Episode #61
Matt Witten's 51%: How Debt and AI Fuel American Authoritarianism
Matt Witten's writing career spans shows including Homicide, Law & Order, and CSI: Miami, a series of Jacob Burns mysteries, and a novel optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio. On this episode of Science Fiction and Fantasy Factory, he joins Mookie to talk about his newest book, 51%, a dystopian crime noir one reviewer described as a stylistic mashup of Philip K. Dick and Dashiell Hammett. The book's origin is genuinely personal. After hearing television producer David Nevins say the best shows come from a writer's deepest fears, Matt walked home one night and landed, unexpectedly, on two words: student loans. He'd just lived through the real thing. A young immigrant woman staying with his family had gotten into two colleges, one she loved that would cost $240,000 in loans, and one she didn't want that would cost a tenth that. Matt found himself the one explaining the math and, in his own words, crushing her dream. She ended up thriving at the school she didn't want, but the experience, layered onto decades of watching economic inequality widen, became the seed of 51%: a near-future America where corporations pay for your education, your car, your medical care, and slowly acquire a percentage of you in return, until they own you outright. Matt walks through how that premise builds out into a full world: income share agreements, a real financing model already used by places like Purdue, pushed to its logical extreme, and a genuine AI antagonist, the Red Queen, that his own son helped him build out. He credits his old Law & Order boss Dick Wolf with a piece of writing philosophy that shapes the whole book: give every character, including the villains, a genuinely valid point of view, so the story never curdles into a lecture. Mookie and Matt also dig into his winding creative path, poetry at seven, a paid play at fifteen, thirty-three rejections before his first novel sold to three competing offers in under a week, and sixteen years writing network television before returning to novels because, as he puts it, nothing beats the feeling of getting to the computer. The conversation closes on something quietly moving: Matt's family, four accomplished siblings including physicist Ed Witten, and a single photo he still keeps on his wall, all four kids and their 105-year-old father, physicist Louis Witten, smiling the day they got their father safely moved into a new home. Mookie gives 51% a big two thumbs way up, a terrific tale that is already in development at NBC, with Matt co-writing the pilot himself. The Guest Matt Witten is a novelist, playwright, and television writer. His TV credits include House, Law & Order, Pretty Little Liars, Medium, Supernatural, CSI: Miami, JAG, Judging Amy, Homicide, and The Glades. His novel The Necklace has been optioned for film by Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way, and his novel Killer Story won a Foreword Indie Award for Best Mystery. His newest thriller, 51%, is currently in development at NBC as a television pilot, which Matt is co-writing. More from Matt Witten: https://mattwittenwriter.com Get 51%: https://www.amazon.com/51-Matt-Witten-ebook/dp/B0GQCKYNZ7 Want to be on the show? Have feedback? Send Mookie a text! Support the show
