Sam Esmail’s Top Five Favorite Things of 2023, Including the Sports Upset He’s Literally Waited His Whole Life For

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To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.

1. “Barbenheimer”

2. ChatGPT

3. Lil Yachty, Let’s Start Here

4. The labor movement

5. The New York Jets beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 20-14

GQ: The first item on your list is “Barbenheimer”—Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Did you do the true double feature? Bang, bang, in one day?

SAM ESMAIL: Of course I did! Of course I did. In this day and age, when theaters are on the ropes—something I did countless times as a kid, and not just double features, triple features, quadruple features, I'd literally go to the movies at noon when the box office opened and stay there until the evening, I did that so many times—that a double feature became this phenomenon around the globe was just music to my ears. Coming out of the pandemic and then with the strikes hitting, I was really worried for a second, about the moviegoing experience. And this just kind of renewed my hope in it.

Not to mention, these were two genuine artistic statements, by real filmmakers.

Absolutely. I mean, look, I have to give a lot of credit to Nolan, because here's a three-hour biopic about the guy who invented the atomic bomb, set in the forties, thirties, and forties, in mixed formats, black and white and color—and it almost makes a billion dollars. That's just remarkable on so many levels. And then of course, Greta, who I'm such a huge fan of—Lady Bird is one of my favorite high school movies of all time. She took on a pretty risky proposition, in adapting a toy into a fleshed-out story with real stakes and characters and themes, and was able to pull it off with such wit and intelligence. Not only are these movies both great in their own right, but they compliment each other in a weird way. It's just a remarkable feat.

So the next item on this list—I can't decide if it’s very not Mr. Robot of you to choose this, or extremely Mr. Robot of you to choose it. You put ChatGPT on this list. What are you, Sam Esmail, doing with Chat GPT?

It's in its infancy right now, and I'm mostly just playing around with it. It's kind of interesting to use it as a research tool. Nothing more past that. But the thing that really surprised me about it is it’s such nerdy tech, and I'm so fascinated that the public has already caught onto it, at this early stage. I think it's the fastest-growing app, or website, in existence. And so the fact that everyday people are seeing the benefits of this very nerdy tool is so telling of the times that we're in right now. And I don't know if maybe I was underestimating the public, but I was sort of heartened by that. Now, at the same time, it raised all these sort of ethical questions about AI and the future of AI. And of course you invariably start to get this fear-baiting about how AI is going to control us, and the rise of Skynet, et cetera.

And while that's all fair game– I'm not going to say that people's fears aren't justified–I just find this moment, of us having the conversation about it, honestly really delightful and very, very, very important. The fact that Biden is even discussing AI in a serious way. It’s a conversation that desperately needs to happen and I’m just impressed that it’s actually happening at this early of a stage in its development. I think it's great—and actually, weirdly, gives me hope for humanity.

I keep wondering if all the fearmongering is actually advertising in disguise. Like, Oh, gosh, we made the technology too good. Please buy our stock.

The conversation needs to happen regardless. It's not happening after the fact, which is what I was worried would happen. We’re taking it seriously now, when we ought to.

OK. This Lil Yachty record! It’s a pretty big departure for Yachty– have you been following his arc to this point, or was this one where you came on board?

I've definitely heard his singles before, and I'm a huge hip-hop fan, so I had my eye on him, but this album blew me away. It's one of my favorite hip-hop albums in a long time—if you can even call it a hip-hop album. It's more R&B and psychedelic rock. It was just a burst of creativity that took my breath away—it was just so different. Maybe it’s just me getting older, but I really love music that comes out of left field and introduces a different sound, even if it's derived from other sounds I've heard. What Yachty was able to blend together, to create this unique music– it was just breathtaking.

And not to keep harping on the AI of it all, but the album cover is completely AI-generated and he captures the sort of uncanny valley of it so well, and it kind of adds to the tone of the whole album. So for me, it kicked off the year just right. It's probably my favorite album of the year, and I want to stress album, because it's one of those albums that I think you can kind of hear from the first track to the last track, and it feels of a piece. And it's something that I've been guilty of just cherry picking and listening to one-offs here and there. But this was the first time in a long time where I really just wanted to hear the album from beginning to end in one sitting.

I love that Yachty cover, too. I assume the uncanny-valley effects we’re talking about will fall by the wayside as this technology gets better, but right now that aesthetic is the thing I find most interesting about it. Did you see the AI beer commercial?

Yes, I did. It's so crazy, the feeling it conjures up inside us. I see a beer commercial like that, and I’m like, I don't know if I've quite felt this way about something that I've watched before. There is some weird originality to it, but there's no human behind it. And wow, does that raise so many ethical and moral questions, about what is art and what is an artist. But I find all that stuff intriguing, and it doesn't scare me away. It makes me dive in. The thing about this album cover—let's not forget that this is all fairly new. This album came out in January 2023, so Little Yachty really had his finger on the pulse on this one. And the thing with the cover is, that uncanny-valley original creepiness that you feel with it does carry me through the album. There's something about seeing that picture and listening to that music that tells a story and took me on a ride.

Your next item is the labor movement—the Screen Actors’ Guild strikes and Writers’ Guild of America strikes, but also the United Auto Workers, and the rest of what’s been called the Year of the Strike. Obviously, with the WGA and SAG strikes, AI was an issue there. It's not the only issue, but it's a piece of it, clearly. What are your feelings, as a writer who’s just come through this?

My feelings are that it had to happen. This conversation was overdue, and I'm happy we got to the other side of it, and I'm happy with the outcome. But the reason I put it on this list, and maybe there’s a through-line here, is that it's not just AI, it's tech—the other issue was pertaining to residuals, and that's mostly because of streaming, which has all come from technology.

That's the reason it was a touchstone for me this year. The reason I’m so obsessed with telling stories about technology, or around technology, is because it’s growing so exponentially, and it’s impacting our culture and our interaction and our humanity in ways that I don't think we've fully caught on to. It may even be going faster than we realized. This was a moment where everyone—and I'm including the auto workers here—said, We need to talk about this, because this is a runaway train, and it could be a train wreck if we don't hit the brakes and just have the conversation. And again, it sounds so optimistic for someone who creates material that feels a little more nihilistic. But what I loved about it was, no one said that technology was bad.

No one said that we should just stop using AI or we should stop using streamers or advanced robotics or any of that. But we have to decide what the human side of that looks like, and that we can't forget that the human side is what this is all for. That you can't tell stories written and created by artificial beings for people to engage and resonate with. That's not going to work. That calculation doesn't add up. And that's what I loved about this, is that we were savvy enough to hit the brakes and say, let's have a conversation about where technology can go, and the wrong turns we could take, and the ways we can put guardrails on it and really keep this about leveraging the best use of acting, of writing, of art in general. And how human beings have to be the central figure of that at all times, regardless of what the tool is.

There is one other item on this list, and I love that this is here. On October 15, the Jets beat the Eagles 20-14. This is the first time this has ever happened in the history of the franchise. I didn't realize what a big deal this was, but clearly this was a huge deal.

It's crazy, right? So, look, I'm a Jets fan. I grew up in New Jersey, and—actually, specifically, in my high-school years—I grew up in South Jersey, which is basically a suburb of Philly that was 30 minutes outside Philadelphia. So I was always surrounded by Philly fans, and it's been painful to be a Jets fan for many, many years. And this year in particular—our season was basically over within the first five minutes of the very first game, when Aaron Rodgers hobbled off the field. And so I was dreading the Eagles matchup. Like every Philly-fan friend that I know, including new ones that I've met in the industry, I just thought, Here we go. They're going to take us down again. And the fact that with everything going against us, we were able to eke out a win—against a very amazing Eagles team, it wasn't just like a kind of mediocre Eagles team, this was one of the best teams going into the season—in the last quarter? I had to put it on the list. Maybe this wouldn't matter to most people. I don't know how much of a big cultural impact this has, but it definitely was a big one for me.

Sam Esmail’s film Leave the World Behind is in theaters now and premieres on Netflix this Friday.

Originally Appeared on GQ