“Sully the God” is a wonderfully funny story that puts up a mirror to the tech CEO celebrities we see today. Where did the inspiration for this come from? This has a “Succession with magic” bent that I’m obsessed with.

JT: Throwing hot garbage at the myth of the self-made tech-bro-genius was certainly part of the idea. There’s the old saw about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic; I think we were playing with the notion that magic in the hands of human beings would eventually be indistinguishable from technology—including the lifecycle that takes it from genuine awe-inspiring discovery, to commercial adaptation, to profit-maximizing iteration, to a climate-destroying tool for focusing wealth.

PHIL: There was also a desire in both of us to write a character who was an utter, irredeemable, dyed-in-the-wool bastard. I love characters like that. That was a big part of the fun—Sully is completely convinced that he is, in fact, a god among men. Special and blessed. But of course it’s nonsense. He’s thin-skinned, trifling, self-aggrandizing, unredeemable. A complete shit. Sheer coincidence that that resembles the tech CEOs, I swear.

You both worked on this story together. What did that process look like? What sorts of challenges did you face, and how did your strengths help each other?

JT: We’ve been working on a TV show together and having a bunch of fun. We finished the season, and I think I pitched Phil on collaborating on some prose just to keep things going. We beat out the characters and plot in the course of a few conversations, and then alternated writing and revising each other’s work. Both of us are probably writing mostly for the chance at self-indulgent descriptions of baroque and absurd acts of violence, and we’re definitely enabling each other more than we ought.

PHIL: Haha yes, it was very much a creative all gas, no brakes writing situation. A chance to have fun and see just how far we could push things. The most challenging part, honestly, was molding the mass of ideas we had into a structured story. Like, what’s the best entry point for a story about faeries who can make you fly but might also rip your face off? It’s a little bit of a challenge.

The blending of magic and tech corporations is such a fun (and scary, if you look at it for too long) concept, and you were able to play with it so well here. How did you decide which creatures/items/powers/etc. to include? Was it just by necessity, or more of a “wouldn’t it be cool if . . .”?

JT: Fairies that grant flight were part of our first conversation about the idea, and I think everything else was just us riffing. The game was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if . . .” followed by, “How could you exploit that for money?”

PHIL: Followed by “how can we make that more absurd?” There were, of course, a bunch of ideas that got left in a brainstorm document. There was only so much space in the story we were telling. Here’s hoping one day we have occasion to dust them off and put them to terrible use.

What’s next for both of you? Do either of you have projects you’re working on or coming out soon you’d like to talk about?

JT: The TV show we were working on will be out in November, and we’re working on more TV and a movie script.