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

This conversation is framed as the closing of a loop the hosts opened in May 2019, when Acquired published its Uber episode on the very day of the company's IPO — "only 2½ years ago," as David Rosenthal notes, though it "feels like another lifetime ago." The occasion is the premiere of Super Pumped, the Showtime series dramatizing Uber's rise and implosion, which Ben Gilbert dates to February 27. Both hosts return to a mood of disbelief that the venture and startup world they cover has become entertainment: Ben calls it "a little bit surreal," and David adds that it is "even more surreal that this is made by Brian Koppelman and Joe Gordon-Levitt."

The guests split the making of the show neatly in two. Brian Koppelman is "one of the three executive producers, writers, and show runners for Super Pumped," with a resume Ben Gilbert ticks through — Billions, and Rounders, which he calls his all-time favorite poker movie, watched "about a hundred times" while playing Texas Hold'em in high school and college. Joseph Gordon-Levitt "stars in Super Pumped playing Travis Kalanick or TK," with a filmography spanning Inception, Looper and the recent Mr. Korman — and, unusually for a Hollywood guest, he is himself a founder, of the company HITRECORD, previously discussed on Acquired's LP Show.

A revealing early exchange: both guests are listeners, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt credits Acquired's Ethereum episode with genuinely changing his mind. Before it, he says, "I was only aware of the hype and the scams," while now he is "coming quite strongly around to seeing how important it is for the future" — while cautioning he is "still really just early in learning about it." He jokes about being recognized "by Web 3.0 nerds" at events like EthCon, and David Rosenthal answers with the crypto-native in-joke, "We are all early."

Asked how the two met, Koppelman reveals an odd prehistory: a single day he spent as a day-player actor on Premium Rush, sharing a makeup trailer with Gordon-Levitt, mentioning a mutual friend (director Rian Johnson, rendered "Ryan Johnson" in the transcript) and deliberately not identifying himself as a filmmaker. The actual pairing on Super Pumped ran through agents. Koppelman and his lifelong creative partner David Levine (with Beth Schacter as fellow showrunner) wrote the pilot and sent it to their agents; Koppelman says it is rare in his career that he can "tangibly point to things that agents have done that were really incredibly just clearly positive" — this became one.

The mechanics are unusually fast. The agents flagged Gordon-Levitt as the first choice; Warren Zavala, the agent who has represented him for roughly two decades, "read the script on a Friday and sent it to Joe on Saturday in New Zealand," and by Sunday the three principals had a phone call that ended in a virtual handshake — "We were partners going to make the show together." Everyone at the table agrees on the rarity: asked how often this happens, the answers are "not often at all" and "Very rarely." Gordon-Levitt adds the backstory that he was Zavala's first client, signed when Gordon-Levitt had quit acting for college, and that Zavala's unusually strong endorsement — "I think you're really going to like this" — carried weight precisely because he "very rarely uses words that strong," knowing his client "hate[s] almost everything."

Koppelman explains the casting problem in craft terms: it is "really challenging to find actors who can project the kind of intelligence that Joe can project," because the role required an actor who demonstrably "does the work" — the reading, the homework, the research — and who arrives on set "having mastered the scene, and is then willing to play." The character brief is specific: Travis had to be someone an audience would believe "could enlist all these people in his world-changing vision," while also being an actor unafraid to play someone self-protective "at every turn," willing to do "unsavory or wrong, morally questionable" things, and "willing to look somebody in the eye and yell at them because they weren't super pumped." Finding that combination left "a very short list" — a scarcity Koppelman compares to a Silicon Valley founder getting exactly the angels they want on a Series A.

The outcome compounded across the ensemble: Gordon-Levitt, Kyle Chandler and Uma Thurman were all first choices, and Kerry Bishé "the only person who gave her all of Austin." Koppelman argues the casting cascade was partly causal — once Gordon-Levitt signed, other actors wanted in — because, in his framing, this is "a really important story to tell about America at this time."