Opinion | Joseph Gordon-Levitt: ‘Silicon Valley Now Owns Hollywood’

[MUSIC PLAYING] (SINGING) When you walk in the room, do you have sway?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has spent three decades in Hollywood, and he’s only 40 years old. He got his first big break on the hit NBC comedy 3rd Rock From the Sun. Since then, he’s played a heartbroken romantic in 500 Days of Summer, the controversial NSA contractor in the film Snowden, and up next, he’s slotted to play Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick in the Showtime series Super Pumped. So I wanted his take on how Hollywood and Silicon Valley intersect, but, first, I wanted to dive into his new series.

It’s called Mr. Corman, and it looks at the life of a musician turned fifth-grade teacher who is grappling with anxiety. In addition to starring in it, Gordon-Levitt wrote, directed, and executive produced the series. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, welcome to Sway.

Thanks so much for having me.

I want to talk a little bit about Mr. Corman to start off. It’s about a young man who — not-too-old man who is sort of unhappy with his life already and is struggling with anxiety. It sort of feels like a negative view in a lot of ways of what could have happened to you. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Yeah, so the protagonist is named Josh Corman, and, yeah, he’s — [LAUGHS] I never heard it put that way, sort of a negative of me. I wanted to make something that was personal, that was about myself. The first movie that I wrote and directed is called Don Jon, and I played a character that’s very different from myself. And I love — as an actor, that’s one of the things I love, is putting myself in someone else’s shoes. But for this, I was really trying to get into myself, and I’ve been doing a lot of I guess self reflection on my own life and feeling so enormously grateful for the life I get to live. And I also feel quite lucky. A lot of people work really hard and haven’t necessarily gotten the rewards that I’ve gotten.

Such as Mr. Corman because, in the first few minutes of the first episode, there’s a conversation that he has with his fifth grade history class about luck and how important it can be to success.

[CLIP FROM MR. CORMAN] – I’m curious how everyone feels about this. Who here thinks they’re lucky? I want everyone to answer this question, all right. I’ll give you a second to think about it. Now, raise your hand if you think you’re a lucky person. Just for a moment. OK, raise your hand if you think you’re unlucky. Got it, OK. You can put your hands down.

– What about you, Mr. Corman?

– What’s that?

– You didn’t raise your hand.

– Me? No, I mean, I feel like a lucky person, for sure.

[CLIP ENDS]

He’s kind of a bummer, I got to tell you.

Well, he has a real lot to be grateful for, and he does his best to feel that gratitude. But he struggles sometimes. And you know, look, I’m the same way. I have a lot to be grateful for, but I’m not able to 100% of the time feel good. I feel good a lot of the time, but I also have my negative moments. And I think that’s the human condition in a lot of ways.

Well, let’s talk about that for a second because one of the things that’s important is you’re depicting anxiety. I was like, this is a friggin’ bummer, this guy, and I was like, gosh, I feel bad for him at the same time. He’s sort of a white guy in America with a lot of luck, with a lot of things —

Yeah, exactly.

— other people don’t have. And it’s like, oh, God, a depressed white guy, like, I don’t know, with a support system. Can you talk a little bit about that idea of anxiety because I think you depict it with a meteorite heading towards the Earth, right? That’s how he looks up and sees that. That’s when his anxiety strikes.

The character’s anxiety is an amalgamation of some feelings that I’ve had and feelings of other people that I’m close with, and the meteor is an experience of someone I know who has that fear and obsession and whose mind kind of fixates on this idea, that a meteor is coming to destroy humanity. And I thought that was an image that really captured what it can feel like. And Josh is a white guy living in a big city in the United States, and he does have, like I said, a lot to be grateful for. I mean, the truth is a great deal of us have a lot to be grateful for.

I’m not meaning to negate his depression because it’s very well depicted. I was sort of like, I felt badly for the man. There are some funny moments when your roommate tries to make a weighted blanket because you can’t afford it and lies on you with a blanket, which are very funny, but, in this time, given the high rates of anxiety and depression among everybody, you don’t have to like, stack rank people’s pain in some ways.

Well, exactly. That’s exactly what I think, too, and so I feel like it’s all the more appropriate to depict a character who, like we said, has so much to be grateful for and yet still wrestles with maintaining a positive attitude.

So talk about how you decided to depict that anxiety because there’s a lot of sound cues. There’s one single note that sounds when he’s going through his day. Obviously, he’s a musician, so there’s music that’s very — I don’t know. It’s not tragic.

Well, it’s worth noting the composer of Mr. Corman is named Nathan Johnson, who’s a dear friend of mine who I’ve worked with many times. And the music plays a really big part in this show. It’s not standard television score.

No, it’s not. It’s relentless, in fact.

Yeah.

It’s relentless, in fact. You sort of —

Well, especially when depicting those moments in the show where Josh is feeling anxious.

[BELL FROM MR. CORMAN]

So I love that you picked up on that cue. The rules we set up were — make it such that Josh- – [BELL]

— could have made this score in his bedroom, and so that sound you hear from that kind of sting of anxiety —

[BELL]

— is a combination of a few different things. It’s him kind of messing with the wrong part of the strings on a guitar, and I think it’s a chain falling on a desk and a few other layers all put together and run through his digital alchemy.

[BELL]

And yeah, we worked a lot on that one sound.

Yeah so, now, you also — we also see Josh create music on his own, crinkling paper for ambient sound. Is that your style, or is that Josh? Are you trying to create a Josh sound?

Yeah, I think it’s definitely a lot to do with what I like and my aesthetic preferences. You know, I have an eclectic taste, but yet the music that Josh makes I do connect with a lot. I made a lot of music with home recording setups, and it was really fun playing a character who does that.

So one of the things that’s important, speaking of connecting, is I think the main through line throughout is always people not being able to connect with other people. Every character feels solitary in some way. But one of the connected relationships, which is also, I think, troubled, is with your mother, played by Debra Winger, who, by the way, is fantastic. That, to me, is the most important relationship in the whole series that I saw so far. And they literally do a dance, too, around their relationship.

Yeah, they do break out into a good old-fashioned song and dance.

[MUSIC PLAYING FROM MR. CORMAN]

And it is borne out of the struggle to communicate and connect, like you’re talking about. My personal relationship with my parents is really lovely. And the character that Debra Winger plays is actually sort of an amalgamation of my mom and my dad. And then Josh’s dad is drawn from other people I’m close with that have problematic relationships with their parents. And that was going back to the basic premise of me saying, I’m so lucky for so many things. What if I changed a few of these things? How would that cascade?

So I think you’re right that the relationship you see between the protagonist and his mom is really central to the story. And they’re a mother and son that are really close and really do love each other a lot but struggle, at times, to communicate that. And so the song and dance comes in a moment where they’re right on that brink of just wanting to say I love you, just wanting to have that warm connection, and just not quite being able to say it.

Well, it’s interesting because she’s tough. She’s tough on him. Although, I have to say, the fault is all Josh’s. [CHUCKLING]

I have two sons. I’m like, oh, I know that —

Of course.

— you know what I mean? And she doesn’t understand depression, I think, right? She says that to him over and over again. You weren’t supposed to be happy, necessarily. It wasn’t supposed to be perfect. And I think she’s frustrated by his inability to accept things that are less than perfect.

Well, that’s it. Yeah, she says, you’re not entitled to a perfect life. And I think that’s true. That’s true of everybody, regardless of whether you suffer from anxiety or not or where you fall on that spectrum. No one’s entitled to a perfect life. And if you expect a perfect life, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.

Yeah. So one of the things that you were talking about — you had a very successful career in Hollywood. You took a two-year break from acting. So talk to me about what drove that decision.

Oh, just one thing. I had kids. That was it.

That was it.

And I just wanted to spend as much time as I could with my babies. I have two boys, and the first one was born in 2015. And I started developing Mr. Corman shortly thereafter. In fact, I was looking back at the first notes I ever wrote down when I was first thinking about the idea of this character, and it was from 2015. And I think a lot of it was actually inspired by becoming a dad and the self-reflection that comes from that.

What’s been different since you came back? Now, obviously, Covid happened right in the middle of that, right?

Yeah, we were three weeks into shooting when Covid arrived. And so we shut down our production. And I was very lucky to be working with these wonderful producers at A24 who had the idea, just before everyone else, to try to pick our production up in New Zealand. We tried to do it in Los Angeles. We really, really wanted to try to keep shooting in L.A. But there wasn’t a way that we could do it that was both safe and feasible.

So you moved everything to New Zealand and did it there.

Yes.

Wow. What was that like?

I’m still here.

Oh, you are?

Yeah, yeah. What was it like? Like winning the lottery. [CHUCKLES] I just feel so, so grateful to be here, for my kids to be able to go to school, and to get to live a life where, this country — I’ve got to hand it to New Zealand. They’re really team players. Obviously, that’s a generalization. But it’s a part of the culture that’s different than what I feel in the United States.

Yeah, we’re not team players, just so you know. Don’t come back.

It’s different. [CHUCKLES]

There’s no team-playing going on. There’s a lot of yelling.

There’s pockets of it, right? There’s pockets of it, but not as a nation, as a whole.

Our nation, as a whole, is not a team player this year —

No, it’s not.

— last year, next year. New Zealand is different, which is why all the internet billionaires want to live there, naturally.

[CHUCKLES]

So has that changed your perspective on the industry — being there — or the choices you make about projects you take on?

Yeah, I don’t know if it has. I get to take on projects that inspire me. And that can be my gauge. That’s been the case ever since, really, I was young. I was on a TV show that was successful in the ‘90s called 3rd Rock From the Sun. And when that finished, that was actually the first time I stepped away from acting. I took, like, a year off. And that was the longest break I had had since starting when I was six.

And when I came back, I said to myself, well, I really just want to do these littler Sundance kind of movies that challenge me. And even though I’m being told, why don’t you do another TV show? You could make lots of money. Or, why don’t you do another teen romantic comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You? You could make lots of money — it just wasn’t interesting to me. And I was in the fortunate position of having made money on 3rd Rock From the Sun, so I could make those decisions. And I didn’t make money as an actor for years [CHUCKLES] after that.

Yeah, probably 500 Days of Summer was, I guess, the more indie kind of — which was a huge hit.

Yeah, that wasn’t a big payday. [CHUCKLES] Then I was in some Christopher Nolan movies. Those had bigger budgets.

Yes, I’ve noticed that. But a lot of your recent films — 3rd Rock From the Sun, the networks dominated. And now there are all kinds of streaming platforms. So how do you look at the Hollywood ecosystem today versus when you started?

Yeah, it’s a completely different thing. I grew up loving these Sundance movies, all these great lower-budget movies that are less about spectacle and less about Hollywood and more challenging to the audience. And now it felt like, oh, the place where audiences are looking for that kind of filmmaking and storytelling is in series on these streaming platforms. My favorite things that I’ve seen in recent times are Fleabag and Atlanta. They’re not movies. [CHUCKLES] They’re series. And so these are the inspirations I was drawing from when putting together Mr. Corman.

So right now, a lot of your recent films, too, have been on streaming platforms. The Trial of the Chicago 7, Netflix. 7500 on Amazon Prime. Project Power, again, on Netflix. And now you’re on Mr. Corman, which you have a lot of creative control over. Tell me how the project ended up at Apple.

Sure. Look, I’m [CHUCKLES] not really in a position to wax poetic about Apple, necessarily. But my perception, my own personal fandom of Apple, as a company and as a brand, I guess, feels really consistent with how the Apple team has treated me, as a creator. They are artist-friendly. They believe in someone, a human being, who has an idea and isn’t pandering to market research, necessarily, but is coming from an individual’s strong perspective.

Sure, well, that was the hallmark of Netflix. That’s one of the things, that Netflix was attracting a lot of artists, thinking they could do whatever they want. Is that different from your experience on other projects, like your first film Don Jon?

Well, Don Jon — the way I did that was in the old-fashioned Sundance way. Don Jon was not a big budget, and we financed it independently. We produced it independently. We produced the whole thing not knowing if it would ever come out, hoping that it could get into Sundance, hoping that, at Sundance, a distributor would buy it and put it out. That was the game, going back to the ‘90s. And we got lucky, and it all worked. That still happens some. The difference, of course, is that now, all the big buyers at Sundance are tech companies. And that changed very quickly.

Yeah. How do you feel about that?

I feel pretty fine about it, in general. To be honest, I have concerns about some of the ways that big tech is changing our world. But I also have a lot of concerns about the way old Hollywood was impacting the world. And far be it from me to make some kind of absolute statement about the moral authority of Apple. But compared to other tech giants, I feel really good about working for Apple.

I mean, there’s a difference between Apple and Facebook. And each of them have their own compromises. But would you take money from Facebook if they were saying, here’s — to make this film —

[CHUCKLES]

— or series?

Yeah, it’s a really good question.

I do have qualms with the overall business that Facebook runs — what you might call mass-surveillance advertising. And there are people who have articulated the issues with it far better than I could. I’m a fan of Jaron Lanier, for example, and his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Jaron can speak better about how mass-surveillance advertising impacts economies and governments and democracies, et cetera.

But just speaking as a creative person and how the attention economy impacts the mindset of an artist, I do think that there’s some real problems. And we need to course correct, as a generation.

Yeah. You said something interesting to me, is that, I may have questions about the tech companies, but old Hollywood wasn’t so good, necessarily. And I would agree with you. What do you think has changed in Hollywood? Because you’ve been both talent, and now you’re, of course, a creator. What has been the shift, in your mind?

The biggest shift is the fact that, now, Silicon Valley owns Hollywood. Pretty much, there is no more Hollywood, other than Disney. Disney is the only survivor. If you go back to the stalwarts of Hollywood’s Golden Age, you had Warner Brothers, Universal, Disney, MGM. And they’re all now subsumed into tech companies, other than Disney.

Right. Well, Warner is being spun out. But I think a tech company is going to buy it as soon as it’s spun out. But you’re right. Disney is the only pure play, in a lot of ways. So how does that change Hollywood, from your perspective?

I think that change was happening already. But the culture of tech in Silicon Valley is different than the culture of Hollywood, and I think, in many ways, for the better. Hollywood is very emotionally-driven, and probably to a fault. And that subjects, I think, a lot of the decision-making in Hollywood to biases that are coming to a reckoning right now. And I think that’s good, and —

So you don’t mind the shift. You don’t mind the new potentates taking over.

No, that’s what has to happen.

Well, speaking of that, you’ve just signed to play Uber co-founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick in the upcoming Showtime series Super Pumped. This book was written by someone who worked for me — Mike Isaac — for many years. And it was written by the same team behind Billions.

Kalanick contributed to many of Uber’s problems, to say the least. He showed the app’s God view, which track users in real time. There was his response to the sexual harassment problems at the company. And he was sued by a woman who was raped by her Uber driver in India. So what attracted you to this role?

Well, I should start out by saying I just took this job.

Yes, you did.

We haven’t started shooting it yet. And I’m about to dive into fully researching it and doing the proper prep that I will do. In the last few years, I’ve really made a lot of friends in the tech world. And when it was announced that I was going to play this part, a whole bunch of people with a lot of personal knowledge, and who know Travis or knew Travis, were calling me and saying, like, hey, do you want to talk? And that’s really wonderful. Mike Isaac’s book, of course, that you mentioned is going to be a valuable resource.

What attracted me to this — I think that it is fascinating and important to tell a story about who we reward, as a society, and what we reward. And I think Uber is a good example of the incentives of our whole economy and society being off, and us getting these results where people who are very talented in certain ways, but then are maybe stunted in other ways, are being given tons of power that is not necessarily good for humanity, as a whole.

Or they’re ill-suited to handle — or they have bad intentions. It’s interesting because I wrote a big, long piece in Vanity Fair on how I spent a lot of time with his parents, including his mom, who died sadly, tragically. I spent a lot of time with him since the beginning. And I would say we have a testy relationship at this point.

But one of the things was, the overdrive of all the toxic things about Silicon Valley were all present in Travis. And at the Code Conference many years ago when we were talking about autonomous vehicles — it was the most telling moment of this guy — we were talking about autonomous vehicles, and they were having financial problems. And he did things so carelessly — carelessly about drivers, carelessly about everybody, in lots of ways. He goes, you know what? When we get rid of the guy in the front seat —

[CHUCKLES]

— that business model will work. I’m looking forward to autonomous cars. As soon as we can get rid of that guy, it’s great. And I said, thank you very much for telling the truth about how Silicon Valley feels about everybody. As soon as —

About humanity.

Yeah.

I do find —

[CHUCKLES]

— that a troubling thread throughout a lot of Silicon Valley. There’s a lack of love for humanity and an overblown almost deification of technology —

100%.

— in a way that — and I think deification is the right word because I think it borders on religious zealotry, at times, when people deify technology in a way that takes humans out of the equation and empowers, of course, the companies who are making the tech. And they can say, oh, this is what tech wants. This is evolution. Tech will inherit the Earth from humanity.

And I feel like it’s, in a lot of ways, a parlor trick, because really, technology is only as powerful as humans make it. And every technology can be incredibly positive or incredibly negative. It’s not about the will of the technology. There is no will of the technology. It’s the humans that are using it.

Well, not yet. Not yet. We’ll be back in a minute.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

If you like this interview and want to hear others, follow us on your favorite podcast app. You’ll be able to catch up on Sway episodes you may have missed, like my conversation with Sacha Baron Cohen. And you’ll get new ones delivered directly to you. More with Joseph Gordon-Levitt after the break.

One of the things you did back in the 2000s — you and your late brother launched HitRecord, an online community for artists to find collaborators and work on projects together. It started off as a message board. But now you have, I think, 40 on staff, and you raised 6.4 million. Is that correct? A few years ago.

Yeah, yeah.

What were you trying to do then, and how has it changed? The mission.

Well, so when we started it, like you said, a long time ago, it was more of a production company. And it was a way for me and a staff of people to say, OK, we’re making a book. Come to our website and make the book together with us. And we’ll publish the book. And when the book makes money, then people can make money. And we made a TV show that won an Emmy, and we paid people millions of dollars. And it was really wonderful, as a production company.

But the point we came to was, OK. First of all, we’ve accomplished all the things we set out to accomplish as a production company. And second of all, we’re running up against the ability to be as inclusive as we want to be. Thousands and thousands of people come in and contribute. But we can’t include everybody when we’re making a TV show. And so a lot of people are having this experience of feeling like, oh, I wanted to be a part of that HitRecord production, but my contribution wasn’t on the show. And —

Also, you got some criticism on how people are compensated. You have a video up —

Well —

— on the website now explaining how it works.

There was always a video explaining how it works. The criticism you’re referring to — I don’t know if we need to get into it. But our community was defending us against that criticism, which was, like I said —

Talk about the idea of creating as a group. Is that possible when everyone — like you were saying, it limits. You have to limit when you’re creating things. How much does it scale, I guess, is what I’m thinking about.

Well, this is what we found. And this is why we’re continuing to do our production company. But when we raised VC money, we were not raising as a production company. VCs aren’t really interested in production companies. The multiples there are not the kind of thing they’re interested in.

We were raising as, OK, how can we have our production company be a wonderful kind of beacon in the middle of a decentralized platform where we can try to build an ecosystem for art and creativity where everybody can come and find collaborators and have that experience of being creative together with other people?

And do you think with Covid, how much does that change? Do you think things have changed permanently in creative collaboration?

Yeah, absolutely. Covid certainly sent that progress through a warp zone. And we experienced it when — I mentioned the show that we made last year with YouTube Originals. It’s called Create Together, and it was exactly in response to lockdown. Like I said, I was in the middle of shooting Mr. Corman. And that got shut down when the pandemic arrived. And so I was at home and feeling like, OK, if I’m going to stay productive and stay positive, I need to start doing something creative every day. And HitRecord was the perfect place for that.

Is that how collaboration is going to happen going forward? Do you imagine a world where you don’t have to have a place like Hollywood or a place like a movie set or whatever, that you could do this all virtually?

Certainly. Yeah, it’s going in that direction. And it’ll only get more and more that way.

So one thing that’s also happened — speaking of disruption of Hollywood — is not just streaming services and ways to collaborate. But platforms like Cameo have become places for content creation and where you can reach fans directly, essentially. How do you look at things like that? Do you find those — I’ve interviewed the CEO of Cameo. And obviously, in journalism, there’s Substack. There’s all kinds of ways people are content creating, I guess.

Yeah, I think that’s incredibly exciting. And I think things like Cameo or Patreon or Substack, to me, feel like wonderful antidotes to the mass-surveillance-advertising business model. And this is the way forward, is having a direct billing relationship between the person who’s consuming the content and the person who’s creating the content.

If you have this man behind the curtain who’s the advertiser, and the whole platform is set up not to benefit the consumers, but rather these advertisers, that sets us off on these weird incentive structures where we get a white nationalist in the White House, and we get flat Earth conspiracy theories, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that we need to, yeah, move away from that kind of advertising and move towards the models you’re talking about, with Patreon and others.

And what does that do to the Hollywood compensation system? I’m sure you, as a 3rd Rock From the Sun star, had an agent, publicist, lawyer, manager taking chunks of everything. Do you see that changing, where people like you, or directors or writers, have more power?

I think, of course, that will all change. Yes. And if someone has an idea and can make a thing that people like, yeah, they’re going to be put in the driver’s seat, hopefully. Now, one counterexample to that that I think is really concerning, though, is something like Spotify, which — I’m a subscriber to Spotify. I love — [CHUCKLES] I listen to it. But —

Peloton pays more money to them.

There you go. So —

No, I’m serious. [CHUCKLES] Peloton pays more money than Spotify.

I believe you. I hadn’t heard that, but that’s incredible. [CHUCKLES] So I do think that there’s an imbalance that needs to be rectified, probably through regulation. It’s just such new ground that the laws haven’t caught up with it yet. But the tech side of it — the engineers delivering the content are taking more than their fair share, at this point.

Yeah, someone’s always got their hand out, Joseph —

[CHUCKLES]

— just so you know. But you’re a musician. You built an audience on YouTube through collaborations with The Gregory Brothers. YouTube has become a real launching pad for some creative careers, like Bo Burnham. You also criticized the business model. Similar thing. Where do you, then, as a creative, get the ability, if you don’t control these platforms? How do you look when you have to use a YouTube or whatever?

Look, I think YouTube, in particular, is an incredibly beautiful platform in many ways. There’s so much great art on YouTube. Again, the problem is this mass-surveillance-advertising business model. It doesn’t have to work that way. And there’s some real downsides to this business model that was very lucrative but has these other side effects that none of us intended.

And we can’t do this anymore. If we keep doing this, we’re going to break our world. We have laws that are in place to protect our civilization, and the laws haven’t caught up yet with some of these business models. But they have to. And yeah.

Now, when you think about that, this idea of how you create — you started off 30 years ago as a child actor. And by the way, congratulations for not driving into a wall as a child actor.

[CHUCKLES] Thanks.

But when you think about someone who’s coming up like you right now, a lot of them want to be — one survey in 2019, 83% of people from 13 to 38 said they’re willing to give influencing a try — becoming an influencer. But only a tiny percent of those people actually build a business. And much of those businesses — they’re really quite yuck, you know what I mean?

When you look at that, if you were a young person now — you obviously went through a network. And then now you’re moving on to streaming and things like that. What is the evolution plan for people’s careers now?

I love getting to talk about this with someone like you who is really tech-minded and future-focused, because if we zoom out a bit, which is where I think it gets really interesting, I am really worried about the possibility that all of that art and creativity is framed within this attention economy, because that is not the way to happiness.

And I say this as someone who has enjoyed some amount of fame and high attention. And I feel very grateful for that. But I can also feel like I can say, with some confidence, that’s not the shit that’s going to make you happy. That stuff is more like a drug. And so I love the idea of a lot of people being interested in art and creativity and expressing themselves. But how can we reorient our minds around that art and creativity away from, get as many followers as you can, get as much attention as you can?

My most meaningful and joyful experiences don’t come from the red carpet or from the box office or anything like that. They come from being in the middle of making this little thing work or making it funny, making it good, and doing it together with other people. And that is the juice. That’s the really good stuff. And so I would love to see art and creativity oriented around that as a goal.

All right. Well, how are you going to get Josh Corman happy? Please, for the love of God, make him happy.

Watch the rest of the season.

All right.

Watch the rest of it, because I —

I am like Debra Winger. I want to slap the sad out of him. I’m like, stop it. That’s enough, sir.

[CHUCKLING]

I’m happy a lot of the time, too. So is Josh.

Yeah, OK. All right. If you say so. Let me just say, I wish you luck with Travis. But let me just leave you this. When you go to internet companies — you’ve been to a million of them. And they have whimsical names for their meeting rooms or whatever, when you went to Uber. First of all, it looked like a Bond villain’s lair. They had the stairs where, at any point, I thought the floor would come out, and I’d go down into the sharks. But the name of their main room — Uber — War Room.

Right.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Joseph, I really appreciate it.

Great talking to you, Kara. Thank you so much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Sway is a production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Matt Kwong, and Daphne Chen; edited by Nayeema Raza, with original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Sonia Herrero and Carol Sabouraud, and fact-checking by Kate Sinclair. Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Kristin Lin, and Liriel Higa.

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