The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Super Pumped' Episode 2 Recap

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Chris and Joanna share their initial thoughts on the Showtime series 'Super Pumped' and compare its writing, acting, and production style to other shows and movies that focus on tech-based or corporate themes. They use these observations as a springboard for their analysis of Episode 2, which sees Uber growing exponentially with Bill Gurley's funding, attempting to crush competitors through Travis Kalanick's megalomania, and throwing a wildly expensive Las Vegas party for its employees. Hosts: Chris Ryan and Joanna Robinson Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The watch is the latest and the greatest in pop culture from best friends Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. Join them as they discuss TV, movies, music, and much more. Check out the watch on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue.

Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You're talking to me. Kayak, got that right. Good sleep is everything. That's why Ali's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-Dien for both kiddos and grown-ups.

So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. You're racing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Ollie's sleep solutions for the whole family at Ali.com. That's OLLLY.com. Hello and welcome to the Ringer Prestige TV podcast. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the Ringer.com. I'm joined today by Joanna Robinson.

Joanna, hello again. Hi, Chris. Remember how we started this week with Euphoria? And here we are on a, well, this is going to be dropping on an early Monday morning. That's right. We end of a long week of Prestige TV. There's a lot going on. We're running the gamut of human emotions from high school, drug addled, first loves,

to super tech companies changing the market. We're talking about Super Pump, the show on Showtime from David Levine and Brian Copleman, who brought us billions, who brought us Rounders. This is the second episode of Super Pumpt Battle for Uber. As folks may have heard last week, Bill and Mal did a recap of the first episodes.

So Joanna and I are going to talk about the second episode, and we'll give our general thoughts on the show itself because I haven't really had a chance to share my feelings on The Watch podcast, which is a pod I do with Andy Greenwald. A lot of stuff happening on the prestige TV pod right now, though. We've got, as Joanna mentioned, Euphoria, if you want to catch up with that. We've got Super Pumped, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the dropout.

Everything's happening all the time on the prestige TV pod. But Joanna, like, I thought we could start here. In the constellation of current television, where would you say Super Pump is kind of slotted for you? Is it a must watch? Is it a I'm glad it's on? Is it? But where are you at with this? Kind of a curiosity at the moment.

I'm really curious to see where it goes and how it lands. I'm not as fluent in the Billions verse the Coppel manias as some other people at the ringer. But it's a great premise. I'm from the Bay Area. So I am like marinating in this tech bro world at all times. And it's fun to see some of the things. This is what Mal said when she and Bill talked about. It's fun to see some of these things that you lived through.

Yeah. When you watch an American crime story, something like that and it's OJ, you're like, yeah, I lived through that. But I was a kid. But this is such recent history. And I knew people who. worked at Uber and all sort of stuff. So curiosity is where I would put it. How about you? That's a really good way to start this conversation. I enjoy it because I am a coppel maniac, I guess. I don't know what the David Levine version of that is, but I find that their kind of signature banter is like the

floor of that is pretty entertaining for me. But I was chatting with a friend of mine who like you had some friends who worked worked at Uber at the time. And he was expressing, I think a little bit of disappointment in the show specifically because I think he was like, it's not that this is a more nuanced tale and that there was a lot of redemption to be found at Uber. He wasn't really saying that as much as he was just like, it's just a lot more complicated. And it was a lot more in these characters and these people, it was a lot more dense and a lot more nuanced than maybe it's being depicted. Now, this was like an early review of the show.

Like, what did you just watch the first episode? But in the second episode, I feel like the tone is fairly similar to the first. And I think I personally find it very entertaining, but also come out of it wondering whether I just ate like an entire box of dessert. You know what I mean? I'm not sure what kind of health benefits this show has for me. Not that every TV show has to have health benefits,

but this is, there is a little bit of like, everybody's walking around. Everybody kind of talks the same, you know, like every scene sort of repeats the same sort of like baked in challenge of everybody says we can't do something,

but we can do it. We just need money. Yeah. And I think that that's like pretty, entertaining as far as TV goes, but I do think that it has some limitation. Yeah, I mean, if we're talking about dessert television, we should be honest with the audience and let them know that you're currently wearing John Malkovich's red track suit from the rounders and eating Oreos, right? That's right. And I can splash the pot whenever the fuck I want. Yeah, that's true. Not

everything needs to be vegetables, but I think with something like this when it's based on true story, it's good to have some vegetables in with your like umami fats and cheeses or whatever because and that's when I circle back to American crime story which is maybe an unfair comparison except this is going to be an anthology show they're wanting to do this as they're not calling an American tech story but it essentially is you know they're doing Facebook next they want to do a different sort of company and CEO and relationship each season and so when you and when you asked about the TV constellation I thought you were going to ask me about all these shows we're seeing around. right now about like Silicon Valley grifters or grifters schemers in general. And, you know, I just got done talking about the dropout on this feed. There's a lot of things to closely compare it to. And so when you compare it to those other things, I think I do miss the vegetables a little bit with with the excess. But certainly you could not accuse the show of not trying to sort of hype you up with something very dazzling and entertaining at any given moment. Can we, talk about the Quentin Tarantino.

Yes. So episode two continues the same sort of structure that episode one had, which is, I would say on one hand, it is a very traditional showtime drama, like somewhat looks like a soundstage for really good actors delivering their lines, pretty basic coverage, pretty basic, you know, straightforward, straight ahead filmmaking. And then on the other hand, every five minutes or so, they indulge in like a flourish. Now those flourishes can be anything from animation. to fourth wall breaking direct to camera address to, as Joanna is referencing, a voice of God, I guess, a narrator that comes in from time to time voiced by none other than Quentin Tarantino, which is honestly, I didn't think I still had the capacity to be surprised by popular culture,

but I was like sincerely shocked by this. Your monocle popped off. I know. You dropped your Oreos. Like, what are you going to do? Could you tell it was Quentin right away? I stopped. And I was like, that sounds a lot like Quentin.

And that's weird that that would be the direction they gave whoever this actor is doing the voiceover. And also, who is this person? Like, is this person the narrator of the book? Right. Or something, like, what are they, what is the purpose of this? And then it just occurred to me, I think as soon as he said, motherfucker, I was like, that's Quentin Tarantino. I was late to it because I assumed it must be some character that we hadn't met yet, because, you know, that that would definitely be a POV we'd be interested in. But it wasn't until, I think he said something about like in my business, I think it's talking about Michael Ovitz or something like that. And he's like in my business. And I was like, the business of how, Quentin? Is it Quentin's here?

Yeah. It's wild. And I mean, I, I like a firm voiceover. You and I just talked about this with the Batman. I enjoy a strong narrative hand. This is a surprising one. And it is definitely, I mean, you'll have to tell me as someone who's more familiar with this world. My understanding is that Tarantino is here because he's a Billions fan. Like he's a fan of the kinds of shows that these guys you. Does a freewheeling, hard swearing Quentin Tarantino feel in line with what you expect to see from a show from these guys? Yeah. I mean, I think that it's consistent with the sort of house voice of Coppulman Levine stuff. So going back to Rounders through like, you know, Wonderboys through Run a Runner Runner, which I think was obviously like a tough production, but then through their TV

work with Billions and now super pumped. These are guys who I think have like a real mastery of the pumped up guy, but like it's not masculinity. It's masculinity shot through the prism of like high finance or technology or gambling and like that's people who are applying this sort of like maybe abundance of testosterone into the world of of money, into the world of power, into the world of greed. So it's very much of a piece of their other work. And, you know, if nobody, if you had never seen a compliment and Levine thing before, I would say, say that once upon a time, Alec Baldwin gave a very long monologue

and Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, and nothing was the same. And there is even a reference in this episode to the always be closing element of that speech. Travis Kalanick, the head of Uber played by Joseph Gordon-Levin, says always be hustling, but he even starts like,

A, always be, B, just like Alec Baldwin. So I feel like that's the, the er text for these guys. Are you saying Yeagerbombs are for closers? Yes. We can talk a little bit about this episode itself as an entree into talking about some of the parts of the show that we find interesting or flawed. But we essentially established Uber is disrupting the transportation space, the taxi space, fueled largely by the funding of Bill Gurley, who's played by Kyle Chandler, who is resplendent in this episode,

whether he's wearing a tucked-in polo shirt or a just gorgeous Pixies T-shirt, which we'll get to in a bit. And drunk on this money, Uber is spend, spend spending. They are breaking the law. They are trying to crush any kind of oversight that they meet and crush their competition and celebrating all along the way. The episode is named X to the X, which is the name of a party that they throw in Las Vegas towards the end of this episode, which costs, I believe, $25 million to fix all the damage that they do to Las Vegas, which is really saying a lot about Las Vegas.

Yeah. Let's talk about Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who obviously is. is carrying the most water in the show as playing Travis Kalanick. And you and I had chatted a little bit when we first watched the first episode about whether or not someone who seemed as inherently decent and nice as Joseph Gordon Levitt does in his public life can pull off playing someone who, as written, is such a prick. What did you think after watching the second episode about his performance?

I'm all for JGL flexing himself in different directions, as he has, you know, in the past a couple times, but I'm almost wondering if they're trying to use the inherent like ability of a JGL to pace over the fact that they haven't bothered to give this character any human motivation that I can glom onto. Do you know what he mean? And so as it is, he shows up behaving badly and he keeps behaving badly and that's what he, that's just what he does. And I don't mind a story about people behaving badly. You know, I ate up Wolf of Wall Street, etc. But there's still something so human about Leo in that movie.

So like a little boyish about him, even as he's playing, you know, this monster. And I think usually when we watch one of these fall from grace stories, we start in a place that feels more relatively human. And I think the dropout is a really good example. That show spends like three episodes,

sort of putting you in the pocket of Amanda Seifred before things get really bizarre over there, you know? And so to see no effort there, I was wondering if maybe they were leaning on the casting to get that done. What do you think? I'm really of two minds when it comes to killing Batman's parents. I don't know that it has to happen. We've obviously got Batman on the brain. But I think it's really useful to have a couple of different shows on at the same time that all seem to be drawing from familiar or like similar source material. So the way that the dropout is sort of trying to illustrate the character of Elizabeth Holmes is by showing. step by step like, look, this is what happened to her father. This is how it made her feel. This is what

motivated her to do X, Y, or Z thing. Travis Kalanick, as depicted by Super Pump, kind of comes fully formed as a dickhead. You know what I mean? He's just like comes flying out of the gates and he's just like, I want to crush everything. I don't care who I screw over to do it. I want to be considered like a Bezos or Larry Ellison or the Google founder. I'm looking to be a king. I'm looking to be Elon Musk. I'm not looking to be just another guy who had a cool idea and then faded away. And there is something interesting about that. I don't always need there to be an original wound that sets somebody down the path that they're going. But I think that this show feints towards, like, you know, because he's got this relationship in the show with his mother played by Elizabeth

Shoe. There's some stuff going on with his brother, who's a police officer. And they seem to have like a competitive relationship and he can never really get the acknowledgement that he seems to seek from his brother. So there's some stuff there that's like, oh, family is motivating him. But I think it's really just a guy who's decided that, you know, he wants to be a king of the world and he doesn't care on who he steps on to get there. I think that JGL is playing it very broadly and in a cool way. It has theater kid energy in a way that I think is very appealing to watch like throughout the episode. I did something I've never really done before, which is I watched a couple of Travis Callanick speeches on YouTube,

some presentations you made like at Y Combinator and stuff like that. I'm sure he has his moments and like every scene that he's sort of addressing his staff. He's always like, we're going to do this and we're going to do that because we're this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you watch his speeches, they're different than that. Like there's a little bit of self-effacement. There's a little bit of him talking through being a little nervous standing on stage. These speeches may have come a little earlier in Uber's run.

so maybe he hadn't become the dark prince of that based ride sharing. But I kind of was like, I wanted to see that, Travis. Yeah. You know, I kind of wanted to see like a little more of like a fully formed human being rather than this rock star that he is being depicted as. Like another flavor in the soup, you know, I completely agree. I sort of put this question to you. When Bill was trying to sort of like re-dream cast this, he was looking at like early Damon,

rounders, early Decaprio, something like that. And I think you have a really good idea. But I was, I started thinking about this. And I was like, I think sort of what this show is kind of trying to do by putting a George of Gordon Levin in this role is similar to what promising young women did with, with like every nice guy in Hollywood. Yeah. Showing up to be a monster.

And I was trying to think of some of those guys. Like a Max Greenfield might be too small, but maybe like a Bo Burnham or something like that might be really interesting to see in this role. I'm not writing JGL a lot. Like, you know, we've got some more episodes to go, you know. Yeah. And he's got like a physicality that I think is really cool for this, for this part, especially because there aren't going to be a lot of set pieces.

There's no car chases. It's going to have to be somebody making moral compromises to get what they want in rooms with other people. And this most significant one that he makes in this episode is activating a program called Grayball, which is narrated by Quentin quite vividly. but it's essentially a way for Uber to block governmental oversight, like people who work in departments of transportation, anybody who might be sort of trying to stop Uber's rise, they can identify these people using metadata from their Uber account and stop them from being able to

hill a ride. And the reason it's so transgressive is that they're mining this metadata in a way that feels that if the average Uber user new would feel extremely invasive. Right. And, you know, Bill was talking about this a little bit, like in the earliest days of ride sharing, when you're, I remember where I was the first, I was in L.A. And one of my coworkers was like, oh, let's just call an Uber. And I'm like, call a what now? What are you talking about?

You know, and they showed me out to download the app on my phone, et cetera. But you were still wary. This is before, I think, you know, just a little bit before we were like, terms of service, what? I don't read those. You know, and we're like, do we want to put our card and our identity on this thing? And this episode shows us that from early on, Uber is playing fast and loose with some privacy in all of this. It's funny now because I was recently in Portland, Oregon. And I realized that I had like an app for various ride sharing companies.

I also had apps that I had to download because to park in Portland, you pay through an app. But there's two different services. So you have to have like now like everybody knows where I park. Everybody knows how I got there and what car I'm using. I was realizing how Uber in 2012 or whatever felt like a novelty. I couldn't believe I didn't have to negotiate parking and dropping off my car in L.A. And Uber really did actually change my life in Los Angeles pretty significantly. But it's really funny how now we've gotten so far the other way that I'm like,

I literally have an app for every single thing that used to just be like put a quarter in a meter and then come back 20 minutes later and put another quarter in a meter. Like that's it. Why do we have to have my personal information exchanged for a parking space? When's the last time I touched a coin? I couldn't tell you. But like the, you know, not to get too political about it, but it reminds me of like the conversations we were having about the vaccine and all these people saying like, oh, I don't want the government to put a chip in me via vaccine. That's not what happens, you know, for the record. And all the other people responding, you have it in your pocket at all times. At all times, everyone knows where you are, which is not

really what the show is about. But it, but it was like a nice chilling, demonstration of that in the gray ball sequence in this episode. So let me ask you a broad question then. What is the show about? And does a show like this need to be about anything other than a dramatized reportage of events that are covered in Mike Isaac's book? But that is essentially just like cool scenes of people yelling each other in conference rooms.

Before we get on to this, I'll just say that my dream recasting of Kalanick would be Miles Teller. Not only do I think they bear a physical resemblance. And I am big Miles Teller fan. I just do feel like maybe he would have a little bit more of a facility with just being a grubberowism. A very corruptible person, I guess. Let's put it that way. Like he just seems like the kind of guy who could put on a V-neck sweater and scream at a bunch of people for 45 minutes.

And JGL can do that. But it sometimes stretches disbelief. Whereas Miles Teller, I've been like, I'm right here with you, man. I get it. Yeah, I think he's got a perfect, that perfect smarm. So this idea of what this show is about or needs to be about, I don't think it needs to be about anything. I do want it to have a little bit more to say than this is this bonkers thing that happened at this company that we all used or used its competitor at some point. Because when you get to, you know, we'll get to some of the party stuff.

but because there have been so many versions of this story, what I want is either an analysis of a human, how does a human get to this point where they've made so many moral compromises that they're willing to do all the things that Travis eventually does? Or what does it mean for us as we live in a society? Chris, I don't know if you knew that, but we live in a society.

What does it mean for us to elevate people like this to levels of goddom? because, you know, they run these tech companies. You know, like, so what does it say about us or what does it say about this person or these people? If it's just telling me, like, the Wikipedia article, but in a fun way with Quentin's here and there's some needle drops, that's absolutely fun, fine Sunday night showtime programming. Absolutely. But especially when we have so many other shows that are so similar to it right now, if I had to choose for me what the dropout is doing.

And I think even it hasn't premiered yet, but what We Crash the WeWork show is doing has a little bit more to say than this show does. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is where it turns into really a matter of taste. And if your taste does run towards Bill Gurley's wife referencing Phil Jackson's three Pete NBA championship with Michael Jordan, which is made in a lab to appeal to a very specific kind of ringer staff writer, they're like, yeah, like you're probably on board. I wonder what this show will feel like in totality. So it's not a very long run. I believe it's just, is it six episodes or eight? Seven.

Seven. Seven episode. A weird seven season. A seven episode run. And I think things are just going to increasingly get more and more hairy. We haven't even gotten Uma Thurman as Ariana Huffington, which I think could be a welcome gear change to the show itself. I also just can't.

I just want more Kyle Chandler in this show. I feel like I've just been teased with Kyle Chandler for the last couple of years and I just want like a really nice, meaty part for him. He was supposed to be in a show a couple of years. ago that I think was like... The Pope show? The Pope show. Yeah.

Yeah, he was like a show that never came on, but it was like, it was built around him. And I don't know if it was like about the Vatican election, like the election of a pope or how the Vatican is run. Yeah. But it was like this show is going to be about Kyle, like Kyle Chandler's character. And I just feel like I'd love to see Kyle Chandler like carry a show. It's been a while. Yeah.

I mean, after Friend of Lights, he did those string of movies where he was just like a guy behind a desk, like shouting sometimes, you know, and, like, you get your occasional super eight. But, like, he did a series of shows where he was, like, an FBI agent or a bureaucrat of some kind. And it's just sort of like, I don't think you're using, you're playing all the notes on the Kyle Chandler piano that are available to you. This is really fun what he's doing here, because this is a Texas fried billionaire. And so, like, you get, you get the Texas twang. You get to feel your, like, Dylan Panthers nostalgia as you're, as you're watching him talk. But, like, I mean, that move with the Pixies, too.

shirt. I had to slack you in all caps, essentially. It was incredible. Do you get the feeling like Kyle Chandler maybe doesn't have a wardrobe for this show? He just shows up. Yeah. But the old Harrison Ford, I just wore this t-shirt to set move. Yeah. I hope so. I hope that's Kyle Chandler's real pixies t-shirt. So we've referred to this a couple of times. There is a scene in that second episode where Bill Gurley, played by Kyle Chandler, summons Travis Kalinek to a private airport or an airport where there's a lot of private jets to have, like, what is easily a conversation they could have over text message or phone. And this is one of the phenomenons of current television where you just know based on the last two years of being inside and spending most of your time on Zoom or text

or whatever that like we really don't need to meet anyone at the airport to have a five-minute conversation anymore. But that would be bad TV. So I'm glad that Koppelman and Levine are pushing on with the time on our tradition of I need you to come by this random but cinematic place to have a quick chat. Is it a flex? Is it a power move to meet at the airport? I think he's trying to be like, if you do what I say, you can have a private jet. How cool would that be? And Travis Kalanick is like, actually it wouldn't be nearly as cool as you think I think it would be. I actually want the whole hanger or the whole airport. I want to be a god. And I think Gurley trying to put Travis in a box is the central dramatic tension of the show going forward

and whether or not Travis will allow himself to be limited by anyone's else's imagination but his own. There are a couple of good peripheral performances that I thought we could discuss and some of which I think you see people doing the most they can with what they're given. And some, I think it's people who are kind of like, I would love to get like five more minutes or a slightly more nuanced or deeper depiction of this character. We can start whichever one you want. I thought we could talk about Carrie Bichet, who's like a fantastic actress and plays Austin Gite, who is a real person and is, was one of Travis's lieutenants at Uber. And Carrie is essentially, for most of this, of this show so far, has been carrying around a lot of exposition.

like she goes to the town where they are trying to roll out Uber and calls Travis Kalanick from the street corner and says, TK, we got to do this, but we can't, you know, and explain. The drivers are revolting. Yeah, the drivers, we got to make them whole. Yeah. But underneath of that, there is a person battling addiction. Actually, if you go to Austin's actual Twitter bio, she says, I'm, I think, believe, 16 years sober, 21 years sober. So the sobriety of this character is obviously a central thing.

but for the most part so far that's been pretty only lightly addressed right? Yeah, it's, you know, the fact that they dedicated a chunk of this episode to her sobriety, especially maybe in contrast to the excess of the party

that is thrown in Vegas by the end of the episode, I think beyond what she does on the street, I think the key role she's playing in this show is actually humanizing Travis because it's someone that he actually seems to care about

other than himself. and that's not really true of his girlfriends or I would argue probably even of his family. And so what's surprising to me in all of that is that, you know, I then, this is what I would call a Wikipedia show where I just get curious and start Googling names to find out if they're real people and read up about them and stuff like that. And Austin, I mean, maybe we'll get her backstory at some point. But it's really fascinating to me. She started at, she's like the number four employee at Uber, like the fourth person hired, technically an intern. and within like a couple years was a VP of, you know, and ringing the bell of the stock exchange,

interviewed in Fortune magazine, all this sort of stuff. That's a fascinating story that the show does not seem interested in telling us, or at least not yet. And I'm curious why they would leave something like that on the table. Again, I haven't watched past episode two, so maybe they're going to get into it. But Carrie Bichet, who's just incredible, you know, we're, I assume you're a Halton Catch Fire fan.

Like, you know, I hope there is a lot more for her to do than what she's done so far. But I am curious, like, if you were putting together a biopic, which is not quite what this is, but a biopic series, and you ran across some of these juicy biographical details, would you, Chris, like, be able to leave that on the table and to say, we're just going to start here. We're starting in the middle.

Or do you want to start with, this is already a thing? People are starting to use it. They're starting to expand out of San Francisco. Everybody kind of knows, like Uber is becoming a verb. this point or like shortly after. And you're starting to also hear stories about Uber's excess and the amount of money that these technology companies seem to be burning through largely from venture capital. It's like in some ways that there's a weary TV watcher part of me that is happy to be starting in the middle. In other ways, I think even in the middle, they're skipping a couple of steps.

So my example would be the character of Emil who's played really wonderfully by Bob Act Tofti, who I don't know if you have you seen him in other stuff? No, and he's like my favorite part of the show after Kyle Taylor in a pixies t-shirt. Yeah, I mean, he, so he's, he's, he's the kind of emissary for Bill Gurley, who's inserted into the hierarchy of Uber and is ostensibly there to maybe report back to Bill about like what's going on. And seems to have like a road to Damascus moment where he just decides he's a full

Travis Call on a convert, which is not really shown, I don't think, where he just, I mean, like he is kind of confronted by Travis or whatever, but his. overall like kind of like conversion to i just think Travis is the smartest guy i've ever seen and i'm going to break the law in his name and go against bill girly for him is a little bit like mystifying it's not really depicted in the traditional hollywood kind of like here's the what like here's the guy's thought process yeah so there's part of me that's like i'm glad i don't have to watch a scene i've probably seen in 50 other movies and tv shows yeah on the other hand it is kind of mystifying when this guy is like let's just activate gray ball and screw bill girlie over a

a little bit. You can tell me whether or not this isn't the case on billions, but like, that's what sucks some of the stakes out of this for me. Again, there's so much, there's bonkers things that have already happened that will happen. There's a, you know, Gonzo montage of Vegas, all the sort of stuff. So I feel like I should feel tense and, and like that the stakes couldn't be higher, the moral stakes or the financial stakes. But since the money means nothing to them, really, and then I'm not really having access to the weight of these decisions, it really feels like a fuck it for a lot of these guys. Then, you know, I think my only tense question is, how soon will Bill Gurley figure out

that he's back to lose her and get out of there? You know what I mean? Like, right. I would say before episode seven, probably happen. When will Jessica Hecht make him some espresso and say, like, we got to get out of here, Bill, you know, so. So it'll be like, you know, when Steve Kerr took over the Warriors, this is what happened Dream Girl, right? Like with the espresso and the stats. So I think that's what I'm unthirsting for. And, you know, my understanding from folks who love billions is that, you know, as wild

or morally bankrupt as some of these characters can be, they are characters with, you know, heart and human motivations that people can understand. Or kinks or perversities or frailties or vulnerabilities, which I think is. Shout out to Giammati. Got you. Yeah, right. And I think for so far, like, like what we're really seeing with Travis is just like he's very ambitious and that ambition

applies to his love life as well as his professional life as well as the his family life. So I guess that's interesting. I mean, I find it like watchable. I don't know how compelling it is. You mentioned the party that takes up the rest of the episode or sort of like the bulk of the the second half of the episode. It's the X to the X party in Vegas, which starts out with the best intentions with a list of things that Uber employees are asked not to do, none of which are followed.

And this is one of those like one of those things that happens. a biopic or a bioseries that you're like, surely this is exaggerated. And then you Google it and you're like, oh no, it's word for word. Oh, no. Yeah. So Travis views his employees as like super soldiers and feels that they need to get like super soldier level rest and relaxation as I'm sure he enjoys indulging in it too. Yeah. So they go to Vegas and have this blowout party. And there's a couple of interesting elements like the press are starting to snoop around Uber a little bit. And Travis hires a pretty powerful two-headed comms team. What's the nickname for these two women? I don't remember, but I love that Bill Gurley calls them the nannies. He's like,

you hired nannies. They call them uberettos. Is that what they call the team? So basically, this goes about as poorly as you could possibly imagine the episode more or less ends with Travis and Emile and Bill kind of going through a line item of the party. And it's just like, it's just more red ink to these guys. Like they're just like, whatever, we'll just write it down. We'll write it off. I kind of wanted this whole situation to be even more gonzo. Like, I want to. wanted it to be even more irreverent and big shorty. And it's fourth wall breaking kind of hilarity. They do a cool thing where basically the party hasn't even started and they wake up the

next day and are going through the cost of what they've done. Yeah. But there is like a kind of stuck in betweenness to it where it's like it's partially just like a straightforward TV show. And then there are elements of the Quentin stuff, the throwing the TV out the window, all this other stuff that I think if they had just leaned into that more and maybe the show itself would have made more sense. I think the, you know, the most successful moment is, is yeah, when Kyle Chandler comes out, when Bill Gurley's asking about the cake out the window

into the pool and I'm pretty sure that it's a meal who goes like, they're engineers, right? Oh, they're engineers. They figured it out. Like, that's hilarious. It's okay. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the whole, as you said, big short, right? Like, whenever we see something like this, like whenever we get a bunch of text on screen or Tarantino voiceover or some sort of a big device like this, my shorthand in my head is margarabi in a bathtub right like this is marga the margarabi in a bathtub moment where we're explaining what gray balling is or you know how you could possibly be too excessive for Las Vegas and uh yeah I think maybe I agree with you that it needs even more like bring me more bathtubs margar robbies as far as the I can see put selina Gomez in a casino

or whatever else it is that out of McKay did yeah I think I think if this show wants to be that wants to just be gonzo and like look at the privileged class enjoying his privileges. It can be. But yeah, I think maybe it's trying to be two things at once. Because it's the other element that we've gotten in both episodes are these moments where Travis is telling us, telling someone a story, either about how they got the idea for the company or how he broke up with his very patient girlfriend. And we see him the dream scenario, the lie, and then the green screen.

and then him like looking sort of like wistfully at what really happened and then we see what really happened. So the show is trying to do something interesting there with like the lies that he tells that he almost tells himself. There's something very interesting there. I just don't know who that that like little boy or hurt man is at the center of. It's funny when 500 days of summer comes out. It's funny like when he does like you get a little bit of like, oh, here's sweet Joseph Gordon Levitt. I don't know. Maybe what I'm looking for is consistency with those bits. Like Wolf of Wall Street, it's just like from the second it starts to the second it collapses. It's just whip pans and

15 needle drops within one shot and freeze frame, reverse, flashback, flash forward, voiceover. Everything is happening. You know, that's not necessarily a recipe that everybody can follow. But I do wonder whether or not super pumped couldn't afford some of that stuff because they spent all their money on Pearl Jam songs. So is it two so far? Is that how many Pearl Jam needle drops you've gotten? It feels like more. You know what I mean?

I think sometimes like it's like hearing the stones in a Scorsese movie. You're like, did you just buy Exile on Main Street? Like what did you? Did you pay in bulk? Yeah, yeah. And you know, and as Bill and Mel mentioned, like you never hear Pearl Jam. Yeah. So maybe Eddie Vedder like when Tarantino is a huge Billion's head.

I would love to know. Honestly, if Eddie Vetter, and Quentin Tarantino want to host a billions rewatch pod, I think I would retire. Oh my God, please. Let's kind of end it with this open-ended question, which is where do you want this show to go from here? What do you want more of and what do you maybe want, Lhasa? You know, to push it even further into that Gonzo territory. I think there's, you already mentioned it. The thing that I'm most anticipating is Uma Thurman doing Ariana Huffington,

which is a wild promise. Yes. And Tankazaria doing Tim Cook. Like these, these real life figures who have been. parodied on SNL. So let's see what it looks like here. And we could get something on par with what Swimmer did in People versus OJ. Make this show memeier. That's the second time. I think I've said this on a podcast this week. So I just want to assure people listening. I don't need everything to be memeier. But like, but something like this, you know, I think if Uma shows up doing something because Ariana, what a, what a wild card that is. Like if, if Uma shows up going full-blum, Huffington. That'll ratchet up my enjoyment of the show in a big way. How about you?

I think I just would like to see it feel a little bit more. I don't know. I want to say like more free, but I would like to see the show like move around a little bit more. A lot of our action, a lot of the conversations are taking place at a conference room or, uh, in the jam pad, which is Travis Kalanick's apartment where he did a lot of, I guess, brainstorming. Even though it didn't really make sense like storytelling wise, it was nice to see them at the plane, at the airport. Like I'd like to get like a little bit more movement. I imagine this is pretty true to life that much of this business was conducted in these various rooms and that that's not going to be a lot of out on the range.

But it would be cool to feel like a little bit more free. But as far as like what I'm looking for it to tell me about Uber that I didn't already think or to confirm any of my biases or anything like that, I think I just wanted to be like entertained and laugh three times at like a cool reference to basketball or music or whatever and just take my enjoyment where I can find it. I don't need a big moral story. And like, I mean, I've already had my moral reckoning with Uber. I deleted Uber off my phone.

There's an episode coming up called delete Uber and that's probably right around when I did that. Yeah, I think the next episode deals with the challenge of Lyft. And then, you know, like, so we're going to cover a lot of the bases. Yeah. And so I've been, you know, I'm, I'm a Lyft person. I've already like, I've already parted my ways with Uber. So I don't need it to like open up my eyes to the horrors of Uber or anything like that. I like to stand outside my house in L.A. for six hours and try to hill a cab.

just keep it old school. Just like I just have my handout. Just to prove something. Just to bring back that New York feeling. Chris, we're supposed to be a dinner at seven. What's up, man? He's like, nope, still waiting for a cab.

Listen in. It's a protest against the disruption of, anyway. Yeah, yeah. No, just a couple laughs. I do want to mention something really quickly about the jam pad since you brought it up. In my Googling a Wikipedia around the show, I found out that Travis's jampad, which wasn't just for Uber. He used to use it as like a salon.

It was in the Castro. He used to use it as a salon for like young techies. And it had its own Twitter account. The Twitter account is still exists. It just hasn't been active for like 12 years, I think like that. But there was a Twitter account for this house that he lived in. And the thing that that felt the most familiar to me, because when I first moved to the city, read around this time a little earlier,

all my friends worked for like Google or Oracle or whatever. They all worked in tech. And I was working at a bookstore. And it was like our incomes were very different. But the scene where they're hanging around playing weed tennis, that is the most familiar thing to me. I was like, oh, there it is. Yeah.

I remember when that was big just in general. Yeah. Okay. Well, we can wrap it up there, Joina. Thanks so much for joining me. And thanks to Chris Sutton for producing us today. Like we mentioned,

top, there's tons of Ringer prestige TV pods. Do you have other ones you're going to be on next week that you already know of, Joia? Not that I know of, but I'm sure I'll all be around talking about something. I am very curious, winning time, the Lakers show.

Yes. This should already be in the feed, but I can't think of a more... Yeah, I think Bill and House are doing the first one. I think Andy and I will talk about it on Monday on the watch. Yeah. It's really cool. Yeah.

We can wrap it up there. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for listening to the Prestige TV podcast. We'll talk to you soon. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute.

Columbia's Omnyshshade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures.

What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with their crumudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Remarkably bright creatures is now playing, only on Netflix.