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

We sit down with two of the most talented and respected people in Hollywood — Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — to talk about the process of adapting Mike Issac’s story of Uber, “Super Pumped”, into their new Showtime series. To say this was a thrill for us is a MASSIVE understatement. Huge thank yous to Brian, Joe and Showtime for making it happen! *Links:* - Super Pumped (the series): https://www.sho.com/super-pumped - Super Pumped (the book): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PZ2B85Y/ *Carve Outs:* - Joe performing Katy Perry in the style of The Cure on Jimmy Fallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2lGEZOOHwI - Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker companion podcast: https://www.pushkin.fm/show/against-the-rules-with-michael-lewis/ - Stevie Van Zandt’s Unrequited Infatuations: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R56XNMQ/ - Your Undivided Attention: https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/a-problem-well-stated-is-half-solved - Jakob Dylan on The Moment: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5xNbG6XBjoVLDvpOUbZSIr?si=engSyJ9IQlePpqDOw7rSjw - Joe’s Don Jon: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2229499/ - HitRecord: https://hitrecord.org *More Acquired:* - Get email updates https://www.acquired.fm/email and vote on future episodes! - Join the Slack http://acquired.fm/slack - Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store https://www.acquired.fm/store! _Note: Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions._

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Gilbert?

  I think you both know enough about Acquired that I don't need to go into the general shtick and spiel.

• 0:06David Rosenthal?

  Right on. I love it. I'm so honored that you guys have listened. It makes my day. Thank you.

• 0:11Speaker 02

  That's why we said yes.

• 0:15Speaker 03

  Who got the truth?

• 0:18Speaker 03

  Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way.

• 0:32Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 0:46David Rosenthal?

  And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm an angel investor based in San Francisco.

• 0:52Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:03David Rosenthal?

  God, it feels like another lifetime ago, but it was only two and a half years ago.

• 1:06Ben Gilbert?

  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 on February 27th called Super Pumped. I have to say, it's a little bit surreal, the world that we live in of venture and startups, as we will talk about on this episode, becoming part of entertainment and pop culture like that.

• 1:36David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 1:46Ben Gilbert?

  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 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,

• 2:27Ben Gilbert?

  you know his previous work, too. Inception, Looper, recently Mr. Corman, 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.

• 2:42David Rosenthal?

  Totally.

• 2:43Ben Gilbert?

  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 tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta. AI has scrambled the whole security picture. It used to be that you proved that you were secure once a year on audit or a static PDF, then everyone would nod and you're done. But in an AI-first world, that doesn't hold up anymore.

• 3:15David Rosenthal?

  Yep. Your risk surface changes every week now. A vendor turns on an AI feature, or someone writes in a new model without telling IT, and your posture is different than it was last week, let alone at your last audit. Vanta's own research found that around 70% of companies have this quote-unquote "shadow AI" running with no security review at all.

• 3:36Ben Gilbert?

  Right. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're the leading agentic trust platform, meaning they've built the thing that closes the gap. And the way that they close that gap is Vanta Agent. Think 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.

• 3:58David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 4:16Ben Gilbert?

  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 $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/acquired. That's V A N T A dot com slash acquired for $1,000 off, 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.

• 4:59Ben Gilbert?

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Brian Koppelman, welcome to Acquired.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  Thrilled to be here, guys.

• 5:05Ben Gilbert?

  Ah, we are super pumped for this.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  And now we have to leave. Joe, this is fun.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  I brought these guys to you, Brian, and they let us down.

• 5:17David Rosenthal?

  Ben loves these little quips. It's just great.

• 5:19Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, by Web3 nerds. I'm huge. And 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, 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.

• 6:08David Rosenthal?

  Thanks, Joe. We are all early, though.

• 6:11Ben Gilbert?

  We seek to inform, not to sway too much, but yeah, I appreciate the thoughts.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  That's probably why I was swayed, because the folks swaying, I'm like, get that, get the fuck out of here. I don't believe you.

• 6:22Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Well, Joe doesn't know this, but we actually met in a makeup trailer once.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  No, I don't know this. You've been saving this story?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had a day as an actor in a movie you starred in.

• 6:57Speaker 04

  Right, okay.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  I was there to be a day player, and I didn't want to go into a whole, like, other thing.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  On the movie Premium Rush, and he's talking about Rian Johnson.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Premium Rush, and yes, Rian 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 Schacter, 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, has 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

• 7:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:15David Rosenthal?

  And how often does something like this happen? I'm intuiting not often.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  No, no, not often at all.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Very rarely.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  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 it 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

• 9:04Speaker 04

  gonna 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.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Well, you ask how rare that is. I mean, it is incredibly rare and Warren is one of these people who where so many agents, the cliches are true, but Warren's not full of shit. And he's in the past said, this isn't gonna work. He's very quick to say why it's not gonna work or think. And he was like, I think Joe's gonna 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. No, 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

• 9:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  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 are 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. Carey Boucher is the only person we gave the role of Austin to. 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 it. Partially because this is a really important story to tell about America at this time.

• 11:03Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Within a first few pages of reading the script, the dialogue in this show is fireworks. It's just fun.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  We are kings, gods.

• 11:29Speaker 05

  Travis's big goes getting in the way needs to be checked. No one who wields an entire sector into being is in a balanced place.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  My own investors are plotting my demise.

• 11:42Speaker 06

  It's gone too far. I can't line up with you. I gotta stick with the company.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  I am the company.

• 11:48David Rosenthal?

  I don't think I've watched a show with that much like profanity per minute in a long time. That must just be fun. And it's so like well-written profanity too. And so Uber, it's great.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  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, you know, 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 because 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 themselves? So seeing the opportunity to

• 12:40Speaker 04

  step into an arena and just be that guy sounded like a lot of fun. To me, Uber serves as a 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,

• 13:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  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,

• 14:20Speaker 02

  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?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  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, into 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 can't, 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

• 16:05Speaker 02

  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 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. Gurley has this, his own really challenging question. And so that seemed just amazing to like dive into.

• 16:48David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  I'm going to challenge that just a little bit because like Christian Bale plays Michael Berry in a movie. Why 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 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.

• 17:34Ben Gilbert?

  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, you know, primary source information from getting to know these people in real life too?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Well, we didn't talk to the people in the show for the show, meaning I told Bill, because I'm 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 the wall went up on both sides and that's that.

• 18:27Ben Gilbert?

  Huh. Fascinating.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  I mean, you gotta serve the story you're telling. That's what I, you know what I mean? You gotta serve the story you're telling.

• 18:33David Rosenthal?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I mean, Bill Gurley and I mostly talk about Jason Isbell. So, I mean, we mostly talk about rock and roll with each other.

• 18:40Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 18:53Speaker 04

  I had a couple of 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 it 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.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:36Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 20:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 21:08Ben Gilbert?

  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 than the character you usually tend to play?

• 21:21Speaker 04

  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 Gallenick is nothing if not confident.

• 21:51David Rosenthal?

  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 liar's poker. There's the social network, which we've talked about, where maybe written or created intending one thing and then get received. Joe, you know, the responding to confidence and your thought that like, people will like Travis more than you might think. How much was that in your minds making this?

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Brian, 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 protagonist's shortcomings and dark moments, I would hope at least that the majority of the audience will come away understanding this is a cautionary tale as

• 23:00Speaker 04

  opposed to a glorification of bad behavior.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  A hundred percent. 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.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  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 Bell for it. 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.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  And I have a lot of confidence in people over the long term.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:19Ben Gilbert?

  Yeah, that's a great point.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  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, to your jobs as investors?

• 27:05Speaker 04

  I'm curious to hear your, your thoughts on that.

• 27:07Ben Gilbert?

  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. And so.

• 27:50David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  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 is an artist.

• 28:28David Rosenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  He's changing the world is 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 he, 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 priorities shift. And what, that's fascinating to me always. What happens to an artist like that? You know, 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.

• 29:05David Rosenthal?

  An incredible business person, right?

• 29:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:16David Rosenthal?

  The show shows this so well, like so, so well. Like, cause 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.

• 29:51David Rosenthal?

  That was so good.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  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. Stumble Upon was the greatest, not a business, right?

• 30:17David Rosenthal?

  Totally not a business, but great.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:46David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:03David Rosenthal?

  That would have been so great.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  That's in the book. It's in Mike's book. That's in Mike's book.

• 31:07Ben Gilbert?

  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

• 31:52Ben Gilbert?

  indeed, that was the apocryphal story. I was like,

• 31:54David Rosenthal?

  Masterminds.

• 31:59Ben Gilbert?

  So I just have to applaud you for that.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  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 gonna play with this. Cause 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 to do and, 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.

• 32:39Ben Gilbert?

  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, of things like that fade away.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Perfectly said. Yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  The medium is the message, as they say.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  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 are 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?

• 33:33Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 33:47David Rosenthal?

  Yeah. The hard part is knowing what permissions they have, what employees are using them for, or what decisions AI is making. AI security for an enterprise at scale is not a small concern. Like, the risks are real.

• 34:01Ben Gilbert?

  Exactly. And the challenge with AI is governing it, securing it, measuring it, and making sure that it actually delivers value. That is why ServiceNow built the AI control tower.

• 34:11David Rosenthal?

  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.

• 34:28Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 34:45David Rosenthal?

  ServiceNow already runs more than 100 billion workflows annually and trillions of transactions for more than 85% of the Fortune 500. So when companies need a place to govern AI at enterprise scale, they're building on a platform at the center of how their business already operates.

• 35:01Ben Gilbert?

  And in a future that isn't going to be one AI, it's going to be thousands of AI agents working across every function of the company. But the question is, who's managing them all?

• 35:10David Rosenthal?

  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/acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. What was the process and timeline like from Mike writes the book, book comes out, to then you and Showtime are working on the project?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Before the book came out, way before the book came out.

• 35:33David Rosenthal?

  Oh, before? Oh, wow.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Mike DM'd me on Twitter, "Would you read my book?" It's not coming out for five months.

• 35:38David Rosenthal?

  Did you have a relationship before then?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Just like a Twitter friendship.

• 35:42David Rosenthal?

  Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. Twitter is so awesome.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  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 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 not 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 were like, "We're gonna make this show. We're gonna 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.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  Oh, I didn't know that. I knew he was like present, but I didn't know he was in the room every day.

• 36:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Wow. Yeah, I didn't know that.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  That's so fun.

• 37:04David Rosenthal?

  This series, and we see 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?

• 37:13Speaker 04

  It was really just a few days of exteriors in San Francisco. The rest is, uh, yeah, in LA and mostly on, you know, the Paramount lot and sound stages. Don't tell anybody.

• 37:25David Rosenthal?

  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, 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.

• 37:34Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Obviously, the dialogue is gonna 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 gonna dramatize things to make them interesting and exciting and compelling. But you are not gonna 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, it's 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,

• 38:47Speaker 02

  You know, when you're reading Mike's book, the thing that happened with Sergey Brin 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 Crumholtz killed it.

• 39:15Speaker 04

  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. Crumholtz as Sergey Brin, definitely a highlight.

• 39:27David Rosenthal?

  Amazing.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  One of the only people who got an improvised line into the show, too.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Maybe the only improvised line in the whole thing. And it's spectacular.

• 39:37Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Because the exact thing we needed isn't online anymore.

• 40:11Ben Gilbert?

  Oh, fascinating.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  And then to have him do the laugh, he brought the laugh and we were so happy that he did.

• 40:17David Rosenthal?

  The laugh. Oh, so good.

• 40:19Ben Gilbert?

  The shotgun laugh.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  I was watching a piece of tape taped to the laptop's monitor is what I was watching.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  I do sometimes wish people understood how challenging a job it is that Joe Gordon-Levitt has 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 loathe to talk about it because they seem.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Because everyone's like, oh, yeah, it's really hard, you know, show up a 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.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Thank you, Dave. Thanks, man.

• 41:13Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  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, 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.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  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.

• 42:59Ben Gilbert?

  Wow. Plus you have your own personal life where there's very real emotions that you're experiencing when you're off camera, too.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  No, I don't have that.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  I gave that up. I'm a vampire.

• 43:12Ben Gilbert?

  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 8:00 PM, 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?

• 43:28Speaker 04

  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 a 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, 8:00 in the morning and you finished at 8:00 in the evening, well, then maybe you could start again at 8:00 in the morning. But mostly, if you start at 8:00 in the morning, then you finish at 10:00 in the evening, then you have to start the next day at 10:00 in

• 44:10Speaker 04

  the morning. And so over the course of the week, that keeps happening. So you start the week at 5:00 in the morning, and by the end of the week, you're coming in at noon or 1:00 PM, and you're having quote unquote lunch at 9:00 at night.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  I mean, everything Joe said is exactly right. 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 gonna intentionally do that. And we just like our lingo, like, so we like to call it lunch, nobody calls it dinner. I remember like learning that in the beginning. And the thing like, it's just lunch, no matter what time of day it is.

• 44:45Ben Gilbert?

  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. 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?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  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 it's, you're like, oh, fuck, that doesn't turn around suddenly like, oh, what a great surprise. It was great.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Yes, that's true. But I've also been in those things, and then they've been hits. So I don't know.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  There's no accounting for taste. He's asking about the feeling of the, of knowing the work is good or not. And like when it's bad, you know, it's bad and you missed. 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 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, I like, because I don't care if I get bad. When I know the work's good, I don't, I'm completely divorced from any of the ramifications. But if you know

• 46:21Speaker 02

  it's coming and you know, they're right. You're just like, fuck, you know, it's horrible. It's horrible.

• 46:27Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  It's a great show. Yeah.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Thank you. So I, 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, and again, I'm, I'm proud of it. And some people really liked the show. And then not enough people did, though. And so it didn't get picked up. So that, yeah, that does happen. And it's humbling and a learning experience. And that's, I guess,

• 47:20Speaker 04

  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.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  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 Dahl'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 and they both hated it. And it was a week before it released. And at the time, those things mattered.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  And I remember going into like a fetal position, like, am I going to have a career? It's my first movie.

• 48:32David Rosenthal?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  But then the next day I woke up and I remember 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

• 49:17Speaker 02

  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 like, 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. 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.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  One way to put it is 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 dud this whole thing. I'm like 23 or something and submitted it to a festival. It had gotten rejected. I was low about that. Ryan sent me a copy of the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke, which is a wonderful book that I highly recommend. And one of the things it talks about in the, in right towards the beginning of the book,

• 51:02Speaker 04

  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.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  And if you can get there, that's the thing. And yeah, then you can ignore the rest and, 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.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  You know, Ralph Waldo Emerson applies too, right? Self-fulfilling, 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 forward. 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.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:52Ben Gilbert?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, Logora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work.

• 53:06David Rosenthal?

  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. Logora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

• 53:22Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 53:37David Rosenthal?

  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. Logora'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.

• 54:01Ben Gilbert?

  And they recently launched Logora 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.

• 54:20David Rosenthal?

  And Legora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting. The early Legora numbers essentially speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora 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

• 55:02David Rosenthal?

  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 legora.com/acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you.

• 55:15Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  I'm flattered. Thank you, Ben. Those are fun.

• 56:04Ben Gilbert?

  It was surprising and super fun to see. But let me kick it over to Brian. What would you recommend listeners check out?

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Well, you brought up Liar's Poker before, and Michael Lewis has just released for the first time, an audiobook, an unabridged audiobook of Liar's 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 as either Bruce Springsteen's right-hand, or as James Gunn of Finey's right-hand in The Sopranos.

• 56:40David Rosenthal?

  You had a great episode with him, didn't you?

• 56:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  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 Schmucktenberger, 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

• 57:37Speaker 04

  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

• 58:21Speaker 04

  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 grow or die, grow or die, grow or die. And by the way, that's, 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 dominos 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.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's beautifully said, perfectly said.

• 59:06David Rosenthal?

  I'll go real quick, my last one. Brian, 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.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  As he says on there, Jacob and I have been friends since we were in our very early twenties. So, I mean, yeah, I could ask him because I've known him for 30 years.

• 59:25David Rosenthal?

  Right.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  But yes, thank you though.

• 59:27David Rosenthal?

  Like, I'm not going to ask Jacob Dylan about his dad, you know? But like, I'm really glad you did.

• 59:33Ben Gilbert?

  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?

• 59:42Speaker 02

  I want to call out that everyone should go watch the movie Joe wrote and directed, Don John. It is a spectacular film. And like, that's the other thing I wanted 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, 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.

• 1:00:12David Rosenthal?

  Love it.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys. Thanks for having us on here.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks, everybody. Oh, yeah. And check out HitRecord.

• 1:00:18Ben Gilbert?

  Hitrecord.org. Is it dot com now?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  We own them all.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  It was originally HitRecord.org.

• 1:00:24Ben Gilbert?

  Sweet. Hitrecord 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.

• 1:00:52David Rosenthal?

  All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

• 1:00:59Ben Gilbert?

  Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale.

• 1:01:09David Rosenthal?

  Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly. The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers and how fast you can use that signal to guide what you ship next.

• 1:01:30Ben Gilbert?

  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.

• 1:01:42David Rosenthal?

  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/acquired to get started.

• 1:01:53Ben Gilbert?

  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/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/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.

• 1:02:38Ben Gilbert?

  And we will see you next time.

• 1:02:40David Rosenthal?

  We'll see you next time.