Acquired - Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt)

0:00Think you both know enough about acquired that I don't need to go into the general stick and spiel right on I love it. I'm so honored that you guys have listened. It makes my day. Thank you. That's why we said yes

0:32Welcome to this special episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund PSL Ventures. And I'm David Rosenthall and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts.

0:54David, I feel like today is the natural culmination of a journey we started in May of 2019 when we did our Uber episode on the day of their IPO. God, it feels like another lifetime ago, but it was only two and a half years ago. Well, for listeners who don't know the events of Uber leading all the way up through their IPO and the implosion around that and the just insane story that all of that was is coming out as a showtime series.

1:22on February 27th called Super Pumped. I have to say it's a little bit surreal, the world that we live in, a venture in startups, as we will talk about on this episode, becoming part of entertainment and pop culture like that. And even more surreal that this is made by Brian Coppelman and Joe Gordon Levitt. There's no world that I would have imagined we would find ourselves here.

1:46No, and on top of that, there is no world that I would have thought we would have found ourselves in where there are guests on a choir to talk about it. And so we're ludicrously fortunate today for that to be the case. And for those who don't know, Brian is one of the three executive producers, writers, and showrunners for Super Pumped. You probably also know his work from Billions and from Rounders, which is my all-time favorite poker movie that I watched about a hundred times in high school in college when I was playing a lot of Texas Hold'em.

2:16Brian's work over the decades is just awesome. We're just lucky to have him making stuff out in the world. Joe, as many of you already know, stars in Super Pumped, playing Travis Kalanick or TK. Of course, you know his previous work too, Inception, Looper, recently Mr. Korman, many other great movies. Joe is actually a founder himself of the company HitRecord that we discussed a few months back on the LP show and just a delightful human being. Totally.

2:43And one note for listeners, we want to wave our arms around and say, we're normally a pretty family-friendly podcast, but this episode does have some strong language as does this show itself, obviously. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, LaGoura, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

3:09Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. Lugora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry? So the founders did exactly what great founders do, operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm.

3:36for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love, like tabular review, where you drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Legora's bed here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work. And this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

4:05And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early LaGora numbers essentially speak for themselves, when they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. LaGora now has over 100,000 lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries, and crazily, they went from 1 million to 100 million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers, and that is the real test.

4:57Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, listeners, join us in the slack. Talk about this episode acquired.fm slash slack here, Joe's interview on the LP show.

5:27Just search acquired LP show and any podcast player or click the link in the show notes here without further ado on to the interview. Joseph Gordon Levitt and Brian Kapleman, welcome to acquired. Thank you. It's thrilled to be here, guys. Ah, we are super pumped for this. And now we have to leave. Joe, this is fun. I brought these guys to you, Brian. And they closed down and loves these little clips. It's just great. It's a little much.

5:57Joe, the first question we have that our audience has been asking is, how is your life changed since being unacquired? Are you like getting recognized in cafes now? Yeah, by web three nerds. I'm huge. I was at, what's it? Ethan Conn or something? And everyone was super stoked. I was joking just there, but it's true. And I'll earn some instant credibility, perhaps by saying when I listen to your Ethereum episode, really did change my mind about what Web3 is. And I really wasn't aware of any of its merits. I was kind of only aware of the hype and the scams. And I'm coming quite strongly around to seeing how important it is for the future. And I'm still really just early in learning about it. But you really inspired me. And it makes me excited for for what it's going to become. Thanks, Joey. We are all early though. We seek to inform not to sway too much, but yeah, appreciate the thoughts.

6:51That's probably why I was swayed because the folks swaying I'm like get the fuck out of here. Let's start right in with super pumped and I have a ton of other stuff I want to talk with you guys about previous projects, you know, Brian, I'm a huge billions fan. I want to talk about the art of storytelling a little bit and bringing these things to life. But let's start right in with super pumped. How did you two meet? Had you known you wanted to work together before or was it just the serendipity of this project?

7:19Well, Joe doesn't know this but we actually met in a makeup trailer once. No, I don't know this. You're even saving this story? Yeah, I had a day as an actor in a movie you starred in. Right, okay. And we were in the makeup trailer and I was like Ryan's a friend of mine and you were very nice about it, but I did not idea myself as a filmmaker. Right.

7:41I was there to be a day player and I didn't want to go into a whole like other thing on the movie premium rush and he's talking about Ryan Johnson premium rush and yes Ryan Johnson who Joe's worked with a number of times David Levine's my creative partner lifelong best friend we do everything together on this project best shactor showrunner with us and really ran the writers room with us and it's made the show with us but it's been rare over the course of my career that I contingently point to things that agents have done that were really incredibly just clearly positive. But this is one of those cases where Dave and I wrote the pilot, sent it to our agents. They gave it to an agent, one of our agents works with Joe as Ben Joe's agent for a long time. A great guy named Warren Zavala. Warren read the script and we had said, Joe Gordon Levitt's our first choice for this. He's the person we think could do this in the world.

8:33Warren read the script on a Friday, sent it to Joe on Saturday. In New Zealand, Joe read the script on Sunday, David Levine, Joe and I got on a phone call at the end of which we shook hands virtually. And that was it. And we were partners going to make this show together. It was really incredible. And how often does something like this happen? I mean, too, it ain't not often. No, no, not often at all. Very rarely. So I've known Warren since I was 19 years old or something.

9:02I'm 40 now. I was his first client actually. He was an assistant to another agent of mine. And I had quit acting and was going to college when he got his desk, so to speak. And he called me and he was like, I'm an agent now. And I was like, I'm not acting. And he was like, you should act. And it went from there. And he's been a fantastic confidant and collaborator ever since. He's truly an ideal agent. He doesn't bring me that much stuff with the level of enthusiasm with which he brought me super pumped because he knows that I hate almost everything. And he said, I think you're really going to like this. I think this is something you should probably do. And he very rarely uses words that strong. So I read it right away. And he was right. Well, you asked how rare that is. I mean, it is incredibly rare and Warren is one of these people who were so many agents that clichés are true, but Warren's not full of shit. And he's in the past said, this isn't going to work. He's very quick to say why it's not going to work or think. And he was like, I think Joe's going to dig this. I'm sending it.

10:02And from our perspective, look, not to embarrass you, Joe, but it's really challenging to find actors who can project the kind of intelligence that Joe can project because Joe is such a thoughtful and smart person and he does the work. Now what you do, dude, you do the work, you do the reading, you know, you do the homework, you do the reading, you do the research, you're prepared, you're ready to talk about all of it, you're somebody who comes to set having mastered the scene and is then willing to play.

10:31And so there were all these things that we needed Travis to be because we also needed Travis to be somebody who you believed could enlist. All these people in his world changing vision and we needed an actor who would try to protect himself at every turn and actor who wouldn't be worried about doing things that were unsavory or wrong morally questionable and actor who would be willing to.

10:57you know, look somebody in the eye and yell at them because they weren't super pumped. And it's not easy to find that combination of things in an actor. And so it was a very short list for us. And this happened throughout this whole project, then it is rare. As rare as in Silicon Valley to get exactly the investors you want as your angels or in your series A. And Joe knows because he was part of the conversation. I mean, Joe is our first choice. Kyle Chandler was our first choice in human thermon.

11:24Carrie but Shay is the only person we gave her all of Austin too. Like we just got our first choices throughout this whole thing. And partially because once Joe was on it made other actors want to be on a party because this is a really important story to tell about America at this time. So I'll ask this in reverse chronological order, but I'll ask you both the same question. Joe, what was it about this project that made you say yes? Why was your agent right in telling you? I think you're really going to like this within a first few pages of reading the script.

11:54The dialogue in this show is fireworks. It's just fun. I don't think I've watched a show with that much sleep. profanity per minute in a long time that must just be fun and it's so like well written profanity to and so uber it's great well that's another reason i think we all have inside of ourselves i think a certain uh beast or animal that just wants to take what you want and fuck everybody else and win it all costs it's part of human nature it's our you know hunter gather ancestry or something but most of us don't indulge that urge because there are consequences to pay if you do and get to see the consequences that Travis suffered because he did, but Travis does. He just goes as hard as he can into that, that just animal instinct and who doesn't want to indulge that side of himself. So seeing the opportunity to step into an arena and just be that guy sounded like a lot of fun. To me, Uber serves as an excellent example.

13:25of a larger trend that I think needs to be talked about which is what happens when the modus operandi is profits above all shareholder value up before everything who cares who we impact who cares how anybody feels none of that matters the only thing that matters is growth growth growth and it's not just Silicon Valley that's guilty of this mentality but Silicon Valley is doing it better than anybody else right now And this felt like just such a great story to tell to exemplify that kind of trend in our culture. It's not necessarily new, but it's as acute as ever right now. And it's about to drive the human race off a cliff. And I think it's something we as a generation need to change. And so it's worth telling stories about. Yeah. Brian. Joe's exactly right. And I think we were really compelled by

14:26a couple of questions. And for us, as for like the best investors when I've talked to them, curiosity is something that makes you genuinely really curious, where you just can't look away from the question until you start to understand what's behind it. As an artist is a really great and rare thing. And this question of disruption and the cost, the price.

14:55what gets disrupted is the benefit of having this new utility of changing this infrastructure is the convenience worth what's on the other side of the ledger and then I think twinned with that is the question of what happens sometimes when revolutionaries unseat fascists are they able to avoid becoming fascists and is it inevitable that like Hannah Arant talks about that there's going to be lost treasure in the revolution and that lost treasure is the whole reason for the revolution in the first place. And so to us, Uber, yeah, there are many Silicon Valley stories, but to us, the Uber story in the way that Mike takes you into it, the Uber story is one that raises those questions. And we hope the series raises those questions.

15:52and maybe the series posits some theories. So those were like sort of the thematic, resonant reasons. But also all the stuff Joe says applies to which is these people are fascinating fucking people. And they're so much fun to listen to and watch and think about. And they just fire you up. And then lastly into this audience, I'll say this won't mean that much to that many people, but I know Bill, girl, I know Bill Gurley separate from this and I like Bill Gurley. This is going to sound odd but I'm very friendly with Mark Andreessen and Bill Gurley. There's like five of us I've had in the world. You're the bridge. You're the bridge. And the book talks with us but it seems to me there's really a cost that Bill Gurley paid or a question for Bill Gurley which is which is the worst cost leaving this thing in place that might impair all the whole endeavor but protecting

16:51the way that I'm thought of by a C group of founders, or engineering the removal of this person forever changing or cementing my reputation in a certain area in a way that's going to harm this thing that I've really spent a lot of time trying to answer. So there's all these amazing moral questions and life questions for TK, many for Ariana, and then girl he has his own really challenging question.

17:20And so it seemed just amazing to like dive into. Bill Gurley is a giant, literally a giant among venture capitalists, but that like a venture capitalist would be a primary character on a show, the likes of which you all would create. Like, I never in a million years would have imagined that 10 years ago. I'm gonna challenge that just a little bit because like, Christian Bale, please, Michael Barry's in a movie.

17:45Why would a quant investor hedge guy be worthy of because I don't tell you why because we're fascinated by people who put it all on the line man our culture is fascinated by people who step up to the craps table and say I'm gonna put it all on heart eight or I have a reason why I can count we are fascinated by people who make these decisions and are either right or wrong I think so knowing bill personally, but working from source material in Mike's book as a producer, showrunner, writer. How do you weigh working both from source material, but also would you have your own, you know, primary source information from getting to know these people in real life too? Well, we didn't talk to the people in the show for the show, meaning I told Bill because I'm responsible.

18:41person in that way. I said to Bill, Mike Isaac sent me his book. We're going to go tell this story. Anything I may have heard from any conversation that I had with you socially is not in the show. We're starting from Mike's book. It's all going to be sourced by him and we're going that way. And then the wall went up on both sides. And that's that fascinating. I mean, you got to serve the story you're telling. That's what I, you know what I mean? You got to serve the story you tell. Yeah.

19:09I mean, Bill Gurley and I mostly talk about Jason Iswell. So, I mean, we mostly talk about rock and roll with Joe. And Joe, how does that manifest for you as the sort of lead actor? Do you also interface with Mike or does Mike sort of work through, you know, David and Brian and how does that work? I had a couple conversations with Mike, but mostly I just read his book and beyond that, I wanted to talk to a bunch of people that worked closely with Travis.

19:38Because I wanted to know not just what happened but how it felt to Have a conversation with them or be in the room then what was actually like personally because that's my job. I'm not a journalist I'm the actor so it's my job to like make it feel human So I talked with quite a number of people that worked closely with him and Did learn a lot of different things that were different from what you might read and press about him personally, about his personality. Because a lot of what you read is, and justifiably so, is questionable decisions he made, arguably unethical behavior. And I think this show does not at all shy away from showing those things. But I also wanted to show not just those things. I can't reduce this person to these headlines. I want to show a whole human. That's what makes I think a gripping performance.

20:35And hearing from people about a lot of positive things actually a lot of people said how much they liked how inspiring he was how compelling he was how much energy he would bring to a room and that was really fascinating because that's not always evident when you read articles about him or even when you read Mike's book and so finding that balance of like I want to actually make the audience love this guy but Also then be confronted with oh no, this person who I was sort of falling in love with is doing some really seemingly terrible things how we rectify that is to me that complexity is what makes for a great story. Yeah, and Brian talked about how impressive it is that you as an actor are willing to portray someone who's doing bad things where it sort of looks like Joe so does Joe do bad things you know the humans are subconscious in that way.

21:25Oh man on a daily basis the director would say cut and I would I would just instantly start apologizing sorry it's not me everyone knows it's not me right people that I've now know I've been working with every day for months and months I'm still having to reassure them like you know I'm not really like like this right yeah all the time all the time I've seen a lot of your movies you usually play someone pretty likeable did you feel uncomfortable playing someone that at least in my opinion on balance is less likeable then the character you usually tend to play. It's funny, I mean, it depends on what you mean by likable. I bet actually that this character will be more well liked than, well, for example, I just did a show called Mr. Cormin where, you know, it's a guy who's trying his best to do the right thing at every turn and just stepping in it and second guessing himself and lacking confidence and like, this is the other side of me.

22:17maybe. And I think Travis will be more instantly winning because if you're on camera, people respond to confidence in Travis Scott. Like, is nothing if not confident? You know, we have these business moments in our culture that we're sort of are like Rochak tests. Like, you know, there's Michael Lewis's Liars poker. There's the social network, which we've talked about where maybe you've written a created intending one thing and then get received Joe, you know, they're responding to confidence and you thought that like people will like Travis more than you might think. How much was that in your minds making this? Ryan, you can speak to this but it was one of the first things I think I brought up with you guys is like how can we make sure that we don't inspire a new generation of young entrepreneurs to be assholes? And I do think it is a concern and you know does Scarface inspire people to be criminals? Does the Wolf of Wall Street inspire people in the financial sector to be crooks? You know, maybe some like when you're talking about large audiences all sorts of people are going to take

23:15any given movie or show all different ways. But I think because this show is so unflinching in shining light on the protagonist's shortcomings and dark moments, I would hope at least that the majority of the audience will come away understanding this as a cautionary tale as opposed to a glorification of bad behavior. 100% when you watch the last three episodes of the season.

23:43It's not impossible that you'll have some empathy for Travis or sympathy for moments or think he in some micro moments was treated wrongly by people who aren't really his Equal in the field of war or whatever, but there are moments in like the fifth six and seventh episodes that the lens changes who were seeing the story through changes and the point of view who shifts in a way that makes certain things clear, but also I would say this. There's a wave form to this, which you all know a lot more about than I do about how things like wave forms work. I just know what they kind of look like, but over time, you're gonna understand that Wolf of Wall Street's not glorifying Jordan Belfort. Like you just are, in the moment, people might be taken with Leonardo DiCaprio, right? In the moment, people might think that this guy is a master of the universe.

24:41But even now if we watch that movie and we see the end when he's pathetically selling the pens, you know telling the people sell me a pen when it's the real guy and You apprehend that you understand the emptiness you understand the cost and Yeah in the moment there's a lot of glitter, but if you actually look at it It's really clear what they're talking about and I have a lot of confidence in people over the long term understanding these things that we make as artists we can only be attracted to the things that call us that ask these questions and we have to tell those stories as rigorously and with as much truth as we can and we have to raise the questions that we find compelling and we have to imbue it with our most personal thoughts on the matter and then we have to trust

25:44That eventually that if we do our jobs well that thing will be received we can't do anything other than that and think that we're engaging in art So that's the only way I can answer it. I can't be concerned about The small group of people are gonna be like I want to be just like that fucking guy and there will be those people But I think we're trying to shine a light on what it means to be that kind of fucking guy and what we're saying is society when we Prop up people who have Incredible verbal acuity and great math skills and the ability to galvanize in a way that serves us because we all take ubers But in a way that serves that individual more and that does a disservice To huge swaths of people that we're not thinking about as we get into the back of the ubers So if you get into the back of the uber and you're like that guy's cool But for one moment you think about the person in the office who maybe wasn't treated right or the driver who

26:39Thought he was gonna have a fleet of cars because there were deals that incursions to buy those cars and then suddenly those cars are being towed away which we show it's in the book and we show it Maybe you'll just have a moment of empathy for your Uber driver that you wouldn't know but maybe you won't but maybe you will Yeah, that's a great point Yeah, I think it's sort of an important difference between art and other Professions, you know like being investors or being entrepreneurs I think an artist job is more like Brian said, make people feel something and ask questions. Whereas it's not really our job to provide the answers to those questions. That's not art. I'm actually curious. I said a minute ago, what happens when companies are only incentivized by profit? Where does that leave us with a world? It seems like it's maybe leading us towards disaster.

27:31What are your thoughts on that and like do you see a need to try to change that and how could that change and what would that do to? To your jobs as investors I'm curious to hear your your thoughts on that I really like your framework of artists jobs are to make you you feel and to ask the important questions but not provide the answers and If you're working in an operating company or you're an entrepreneur or you are an investor your job is the answers and To be more concrete about that, your job is to create value for your shareholders. The vast majority of the time, the way you do that, is put something out in the world that creates value for customers, and then capture some percentage of that value that you create. And that thing that you're creating, that product you're creating, that value you're creating out in the world for people, is necessarily an answer to something, presumably some problem that they had.

28:26You know, some business can be conducted in a more artful way, but it is kind of antithetical. Your job is to give something to someone that solves a problem for them and then collect value from that. And for art, this is why you can't put a price on making someone feel a certain way. It's lightning at a bottle when you have it and you're able to make someone who rarely cries cry. That's sort of that magical priceless thing. There is a continuum though.

28:52Isn't there because like if I think about your episodes about a 16z and mosaic to a Netscape like it mosaic mark injuries and artists. Oh, he's changing the world is as an artist I would assert and he's looking at something that doesn't exist in seeing a way that he wants to see the world and He's no one even knew who owned the underlying code no one knew who owned the thing did the school on it did the Institute own it but then Partners come into it. Things change and it becomes a business and priority shift and what that's fascinating to me always like what happens to an artist like that You know, maybe marks the smartest person in the world you could make that argument But he's also like this great visionary artistic thinker who then becomes a business person at incredible business person, right? Yeah, and what happens when that ordering switches around of priorities and that's part of all this I think all these people had it in them to do art in some way

29:52the show shows this so well like so so well because yeah Travis you know like a lot of what you're describing about an artist was him like he will this thing into existence all the cards were stacked against him and it is unquestionably a better experience and there were things totally wrong with the way the world was before and then you had that great scene with girlie where he's talking with his wife are always with his partners right it is like you know I used to think that Half of founders were angels and half of them were David Krash. And I realized they're all David Krash. That was so good. Well, thank you. And yeah, that seemed really significant. And it's fascinating to me that nobody here is bringing up a guy who's like the closest thing to an artist and this which is Garrett camp. I mean, if you think about Garrett and how much he wanted to just be doing his other company because it was fun and art. And if you think about that.

30:47company that was like an art project. I loved it. Stumble upon was the greatest not a business, right? Totally not a business, but great. I used it all the time. It was the best. It would just take you on a total adventure on the internet. And I loved it. And Garrett, to me, is an artist within this whole thing, you know, and who figured out I need a Medici. I need a couple of Medici's. I need a worker. I need an investor. I need someone who's going to get our Medici. Like, and was able to sort of put that I've never met Garrett or spoken to him, but in my head, I view him that way. Supposedly, according to what we found, part of his original inspiration for Uber was watching Casino Royale, the first day No Craig James Bond film. There's a scene where he summons his car with his phone. We couldn't get the rights to Casino Royale. It's like the only time I've ever gotten out the rights to anything we tried. We couldn't get the rights. It would have been so great. That's in the book. It's in Mike's book. That's in Mike's book.

31:42I'm trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible but you do have a means of storytelling in the show where you're showing the way that Travis sort of remembers something happening but it's of course a very apocryphal story and then the background falls away and then you get to see actually here's how it really happened and you know so we did this big two and a half hour research episode on Uber and so David and I did a hundred hours of research and so we found like the quote-unquote founding story of Fouber where they're looking over from the Eiffel Tower and David and I both then found like oh that's the apocryphal story and the real story is and like once it starts playing on screen on the Eiffel Tower I was like no way these guys got duped these guys can't get duped they're like the most well researched and then when it fades away and shows that indeed that was the apocryphal story I was like

32:30masterminds. So I just have to applaud you for that. That was one of the things that made me really want to get involved with this too is reading even in that first script that oh they're they're going to play with this because yes, especially on TV like playing with form and kind of fucking with storytelling conventions is not normal. That's the kind of thing I like.

32:55to do in in the kind of movies I like to watch but I was really excited that they were taking what could otherwise be compartmentalized as sort of a mainstream story idea and using non mainstream filmmaking techniques and taking bold risks to fuck with the audiences perception like that like what you're talking about and necessarily you have to get clever because reading a book is a completely different experience than watching it on screen and so You need to innovate off the book when you're adapting from a book because there are things like internal dialogue that are kind of hard to show on screen. But you also have so much more opportunity because you have such a richer canvas to do the types of things like that fade away. Perfectly said. Yeah. The medium is the message as they say. And I think Joe, we've talked about this but because so much of what your culture David and Ben talks about is disruption.

33:48it allowed us to disrupt form and what we were doing because we're taking advantage of the fact that the story we're telling is about disruption so we're not under an obligation to tell you a story that's presented like pricinium and like it's back here and it's just with the normal rules of cinematography or the normal rules of what can happen inside that box you know. All right listeners now is a great time to tell you about a long time friend of the show Vanta AI has scrambled the whole security picture.

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34:58Think of it as a GRC engineer, that's governance, risk, and compliance, except that it's software and it doesn't sleep. It finds the issues, drafts the fixes and cuts the time that you'd spend on vendor assessments in half. In half, which is exactly why more than 16,000 companies today run on Vanta. Companies like ramp, cursor, and snowflake all stay audit-ready and catch the risks that crop up between audits across every vendor, every AI tool, the whole environment. And that's the real value. Trust has to be continuous now, which is why Vanta automates your security, your compliance, and the work to earn and prove trust. We're huge fans of Vanta over here, and literally hundreds of acquired listeners have become Vanta customers at their companies over the years. So you can get a thousand dollars off Vanta at Vanta.com slash acquired. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash acquired for a thousand dollars off and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. What was the

35:57Process and timeline like from Mike writes the book book comes out to then you and show time are working on the project before the book came away before the book Oh before oh wow Mike DM me on Twitter would you read my book? It's not coming out for five months. Did you have a relationship before then just like a Twitter friendship. Oh my gosh. That's amazing Twitter is so awesome. It's awesome. He so he DMs me and then I read 25 pages or 50 pages and I love it and I say to my partner Dave like dude you gotta fucking read this book I think it's our next thing and he agrees and then and then we go to Mike and say hey we want to do this thing we might be able to write it for a year but we will do this and then the whole town wanted it but Mike stayed true to us and our word and because we committed right away to him we didn't play any games he didn't play any games with us and we just held firm with each other we're like we're gonna make this show we're gonna make it very high level

36:51And Mike was in the writers room every day. Mike was in the writers room with us every single day. Oh, I didn't know that. I knew he was like present, but I didn't know he was in the room every day. As it's whole executive producer, he didn't write any episodes. But yeah, Joe, he was in the room. I would say if we did 100 days in the room, Mike was there for 94 of the hundred. Wow. Yeah, I didn't know that.

37:11and then he was reading every script and giving us notes and what was great in the room is we'd be in the room and we'd go what do we really think happened in that room what's your sourcing and he would go and he would reveal the sources but he would go get his notes and then sometimes he'd be like let me come back in a half hour and since he would come back with the person you know and suddenly like the person would be in the zoom with us because it's all zoom rooms now so suddenly the person's in the resume and they're off the record going like oh here's what fucking happened so we're just living it it was crazy that's so fun

37:38The series, and obviously most of the action is based in San Francisco. How much was on location in San Francisco versus I assume mostly filmed in LA and studios? It was really just a few days of exteriors in San Francisco. The rest is in LA mostly on the Paramount lot in sound stages. Don't tell anybody.

38:00I do obviously didn't film it in San Francisco, but if you were then like that's what it's like you can just like I'm gonna run down the street. Let me go get girly bring him in here. Like let's talk about what really happened. Brian, can you talk about how the process for this which is recent factual events that happened in a super high drama sort of pseudo finance environment compares to the research that you do for billions which is also present day also finance high drama.

38:29But you get to kind of be like current historical fiction on billions, whereas you're trying to be like faithful to source material on super pumped. Obviously the dialogue is going to be, you have to figure out what we said in the room. And as you guys said, make it colorful and entertaining. But the incidents, I mean, this was crucial that you're going to dramatize things to make them interesting and exciting and compelling.

38:51But you are not going to tell parts of the story that affect people in a way that they're bullshit. You just can't. So you're really trying to what looks like the way really dinner is the fifth episode. Like we had to know what really happened and then make a gut call, right? Because certain people, but we read everything written about it and talked to as many people as we could talk to to try to understand what happened at that dinner because you just kind of need to know in a way. And also this story offers you things like You know, we read Mike's book the thing that happened with Sergei Bryn and Gabby and TK How are you gonna make something up with the third richest guy in the world doing that and then this other guy was a billionaire and like you can't make that up You could just try to cast it incredibly well and set the environment up so that Joe can feel that these events are really happening now And we got a great Sergey. I mean David Krungels killed it. Joe

39:50Such inspired casting and by the way one of several old dear friends of mine that got to kind of make these awesome supporting appearances in the show crumb holds as Sergei brin definitely a highlight amazing one of the only People who got an improvised line into the show to maybe the only improvised line in the whole thing and spectacular Well, while we're on the topic of actors playing real-life people one person that I noticed so sometimes Someone will be watching a YouTube video and that YouTube video is the real YouTube video of like something that actually happened in the past. There's a scene where Travis is watching a YouTube video of Jeff Bezos and a very familiar actor is playing Jeff Bezos and I couldn't help but laugh and I'm like no way, like how do you make the call on whether to use actual source material for something like that versus cast it? Because the exact thing we needed isn't online anymore. Oh.

40:47Fascinating. I meant to have him do the laugh. He brought the laugh and we were so happy that he did. The laugh. Oh, it was so good. The shotgun laugh. Because like Joe's an incredible actor. So when Joe's playing that scene, he's not watching anything. He's watching some clip of Bezos. I was watching a piece of tape taped to the laptop's monitor as well. I was watching. I do sometimes wish people understood how challenging a job it is that Joe Gordon left us to do and you know obviously it affords lots of amazing things in life and it's incredible when you have the cathartic transcendent moments but the work required to do what Joe does is is incredible and actors are low to talk about it because they seem because everyone's like oh yeah it's really hard you know show up a thing but to have to do that ten times and play that and be in that mental state and

41:37Be just pretending you're watching it. Like, yeah, you guys see this incredible footage of a guy doing Bezos Joe was just imagining that and making that happen. Thank you. Thanks, man. We rarely get to talk with folks of your talent and doing what you do on this show. And I think listeners don't live in your world. So this is probably the first time that someone would get to hear like, what is it like to Act in a green screened white tape laptop. How do you invoke the level of imagination that you need to? Do you have any tactics? I never studied acting in an academic setting. I don't have names for all the things that I probably do. But when you're in a green screen setting and you don't have any reality to play against, it's just like playing pretend. I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. There's somewhere else half the day.

42:32playing for 10 just imagining what's going on and I remember doing that when I was their age and now I still do that I do it on command at 5 in the morning when I have to and the challenge of acting isn't for me is not making things up or playing pretend it's actually having to do that while straddling a hornet's nest of logistical nightmares all day long. Because a movie set is just a mess. Even the most well-run sets. And this was a well-run set. But even the most well-run by nature, there's a million things all going on all at once. It's noisy. It's cluttered. There's someone close to you. The hard part is kind of keeping your focus and your concentration and maintaining that more childlike spirit of imagination.

43:27while having to contend with all this morass of logistical crap. That's the hard part. Wow. Plus you have your own personal life where there's very real emotions that you're experiencing when you're off camera too. No, I don't have that. I gave that up. I'm a vampire. I don't think folks realize this, but when you and I had a couple of phone calls back when you were shooting this, You were like, can I call you it? I don't know what it was like 8 p.m. I'm on my lunch break. It's like, what is the daily schedule like and why are you shooting so late into the night? So there's a thing called a 12 hour turnaround. You know, standard days on a movie set or a show set is 12 hours. We could talk about whether or not that civilized or right. And you know, the union almost went on strike, the union of stage workers. And I think with good reason, it's not exactly the best lifestyle. But be that as it may.

44:21you work at minimum 12 hours and then you need to have a 12 hour turnaround but 12 hours is really the minimum so oftentimes you're working 13 hours 14 hours 15 hours and if you started work at say 8 in the morning and you finished at 8 in the evening well then maybe you could start again at 8 in the morning but mostly if you started 8 in the morning then you finish at 10 in the evening then you have to start the next day at 10 in the morning and so over the course of the week that keeps happening so you start the week at 5 in the morning and by the end of the week you're coming in at noon or 1 p.m. and you're having, quote, unquote, lunch at nine and nine. I mean, everything Joe said is exactly right. The other things that sometimes happen is if you're shooting at night scene, you might stage your week so that on Friday, we're shooting night or on Thursday, and then you're gonna intentionally do that. And we just like our lingo, like, so we like to call it lunch, nobody calls it dinner. I remember learning that in the beginning of the thing, like it's just lunch no matter what time of day it is.

45:20So Brian, I've listened to a lot of episodes of the moment and Joe that this is a topic that you and I talked about on our LP episode here a little bit. Can you walk me through the process both of you of when you create something and you know it's great versus you create something. It's on its way to being released and you're like crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. This is not good. This is not good. Are your spidey senses about that right or can you not trust yourself at all about how the audience will receive something?

45:50If you know it's bad, it's bad. If you know it's bad, it's fucking bad. Joe, that has to be your experience, too, right? When you know that you're like, oh, fuck, that doesn't turn around suddenly like, oh, what a great surprise. It was great. Yes, that's true. But I've also been in those things and then they've been hits. So, I don't know. There's no accounting for taste. You guys get about the feeling of knowing the work.

46:15is good or not and like when it's bad you know it's bad and you miss like everyone misses sometimes but then yeah you're I mean Ben you're being nicely asking me about runner runner and that experience was I knew I mean I knew was a horrible movie every day that I was working on it and we couldn't get it better and Ben and us tried our best and Justin tried his best and it was just one of those things there were a variety of reasons and it was very difficult to manage knowing Six months from now movies gonna come out that's gonna bomb and get a nine on rod tomatoes and they're right Yeah, I like cuz I don't care if I get bad when I know the works good I don't I'm completely divorced from any of the brownifications But if you know it's coming and you know they're right. You're just like fuck, you know That's horrible. Have you ever thought something was like awesome? You're like this is just pure aces and then it comes out and people are like like they just don't get it

47:08Well, look, I just did a show Mr. Cormin that didn't get picked up for a second season and I personally really like it. It's a great show. Yeah. Thank you. So I made something that's very much to my taste. And truth is, it's like, I don't like a lot of stuff that's on TV. And I've got to hand it to Apple that they let me make something that was very particular. And I said, like, hey, I have the ability to do this. How often do artists get to do this? Something on a relatively grand scale that's like just really not trying to pander to any particular commercial bucket, but just making what I would like to see. And I did that. And again, I'm proud of it. And some people really like to show. And then not enough people did though. And so it didn't get picked up. So yeah, that does happen. And it's humbling and a learning experience. And that's I guess the balance to try to strike is making stuff that is on the one hand, like truly genuinely something that I love.

48:03but can simultaneously be something that large audiences like as well. And, you know, I think Brian and David are great at that. They're making something that's clearly very true to themselves. And they've really found a way to make that resonate with a large audience, and it's admirable. Thanks, but it doesn't always happen. And I mean, yeah, I've had these periods. Like, our first movie, I loved it. I knew that I cast was incredible. I knew the script was so solid. John Dahl's a genius director.

48:31you know the movie was a bomb in the theaters but now it's you know obviously a movie that people not only like but are obsessed with and you know it did hundreds of millions on DVD later and it's a movie i get asked to do a sequel to every day of my life i mean ten times a day and twenty five years later that movie's a classic but at the time it was a bomb so i learned right then because we are too horrible reviews in the two magazines that matter like on the same day time and news we came out they both I hated it and it was a week before it released and at the time those things mattered. And I remember going into like a fetal position like am I gonna have a career? It's my first movie. But then the next day I woke up and I remember I had a clear thought. I can still write. They can't take away from me the ability to make stuff. And once I realized that I was like God none of that matters. What matters is can I look at Joe and can Joe look at me and Dave and be like we showed up here every fucking day and we gave it everything we had and we worked with rigor and our full hearts to make the thing great.

49:28And we worked and made the thing that we said we were gonna make because that's also it. Can you go and as can your crazy craft good enough that you can achieve the thing you set out to do and we've all been at this for a really long time. So now like it's likely that we can get something that's a pretty close approximation to what we say we're gonna do. So if you do that and it evokes the feeling you were trying to get into a vote for your group of collaborators, that's the thing like I was so happy to show early on in the process, but we had the first six minutes or something. Finished of the first episode. And I got to show it to him and no, like, well, we kept our promise to you. You kept your promise to us. That's really all you can do. We said we was going to feel like this thing. And he was going to deliver this thing. And we did that for each other. And that's a bond. Then I'll tell you the main thing that's amazing is we've become real friends over this. But let's say Joe had off to do a thing in Zimbabwe and I went off to do a thing in South America.

50:27If we met up seven years later, we would hug and be like brothers because we've gone through this thing together and worked in the way that we did. And that's an incredible gift of this thing that we get to do with our lives. Especially when you show up fully to do this work together. It's a really beautiful, magical thing. And that's where my focus is. It's never on that other part of it. I can't. You go crazy if you let yourself focus on that other part of it.

50:53One way to put his intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation that I really really believe in and we mentioned Ryan Johnson at the beginning of the show. I'll tell a little anecdote about him. I made a short film that I submitted to a film festival and it got rejected and Ryan had helped me make it and I was really proud of it. I had worked on it. I had done everything for it. I had shot it. I had edited it. I had made the music. I'd like I'd done this whole thing. I'm like 23 or something and submitted it to a festival. It had gotten rejected.

51:23I was low about that Ryan sent me a copy of the book letters to a young poet by real K which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend and one of the things it talks about in the in right towards the beginning the book it's sort of a mentor poet speaking to writing a letter to a young poet and saying you're asking me whether I think your poetry is good.

51:46and here's my answer to you forget about all that forget what anybody says go into yourself all you can really do if you want to be an artist and maybe this applies beyond art but I feel quite confident it does apply to being an artist all you can do is just go as deep as you possibly can into yourself and see if you can dig down deep enough where you can honestly say I'm not paying attention to anybody else or anybody's perspective or opinion I'm just here with myself, because that's where your unique voice is. And if you can get there, that's the thing. And yeah, then you can ignore the rest. And you know, that's not necessarily going to make you money or make you popular, but being an artist isn't about money and popularity. You know, Ralph Waldo Emerson applies to, right? So, which is the idea that if you do give voice to what's innermost, and that's not self-indulge, it's not just tossing it off, it's like doing the work.

52:44of getting to the thing you really care about it's likely that that's going to strike off of other people too because you have the courage to put it for yes what someone like Joe can do is go deep enough to express with his face and his body and his voice something that's so particular a personal and private to him but because he does it with such openness and truth we see it and we're moved by it because he's reflecting back to us parts of ourselves that we don't have the courage to experience or lost that we've experienced. And that is the thing that the most, the actors who are on Joe's level are able to do. And it's a very beautiful and sacred kind of a thing for that reason, I think. Thanks, man. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show ServiceNow. If you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

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55:05So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Well, the way that we tend to wind down episodes here is a section we call carve outs. And this is where we ask the guests to make recommendations of something they've seen or read or anything they would recommend to listeners. And I'm going to start real quick for people who don't realize how insanely multi talented Joe is.

55:34open up YouTube and search for the cure Katy Perry, Jimmy Fallon. And you will see a clip of, this is the most unbelievable thing. Joe, you singing the cure song in the style of Katy Perry on Jimmy Fallon's new show. And then I think there's a second one too, if you playing a variety of instruments. So if you thought Joe was a talented actor, you got the depth part right, but you're missing the breadth. I'm flattered. Thank you, Ben.

56:03Those are fun. As surprising and super fun to see, but let me kick it over to Brian. What would you recommend listeners check out? Well, you brought up Liars poker before and Michael Lewis is just released for the first time an audiobook, an unabridged audiobook of Liars poker, but he also put out a companion podcast. And the companion podcast is spectacular. And second, for this conversation we're having, there's a book I just read called unrequited infatuations by Little Steven Vanzant, who you know is either Bruce Springsteen's right hand or as James Gunnolfini's right hand in the sprannos. You had a great episode with him, didn't you? Yeah, we just did one now that his book came out and it's an amazing book about art and commerce and about all these questions. Unrequited infatuations, I highly recommend it. Great. Joe, I've been listening to a podcast called Your Undivided Attention.

57:00that's the center for humane technology Tristan Harris and there's an episode called a problem well stated is half solved and his guest is this some scholar named Daniel Schmuckdenberger I think and it's relevant to what we're talking about I think because when he's saying the problem well stated is half solved I've never really heard a conversation that to me so sharply and comprehensively observed what's going wrong with the world and what it might take to fix it. Not that they're offering comprehensive solutions, but you know, we all hear all the time like, well, there's climate change. And oh, Facebook's also breaking democracy. And there's a rise in authoritarianism and also incredible inequality and all these different things, but they feel like

57:56It feels like whack-a-mole it feels like there's no way how could we ever possibly address all of these things and one of the things that he was getting at was part of what is interesting to me about the uber story that I was touching on earlier also which is a lot of it does come down to what's the incentive how does the whole big system work and when you've got a system that mandates exponential economic growth but you've got a finite planet it's by definition unsustainable so we're definitely heading for catastrophe unless we change the way the system works and no longer require it to be grower die grower die grower die and by the way that's that was a phrase that's the name of episode one grower die i came away from that podcast pretty thoroughly convinced that all the other things

58:54are dominoes to that one and that if we can't change that we're not going to get any of the other ones but if we can change that we maybe have a shot of solving the rest well it's beautifully said perfectly so i'll go real quick my last one brand your episode with Jacob Dylan i thought was so good it was so fun having been a kid growing up listening to his music i honestly don't know that anybody else could have asked him about his like father the way that you did As he says on there, Jacob and I have been friends since we were in our very early 20s. So I mean, yeah, I can ask him because I've known it for 30 years. Right. But yes, thank you though. Like, I'm not going to ask Jacob Dylan about his dad, you know, but like, I'm really glad you did. Awesome. Well, Joe, Brian, we thank you so much for coming on. Anything you want to call out for listeners to find you somewhere on the internet or do something. I want to call out that everyone should go watch the movie. Joe wrote and directed Don John.

59:48It is a spectacular film. And like that's the other thing I want to recommend. I don't know if people have seen it, but like it shows the breadth of your work, man, because it's so different from the television series that you directed, you know, so that. And then yeah, if you want to find me on my Twitter, a bright compliment, but ask before you send me your manuscript. Mike Isaac asked me first. Don't just send shit. Ask. Ask me. I love it. Thanks guys. Thanks for having us on here.

1:00:15Yeah, thanks everybody. Oh yeah, check out hit record hit record dot org. Is it dot com now? We own them all. It was originally hit record dot org sweet hit record dot anything. Thanks guys. All right, listeners with that be sure to tune in this upcoming Sunday I believe the 27th is when super pumped will air I'm excited to see what everyone thinks. Many of you were very, very close to this story, and so it'll be fascinating to experience it as a series when so many of you experienced it either through a friend or family member or you personally being at Uber as a lot of these events unfolded.

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1:01:53Well with that, listeners, join us in the Slack. I'm sure we'll be talking about not only this interview but the show itself, acquire.fm-slash-slack. Go check out the LP show. View our previous interview with Joe, just search acquired LP show in any podcast player.

1:02:09If you want to become an LP and get those episodes two weeks earlier, that's at acquired.fm slash LP. Join our Zoom calls, all kinds of cool stuff. And if you're looking for that next new thing in your career, acquired.fm slash jobs, those are handpicked curated jobs from your friends that acquired. And with that, feel free to share this episode with your friends. We love tweets. We love one-on-one stuff even more. So if there's somebody where you think they'd really enjoy this, pass it along.

1:02:38And we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.