Month: February 2022

Our commitment to hunting down the best fast food chicken sandwich knows no bounds. We’ve already launched an extensive investigation in search of the best chicken sandwich build — it’s Popeyes, no surprise — but that got us thinking: Who is actually cooking up the best chicken? If you strip away the dressings, the bread, the accouterments… is Popeyes still the GOAT?

That’s how we came up with today’s challenge: the naked taste test. Just chicken patties — no place to hide.

We’ve done the naked taste test before, with fast food burgers, and the results of that one surprised us. Stripped of the fixins, our ideas about who made the best fast food burger shifted. A lot. Since chicken sandwiches are fast food’s current favorite snack, it’s only fair that we put their patties to the same test.

With no condiments or pillowy buns to grab my attention, I’ll be able to focus on each fillet’s flavor, the crunchiness of breading, the breading-to-meat ratio, and the texture of the chicken itself. As a result, all of the chicken breast fillets that come drenched in sauce — Wendy’s Hot Honey Chicken, Arby’s Buffalo Chicken Sandwich, etc — have been removed. Sound fair? Let’s eat and crown a true champ!

13. McDonald’s — Crispy Chicken

Price: $3.90

Tasting Notes:

Last year, in an effort to cash in on the chicken sandwich craze, McDonald’s launched a trio of new chicken sandwiches, all built around a newly reformulated chicken fillet recipe. This new sandwich is the best chicken sandwich McDonald’s has ever offered.

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t make it good. It has a truly odd aftertaste; dull, bitter, and a little dirty. It doesn’t taste marinated in pickle brine so much as lightly grazed by a pickle. It has the ghosts of flavors — a wisp of pickle, the specter of pepper — but mostly just dry, stringy chicken that’s a chore to chew through.

The Bottom Line:

McDonald’s Crispy Chicken is one of the chain’s least processed foods, but also one of the most lacking in identifiable flavors. Go figure.

Find your nearest McDonald’s here.

12. KFC — Chicken Sandwich

Price: $3.99

Tasting Notes:

KFC, a place with f*cking ‘chicken’ in the name, shouldn’t be able to make a chicken sandwich this bad. There is no excuse. They might as well not make a chicken sandwich to begin with because this is straight-up garbage. The chicken is dry and tough, the batter tastes like eggs, and despite looking like the crunchiest thing on Earth, the texture is disturbingly soft. It has no redeeming qualities, which really puts into perspective how bad McDonald’s is. I hate KFC’s chicken sandwich this much, and there’s still something worse.

The Bottom Line:

Don’t eat this. Kick it down the street, run it over with a car, don’t even let bugs eat this garbage. KFC, if you’re reading this, stop making chicken sandwiches. Please, we beg you.

Find your nearest KFC here.

11. Jack in the Box — Cluck Sandwich

Price: $4.99

Tasting Notes:

I love that Jack in the Box’s chicken sandwich is called “The Cluck.” I don’t need fast food brands to get creative or cute with their chicken sandwich names (looking at you Burger King Ch’King) but there is something fun about rolling up to a drive-thru and saying “Hi, can I get the Cluck?”

Unfortunately, that’s where my adoration ends. Like a lot of these bottom-of-the-list chicken sandwiches, this one is dry, incredibly dense and hearty, and way too salty. It also suffers from the same problem as all fried food from Jack in the Box: it tastes vaguely like Curly Fries.

You may think that’s not a bad thing, because you love curly fries, and we don’t blame you, you’d have to be a monster not to. But curly fry flavor isn’t great when it’s constantly hovering over the flavors you’re supposed to be tasting like an unwanted guest. You come away from this chicken feeling like you tasted something fried in old oil.

The Bottom Line:

Not the worst thing on the Jack in the Box menu, but if you’re really craving chicken from the Box, you’re better off ordering strips or nuggets.

Find your nearest Jack in the Box here.

10. Carl’s Jr. — Hand Breaded Chicken

Tasting Notes: $6.09

Carl’s Jr.’s attempt to compete with Popeyes was to drop a hand-breaded chicken sandwich that matched the quality of the brand’s hand-breaded chicken tenders. On that front, Carl’s Jr.’s big chicken sandwich relaunch has been a success. Like McDonald’s, this is the best chicken sandwich that has ever been on the Carl’s menu, replacing that addictive, but school-cafeteria-quality $1 spicy chicken sandwich that used to be the only option on the menu. This new version is just a few missteps away from being a great chicken sandwich.

The hand-breading is great and noticeable. You can see tossing waves in the batter, and the fillet is well covered with a nice ratio of breading to meat. But the batter itself is kind of flavorless. All you really taste is salt, and coupled with the dry meat, this results in a chicken sandwich that desperately needs its accouterments to make it work.

The Bottom Line:

Most of the flavor of this sandwich comes from the sides, so if you want the best chicken sandwich at Carl’s Jr., skip the classic and reach for the Hot Honey or Bacon Swiss.

Find your nearest Carl’s Jr. here.

9. Jack in the Box — Spicy Chicken

Price: $6.61

Tasting Notes:

The Spicy Chicken is a very slight improvement over Jack in the Box’s Spicy Cluck Sandwich. Side note, why couldn’t this have been called the Spicy Cluck? I digress. What this chicken has going for it is a spicy cayenne kick that masks some of that ghostly curly fry fryer flavor (try saying that five times fast). The breast here is also a bit more substantial and meaty.

Unfortunately, it’s still pretty dry, so while more meat will deliver a more substantial meal, it also takes more effort to chew through. That probably matters less when you have cheese, bacon, and sauce on the sandwich, so I won’t hold it against this fillet.

The Bottom Line:

Jack in the Box’s best chicken fillet, but that’s not saying much.

Find your nearest Jack in the Box here.

8. Wendy’s — Classic Homestyle Chicken

Price: $7.36

Tasting Notes:

I love Wendy’s, and I especially love Wendy’s chicken sandwich. So the most shocking result of this experiment was finding the Wendy’s Classic Chicken in the middle of the ranking. I truly believe Wendy’s is a few menu tweaks away from taking the top spot from Popeyes for best chicken sandwich. Yet when you taste just the fillet, that feeling couldn’t be more wrong.

The breading has one flavor: salt. And while the quality of the chicken is a step up from everything lower on this list, tender meat is not enough to bump this chicken any higher.

The Bottom Line:

Wendy’s makes a great chicken sandwich, but their standard Classic Chicken Sandwich is shockingly middling.

Find your nearest Wendy’s here.

7. Burger King — Ch’King

Price: $6.50

Tasting Notes:

I have to hand it to Burger King. The brand is bad-to-middling at just about everything they do — they make bad fries, horrible milk shakes, bitter and burnt coffee, and the Whopper is one of the worst fast food burgers you can buy — but the Ch’King is in another class. We do a lot of food rankings here at Uproxx, and I’ve personally placed Burger King at or near the bottom of many of them. But the Ch’King, which was launched last year, gives me hope that the brand is changing for the better.

The Ch’King is Burger King’s best menu item. It may not be top-five worthy for the purposes of this list, but it is an objectively good chicken fillet. It’s well seasoned, with a nice balance of cracked black pepper and garlic powder, it’s crispy and craggy, a perfect sponge for soaking up whatever sauce you douse it in. I really don’t have anything bad to say about this sandwich. There are just a handful that taste better.

The Bottom Line:

If you’re at Burger King, order the Ch’King. It’s the best thing on the menu in any iteration.

Find your nearest Burger King here.

6. Wendy’s — Spicy Chicken

Price: $7.36

Tasting Notes:

Oh how the mighty have fallen. Okay, granted, landing just outside of the top five isn’t that much of an ‘L,’ but as I said before, I truly believe Wendy’s Asiago Ranch Chicken Club is one of the best fast food chicken sandwiches your money can buy. But that’s not because of the chicken.

The spicy version of Wendy’s fillet is a step up from the flavorloess homestyle version, but just barely. When biting into this sandwich your palate will be met with a black-pepper dominant flavor and a strong cayenne pepper kick that lingers with a steady, sustained burn. The chicken isn’t the juiciest, but it’s not dry either, and it breaks from the rest of the fillet easily and isn’t laborious to chew through.

But let’s be real here, all that spice is meant to mask the mediocrity of the chicken’s actual flavor. It works, but think of how much better this chicken could be if Wendy’s put a little more effort into either the sourcing or the preparation.

The Bottom Line:

It hurts me that Wendy’s fillet isn’t top-five worthy, but the various sandwich builds and the spicy cayenne kick is enough to make it come across as a sandwich capable of punching above its weight.

Find your nearest Wendy’s here.

5. Chick-fil-A — Chick-fil-A Chicken

Price: $3.05

Tasting Notes:

We’ve finally reached top-five territory! Before I get into the merits of this particular breast fillet, let me just say that any of these sandwiches could be someone’s favorite. They’re all delicious winners in our book and are definitely worth ordering. Chick-fil-A believes so strongly in their chicken sandwich that they actually call it the “Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich.” This is the restaurant’s namesake, and for good reason. While this chicken is a little drier than the birds ranked above, it’s tender enough and the flavor is fantastic. A medley of fragrant and spicy garlic, onion, and black pepper greet your tongue, settling into a briny, complex finish courtesy of the pickle marinade.

The fillet is pressure cooked, which keeps it from being as crispy as some of the more traditional deep fried fillets, but the breading adheres to the meat no matter how chaotic your bites, delivering a consistent flavor from first bite to last.

The Bottom Line:

Chick-fil-A’s chicken breast fillet was, until very recently, the best fast food chicken sandwich in the universe. Without this sandwich being so good we probably never would’ve gotten the Popeyes chicken sandwich, so for that we’ll always look at this fillet fondly. But it’s no longer the best.

Find your nearest Chick-fil-A here.

4. Raising Canes — The Sandwich

Price: $5.98

Tasting Notes:

This is f*cking stupid. As you can clearly see, Raising Canes’ chicken sandwich isn’t so much a chicken sandwich as it is three individual chicken tenders thrown in a bun and doused in housemade thousand island-style sauce. This hurts it in our definitive chicken sandwich ranking, and it’s going to hurt it in this chicken fillet ranking because… well it’s not a fillet. It’s the fillet equivalent of three kids stacked up inside a trench coat. For that reason alone it doesn’t get the top spot. Having said that, at the end of the day this is a ranking that’s all about flavor, and on that score I have to hand it to Raising Cane’s. This is some damn good chicken.

It’s crispy, and strikes the perfect balance between salt, cracked black pepper, and garlic powder. The breading to meat ratio is perfect, it’s craggy enough to soak up Cane’s sauce, and provides a nice audible crunch (though some pieces deliver on this better than others). Yet it’s not over-battered to the point that some of your bites are nothing but breading. All of that earns this chicken top placement, but the real highlight is the meat itself.

This is fast food’s best chicken. It’s juicy, tender, citrus marinated. It tears away nicely with each bite, and practically melts in your mouth. Raising Canes has one thing on the menu, chicken, and they do it exceptionally well. But the chicken sandwich is the most low-effort thing on the menu, and that includes the coleslaw.

The Bottom Line:

Delicious, worth every bit of hype this chicken has ever received. But c’mon, Raising Cane’s. Give us a proper chicken sandwich! Take a chicken breast, pound it out, bread it, and Popeyes will forever be a footnote in the history of chicken sandwiches.

Find your nearest Raising Cane’s here.

3. Chick-fil-A — Spicy Chicken

Price: $3.29

Tasting Notes:

The non-spicy fillet may be Chick-fil-A’s namesake, but the Spicy Chicken is their best menu item. Added to that complex pickle finish is a mix of smokey paprika and a fair shake of cayenne, overall leading to a more distinct and memorable flavor. It has everything the original Chick-fil-A fillet has, the same semi-soft but consistent pressure cooked batter, the same tender bite, but it manages to have more flavor. And that makes it a better bird in our book.

The Bottom Line:

Kick it up a notch by ordering the spicy deluxe and add some pepper jack cheese to this medley of spicy flavors.

Find your nearest Chick-fil-A here.

2. Shake Shack — Chicken Sandwich

Price: $6.29

Tasting Notes:

Next to Raising Cane’s, Shake Shack has some of the highest quality chicken in all of fast food. It’s fresh and never frozen, antibiotic free [Ed. note: there is some debate about whether this designation actually means anything, and whether “antibiotic free” — no antibiotics in the meat, which is always true by law — is the same as “raised without antibiotics”], and the chicken is so tender that I had to take a close-up picture of it just to show it off. Like Carl’s Jr., Shake Shack hand-breads the chicken and it has those beautiful tossed flour waves in the breading — which is light, crispy, and full of onion, garlic, and black pepper flavors. The chicken has a soft mouthfeel, you can truly taste that it isn’t frozen.

It was a real toss up between the top two, but this chicken just wasn’t quite as juicy as our number one. Like everything at Shake Shack (except for the fries) a lot of care and craft was clearly put into this sandwich. But there’s a reason you think “burger” when you hear the words “Shake Shack.” This chicken sandwich still plays second fiddle to Shake Shack’s true virtuoso of flavor, the Shack Burger.

The Bottom Line:

It’s great, easily one of the best chicken sandwiches you’ll ever eat and probably the best sourced. But it doesn’t taste better than number one.

Find your nearest Shake Shack here.

1. Popeyes — Chicken Sandwich

Price: $4.99

Tasting Notes:

I desperately wanted this plain taste test to result in a surprise number one, but alas. Once I bit into this fillet it was more than clear — Popeyes chicken sandwich is truly the GOAT. No other chicken sandwich tastes nearly this good. The sourcing probably isn’t as good as Raising Cane’s or Shake Shack’s, and the pricing reflects that you’re dealing with lower-quality bird, but dammit if it doesn’t taste the best. Hell, you don’t even need the pickles, mayo/spicy sauce, or the bread. I’d happily eat this shit with a knife and a fork like George Costanza eating a Snickers.

The chicken is tender and so juicy, bursting with mouthwatering flavor. It’s fried to a perfect golden brown, the breading a medley of buttery, sweet, garlicky, peppery flavors that ricochet across the palate and cause salivation between bites. It has a subtle hint of spiciness to it. I’m not sure why Popeyes hasn’t given us a proper spicy version of this sandwich when they already have a spicy breading on hand, but it almost doesn’t matter.

This chicken sandwich is so good that Popeyes doesn’t have to do a single thing to it to make it better. But that doesn’t mean they can’t. Add cheese to it, throw in an order of macaroni and cheese, put some fries in their — it’s a delicious canvas for your imagination.

The Bottom Line:

Truly the best chicken sandwich in the fast food universe, the hype is fully justified. If Michael Jordan was a chicken sandwich, he’d be Popeyes. Fast food chicken doesn’t taste better than this.

Find your nearest Popeyes here.

After nearly two years of false starts and a few strong mixtapes to hold fans over, Conway The Machine‘s long-awaited Shady Records debut, God Don’t Make Mistakes, has arrived. Made up of 12 tracks with guest features from Annette Price, Beanie Siegel, Jill Scott, Keisha Plum, Novel, T.I., and more, God Don’t Make Mistakes is the culmination of the Buffalo rapper’s career to date, which saw him and his Griselda Records cohorts Benny The Butcher and Westside Gunn (also featured on the album on the lead single “John Woo Flick,” naturally) sign to Shady Records in 2019.

So far, though, the standouts of the album appear to be a pair of tracks that, on the surface, couldn’t be more different, but are in reality vintage Grisela presentations. One, “Stressed,” features a relative newcomer, Wallo627, who contributes a spoken-word outro giving a passionate pep talk to Conway, reminding him “you’re back, now you’re back at one hundred.”

The other, which you can check out up top, has a much splashier guest list. “Tear Gas,” which features a smooth beat courtesy of G Koop, Cosmo Beats, and Vidal Garcia, has guest verses from rap game veterans Rick Ross and Lil Wayne, who come through to match their host’s complex delivery with punchline-laden raps of their own. However, it’s still Conway’s show, and longtime fans needn’t worry — the Griselda capo’s Shady debut fits right in amongst the rest of his extensive catalog with haunting beats and hardbody rhymes.

God Don’t Make Mistakes is out now via Shady Records. Get it here.

Nobody should have to deal with this much loss. In the past year, Bay Area rapper Rexx Life Raj lost both his mother and his father and as he’s picking up the pieces of what the future holds, he’s navigating his grief and emotions in song. “Balance” is the first offering from his upcoming album and it’s an ode to his late mother and a powerful overall meditation on loss.

“We are battling obstacles in life and I know it comes with it’s challenges. But to me what separates the good from great is just the way you choose to handle it,” the rapper says on the hook over an affecting guitar and crisp snare drums. It’s an intense reminder of how music can help heal and find yourself amid insurmountable loss.

“Balance was a concept I’d had in my mind for a while because it was something I had been dealing with,” Raj said in a statement. “Trying to juggle being a caretaker, music, businesses, and relationships were weighing heavy on me. I wrote it as an affirmation to myself and hopefully the listener.”

The video plays out like a memory of spending time with his mother. She reads the boy a story, then he accompanies her to the doctor where she gets bad news. The next cut is outside of her funeral and it’s all spliced with footage of a grieving Raj leaned up against a hillside tree, delivering the song’s lyrics in a somber moment. The end of the clip is a cellphone video of Raj in the car with his parents, smiling together and enjoying life.

This is no doubt an impassioned introduction to the next chapter for Rexx Life Raj.

Watch the video for “Balance” above.

Choose your favorite stat from DeMar DeRozan’s eight-game scorcher. They’re all wonderful, an absolute defiance of the way basketball and the randomness of shot-making usually play out.

Sixty-eight percent true shooting. Seventy-seven percent of his shots from midrange. Fifty-nine percent on those shots. Twenty-two points on 82 percent true shooting in 11 clutch minutes across four games, where the Bulls are 4-0 and he’s averaging 38.4 points a night throughout the entire eight games. Extend the parameters to 17 games and he’s averaging 34.4 points on 66.4 percent true shooting. Whew.

During the eight-game run, he’s scored 100 points on 74.6 percent true shooting in 81 fourth-quarter minutes. That’s 44.4 points per 36 minutes. He’s in such a groove that you expect every game to be a continuation of it, but the groove is so outlandish that logic suggests it has to subside soon. But it hasn’t, even amid turbulent lineups.

Chicago’s roster has been demolished by injuries. He’s played some of these games without Zach LaVine, Lonzo Ball, and Alex Caruso. Perimeter defenses are entirely locked onto him, content to let Coby White or Ayo Dosunmu beat them. They’re good players, but you’ll tip your cap if the All-NBA-caliber star is quieted and young guards cook. Instead, they’ve all thrived. Thirty-five points has been his threshold and he’s met it every time during this stretch.

The All-Star break didn’t quell him, either. He scored 37 points on 21 shots in Thursday’s crunch-time win over the Hawks, including 12 points on 5-for-5 shooting (2-for3 at the line) in the final frame and the go-ahead bucket.

Over the years, DeRozan has developed advanced footwork and a collection of dribble moves that prime his pull-up jumpers. Once he begins the dance — whether it’s sweeping crossovers, between the legs hesitations, half-spins into fadeaways, or anything else — variance is the defense’s best ally.

Disrupting his rhythm and walling off the foul-line extended region before he gets there are the paths to containing him. But accomplishing those objectives is a Herculean task when DeRozan’s bag of counters seems endless and he’s often easily within earshot by virtue of his 6’6 frame. He’s relentlessly in control of the push-pull dynamic between defense and offense, while dictating how possessions unfold.

The concept of a “tough” shot differs for every star scorer and player. Many of the “tough” shots teams think they coax DeRozan into — fadeaways, contested pull-ups, whirling turnarounds — are looks he relishes. Slowing this version of him demands reorienting what the definition of tough is as it pertains specifically to him. In the heat of a game or possession, expecting defenders to alter preconceived notions is a lofty ask.

DeRozan is putting together a career season. He wields a strong case for First Team All-NBA. Choosing among him (who is listed as a guard, even if he plays on the wing), Stephen Curry, Ja Morant, and anyone else for just two guard spots is, uh, stress-inducing. Godspeed, voters.

As for the MVP race, DeRozan has earned mention in the conversation, but faces the daunting hurdle of breaking into a race defined by the trio of Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, and Nikola Jokic. It’s not diminishing what he’s done if he ends the season elsewhere in the top-5 of MVP — rather, his potential exclusion is a testament to the greatness of his contemporaries and the (scoring) seasons they’ve also put together. Everything DeRozan does this year and is doing over this recent heater warrants considerable praise.

Being recognized as one of the best guards in a given season is incredibly hard and should be celebrated. DeRozan is 32, playing his first year with a new team (who holds the East’s No. 1 seed) and touts a loudly justifiable case for First Team All-NBA. Plainly speaking, all of that kicks ass.

At this point in the year, I hardly find myself jotting down notes when DeRozan drains another bonkers jumper. I know another one is coming soon if I really need to study the details later. None of them are atypical anymore. All I can do is sit on the right side of the bus, smirk, and say “that boy nice.”

We’re just a few months into 2022 and pop culture has already delivered some major moments. So many in fact that we had to whip up a special episode of Culture Quick Bites just to break it all down. You know, for the fans.

Host Drew Dorsey signs on for the job this time, recapping the biggest pop culture plot reveals that this year has given us so far. We’re talking highly-anticipated season finales of shows like Euphoria, Pam & Tommy, and The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+. (We’ll be devastated to see them go but don’t worry, there are hundreds of other shows streaming your way soon.) We’re remembering the fun of Winter Olympics action complete with the reliably hilarious commentary of Saturday Night Live star Leslie Jones. We’re talking about the return of music festival season complete with new shows for the aging millennials who just want to hear My Chemical Romance rock out one more time. And, weirdly enough, we’re also talking about Pancake Day — a national holiday we plan to celebrate by consuming sweet syrups on a bed of delicious carbs … if we can ever figure out the right date.

For all of that, plus an update for gamers on a certain George R.R. Martin collab, check out the video above.

Pondering the entire history of the universe is an overwhelming endeavor for our finite human brains. We have a hard time even conceptualizing “a billion” as a number, much less trying to wrap our heads around the billions of years of the existence of the universe.

It’s even overwhelming just to try to imagine the whole of human history on Earth. There’s just so much of it. Diving into the history of just one country or region is a lot, and the more we zoom in, the more there is to learn.

But what if we zoom way out? Like, waaaayyyy out. How condensed could we make the history of the world if we took a 30,000- foot view of it? And how could we make it educational and entertaining at the same time?

Those are basically the questions Bill Wurtz answered in his video appropriately titled “History of the Entire World, I Guess,” which has been viewed on YouTube more than 139 million times since he posted it in 2017.

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Wurtz uses an odd combination of simple animation and graphics, funny descriptions delivered almost in a monotone and some intermittent musical blips to tell the story of the universe from the Big Bang to recent history. And it’s impressively comprehensive for being a quick overview of, well, everything. Wurtz told the H3 Podcast that he spent 11 months researching and writing the video, which he originally hoped would be five to seven minutes long. The final product clocked in at just under 20 minutes, but it’s totally worth it.

The video starts with the basic fact of our individual existence: “Hi. You’re on a rock, floating in space. Pretty cool, huh?” Then it pulls us back to the very beginning of the universe before slingshotting us through the formation of matter, stars, planets, Earth, life on Earth and finally, the entirety of human history. It’s a super high-level overview, and yet you walk away with a better understanding of the basic chemistry, physics, astronomy and geology of the universe, in addition to the geopolitical, religious, military and industrial history of the human race.

It is, in a word, remarkable.

The original video is worth a watch if you’re cool with a handful of f-bombs. The version below has had almost all of the profanity removed to make it more kid- and school-friendly. My own kids have watched it at least a dozen times. Despite how quickly it moves, they get so excited when they recognize some slice of history that they’ve learned about, and they’ve been inspired to learn more about things Wurtz references in the video. They love it.

Honestly, getting this much history into one video and tying it all together in a coherent way is incredibly impressive. And to have so many clever, laugh-worthy moments thrown in for funsies is just delightful. It doesn’t include everything, but how could it? And it can be a little jarring to have huge, devastating events flash by in seconds, knowing how many people’s lives were impacted by them. That’s the nature of the 30,000-foot view, though. It offers a perspective that feels almost disturbingly detached, but it can also help us see our squabbles as momentary blips in the big picture.

All in all, well done, Bill Wurtz.

The Tiger King scriped series has been in production for what seems like forever, and the show finally comes to life next week. Peacock’s Joe Vs Carole takes a deeper look at the Tiger King reality stars Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin after their, uh, fascinating and bizarre Netflix docuseries from 2020.

Starring John Cameron Mitchell and SNL star Kate McKinnon as Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin respectively, the series will explore the complex history between the two rivals, which ultimately leads to Joe Exotic plotting to have Baskin murdered. The show will feature eight episodes, which will all stream exclusively on Peacock beginning Thursday, March 3rd.

Exotic and Baskins had a well-known feud for nearly a decade, which was chronicled in true-crime podcast Over My Dead Body, before becoming a hit Netflix documentary. Exotic is currently sentenced to 21 years in prison.

The series was ordered in early 2020, and after multiple COVID-related delays, it was finally shot last summer and fall, which is why McKinnon was noticeably absent from the first few episodes of Saturday Night Live. McKinnon was joined by Kyle MacLachlan as Howard Baskin, Dean Winters as Jeff Lowe, Nat Wolff as Travis Maldonado, and William Fichtner as Rick Kirkham.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt knows the world of big tech thanks to his experiences trying to raise money with Silicon Valley venture capitalists for his production company, HITRECORD. It’s something he took into his role as Travis Kalanick, the now-former CEO of Uber, for Showtime’s Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber (which premieres Sunday). But that doesn’t mean the star of Looper and Inception is a tech bro fanboy. To the contrary, he demonstrated concern for the culture that made a Travis Kalanick possible when we spoke recently about the series, which comes from David Levian, Brian Koppelman, and Beth Schacter, the minds behind Billions. Concern and curiosity. And who can blame him?

Take a broad view and expand out beyond tech to include adventures in scam artistry and the general efforts of the rich and powerful to game systems and bludgeon rivals with their wallets and you’ve got the aforementioned Billions, Succession, Inventing Anna, The Dropout, White Lotus, and Pam & Tommy — the buzziest shows in the world — all about or adjacent to toxic win culture. All fruit from the tree of The Social Network. All focused on people struggling to retain elements of their humanity while nearly morphing into Gods, their consolation often a golden parachute but sometimes ample legal troubles. What is it about these Icarus things that captivate us so (we’ll have thoughts on that from the Daedalus of Super Pumped, co-lead Kyle Chandler, next week)? It’s a fascinating question and one we got into with Levitt while also exploring how winning is defined within that culture, whether Travis is a villain and a cult leader, and approaching this tale with an eye on not creating an accidental pirate folk hero with too much verve and coolness for our own good.

Everyone knows who this guy is, but there’s a lot here. There’s some nuance, but this is definitely a villain, it feels like. How do you find your way into the character and is it just exhausting to play that much cockiness all the time?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt: It’s definitely exhausting. It’s a lot of hard work. I was tired at the end of the day. But it’s also the kind of marathon I’m trained for, man. Like I’m good at this shit. [Laughs] Not to toot my own horn. But also the writing was really good and when the writing’s there it makes it pretty easy.

It’s interesting you say villain because, in a way, I think that’s true. There are a lot of highly questionable decisions and behavior from Travis. To me, what’s more interesting is not an indictment of that one individual human being but rather an exploration of what’s the system? What’s the culture? What are the macro components in place that drive somebody to do this? Ultimately, this is the game that’s been set up for entrepreneurs in our country. Travis just played it really well. Why is that the game? Why are entrepreneurs told that their only priority is to increase value for shareholders… is to grow stock price? “Grow or die,” as he says. Why? Why is that the thing? Why don’t we have an economy that also rewards benefiting the country or the human race as a whole and looking out for people’s wellbeing? And looking at the long-term future? And making sure that the things we’re doing are sustainable? None of that is built into our economy. And that, I think, that’s the problem! If we want to point a finger at, “Oh, this is bad, this is killing us.” It’s not Travis. It’s the larger system that Travis is a product of.

Well, I mean, yes. But while those are all valid and good points. And you’re right, what are the motivations behind those decisions? But a lot of it is just, “how cool would it be to have a hundred billion dollars?” and “How cool would it be to not have to listen to any rules?” And we’ve kind of seen what that looks like in a larger sense. So to me, that’s sort of why I go with a villain [label] because the system is what the system is, but he’s still choosing to exploit that system.

Right. But what else can he do?

Well, I mean, there are people that make the choice to work within the system, work within the rules, make things better.

They don’t win. They don’t win.

What does winning look like though? Is 100 billion dollars winning? Is 50 billion dollars not winning? Is 10 billion? Is it a scale? I guess that’s the question. What is enough success?

Winning is building the thing that everybody’s using. So let’s take Facebook, as an example, or YouTube. These are platforms that currently have established the framework for public discourse right now. They won in that way. They’re the medium through which we all have to conduct our lives, our public discourse, our democracy, our social lives. They state the claim. We can’t just say, “Oh, I won’t use Facebook. I’ll use this other social network that’s not driven by ads.” I mean, you could say that you’ll use that but no one will be on there with you. When a thing has succeeded like that and becomes the winner, the thing that everyone’s using, why does the thing that everyone’s using have to be optimized just for profits? I guess that’s the point that I’m making.

That’s a really good point.

If you don’t just optimize for profits… Why didn’t Vimeo win? Why did YouTube win? YouTube won because it made these decisions that are now the things that are breaking our democracy. Vimeo took the high road. It didn’t allow for the violation of copyright. It didn’t go the advertising route. It made a few of those big decisions. And now Vimeo is Vimeo and YouTube is YouTube. Vimeo came first. It wasn’t that YouTube had the first movers advantage. Vimeo launched before YouTube did.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to this view. But there are people that look at things like Goodfellas, The Sopranos, as having been things that glorified criminal enterprise, the mob. We talk about the system in place with these tech gods. And we all know what happened to this guy with Uber, at least. But is there a worry going into something like this that it becomes part of the cycle? Because some of this stuff, even if it’s still morally stunning to a lot of people, to others, perhaps people in that world, that’s some cool shit that he’s getting to do as this titan getting people to believe in him through these in-office sermons.

Yeah, I think it’s a wonderful question. It’s something I spoke actually at length about with Brian [Koppleman] and David [Levien]. You mentioned Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street is another example. And it’s a really important point that I think ultimately gets to the question of what’s the role of entertainment in our culture? And what happens when we’re all paying attention to entertainment, to the exclusion of other kinds of rhetoric?

In order to make this story a work of entertainment, you have to lean into the primal emotional stuff. That’s what makes entertainment, entertainment. And I think that it is totally honest, and I think it is worth acknowledging that that’s why… I think that’s a big part of why these things happen is because they are attractive. They do appeal to our animal selves to just take what you want and fuck everybody else. And there is something attractive about watching that. There’s something attractive about playing that. And that’s why it keeps happening over and over in history.

I don’t think that a work of entertainment can present a holistic argument of why not to do that. Because a holistic argument of why not to do that requires that we kind of set aside some of those primal animal, emotional feelings. And instead, start activating our logic, intuition, hard work, kind of as Daniel Kahneman calls it system 2 thinking. It’s stuff that we don’t want to think about when we sit down and watch TV. If you make a show like that, people won’t watch it because that’s not entertainment. That’s academia or that’s school or that’s work. And so to me, the role of entertainment here is to entertain you. Appeal to those urges, make you feel those feelings and simultaneously ask some questions.

I think an irresponsible version of Super Pumped would be the one that doesn’t ask those questions. That only shows you the fun parts and doesn’t show you any of the downsides. That doesn’t show you Travis’s shortcomings. And this show is unflinching in showing you.

Definitely.

And as glorious as he appears in episodes one, two, and three, he appears… if you watch the end, he’s inglorious for sure. So I love your question and it’s something we were talking about all the time. How do we ride that balance between, hopefully, not inspiring people to do more of this, but also being honest about why? Why all of us humans are drawn to this kind of behavior.

I read that you were cast as [cult leader] Jim Jones. I’m curious, are Travis and people in this position cult leaders, to a certain degree?

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Travis a cult leader like Jim Jones. He [Travis] was a magnetic personality that rallied a lot of people, his team, as well as his drivers.

Well, obviously not to the same level of the thread running to the end there. I just found like the Koresh comment from Kyle Chandler’s character in, I think it was the first episode [of Super Pumped], really interesting. Cause it obviously seems like he believes that they’re cult leaders. [Laughs]

Yeah, it’s really true. First of all, there have always been these figures throughout history. But I think they’re playing an outsized role in our particular era because of how social media currently works. The way the sort of attention economy, the mass surveillance advertising model that optimizes for the kind of lowest common denominator… It plays very well into the hands of cult leaders, authoritarians, et cetera. We’re seeing a rise in authoritarianism throughout the world. Not just the fact that we elected an authoritarian.

It’s just so odd to me that people are drawn to them. They just get tunnel vision when someone speaks with authority and with confidence, it’s very troubling.

Yeah. Well, I think it’s basic human nature. Again, we’re animals. And this is why I think social media has to do with it. And this goes back to the profits at all cost question. Does our current social media frames public discourse to maximize profits? And the best way to maximize profit is to appeal to the most, basic, and sort of universal, human instincts. That’s how you’re going to maximize your profit. If you’re getting a fraction of a penny for every bit of public discourse, you’ll get more, if people are mad or if they’re scared, or if they’re adhering to a strong-man cult leader authoritarian figure that’s going to do better at sucking in all of our monkey brains. Whereas a framework that was trying to optimize for logic, reason, evidence-based, nuanced conversations… you’re making a brain work harder and it’s going to be harder to siphon profits off of that. So this is why I say that these sorts of cult leaders are probably having a heyday right now because they’re swimming in the fishbowl of Facebook and YouTube. And those platforms are why Trump was able to get elected. And, Trump’s not the only one around the world.

‘Super Pumped’ premieres Sunday on Showtime

John Mayer is in the midst of a tour, and so far, COVID has taken its toll on proceedings. A few days ago, Questlove filled in for Mayer drummer Steve Ferrone, who tested positive for COVID. Now, Mayer himself and other band members got COVID, too, so a few upcoming tour dates have been postponed.

In a post sharing the news yesterday, Mayer wrote, “Whelp. More members of the band tested positive for Covid today, and I was one of them. This means we have to reschedule the next four shows, which we’ve already rescheduled and posted above. I’m so sorry to make you change your plans. This is a bummer for everyone in the band and crew, to say nothing of the question hanging over everyone’s head — mine included — as to how I tested positive on PCR twice in two months. (The first was extremely mild, but this one’s got the better of me.) We’ll give you everything we’ve got at these upcoming shows, just as soon as we rest up and regroup. With love and appreciation… me.”

As for the altered shows, they were originally scheduled for tonight (February 25) in Pittsburgh; March 1 in Belmont Park, New York; and March 4 and 5 in Boston. Those concerts have been moved to May 5, 7, 9, and 10, respectively. It appears Mayer’s next show will be at Las Vegas’s The Grand Garden Arena in March 11.

The Russian invasion and deadly bombing of Ukraine has left a lot of people staring at their TV and computer screens and wondering what, if anything, can be done to help. There’s not much direct action for most of us to take, unfortunately, although Chris Evans has called attention to how a former Ukrainian president was poisoned and disfigured while running against a pro-Russia candidate. That’s more than a few other prominent social media users and TV/WWE stars have done. However, the Anonymous collective group of hackers claims to be doing a lot from behind their own screens.

Anonymous, of course, doesn’t exist behind verified accounts on Twitter, given the nature of their anonymity, but they’re apparently standing with Ukraine. One purported Twitter account declared that they’re intending to “change the world” and “stand up against anything.” The account also called for the Russian people to take a stand against this war as well.

The customary “We are Anonymous. We are Legion. Expect us” mantra does not bode well for Russia so far. The group claimed to have breached (and subsequently leaked) database information from the Russian Ministry of Defence.

In addition, the group announced that they took down the RT News website that corresponds to the Russian state (propaganda) TV station of the same name.

The RT News editor-in-chief confirmed (via Twitter) that the site was attacked but that “RT has been able to repel the hit on their servers.”

The decentralized collective can be found across many Twitter handles, but one account in particular is expressing a lot of the group’s apparent rationale. “When the world turns to chaos because of fools leading other fools to violence, we may feel powerless,” they wrote. “Understand together we are not powerless. Even a singular voice of reason in the darkness can be a beacon of light for many. Speak out. Be heard. Be righteous in all that you do.”

And if anyone wants to thank Anonymous, they’re not having it. “No need to thank us, seriously,” they wrote. “We’re just doing what we think is right because if no one stands up against oppression, who will? Everyone should be standing up at this point. We’re in 2022, not 1922.”