At the Brandy Library, in Tribeca, a man in suspenders led Steven Soderbergh down a spiral staircase, into an amber-lit V.I.P. lounge. Soderbergh, who calls the bar his “satellite office” (his real office is down the street), ordered “the usual.” The usual was singani, a Bolivian spirit made with Muscat of Alexandria grapes that are grown in the Andes, at an altitude of six thousand feet. Soderbergh first tasted it in 2007, while directing “Che,” and learned that it had never been exported from Bolivia. In 2014, he founded his own brand, Singani 63, and spent eight years on a quest to bring it to market. The spirit finally received U.S. government recognition this past winter.
“Don’t go into the booze business,” Soderbergh warned, as the server poured him a glass. “I wonder why I did. Part of it was to be able to get it, because otherwise you’d have to have people buy it and send it to you.”
Dread seems to come easily to Soderbergh, whose œuvre has probed the pleasures and the agonies of voyeurism (“sex, lies, and videotape”), stripping (“Magic Mike”), and Liberace (“Behind the Candelabra”). In 2020—a dread-filled year—he was reading the nonfiction book “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America,” about the decades-long effort of plutocrats and right-wing intellectuals (the Koch brothers, Charles Murray) to rig the economy. “Like everybody, I was in a steady state of feeling overwhelmed by everything,” Soderbergh, who wore a blazer and his signature black-rimmed glasses, recalled. “It’s always been my theory that this can all turn into ‘Mad Max’ a lot faster than people think.” Naturally, he contacted the book’s author, Kurt Andersen, and they turned it into a comedy.
The result is “Command Z,” a sci-fi series that Soderbergh self-funded and released independently this summer, available on the Web site commandzseries.com, in eight bite-size episodes. Michael Cera plays a billionaire who has blown himself up on his way to Mars and appears in the dystopian year 2053 as an A.I. upload. (Shades of the would-be cage-match combatants Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.) His digital double sends a trio of employees on a mission to save the world by travelling back to 2023 and influencing ultra-powerful jerks to make better decisions. Their method of time travel: entering a wormhole inside a laundry dryer while listening to “Theme from Mahogany.”
The fictional billionaires include a fossil-fuel mogul and the founder of a private-equity firm—the type of guys who are “infatuated with their own brilliance and the affirmation of that brilliance by having a quarter-trillion dollars,” Andersen, who sat beside Soderbergh with a glass of Merlot, said. Neither man has had close experience with such people. Andersen knows Warren Buffett—they’re both from Omaha—but views him as the rare benevolent billionaire. Soderbergh has worked with an evil non-billionaire, Harvey Weinstein, and plenty of megastars—“Clooney told this story about getting elbowed in the mouth in Rome by somebody trying to get to Brad”—but Hollywood fame “doesn’t typically result in the Federalist Society,” he said.
Still, the thought experiment was tempting. Given the opportunity to go back in time, how would they influence our future billionaire overlords? Let’s say: Zuckerberg, 2004, Harvard University. “Get him laid more,” Andersen spitballed.
“It’s axiomatic,” Soderbergh said. “If he had the same approach to relationships that I do, that business couldn’t have scaled in the way it scaled. I would have probably smothered it as soon as I saw the implications of what it could do.”
How about Musk, in his South African adolescence? Andersen proposed enrolling teen Elon in an institute to teach him “that free speech is not just being an asshole and a troll and saying whatever you want and, like, lolz.” The Koch brothers? “Just kill them,” Andersen joked. Donald Trump? “His father was a monster,” Andersen reasoned. “He would be better today if I went back in time to 1946 and raised him as my own.”
How would they use the time machine on themselves? Andersen said that he would urge himself to visit his mother in Omaha more often before she died: “I don’t think it would have any bad unintended consequences—unless my plane went down. That would be tragic.”
Soderbergh said that he’d pondered the question on the walk to the bar. “It wouldn’t work,” he said, clutching his second glass of singani. “First of all, if it was my voice, I wouldn’t trust it at all. Secondly, I’ve gotten very good advice from people whom I do trust that I have completely ignored.” Would he advise himself to stay out of the Bolivian-booze trade? “No, and I think it comes back to issues of intention, why you do things,” he said. “But, boy, it’s extremely competitive in ways that I didn’t understand, as somebody who used to just walk into a bar and order a drink. What was happening on that backbar was invisible to me. And now it’s ruined.” 
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