Welcome back the Showtime series super pumped.
The battle for Uber tells the roller
coaster ride of Silicon Valley's most successful
and most destructive companies. Uber.
The battle for Uber is the first of
the super pumped anthology series in which each new
season will explore a new true business story that
changed our culture in one way or another,
the battle for Uber revolves around former
Ceo Travis Kalanick played by joseph Gordon
Levitt who was eventually ousted of course in a boardroom coup Take a look,
I'm gonna take this thing the whole way with or without you.
You know you're on your way up
and they slap a target on your back.
We're receiving the most powerful tech company in the world.
Apple should shut you down
once we start we won't stop.
We are disruptors because that is what revolution requires. It's gone too far.
I can't line up with you. I gotta stick with the company.
I am the company.
Mhm.
It looks so good.
Earlier today I got to sit down one on one with
joseph Gordon Levitt himself to talk all about the show,
take a look.
Did you have any communication personally with Travis Kalanick?
I wasn't able to talk to him but I did speak to
a whole bunch of people that worked closely with him of course.
The series is based on a book called super pumped
that was written by a new york times journalist.
So everything in this show is adhering
to that new york times journalistic integrity.
Everything comes from a firsthand source and
confirmed by you know a secondary source.
Um but I wanted to go deeper than
what happened and get to, how did it feel, what was it like?
And and that I don't think you can get as well from journalism.
You get that by talking to the people who were there.
And what I found actually was there's a side to Travis that
you don't read about as much in the press
that
makes you understand why he was so successful, that a lot of the people I talked to,
they had a lot of really positive things to say about him.
They really liked him, they found him fun to be around inspiring winning.
And so I was trying to kind of strike that balance.
Uh you know, this show does not flinch at showing his shortcomings.
Um but I also wanted you to, I wanted the audience to feel like, hey,
this is an extraordinary, powerful um intense, smart winning individual.
And it's it's not a coincidence that he made the fastest growing company in history.
Of course,
the book you're referencing there comes from the Great Reporter Mike Isaac.
What was most shocking to you?
Was there anything that really jumped out of the pages there that said,
it made you say, I thought I knew this story, but not like this,
what most stood out sure.
So there's uh there's a program that that Mike Isaac details in his book
that was called Gray Ball
Funny Name, but this is a piece of software that they wrote behind the scenes,
no one ever experienced this.
But what it did was avoided law enforcement because they were breaking the law
and they needed to not get caught.
And so they wrote software,
they had a team of engineers working on a
piece of software that systematically breaks the law at scale
and they got away with it and made billions and billions of dollars and you know,
I knew there was maybe some questionable decision making but
I didn't know they were just fully breaking the law
1000 a million times over and you know,
super pumped is kind of a crime story in that way.
Yeah, it's incredible controversy and perspective.
Course you portrayed several high, high profile, very real people.
People like Edward Snowden throughout your career.
What is the process as it pertains to learning how to play an
actual person joseph instead of someone just on the pages of the script?
Yeah, it is quite different.
You have so much to go on like for one
thing Travis Kalanick is from the san Fernando valley,
which is the suburb of Los Angeles where I was born and raised.
So it actually I had a certain shortcut,
I didn't have to like work on a voice or how he talked or anything
because when I listened to him talk I'm like that's basically how I talk,
how my brother talks.
Um
So so that was sort of a shortcut but then I personally,
I just find real life stories fascinating because the way the world is nowadays,
like, you couldn't come up with anything stranger or more intriguing in fiction,
You're a bit of a tech startup founder yourself, of course, Hit record,
going back now several years were able
to take anything from your own personal experience
and kind of injected into the role here, I wonder.
Yeah, So hit record is this online community that, that I've run for years.
And just in the last few years, we wanted to build some better software.
And so I did raise money from
tech venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, um,
and actually had a really positive experience, um getting to know that world,
but it did inform me getting to play Travis Kalanick.
Like there's,
there's a sequence in the show where we are raising
VC money and it happens in a montage montage,
meaning there's music playing over it.
So you don't see our dialogue, you don't hear our dialogue,
therefore it's not written.
So it's the actor's job to just kind of improvise what we say.
And I was doing these scenes, you know,
listening to the Beastie Boys and just shooting off about
customer acquisition costs and lifetime value insurance rate and monthly active
users and all these things and the other actors turned to
me and like how do you know all this stuff?
Like,
did you do like weird amounts of research for this role as
I know I've been living it for the last three years.
So yeah, it it did help inform how I played the role.
So you're the ultimate method actor here if you will, to be fair,
who listening to the Beastie Boys wouldn't start talking about that stuff.
So I'm right there with you after this experience.
Do you find yourself more or less likely personally
to use Uber? Has this at all shifted your own perspective as a passenger? I wonder
that's a good question. I would say less likely
to be honest.
I mean, even though the company has changed a lot since uh,
since the time of Travis and frankly,
I don't ride in Uber's nowadays because we live in a plague.
But um,
I do uh frankly use Postmates and Postmates was
acquired by Uber and I think there's probably some
problematic ethical considerations to have with Postmates and
I'm guilty of going for the convenience.
Um, but but yeah, it does,
it does make me think and I think that's that's what
makes for a great show that I can feel proud of.
Its something that entertains you. It has that rat a tat tat fireworks.
That'll just make you have fun watching a show at the end of the day,
but also does ask some some valid questions about the way the world works.
How do you hope the series might impact tech startups and
executives at other companies in Silicon Valley who might see it?
You know, I would of course hope that
people aren't going to try to emulate this behavior, but rather we'll see like,
oh yeah, I can see how this behavior is seductive, but it doesn't end well.
I would also add though, this goes beyond Silicon Valley,
this isn't just about Uber and it's not even just about Silicon Valley,
it's about the whole way our economy works.
If your incentive is only to maximize shareholder value,
if all you have to do is just make it go up into the right and you don't
have to take consideration for how that impacts other
people or how that impacts the larger future.
And no matter what
anybody does, if those are the incentives, if those are the rules of the game,
then all of our biggest companies are gonna keep
doing these things with good intentions that that are harming the world.
And that to me that larger system is,
is the thing that we have to think about trying to change
healthy skepticism there as it pertains to capitalism. I like that response.
Um I've been a big fan of Hit Records for many years.
I remember your first episode on tv back in 2014.
I've always viewed it as the spirit of a joseph sort of, to empower content creators.
This amazing online community,
really underscoring the importance of global collaboration.
It was in many ways a precursor
to the current day influence of things like Tiktok and I'm curious what you suspect
the next generation of content creation might look like.
What are the trends that you see out there. Considering the fact that
you've sort of seen where the puck was going for many years,
I would hope that we're moving away from having to have an
audience of millions and moving more towards where you can have your
community and your audience
and
and have that be meaningful like to give you an example,
like
compare Patreon to Youtube
to get to earn uh,
to earn the money on, on Youtube.
If you had like a million people watch your videos in a month on Youtube,
You'd have to have 500 people on patreon paying you $5 a month,
Same same amount of money, 500 people versus a million people,
those million people don't really care about you very
much because they're watching your videos for free.
And the nature of how YouTube works is it's
sort of this endless stream of like that's how,
you know, that's how the advertising driven platforms work.
Whereas the 500 people who are paying you $5 a month,
they probably really care about you.
If they've taken the time to pull out their credit card
and sign up to your Patreon page and give you $500.
So if you're an artist making art for a million people who
don't care about you versus 500 people who do care about you,
I think you'll make better art and be more yourself
and do something more authentic and meaningful and heartfelt and soulful
For that audience of 500 people who really do care about you.
And I think that's the direction the world is moving.
Whether you're talking about patreon or you
want to talk about like certain web three
Things,
which
we can talk about Web three and I'm not an expert, but there's plenty of
questionable going on in that realm.
But I do think that that the heart of that movement
actually is is quite encouraging towards people having more sincere connections,
maybe at a lower volume,
but at a greater depth because it's not
driven by advertising and instead driven by um
more direct connections and relationships.
Like I said, what an awesome sit down with Joseph Gordon Levitt.
I'm so thankful for his time. Super pumped.
The battle for Uber premieres on February 27 on showtime.
Great to have him on the show.