing the end of human existence, yes.

All righty, then. That’s pretty high.

Especially for a technology we’re working so closely with.

In a way, the stakes of Mountainhead are much higher than Succession. Succession was about a crumbling empire clinging to relevance. But Mountainhead is looking to where we’re headed — sunny with a chance of doom.

It is a more scary prospect. The tone is probably more darkly comic. But I think that you’re right that the subject matter is bleaker than what we got to in Succession. Succession had more human tragedy. If that was going to present in Mountainhead, it’s only in flakes. We know that Steve Carell’s character is facing mortality, for example. But apart from that, it’s quite a bubbly, frothy, masculine weekend away. The texture of the piece is more bouncy in some ways.

You chose four wonderful actors, all Americans. The parts as written were all Americans, in fact.

We could have imagined a different background if the right actor had had a different background. But the tech world is dominated by Americans and people who’ve become naturalized Americans.

Many are citing our current era as the decline of the American empire. And yet all these tech-giant billionaires are from the United States or want to live in the United States. What is your take on that?

Mountainhead is quite a caustic satire, and it is tough on the world of tech and a certain obliviousness that can be there. But the flip side of that obliviousness is a tremendous ambition and a sort of mad optimism. I love America. I’ve loved it since I studied American studies, and I love visiting there. And I like the people there. People from all around the world still want to come to the U.S. People want to work there. I find it a terrifying society, sometimes a wonderful society, and a thrilling one. And I think the entrepreneurial edge, the slightly terrifying openness to the next idea, is thrilling. Probably so long as America doesn’t lose that, it will remain at the cutting edge of tech. And that’s at the cutting edge of the world. The film goes heavy on the negative side of tech advances, but there are obviously positive sides, not least for the economy.

Based on Succession and Mountainhead, had I never met you, I would think, “This Jesse Armstrong person has a very dark, negative view of American enterprise.”

Well, I think that’s fair enough. Often cynics are disappointed romantics, and I think I do have a romantic idea of the United States. And so maybe the disappointments with the ideals or things that don’t come to fruition, the dark side of it feels very present to me. Maybe this is one thing that you can do as an outsider — is to be brutally clear-sighted. But I have no animus toward America. I have the opposite. I have a love for it and a sadness when the country doesn’t have the leaders who hold it up to its highest ideals.

The film takes a fun detour in the third act into what almost verges into horror territory. Did you enjoy it? Would you go further? Would you do a full-on horror piece?

I don’t think horror is my genre. I’m too scared. I’m scared of horror movies. But I guess it’s also maybe a sitcom tone. I thought, “How do you express the latent madness of first principles thinking, which is so prevalent in Silicon Valley?” Well, you go beyond to something that seems unimaginable, but you managed to get there because your process of logic takes you there. So it felt coherent with the set of ideas that were being represented in the film. I was comfortable with that tone, maybe more from the sitcom aspect than from drama. I think that if we’d done that in Succession, it would’ve broken the show, but it felt containable within the tonal universe of this film.

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.