Joseph Gordon-Levitt: A Fireside Chat
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Hello, acquired LPs. Just me, Ben here.

While David has been out on podcaster paternity leave, I've got an interview that I want to share with you today. Our good friends over at Fika Ventures introduced me to Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a fireside chat that we originally did for their firm's annual meeting. We wanted to give a huge shout out to Ava Ho, John Chen for hooking this up. And because there's plenty of intro in the actual interview, without further ado, let's dive in.

It is really my honor to introduce someone, a creator in the truest sense of the word. Of course, you'll know him from wildly popular films and shows like Inception or 500 Days of Summer. One of my personal favorites, Looper, or his recent Apple TV show that he wrote, directed, and produced, Mr. Corman. Of course, I am talking about Joe Gordon-Levitt. In addition to all of this, Joe is a musician, a gymnast, an entrepreneur, and the co-founder behind the startup

hit record that we will talk about today. He is currently playing Travis Kalanick in a Showtime series called Super Pumped. He took some time out of his busy schedule to be with us here today. So please welcome the Golden Globe nominated Emmy Award winning Joe Gordon-Levitt. Joe, great to be with you.

Hey, so happy to be with you, Ben. Thank you for that introduction. And I've been listening to the Acquired podcast lately, and I'm a fan as well. So thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I figure we dive right in. We were recently chatting and you told me this quote that's really stuck with me, that the creator economy seems to be about this final finished product and not the actual act of creating, which was a little bit of a light bulb for me. So I was wondering, could you share your thoughts on this with the audience today?

Yeah, it's true. It's all about the content, it seems. Whereas for me, what I love the most about getting to be an artist isn't the finished content. It's the creative process itself. Even the movies you just mentioned, like you mentioned Looper.

When Looper came out and people liked it and it did well at the box office and it got good reviews, I won't say that that's not thrilling in its way. But if I'm honest, the things that gave me the most joy and that were the most meaningful to me that I think I'll be remembering when I'm old and gray, it wasn't those things about the finished movie. It was the days on set. It was the making of the thing, the creative process itself. And I feel like...

There's such emphasis right now on the quote unquote creator economy. There's lots and lots of growth. There's lots and lots of businesses starting. There's lots and lots of businesses doing really well. But they're all kind of focused on how do we monetize the content itself, the finished content that these creators are creating.

And coming from my perspective of, oh, but what makes me happy isn't the finished thing. It's the creative process. At HitRecord, we've been really focused on how can we provide that experience, that joy and that meaning that comes from the creative process itself? And how can we build a platform and orient our community towards that creative process?

You bring up this idea that not being from the film industry, I don't totally know, but I imagine 30, 50, 100 days on set, whereas you only have one launch day. I'm wondering what you think it is about the human condition such that we index so hard on when we can show our baby to the world, but not the incredible amount of time and particularly the relationships that are formed along the act of creating.

Well, that's what gets the most attention. We're all focused on getting attention and I think that's natural. That's probably baked into our biology that if more and more people pay attention to us, we're more likely to survive and reproduce, right? I really do think, yeah, we live in a world where as more and more people have access to getting creative, it makes sense that one first instinct would be, okay, well then let's see what all these people are making and let's try to get attention for those finished things.

But the other side of that democratization, when you put incredible creative tools in the hands of so many more people than have ever had them, is they all get to participate in the creative process itself. Like, here's an example. When I grew up, I would play with, you know, my family's camcorder and we would always want to make little movies. I'm talking about being like eight years old or something, making little movies with camcorder. And we always wanted to edit them, but we couldn't.

You just couldn't really edit back then. Editing was something that you had to have equipment that only existed in professional settings. But now you can edit

on a phone. That's a wonderful, as they say, democratization of creative tools. What do we do with that? So do we then democratize the finished things that people have edited? That's cool. That's great. People are doing that. But there's also so much fun in just the editing and the ability of an eight-year-old or a 15-year-old or a 35-year-old to make something

on their own or with their friends and get to finish it and get to use all these creative tools that they never had before? And what is that process?

process and how much joy and meaning can they get from doing that and doing it together with other people. And I think that with more emphasis on the joys of the creative process itself and maybe a bit less emphasis on the finished product, you have a lot more happier, creative people. I think the orientation around the finished content nowadays, it can be sort of anxiety inducing. And I think that's part of why you see a lot of folks that are so focused

kind of addicted to these more kind of attention economy platforms feeling kind of shitty all the time. I don't think it has to be that way. Yeah, you definitely find yourself chasing likes, having very objective metrics to chase, which I think I earlier brought up the human condition. I think this is probably a better place to talk about it a little bit. But before we dive into what drives creators these days and what incentives we've given them and all that, you mentioned HitRecord. What is HitRecord?

So HitRecord's an online community that I started a long, long time ago, and it's full of people who love being creative together. It's been a long journey with HitRecord. It started as a total hobby many years ago. It was something I started with my brother. We launched it as a production company a little over 10 years ago now, and we did well as a production company for a while. We made shows, put out books, produced.

records. We won a couple of Emmys and we're still going with our production company. What we've been focused on a lot lately is how do we build a platform around that production company so that more and more people can have this meaningful and joyful experience of the creative process and doing it together with other people.

I want to understand for those of us not from the industry, what does it mean to be a production company versus a platform? I assume production company means you are involved in handpicking all the people who get to be a part of the project.

Yeah. So what I mean by production company is when we would like make a TV show, we would put out calls to action and post to our site and our app and stuff and say, hey, we're making a TV show. Come and contribute to it. We were very much in charge of that TV show. And I was directing it and our whole team was leading it. And we were incorporating many contributions and collaborations and remixes and stuff that would happen within the community on our site and stuff.

But ultimately, the finished TV show was something my production company was on the hook for to deliver to the network or to the client or whoever we were working with. And so when I say we're now trying to build a platform around that production company, what I mean is we're still doing our production company stuff, but we want to make sure that there's a meaningful, great experience for people who come and enjoy

want to participate and whose contributions aren't necessarily going to make it onto the TV show or into the book, et cetera. And what's an example of what that could look like? Let's say I'm a creative, talented person who shows up on HitRecord and I start communicating with other people on the site and building a discourse and maybe building a little bit of a reputation. How could my talents literally translate to becoming a part of a project? Well, anybody can still start a project.

We start some of the projects and we did build tools to let anybody start projects. What we found is it's obviously, and it makes enough sense, it's really hard. It takes a lot of skill and dedication to start and lead your own project. While we found that leaders and starters of projects was not something that was probably going to scale, people who wanted to participate and contribute to projects really did scale. And we were able to grow those numbers really well.

And so now where we're focusing and we just are launching a new part of our platform that's all around learning. A lot of people, they come and they have that creative urge inside of them

They don't necessarily have the skills, the practice to excel to the point where they're going to be the contribution that gets picked to be on the TV show or whatever. And so we've launched this thing called class projects where you can learn a creative skill by doing and learn it in our hit recordy way where you're not just watching educational content, but you're participating in these class projects where you learn by doing.

And so what's an example of one of these class projects? And how does the instruction work? How does the interaction work? So I've taught two of them so far. I'll give you like one example. I did one about acting. And instead of sitting down and saying like, all right, I'm going to tell you everything I know about acting. It's not an acting class. It's a class project. So the

The one that I've done so far, it's called Voice Acting with Naturalism. And it's all about doing a monologue in a naturalistic way. And so I am just going through my process and saying, here's how I would do a monologue. Here's how I pick the material. Here's how I practice that material. Here's how I finally...

perform it. We break it down into three lessons. Each lesson has a video. At the end of each lesson, you contribute your work in progress. And at the end of the final lesson, you contribute your finished recorded monologue. And you get feedback along the way from TAs on our staff, as well as your fellow classmates. And so it's very participatory and it's very communal.

That's cool. And is the long-term goal that then you're training all these naturally creative people to be able to work on hit record productions at some point? Well, I wouldn't put it exactly that way. We keep doing our production company stuff. And that's, I think, a really inspiring part of our ecosystem that these productions are going on. One thing that I always am really careful about is dangling on realistic carrots. And I...

I think there's a lot of stuff in online and just in our world, in the creator economy, especially it's like here, we're going to be your ticket into being a star. And I really don't like that. I don't think it's honest. I think if you're dangling that carrot, you're

going to disappoint 99.999% of the people listening. And so we really put more emphasis on what I was getting at a second ago, all the joy that can come and all the meaning that can come from just the creative process itself. And I'll give you an example. When you do some community theater,

you're not doing a community theater because you think you're going to win an Oscar. You're doing it because it's fun to do. Or, you know, when you go and you play basketball with your friends at the park, you're not doing it because you think you're going to make it to the NBA. You do it because it's fun to play basketball with your friends at the park. And again, like I said at the beginning, I think there's a lot of emphasis right now on the finished content and how you can become a

a star. And I get it. There's a natural desire for that. But I think we're creating a lot of really disappointed people who have that urge inside of them to be creative and do their thing and put it out there. And then they don't become a star. And then they consider themselves failures. And I think that sucks.

But I don't think it has to be that way. And if we oriented a creative culture and a platform around instead saying, hey, there's so much to be gained for your life, for your mental health, for your happiness, and just for fun by doing art, whether it's acting or music or writing or drawing or photography or whatever it is, and doing it because you love doing it and because it's satisfying to grow as an artist. It's a great way to explore yourself. It's a great way to connect with other people and make

incredibly genuine, intimate friendships when you're collaborating with other people on artistic projects. I mean, it doesn't have to be about making it big. Can you give us maybe a sense, just so we all understand the scale and scope of it, maybe how many people have used HitRecord and what sorts of projects have come out totally organically in the community of people collaborating together?

Well, there's more than a million. We crossed a million last year of registered users. There's new projects going on all the time. Let me see. How do I put that into a number for you? How public are we? I don't know. How much should I say? I think if you look at the kind of scale that we're seeing with online learning, especially, this is a space that's really...

exploding. And I really understand why, especially in times of the pandemic, but I think it was even happening before the pandemic. For example, I'm friends with David Rogier, who's the co-founder and CEO of Masterclass. He actually even invested a little bit of money in HitRecord. He's been a wonderful mentor. And Masterclass is just...

killing it. What we're doing, of course, is different than Masterclass. And we've talked about this with David. They make this incredibly high quality, very premium, high production value educational content. People love watching it.

Ours is less about watching and more about doing. And we don't spend our money on high production value. We've spent more money on a truly interactive user experience, on being able to provide feedback to people's works in progress, etc. It's all geared towards learning by doing.

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Well, transitioning here a little bit, you are the co-founder of a growing technology company and actively a big-name Hollywood actor. And I think we've seen a few startups that celebrities have been involved in where it feels kind of in name only. You're really in the guts here. And I've been really floored in our couple conversations before this of...

you know, how intimately involved in the product you are. I'm personally curious, how are you doing both? How do you manage your time? How do you think about both of these things working together? The first thing to say is,

I'm really full time with HitRecord when I'm not full time on something else. And when I am full time on something else, like you mentioned, I'm shooting a show right now. I'm acting. My co-founder, Jared, and I have been friends for a long time and are really aligned on things. And we talk every day. But he's the one who's all day every day on this like a...

startup founder. I'm sort of a non-traditional startup founder in that way. I think you are right. And I'm very flattered and take great pride in the fact that this isn't kind of by name only. This isn't something I attached myself to later. You know, this is something that I started with my brother years ago as a total hobby. We didn't

think of it as a startup at all. It was just, I mean, I could tell you the whole story, but, you know, it grew organically from a very small place to something slightly bigger. And it's been sort of a slow growth all this time because we were never focused on

rapid growth or anything like that. It's never really been that for me. And I think that honesty, if I could use that word, is part of why the community feels as good as it does. And people who join HitRecord can sense the genuine nature of why the community exists. When you say why the community exists and why it feels as good as it does,

It's been a decade. It hasn't been a hyper growth thing to a million users. It's been sort of a slow build. How do you think that's affected the reasonableness of discourse that happens on the platform?

Well, we have a lot of people, a strong core community of people who deeply care about it, who it's part of their identity as well. They've been with us for a while and they've, you know, been through multiple phases of it and evolution as it's evolved, I guess. And when you have people who genuinely care, then a community will kind of self-heal or self-regulate or self-improve because when trolls come in, those trolls get

kind of received one of our community core values is, damn it, you've got to be kind. And by the way, I should say, you know, community core values is actually something we just put into writing last year because I'm learning more and more about, you know, kind of the conventional wisdom of

tech companies and tech platforms for years. That was just, you know, we were treating each other kindly, but it wasn't something we'd ever codified into, you know, community core values because I never heard that term before.

Do you deputize people in the community so that it self-regulates in that way? Or is there just a critical mass of people who care deeply so that it doesn't become a trolling environment? Both. There are community moderators. There's also community curators, we call them, who have the power to take something that they like and feature it on the front page. And that's a great way to surface stuff that our staff doesn't find. Yeah, so we have those people that we've deputized, like you said, but then there's also plenty of people who

haven't been deputized, but just take it upon themselves to care. Such a gift.

Well, moving to the sort of acting and filmmaking world for a moment, how is it different today when we have the internet and social media and faster than ever news cycles than when you first started your career before all this got going? Well, when I first started my career, I was six years old. I don't think I was aware of any such ramifications.

I think in many ways, things are so much better. Things are getting better all the time. And then there are accompanying downsides that come along with the new advances. The kind of democratization that we were talking about before, I think has huge upsides and people are able to do wonderful creative things, especially kind of more niche things that would never have found an audience before when the channels of distribution were so much more narrow.

And then, of course, the downside of that currently is that the dominant platforms are these kind of mass surveillance advertising machines that I think are creating some unhealthy incentives. And I'm worried about the creative spirit of people today, especially young people today who at the very embryonic stage of any creative idea are already thinking about likes and follows because they're so addicted. And I think that that's...

potentially poisonous and something that we really have to address. So today we have the upside of anybody finding a niche and flourishing creatively and finding an audience. So we don't have as many gatekeepers, but you have the downside of people being very tuned in to exactly how well they're being received immediately. Yeah, right. And those sorts of extrinsic motivations are

I don't think that should be ignored entirely. But I think the pendulum's swung too far that way. And I think any kind of healthy creative process that's going to make the creator happy, you need to find a balance between being intrinsically motivated and really just diving deep into yourself and finding what it is that you and you alone have to say and saying it.

And then on the other hand, yeah, sure, understanding how that's going to be received and speaking in a language that other people can understand. I think both of those things are important, but we're so swung over to the extrinsic side because we've got this, you know, kind of like Skinner-esque, behavioralist buzzer machine in our pocket at all time that buzzes you with pleasure whenever, you know, you get a like.

It's creating some anxious people. And I feel bad about that. And I don't think art should be angst-ridden. I mean, of course, it'll always be to some degree, but...

Art should be a way for people to find peace and happiness and meaning and joy. It shouldn't be like a slot machine where you're gambling your self-worth all the time. Well, it's funny. I can say as a podcaster that releases three-hour episodes on kind of an archaic platform, like podcasts don't have the dopamine hits built in that TikTok or Instagram do. I do find peace in exactly what you're talking about in that...

When we release an episode, no one can listen to all of it for at least three hours. So I'm not going to get any feedback for a while. And even then, it's probably going to be over the next couple of weeks. Realistically, people can't immediately go binge something like that. I can definitely validate what you have sort of postulated there that the less advanced media mechanisms on the Internet actually provide a little bit probably better mental health.

I think podcasts are a wonderful exception in our sort of scattered time. I love the rise of podcasts. I love that people are dedicating a sustained period of time where you can actually go into depth in something.

In addition to being in these unbelievably popular Christopher Nolan movies that I've seen a dozen times, you're also very much an indie filmmaker, and it seems like you do just a lot of passion projects. How has that world of indie production changed?

Now that we have the big tech companies as buyers, as huge distribution channels, in a way that before it seems like you were just hoping to get picked up by the studios. Can you talk a little bit about that and compare and contrast those two worlds?

We're at a, I feel like an awkward growing stage in terms of what's the professional entertainment industry and what's indie. I mean, the word indie is almost antiquated at this point because indie came from a time when we would call something independent. It meant, well, it doesn't exist within the five major studios.

And now we live in a time where the five major studios are all kind of swallowed up by big tech companies. And like you said, it's all about these kind of other streaming platforms. And so what is even indie is, I mean, is indie just someone with a phone making a TikTok video? That's more like indie, I guess, but it,

I don't know. I think the whole paradigm has just changed. I think a lot of us in the traditional professional Hollywood entertainment industry are having to kind of confront like, is there an indie world anymore? And do we want to work for these huge conglomerates? And, you know, as you probably know, like,

IATSE, the main union of the crews right now, are about to potentially go on strike because film crews are getting pushed really hard with not enough resources to try to make stuff at a professional level and such that it's not really fair. The working conditions and hours and stuff that crews are expected to work.

So I don't know where this all exactly leads, but I don't think that where we're currently at is exactly sustainable. And to be really honest, having listened to a couple of your episodes about Web3, it makes me think, uh-huh.

Yeah, we might be like heading, you know, somewhere closer there where artists really are more independent in that they're forming their own relationships with their audiences, both creatively as well as financially, I guess. And maybe that's a good thing. Have you ever created something and just put it on YouTube rather than working through any traditional channels to get it out there?

Oh, yeah. Millions of things. I mean, I put stuff online all the time. I put stuff on HitRecord. I put stuff on YouTube sometimes, but frankly, I don't love the YouTube environment. We've made some cool stuff for YouTube and, in fact, won an Emmy with them last year. So that was nice. Like, as far as my own, like, more, like, kind of little personal things, that's part of, you know,

what hit record is about for me. It's what it was years ago before we were even a company of any kind. It was just a place where I was putting little things that I was making on my own. So,

I have a lot of fun and it's like a good refresher for me sometimes. Just go on HitRecord and see what projects are going on and just do something really fun and easy. Someone will be like, hey, here's a piece of writing. Will someone else read it out loud? And I'll just do that really quick just because it's fun to do something that's not necessarily attached to anything industrious.

Can you share why it's called Hit Record? Oh, yeah, sure. Well, the beginning, this is, you know, in the mid 2000s. I've been an actor ever since I was a little kid. And then I quit acting when I was 19 to go to college, went to college for a couple years, but then wanted to get back into acting and couldn't. No one would cast me in any parts of

And it was really a painful thing. As you might know, if you've ever like talked to someone who's creative at heart, but like not getting their chance to do their thing. At that point, I was like, okay, I have to take responsibility for my own creativity. I can't wait around for someone else to give me a part. I have to be the one to do it. And my little private metaphor for that was, I want to be the one to push the button to hit record. It was just this little kind of motivational thing.

rallying cry for myself. And it was also kind of a play on words that hit record spelled the same way as hit record. And in the past, the media was a consumable object of a record. And in the

The future, the media is going to be just something that we all do, less of an object and more of an action to hit record. And that was my little bit of wordplay. And I started making little things, little videos and short films and songs and stories and stuff. And my brother helped me set up a little website. And so we called it hitrecord.org. And he suggested we put a little message board on there. My brother did. And at first I was like, I don't know if we should. People can be jerks. And he was like, we can take it down if it sucks.

I was like, okay, let's put it on there. It was just this little, you know, PHP message board. And that's where the HitRecord community started was on this message board. And what we saw was that some people were coming to check out the things that I was making, these little songs and stories and stuff. And some people were posting stuff that they were making on their own. But what a lot of people started to do is wanting to make things together. And we thought, oh, that's

That's cool because that's different than has ever been possible in history. Watching someone's video is not that different than watching TV or listening to someone's song is not that different than listening to the radio, but yeah,

one person in the US and another person in the Philippines collaborating to make something together. That's, that's never been possible before. And we thought that was really cool. So we kind of leaned into that. And my brother was a software guy. So he started, you know, sort of he learned PHP, actually, so that he could build little features on top of this message board to help people collaborate. And

And the community slowly started to kind of grow. And we were just doing this for fun in our spare time because we were in our 20s and had shit else to do. And from there, we started seeing this real culture grow.

And I, at the time, you know, I wasn't particularly entrepreneurial as a friend of mine, Jared said, could this be a production company? Could we make all kinds of things this way? And so Jared and I started it as a production company. And yeah, like I told you, we did all kinds of things as a production company. And then we realized like, oh, you know, if our goal is to let as many people as possible experience that experience,

joyful feeling of being creative together and having that experience of the creative process, the production company is not necessarily the best way to do that. We need to build a platform around this production company and

And that's when we started kind of wading into the tech world because we realized like, okay, if we're going to build a platform around our production company, we need a much better website and we need an app. And we never had any of that. And we didn't know. We used to adamantly insist, we are not a tech company. It's not our background. We won't be good at it. But we started learning and

meeting people and getting advice. And after a couple years of getting ourselves acquainted with a lot of these ideas, we ended up raising VC money and able to hire a proper product and technology team. And here we are today launching our subscription service around learning. It's so cool.

There's a thread on the name HitRecord that I don't want to let go because I think it's really insightful. You started it just because you needed some mantra, an outlet to let yourself be creative, like to give yourself permission for that. Here I am on the other side thinking like, well, if Joe feels like...

He needs to give himself permission to be creative. It's like everybody's got a boss in the old world of TVs and movies. It's like, well, you have to get cast and you have to take notes and then you're allowed to be creative on top of that. It's cool to see you finding some way to say, I'm going to go be creative on my own without anybody giving me permission.

Yeah, because ultimately that bosses yourself, right? I hate to sound woo-woo, but we all have these demons in our head that say to us, you don't need to do that. You probably suck. Nobody's going to care. Don't do that. Give up. Let someone else do that. And any artist, whether they're a total beginner or a seasoned pro or anyone in between, is going to wrestle with those demons and has to

perform the act of bravery of overcoming those demons and going forth and doing it. And that's, that is, that's what like, that's that moment where you push the button. And what we have found on HitRecord is that can be a lot easier within a safe and positive and encouraging community. And that's the community that, that we've grown. And I think that's why a lot of people who come to HitRecord feel like they're able to kind of come out of their shells and try things.

in ways that they might not feel elsewhere online that put more of the focus on the finished content and the likes and follows and other extrinsic rewards that come along with it.

Well, let's pop up for a minute and talk a little bit about film and TV industry dynamics. And, you know, you're filming Super Pumped right now. Your most recent project, Mr. Corman, both of those are television shows. And it does feel like we're in this golden age of TV. And I don't know exactly where to start it, maybe with The Sopranos and The Wire, kind of in the HBO era in the early 2000s. But, you know, you have Mad Men, like so many great

It almost feels like that's the safe place for new IP to come forth and for people to try really innovative things these days is in TV and not on film, at least in the most widely distributed box office pictures. And I'm curious if you would agree with that. And if so, how did we get here? Yeah, a lot of what's going on with TV, like

Mr. Corman, for example, I was very much thinking about the indie movies that I loved growing up in the 90s. And those indie movies were so special because they weren't fitting into the creative boxes that were designated by the Hollywood studios.

But the truth is, is those movies also had really small audiences. And, you know, I used to go to an art house cinema and watch those movies here in Los Angeles where I grew up. But most cities in the United States don't have an art house cinema. Most people never got to see Sling Blade and Big Night. And some people saw Reservoir Dogs because Pulp Fiction was so big. But those movies, the mainstream never really got access to them. And I think it's really exciting that

Now that there's the channels of distribution like we talked about are so much wider, there's a desire for these kind of less normal, more specific things.

kinds of content. That's a really beautiful thing. And I also understand that people might not want to go watch those things in the cinema because the cinema is expensive for, you know, having to pay to park and then pay for the movie tickets and then pay for overpriced popcorn and soda. Like, you know, a trip to the movies for someone with a middle income in the United States is an expensive thing. So I can understand why people...

want to see a big expensive movie if they're going to go to the cinema. And if they want to watch something that's more down to earth, they want to watch it at home. That trend, I'm sure, will continue. I mean, I'm a lover of the cinema and I kind of hate that I'm saying this, but I also think it's probably true that cinema is going to become less and less of a prominent thing in our

our culture, the same thing happened to theater in the whatever, a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, everyone would go to vaudeville theaters throughout the land, you know, or they, they would go to lecture halls and hear oratory and things like that. And for cinema and then radio and then television kind of changed all that. And there were upsides and downsides and that's just the inevitable thing

evolution of technology and how technology impacts our culture. And I think it's up to us and every generation to look at, okay, well, the new technology is this.

Now, how can we make that a good thing instead of a bad thing? There are plenty of ways that it could have a negative impact on our culture. I think we're seeing that in our day right now, that a lot of the new kind of media technology is having really questionable impacts on our world and our culture. And we shouldn't just kind of throw up our hands and say, well, that's the tech. Like, I don't think it's that. I don't think digital technology necessitates technology.

a shortening of attention span and a rise in tribalism and authoritarianism. It's a question of how we use that technology. You touched on something there about the theater going away. I've thought about this a lot, and I am completely from the outside. So I'm curious if you would sort of agree with this take that

It's not that it'll go away in the same way that the theater didn't go away, but it is true that the only thing that I've seen in the theater in the last three years has been Hamilton. So, you know, I'm clearly doing that less than I would have 100 years ago. Do you think the place for the cinema just becomes...

Like, well, that's where I go see the Star Wars movie and the Bond movie and the thing that costs over two to three hundred million dollars to make so they can invest in the production and distribution that they know is going to hit. So I go one, two, three, four times a year. But all the innovation and experimentation is on streaming platforms where there's sort of infinite shelf space, as they say.

I would imagine that the culture of cinema, yeah, is going to look more and more like the culture of theater today. And there is experimentation and innovation in theater. It's just a limited number of people who ever experienced that. I also hope and think that there's going to be

Hopefully once we get past this pandemic, let's hope that that happens one day. I do think that there must be innovations ahead of us in what it means to all gather on a Saturday night and experience storytelling. I'm certain that that's coming. It's not something that I've put a lot of focus on in the last number of years.

It's something we actually did earlier in HitRecord. We used to have these live events that were really fun where we would gather people into a theater and we would play stuff on the big screen that our community was making. But then we would also make new stuff with the people that were there in the audience and bring them up on stage and have them do readings or dance or things like that. And yeah,

what we were making that night into then what the community was all making online throughout the world. And I feel like that's coming probably. It probably has more to do though with, you know, Fortnite than it does hit record, you know, and it probably has to do with Augusta

augmented or mixed reality or whatever you call it, I mean, etc. So I feel like what's so fun about the cinema is you're leaving your house and you're going somewhere where there are other people and you're going into a crowd into a social setting. And you're all experiencing a story together.

I don't think that's going to die. That's probably something very basic that humans are going to want to keep doing somehow. And it's going to be really interesting to see over the next couple of decades, what are the innovations where that keeps happening? Because yeah, I don't think it's going to keep being the same movie going experience that we've seen for the last hundred years. Yeah, no way. Or it just won't survive, at least in mass scale.

So you're talking to a startup audience here. You are currently playing one of the most infamous startup founders of the last 20 years. I know you're just shooting right now, and I know there's no marketing or anything around Super Pumped, but could you share maybe just any fun vignettes from what it's been like on set playing Travis Kalanick? Yeah, sure. Well, it's been funny playing Travis because...

I have over the last three-ish years waded into Silicon Valley and done a lot of learning myself because of HitRecord. I mean, you're a VC-backed founder. Yeah, exactly. And if you had said to me in 2014, oh, I heard you raised a Series A from a VC in Silicon Valley or Sand Hill Road or something, I'd be like, I don't know what any of those words mean. But I have learned what those words mean. And so it does provide a certain amount of insight in...

playing Travis. Actually, just this week, we were shooting a fundraising montage. You know what a montage is? It's where music comes in and you're no longer hearing the actors speaking because the music is playing over it and it's usually like a passage of time or something.

It's usually someone like getting better at something or something like that in a Hollywood montage. So there's a montage sequence where Travis and Emil are fundraising. I had been in those rooms. I had pitched to VCs and done fundraising. And so because it's a montage, we're improvising. There aren't scripted lines for us to say because it's just a montage. So the actor and I are having to kind of just improvise and make shit up to say during these montage scenes that,

I started spitting Silicon Valley speak. I started talking about, you know, customer acquisition costs and lifetime value and churn and things like that. And the other actor, after the yellow cut, the actor goes, he turns to me, he's like, how the fuck do you know these words? Did you do like a lot of research to play Travis Kalanick? I was like, no, actually, this is...

This comes from HitRecord. This comes from actually pitching VCs. So yeah, it's been helpful. That's awesome. I can't wait to see how it translates to the screen. It'll be so fun to see how you sort of bring that character alive. Really looking forward to it.

Joe, thank you so much for doing this. Any parting words for the audience here? Anything you want to point folks towards? I just want to say thank you. I'm delighted to be invited. Thank you to Eva also for inviting me today. And thanks to you, Ben. I really appreciate you doing this. I've found the Silicon Valley community. I know we're in LA, but the tech community really warm and welcoming and openhearted.

open to teaching the likes of me, who's someone that's like, you know, eager to learn, but doesn't have a background in this stuff. I've had so many wonderful, enlightening conversations and found really generous people that are willing to share their time and knowledge. And I'm really grateful for that. So thank you for inviting me here and for having this conversation with me. Thank you.