YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Esmail

lines on the record: 94
first: 2016-10-24
most recent: 2016-10-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think they only show that they're petty people. That was what we got out of that, right? That's true. Nasty petty people. We thought they were, and now we know they are. Right. Same thing with the DNC. What's weird?”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wiki leagues. I mean, it's a lot of power That these hackers have in that, I think. Honestly, in a really kind of morbid way, a lot of those news events help kind of, you know, realize that these, you know, people used to think guys on keyboards or girls on keyboards, well, what are the stakes there? There really isn't, that's not exciting. Well, with these news events, you can see the stakes. These people can influence elections, take down banks, you know, take down Sony, take down a huge corporation.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. Yeah. It's not as if we're predicting anything. I think what we're doing. It seems like it does, but I think it's honestly not talked about. Even to this day with the encryption debate, I don't know if people completely get what the consequences of that. The fact that the FBI wants a backdoor to everything, are we really having a real public conversation about that? I don't know if we're quite there yet, but I love the fact that the show to some degree is kind of sparking that conversation.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“of the Dawn. Make a difference. So it's interesting because a lot of things you talk about then became something that was real encryption It's really gotten. We all knew it was there, but now it's sort of ever present. I don't know yet.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the show isn't about nihilism. I don't actually find that interesting. I think that can be an aspect of it, that there can be from hopelessness, though, it's that, you know, that old, you know, cliched quote, you know, it's darkest before, you know, the dawn. I think we can get to that point. And I think a lot of people can feel that sometimes, especially now this current election, you can feel like, wow, we're really kind of letting go here. This is really the darkest our society has ever been. But for me, the interesting part is, well, what are you going to do about it? And here's a guy who's actively trying to make a difference.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly that there's this, even though anger tends to be this negative, you know, have this negative connotation, there can be a positive part of it. So that's when I sat down and I was like, okay, I figured it out.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“technology and honestly just channeling that anger that they had against their country against the way their society was being run in a really positive way that was the missing piece that was the thing that really moved”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I kind of like cooled off a little bit because I was like, that's, you know, who wants to hear a guy rant about that for hours and hours. I thought that would get a little grating. There wasn't a humanity to it. So I kind of went away from that. It stayed in there, but it was like something the character wasn't kind of complete yet. And then the Arab Spring happened. And, you know, I'm Egyptian. So I have a law of family out there, a lot of cousins, and I went there about nine months after the, yeah, the revolution happened. to just talk to my cousins who were young who were online who were part of that whole movement using”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there were three things, right? Because initially it was like I just need to write something about the hacker culture and tech culture that I didn't think was being represented. And then so that was kind of like in the back of my head for years. This is since like I was 14 and I wanted to be like, oh, it will be a great movie. And I don't know what it is yet, but I'm going to come up with the idea. And then I said, because I always start with characters. So I started thinking about the character of Elliot. And then 2008 happened, the financial crisis. And I was like, oh, it's got to be. And you know, anonymous, they had just come out and Lulsek. And so I was like, okay, so this is like kind of the, this is the sort of group that Elliot might be involved in or might partake in. And in the 2008 financial crisis happened, I was like, okay, this is awesome. It's going to be an anti-capitalist, anti-establishment character who's like angry and who wants to take down the system.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, USA sort of like we want to get into that game. And, um, I had this crazy script, and it was just kind of, you know, that fortuitous.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I was like, why not? Let's change this over. So I had 90 pages. I literally lopped off the last 30. It was a 60-page pilot found a good ending to it. And then we took, we went to the process of taking it out to all the different networks. And, you know, at the time, USA was kind of going through a reinvention process. I mean, honestly, like, you know, if it wasn't for them and if it wasn't for this weird timing where they really needed something to...”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I loved it. I looked at it. I was like, wow, this is really cinematic. You know, you can really do, because to me, like, again, directing was my first and foremost goal. So to me, like that was really important.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, when it went really long, I thought I was in a lot of trouble. I didn't know how to pare it down to, you know, 120-page script. And at the time, my manager, he works at a company called Anonymous Content. And they had just released True Detective.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's weird because it was all fortuitous. I didn't know that it was going to be a TV show. Again, like I really wrote it as a follow-up feature. Yeah.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you know, there's an interesting book that just came out that I heard was really good. It's called Mr. Robot Red Wheelbarrow. Written by me, and one of my writers, Courtney Linney. But it actually is going to, it's not just like a marketing book about the making of the show. It's like an expanded storyline that was actually happened in between the first and second season. Another book I would recommend is this book called Son of Hamas, a really interesting book about the Son of Hamas and his relationship with the Shinbed.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't get it. Everyone's got their high school persona and the persona is a nerd who's just sitting there hacking away in the night. Well, look at what Donald Trump just did on the stage. I know, 400 pounds. 400 pound guy who now I feel sorry for his email accounts. I really want to.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the pirates of Silicon. Like, there were all these, they just never, when they got to the hacking. It was like they always defaulted to this weird thing about CGI ones and zeros flying at you. And it was just silly. And even when the movies tried to be serious, there was like swordfish and strange days, it still kind of fell. It always fell flat. And to me, I always felt like the culture was incredibly interesting. Why not just represent it authentically? So it was always in the back of my head.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is 100% accurate. Well, that's the thing. So being a tech nerd and being in the culture, my friends were also, you know, kind of obsessed with the same thing. We would go see those movies. We'd see the net.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I remember when I went into computers, I was like, well, this is the thing I'll do now to make a lot of money, but movies will be the ultimate goal. So when I couldn't even do that, I kind of went back and went to AFI. And that's when I went back to film school.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. You don't Yeah, that's sorry, Darcy. That is a prerequisite. So then I was like, you know what? I'm going to go back to my patch because my first passion, even as a kid at five, was, you know, it was movies. And I mean, it was something that”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you're in school. You did this in school. So, yeah, I did this kind of like in between NYU. I went to Dartmouth briefly that I didn't last there very long. No. And then I quite.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing I obviously didn't anticipate, and this is why I'm probably bad at this, is that broadband came about and that all kind of went away, including the unstoppable AOL. They kind of went down with that. And, you know, 2000 hit and there was like the big bust.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And it was the thing about it was you logged in on the client software, the email would pop up, your buddy, your Instant Messenger would pop up, everything would be right there. And then you can browse. And it was like a one-stop shop. So what I did, so my idea was to build that software called Portal Vision and then sell it, license it to Mindspring. I see. Earthling to AT&T.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they had these shitty dialers that was like kind of crappy and confusing to work. Then you'd get in and then you'd have to launch another client for your mail and then set that up with your SMTP server. And, you know, I just saw people struggling”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was like, okay, game over. They've taken over. And Microsoft is probably the other one. MSN? Yeah, MSN and Internet Explorer. And so that was the other kind of, but AOL as a service provider was, you know, it was unparalleled. Everybody just on AOL because of that client-based software. And if you remember the other ISPs, like Earthlink and Minespring.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, although that's where the real money happened. But no, what happened was, you know, this is the late 90s, AOL was, if you obviously you know this, huge. They were the biggest company. I mean, I remember at the time everyone was like, that's it. They've won. There's no way you could, I mean, sort of the I think people felt the same way about Yahoo, but AOL was like the one and they had just bought Well, no. This was before. So they had just bought Netscape.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I took Pascal. I was terrible. And then when I went to NYU, I minored in computer science. I just couldn't code. I just didn't have the patience for it. I remember I could come up with”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm in New Jersey. I mean, it was crazy. And then we would, you know, if it got a little closer, we would snail mail each other pictures and letters. And that's when you know things could get serious. And my friends would make girlfriends over there, you know, and it was like, wow, okay, cool. Oh, wow. She sent you pictures.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess you just make friends. You just talk about what you do, where are you from? The thing that you would do at a party, the thing that a normal person would do at a party, it was so much easier to do when you're at a keyboard behind a screen. Right. And we were all sort of, I mean, we were all sort of enamored by the idea that, wow, you're in Minnesota and you're on this thing talking to me.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then you So we would go on the IRC a lot. And there would be, I mean, Yeah, chat servers. And the one that I remember was Olahof's. It was in the Netherlands.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they didn't think anything of it. So we just got a free internet account. You had to just have the balls to walk up to the person behind the desk and say, yeah, this is me. And they would ask you what your measure was, something like that. And then you'd make up some bullshit and then they'd give you the”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and again, closed network at the time at least. So what we had to do was we went to college, we went to the local college. I mean, I was like 14, so I was in high school. So we go to the local college. This is how terrible the security system there was. You just say, I'm a student, they would give you an internet account.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hacking away. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then what happened was then the internet started coming around or we would start hearing about this kind of internet where you could kind of go anywhere. But it wasn't open for commercial use, right? You could, again, Prodigy was a very closed network. I think AOL had”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So I could upgrade it more. And I got a modem pretty quickly, like in the early 90s, and was on Prodigy, but honestly, I started just doing BBSs a lot, which I mean, for those that don't know, I'm sure your crowd does know board systems. So people would be running this at their house, and you would dial into their house”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And then I reluctantly, I had a Mac, an Apple, but it wasn't open. There wasn't much you could do past the things that Apple wanted you to do. So then I got a Windows 3.1, which I thought was ugly. I remember feeling like, this is just not as good as the Apple. But, you know what?”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would pirate games off of that with my friends. I mean, it's weird. Like my fascination with tech was kind of combined with the fact that I was, my parents would never pay for anything Kind of like got me more involved because I would have to find clever ways exactly clever ways to get things for free”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I was announcing to the industry, okay, here it is. I'm a director. You can't say I can't direct anymore. And then I was writing Mr. Robot while I was making it to sort of as a kind of follow-up feature And then I got into trouble while I was writing it because it went on way too long. Like I was like 90 pages. So then I turned it into a TV show.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes I think the misconception is directors just need to be very visual and it's all about style and like crazy angles and whatever and not about the story tongues anyway. So I kind of stopped writing. I could stop taking jobs and I decided to just write something that I know I'm going to direct, something small on a kind of more contained budget. And that's when I wrote my first indie feature comment and got that and directed it, got that made. So it was like kind of announcing it.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Because I wrote another script a year after also got on the blacklist and I got jobs out of that, but no one actually, I think there's still this weird thing that, you know, writers can't be directors, which is strange to me because I think writers, the great thing about writers is that they're storytellers. And that's what you really need in a filmmaker.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And then that kind of, the irony of it was I kind of went in, I kind of got stuck into the system And I got started getting pushed to write the new hangover and just these broad comedies because it was kind of a satire. So I was pigeonholed as like the broad comedy guy, yeah, right. And it wasn't anything that I wanted to do. And so I kind of struggled for a few years after that. And then eventually, and the other thing was nobody wanted me to direct, not even my own scripts directed your clothes.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And then, I mean, literally the script opens with this sort of VO kind of blasting Hollywood and giving them the middle finger. Which they like.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I never wanted to be a writer. I went to film school as a direct, and I'm purely just that was my goal to direct films. And when I graduated, I didn't really find any material that excited me. And there was this real frustration at the time. It's still kind of a frustration with the Hollywood films. There were a lot of not original ideas and a lot of derivative stuff. So I wrote this script called Sequels, Remakes, and Adaptations. My way of opining the Hollywood industry. So it was a little bit about a struggling writer, et cetera. And I wrote it to direct it just as an independent film.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2004 and struggled for a while. And then around 2008, I read a screenplay that got on this thing called the blacklist. And that's when I got an agent and manager and started getting jobs as a writer.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Total game. Total geek. I mean, I've been in the Hollywood, like, well, technically, I don't know what being in Hollywood is because I went to film school and then came out here in about 2001. I want you undergrad and went to AFI for grad school. All right. And that's when I first came to Los Angeles and graduated in about.”
2016-10-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: 'Mr. Robot' creator Sam Esmail · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT