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

I think you both know enough about acquired that I don't need to go into the general shtick 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. Yeah. Welcome 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 Rosenthal, and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. David, 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, you know, 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 on 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 Koppelman and Joe Gordon-Levitt. There is no world that I would have imagined we would find ourselves here. No. No. 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 Acquired 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 100 times in high school and college when I was playing a lot of Texas Hold'em. Brian'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. Corman, many other great movies. Joe is actually a founder himself of the company Hit Record that we discussed a few months back on the LP show and just a delightful human being. And 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 the show itself, obviously.

All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Lagora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yep. 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. Lagora 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 for 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. Lagora's bet 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. And 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 1,200 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. Plenty 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 lagora.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. Hear Joe's interview on the LP show. Just search Acquired LP show in any podcast player or click the link in the show notes. And without further ado, on to the interview.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brian Koppelman, welcome to Acquired. Thank you. 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 let us down. Ben loves these little quips. It's just great. It's a little much. Joe, the first question we have that our audience has been asking is, how has your life changed since being on Acquired? Are you like getting recognized in cafes now?

Yeah, by Web3 nerds. I'm huge. I was at, what's it, ETHCon 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 listened to your Ethereum episode, it 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 what it's going to become. Thanks, Joe. We are all early, though. We seek to inform, not to sway too much. But yeah, I appreciate the thoughts. That's probably why I was swayed. Because the folks swaying, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. I don't believe you. Yeah. 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? Well, Joe doesn't know this, but we actually met in a makeup trailer once. No, I don't know this. You've been 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 ID myself as a filmmaker. Right. I was there to be a day player. And I didn't want to go into a whole other thing. On the movie Premium Rush. And he's talking about Rian 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. And on this project, Beth Schachter was a showrunner with us and really ran the writer's room with us and has made the show with us. But it's been rare over the course of my career that I can tangibly 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. It's been 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. Warren 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'm intuiting not often. No, no, not often at all. Very rarely. So I've known Warren since I was 19 years old or something. I'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 ask how rare that is. I mean, it is incredibly rare. And Warren is one of these people who were so many agents that cliches 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. And 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. 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. And 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 wouldn't try to protect himself at every turn, an actor who wouldn't be worried about doing things that were unsavory or wrong, morally questionable, an actor who would be willing to, you 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. And 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 was our first choice. Kyle Chandler was our first choice. And Uma Thurman.

Carrie Bechet is the only person we gave the role of Austin to. 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 it. Partially 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, the dialogue in this show is fireworks. It's just fun. We are kings. Gods. Travis's egos getting in the way needs to be checked. No one who wills an entire sector into being is in a balanced place. My own investors are plotting my demise. It's gone too far. I can't line up with you.

I got to stick with the company. I am the company! I don't think I've watched a show with that much profanity per minute in a long time. That must just be fun. And it's so well-written profanity too. And so Uber, it's great. Well, that's another reason I think we all have inside of ourselves, I think, a certain beast or animal that just wants to take what you want and fuck everybody else and win at all costs.

It's part of human nature. It's our hunter-gatherer 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 just animal instinct. And who doesn't want to indulge that side of themselves? So seeing the opportunity to step into an arena and just be that guy sounded like a lot of fun.

And to me, Uber serves as an excellent example of 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 a 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. What 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? Right. And is it inevitable that like Hannah Arendt 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. And maybe the series posits some theories. So those are like sort of the thematic resonant reasons. But also all the stuff Joe says applies to, which is these people are fascinating fucking people, man.

And they're so much fun to listen to and watch and think about. And they just fire you up. And then lastly, and to this audience, I'll say this, which won't mean that much to that many people, but I know Bill Gurley. And I know Bill Gurley separate from this. And I like Bill Gurley. This is going to sound odd, but I'm very friendly with Marc Andreessen and Bill Gurley. There's like five of us, I think, in the world.

You're the bridge. You're the bridge. And the book talks about this. 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 imperil the whole endeavor, but protecting the way that I'm thought of by a 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 Gurley has his own really challenging question. And so that seemed just amazing to dive into. Bill Gurley is a giant, literally a giant among venture capitalists. But that 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 going to challenge that just a little bit because like Christian Bale plays Michael Barry in a movie.

Why would a quant investor hedge guy be worthy? 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 going to put it all on hard 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 when you have your own 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 a responsible person 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 that wall went up on both sides and that's that.

Huh. 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're telling. Yeah. I mean, Bill Gurley and I mostly talk about Jason Isbell. So, I mean, we mostly talk about rock and roll with each other. 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 because I wanted to know not just what happened, but how it felt to have a conversation with him or be in the room with him. 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 in the 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. And 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 do we rectify that? Because 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. Oh, man. On a daily basis, the director would say cut. And I would I would just instantly start apologizing. I'm sorry, it's not me. Everyone knows it's not me. Right. The people that I've now 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 likable. Did you feel uncomfortable playing someone that, at least in my opinion, on balance is less likable than 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. Corman, 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, maybe. And I think Travis will be more instantly winning because if you're on camera, people respond to confidence. And Travis Galenick is nothing if not confident. You know, we have these business moments in our culture that were sort of are like Rorschach tests. Like, you know, there's Michael Lewis's Liars Poker. There's the social network, which we've talked about.

We're maybe written or created intending one thing and then get received. Joe, you know, the responding to confidence in your 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 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 any given movie or show all different ways. But I think because this show is so unflinching in shining light on the protagonists' 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, it'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, sixth, and seventh episodes that the lens changes, who are seeing the story through changes, and the point of view shifts in a way that makes certain things clear.

But also I would say this. There's a waveform to this, which you all know a lot more about than I do, about how things like waveforms work. I just know what they kind of look like. But over time, you're going to understand that Wolf of Wall Street is 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.

But 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 that 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 going to 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 as a 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 Uber. 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 thought he was going to have a fleet of cars because there were deals that encouraged him 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 have. 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's 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 the world? It seems like it's maybe leading us towards disaster. What are your thoughts on that? And like, do you see a need to try to change that? And how could that change? Or what would that do to your jobs as investors?

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. I really like your framework of artists' jobs are to make 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. And so, you 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 in 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. Isn't there? Because, like, if I think about your episodes about A16Z and Mosaic to Netscape, like, at Mosaic, Mark Andreessen's an artist. Oh, yeah. He's changing the world as an artist, I would assert. And he's looking at something that doesn't exist and seeing a way that he wants to see the world.

And no one even knew who owned the underlying code. No one knew who owned the thing. Did the school own it? Did the institute own it? But then partners come into it. Things change, and it becomes a business and priority shift. And that's fascinating to me always. What happens to an artist like that? Maybe Mark's 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.

An incredible business person, right? 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. The 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 willed 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 Gurley where he's talking with his wife. Or no, he's with his partners, right? And it's like, you know, I used to think that half of founders were angels and half of them were David Koresh. And then I realized they're all David Koresh. 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 in 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 company, that was like an art project. I loved it. StumbleUpon 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 stuff. 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 Daniel 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 not got the rights to anything. We tried. We couldn't get the rights. That would have been so great. That's in the book. It's in Mike's book. That's in Mike's book. I'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 100 hours of research. And so we found like the quote unquote founding story of Uber 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, masterminds. 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 going to play with this.

Because especially on TV, like playing with form and kind of fucking with storytelling conventions is not normal. Normal. That's the kind of thing I like to do and 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 audience's perception like that, like what you're talking about, Ben.

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, it allowed us to disrupt form in 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 proscenium 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?

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Way before the book came out. Oh, before. Oh, wow. Mike DM'd 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. 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 got to fucking read this book.

I think it's our next thing. And he agrees. 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 going to make this show. We're going to make it very high level. And Mike was in the writer's room every day. Mike was in the writer's 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 a co-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 100 days.

Yeah, I didn't know that. And 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 his sources, but he would go get his notes. And then sometimes he'd be like, let me come back in a half hour. And sometimes 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 Zoom 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. The 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, yeah, in LA and mostly on, you know, the Paramount lot and sound stages.

Don't tell anybody. I do. Obviously, you didn't film it in San Francisco. But if you were, then like, that's what it's like. You could just, oh, I'm gonna run down the street. Let me go get girly. Bring him in here. And 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.

But 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 was 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. But 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 Waverly 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, when you read Mike's book, the thing that happened with Sergey, Bryn and Gabby and TK, how are you going to make something up with the third richest guy in the world doing that?

And then this other guy who's 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 Krumholtz killed it, Joe. Such 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.

Krumholtz as Sergey Bryn, definitely a highlight. Right. Amazing. One of the only people who got an improvised line into the show, too, didn't he? Maybe the only improvised line in the whole thing, and it's spectacular. 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 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, fascinating. And then to have him do the laugh. He brought the laugh, and we were so happy that he did the laugh. The laugh. Oh, so good. The shotgun laugh. Because 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 is what I was watching. I do sometimes wish people understood how challenging a job it is that Joe Gordon-Levitt has to do. And 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 incredible. And actors are loathe to talk about it because they seem...

Because everyone's like, oh, yeah, it's really hard. You know, show up at the thing. But to have to do that 10 times and play that and be in that mental state and be just pretending you're watching it. Like, yeah, you guys see this incredible footage of a guy doing Bezos. Joe is just imagining that and making that happen. Thank you, Dave. 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, you know, white tape laptop? Like, how do you invoke the level of imagination that you need to? Do you have any tactics? You know, I never studied acting in an academic setting. I don't have names for all the things that I probably do 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.

You know, I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. They're somewhere else half the day just, you know, playing pretend, 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 five 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 while 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 at, 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's 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, you 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 start at 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 9 at night. I mean, everything Joe said is exactly right. But the other things that sometimes happen is if you're shooting a night scene, you might stage your week so that on Friday, we're shooting night or on Thursday. And then you're going to intentionally do that.

And we just like our lingo. So we like to call it lunch. Nobody calls it dinner. I remember learning that in the beginning. And the thing like, it's just lunch no matter what time of day it is. So, Brian, I've listened to a lot of episodes of The Moment. And Joe, this is a topic that you and I talked about on our LP episode here a little bit. But 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? If 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. He's asking about the feeling of knowing the work is good or not. And like when it's bad, you know it's bad. And you miss. Like everyone misses sometimes. But then, yeah, I mean, Ben, you're being nicely asking me about Runner Runner. And that experience was I knew. I mean, I knew it 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 a movie is going to come out that's going to bomb and get a nine on Rotten Tomatoes. And they're right. Yeah, because I don't care if I get bad. When I know the work's good, I'm completely divorced from any of the ramifications.

But if you know it's coming and you know they're right, you're just like, fuck. You know, it's horrible. It'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, they just don't get it. Well, look, I just did a show, Mr. Corman, that didn't get picked up for a second season. And I personally really like it. It's a great show. Yeah. Thank you.

And I made something that's very much to my taste. And truth is, is like, I don't like a lot of stuff that's on TV. And I 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 the 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, but 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 the experience like our first movie. I loved it. I knew that the cast was incredible. I knew the script was so solid. John Dole's a genius director. You 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, 10 times a day. And 25 years later, that movie's a classic. But at the time, it was a bomb. So I learned right then because we got two horrible reviews in the two magazines that mattered, like on the same day, Time and Newsweek came out.

They both hated it. And it was a week before it released. At the time, those things mattered. And I remember going into like a fetal position, like, am I going to 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. And we worked and made the thing that we said we were going to make. Because that's also it. Can you go and as can your craft good enough that you can achieve the thing you set out to do?

And we've all been at this 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 going to do. So if you do that, and it evokes the feeling you were trying to get it to evoke for your group of collaborators, that's the thing. Like, I was so high. I got to show early on in the process, but we'd had the first six minutes or something finished of the first episode.

And I got to show it to him and know, 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. And I'll tell you that the main thing that's amazing is we've become real friends over this. But let's say Joe went off to do a thing in Zimbabwe.

And I went off to do a thing in South America. If 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. Yeah, it's true. 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. One way to put it is intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation that I really, really believe in. And we mentioned Rian 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 Rian 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 had like, I'd done this whole thing. I'm like 23 or something and submitted it to a festival. It had gotten rejected. I was low about that. Rian 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 right towards the beginning of 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. And 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 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 too, right? Self-reliance, which is the idea that if you do give voice to what's innermost, and that's not self-indulgence. It's not just tossing it off. It's like doing the work of 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 forth. Yes. What someone like Joe could do is go deep enough to express with his face and his body and his voice something that's so particular and 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 either we don't have the courage to experience or loss that we've experienced. And that is the thing that 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.

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That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower. Yep. AI control tower gives enterprises a single place to see, manage, govern, and optimize AI across the entire business. And it works with any AI, not just theirs. Every device on your network, every permission across every system, every AI agent visible and secure in one place. And ServiceNow can do this because they've spent more than 20 years building the operational backbone of the enterprise. The workflows, governance, approvals, security controls, and institutional knowledge that power how work actually gets done across IT, HR, customer service, finance, and security.

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So 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.

Open 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 of 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. Those are fun. It was 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 has just released for the first time an audio book, an unabridged audio book 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 Van Zandt, who you know is either Bruce Springsteen's right hand or as James Gunnofini's right hand in The Sopranos. 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. That'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 scholar named Daniel Schmachtenberger, 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 it 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 a catastrophe unless we change the way the system works and no longer require it to be grow or die, grow or die, grow or die. And by the way, that was a phrase. That's the name of episode one, grow or die. I came away from that podcast pretty thoroughly convinced that all the other things are 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. Wow, that's beautifully said. Perfectly said. I'll go real quick. My last one. Brian, your episode with Jacob Dillon, 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 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 him for 30 years. Right. But yes, thank you, though. I'm not going to ask Jacob Dillon about his dad, but 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. It is a spectacular film. And that's the other thing I wanted to recommend. I don't know if people have seen it, but it shows the breadth of your work, man, because it's so different from the television series that you directed. So that. And then, yeah, if you want to find me, I'm on Twitter at Brian Koppelman. But ask before you send me your manuscript.

Mike Isaac, ask me first. Don't just send shit. Ask. Ask me. I love it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having us on here. Thanks, everybody. Oh, yeah. And check out HitRecord. HitRecord.org. Is it .com now? We own them all. It was originally HitRecord.org. Sweet. HitRecord.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. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig. Yes. Long-time acquired partner. There is a reason why the best product teams at companies like OpenAI and Notion, Atlassian, Figma, Rippling, Brex, and more rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

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They're measuring what actually moved engagement, retention, and ultimately revenue. And as more teams build with AI, that learning loop becomes even more important. Building with LLMs introduces non-determinism into your product experience. The same input doesn't always produce the same output, and behavior can shift in subtle ways in real-world use. So doing offline evals will give you part of the picture, but you can really only understand the impact once your product is live with real users, and then you can measure how their behavior actually changes.

It's very different than the way that you would ship features in a pre-AI world where you knew exactly what the software was going to do in production. Yeah, exactly. So this is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. The result is a tighter feedback loop and learning that compounds over time so you don't just ship more, you ship better.

So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. Well, with that, listeners, join us in the Slack. I'm sure we'll be talking about not only this interview, but the show itself, acquired.fm slash Slack. Go check out the LP show. View our previous interview with Joe. Just search Acquired LP show in any podcast player. If 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 at 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. And we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.

Bye.