The line and billions where Bobby Axelrod is making a speech to all of Acts capital and he says in the great expanse of time were already dead. And that's something that I believe right? If you look at the great expanse of time. We're not even a DOT the dot is already over. It's already in the past. And so we may as well be super connected to the fact that we're here and alive right
now.
Hello and welcome. I'm Shane parish and you're listening to the knowledge project the podcast dedicated to mastering the best what other people have already figured out this podcast and our website FS top blog help. You better understand yourself and the World Around You by exploring the methods ideas and mental models from some of the most incredible people in the world.
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Today I'm talking with writer and director Brian koppelman who's the co-creator of the Showtime show billions and his film credits include grounders Ocean's Thirteen and solitary man. We talked about the writing process pushing through fear living a meaningful life meditation and so much more Brian's ability to hone in on what really matters will have you think about your life differently. It's time to listen and learn.
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Brian so glad to get to talk to you man.
It's a thrill Shane. This will be great.
This is unlike any other podcast I've ever done a normally one of the people that does the most intense research, but we decided to do this like 45 minutes ago. So we're just going to have to spit ball this.
Yeah, I'd wondered because I know how research have you are and all the stuff that you do how you know, you're whenever I read a post of yours. I feel not just a substantial brain.
Behind it, but I feel that you've worked on your point of view and and I wondered how you were going to research when this compressed period of time because you know, I'm a podcaster to and I find it really hard unless I'm quite familiar with someone's work to do it on short notice, but you did tell you before this that you watch my show and you might know some of my stuff so maybe it won't be as difficult. We'll figure it out as we go to listen. These are these are interesting times.
Times and they demand new ways to attack things.
I totally agree. I love billions huge fan. So I exact one of the things that did strike me. I did a little bit of Googling before is that your big fan of meditation? How did that get
started? I am I practice Transcendental Meditation. I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. Well, I've long tried to find ways to outsmart the part of my brain.
In that wants me to give in to doubt and fear in all areas of my life, right the part of my brain that makes it hard to sit down and do the work because it tells me that probably I'm not as good as I hope I'll be and I'll never be able to capture the feeling I have on the page or when I shoot it the part of my brain that could keep me up at night. I with fears particularly in a time like this.
And so a long time ago when I was 30, I'm 53 now a long time ago and I was 30 and I was in an acute stage of writer's block and really feeling like I wasn't going to be able to ever access the part of myself. That was the most alive and do work that mattered to me. I found morning Pages as described by Julia Cameron the artists way and that worked not only as a solution to my writer's block, but kind of as a salve for many.
Of these it kind of issues but over time and that continued to work and I do that every day, but over time I found myself jousting more frequently with the physical manifestations of anxiety than I would have liked and started searching and the more books. I read the more people I spoke to it seemed meditation was an answer. I'd always been worried about whether I'd be able to I read David Lynch's book catching the big fish and he talks about the way in which
which meditation just calm down those voices and enabled him to do his work. I'm a big admirer of Lynch's I was concerned about TM translate meditation about the sort of legacy of the cult of personality parts of it from the 60s. But the more I looked into it the more I spoke to people the more it seemed that the tool of this practice of meditation would be useful and so I went and
I took lessons and learn how to meditate and I've been doing it for close to 10 years. Now.
You said you do it twice a day. When do you normally do
it? So I wake up the first thing in the morning I make coffee I meditate and then I do morning Pages. That's my routine every day of my life. And then in the afternoon somewhere between three and seven. I'll do the second meditation and it's
it's 20 minutes each time the afternoon when I'd say I do five out of the seven days a week. There are times that I miss it because we're shooting the show and I haven't planned my day well enough, but I'm much better off the people around me are better off if I make it a point to do it.
You mentioned sort of part of your routine. And is there anything else in that routine before I ask you? What morning pages are
you? Well, those are the
Those are the main things I take each part of that the coffee I take seriously the meditation and the morning pages and then I pre billions every morning included a long walk to a couple miles to my office in the making of the show and then I would walk home at the end of the day once we started making the show it became much harder to do the walk in the morning. So I still do cardio exercise, but I have to
to figure out how to get it in every day. I can't necessarily add that in or I just have to get up and you know, 3:45 every day, which I'm not quite able to do what
does it mean to take coffee?
Seriously? Well, it means grinding the beans freshly in the morning. I'm not obsessively crazy about it, but I love the smell of coffee when you're when you grind it. So I usually will grind it in the morning and I used to only do French Press, but now for some reason I'm in the phase of making drip.
But I will I will grind it right that, you know, I want to grind that I want the kitchen smelling of coffee and then I want to make the coffee
talk to me about morning
pages. So I imagine you've had other guests in your 79 or 80 episodes here. Who do them morning pages are technique. I've seen versions of it in various sort of creativity classes. But Julia Cameron really codified the way that I do it in her seminal book the artists way.
And the way Cameron describes them as the way that I do them exactly that is three longhand pages. You must use, you know pen or pencil. You just keep your pen going you don't try to write you're just you're not you're not crafting sentences. You're not thinking about paragraphs. All you're doing is moving your pen across the page until you fill three pages and it
Is this incredibly magical effect it for me. Anyway, it tips whatever is in my subconscious onto the page. It frees me from whatever stopping me from being productive doesn't happen immediately. But after after a month of doing this every day, even three weeks, you will find that not only is it easier to produce work, but you're just slightly lighter.
In the way you move through the world. It's I would say have bought Cameron's Book for a hundred people maybe 20 of those people actually took the time to do the book of those more than half ended up publishing work that they've been unable to produce before that.
Would you rather the same thing every day or is it just literally like stream of Consciousness? Whatever comes in?
No, it's stream-of-consciousness man. And and there are people Business Leaders who do it and educators.
Do it and and artists who do it it. No, it's whatever is on your mind, but I will say this Shane you might find yourself writing about the same thing for three or four days in a row and that thing might then teach you something about something you need to deal with in your life and you reveal a lot about yourself you reveal
yourself. How did you overcome fear? You mentioned here earlier? What were you scared of?
Well, listen, we all have these existential.
Fears, right all these fears or some kind of a replacement for the idea that we're here for a short time. It's The Human Condition, but then these fears manifest in different ways and
People who want to do what I do and who feel that somewhere in them. There's an artistic impulse or even if you're somebody who works in an office and you know that if you work from the most creative part of yourself, that means you're going to take risks. That means you might put an idea fourth that hasn't been thought of in your firm before you might get laughed at your idea might not you might reveal to yourself when you finally manifest it.
Oh crap, this wasn't actually a good idea and the fear of not being special. Hmm not being good enough is can be crippling to people and the truth is what I've discovered is that's all just stuff it Steven pressfield and his book War of art calls resistance, but the to me
As soon as I get past it and start doing the work. I remember that the result the external result doesn't matter at all. I've been cured so many times of whatever's ailing me just by the doing of the work by engaging with this question inside of me by getting listen in these times. I'm never going to talk about a writer or an artist being brave, but there is something of an internal fortitude.
You that when you find a way to engage it, you just come out the other side a better figure you've cut out the other side a better version of yourself and look these are fears all of us have all of us or most of us anyway, and when I guess not all this but most of us are afraid of exposing that part of ourselves that we hold most dear for fear that it will be rejected. But the artist has a duty to risk that
And it's a duty to risk it so that your you're able to be better for me. What I finally realized Shane was that if I allowed these creative impulses to die. It would be like a real death and like any form of death. It would be toxic and this toxicity would ooze out of me on to those that I loved. It would make me a worse father a worse husband a
Friend for the bitterness and jealousy that I would allow to grow in me and I realized that as soon as I allow myself to do the work all that stuff went away dissipated and I knew after Amy and I had our first child that if I want to be the kind of father I wanted to be and this is 23 years ago. If I want to be the 24 the kind of father. I wanted to be if I wanted to tell my children that they should chase their dreams and I had to or I'd be a liar and I'd become
Bitter and a bitter father is not really the ideal version of fatherhood that I had
want to hear more about living your dreams and sort of like you mentioned earlier anxiety walk me through how you how you convince yourself to live your dreams. Like is there is that just diving into the work or is there is there more
to it well,
As I say for me, it was an acute moment, right? It was in a cute moment when I realized.
Fatherhood's really important to me. I'm going to be bad at it and that quickly I was able to shift but what I you know, I saw that there was a chance that by doing this work, I would free myself and I'll say it happened so quickly as soon as David and I started writing our first movie, but we had no contacts we had no thought that we could sell it or that it would make a movie out of it. But the moment I was waking up earlier.
Going into a room generating pages. I started walking straighter. I started as I say moving more lightly through the world and I have found that whenever I talk about this I get hundreds of letters from people who realize that they're in the same bind. I was in and that they hear this quiet voice and they've been scared to let it out and as to the root of where the fear comes from. I don't know. I think it's Primal, but I do know that if
You can somehow manifest it you will feel better long before the world recognizes it so living my dream. I don't translate that into when I got to make the movies. I really translate that into when I started to be able to identify myself as a writer as a creative person so that as long as I decided I made the decision that as long as I wrote every day, I was a writer I didn't need someone else to say it I needed to do that work and if I did it I could tell it to myself.
And if I could tell it to myself I was that thing
they became part of your identity.
Yes. I didn't quit my job. I'll say one thing that I think is crucial is I think sometimes sort of taking huge drastic action that's external to the actual project or external to the actual mission is dramatic and it feels great in the moment, but it turns out to be another way of self-sabotage right? I must quit my job in order that I may paint well,
It's not true. All you need to do if you want to paint this pain. I remember saying to my dad businessman and a successful businessman who worked closely with artists, but wasn't one. I remember saying get screwing up the courage and saying, you know Dad I really and I figured we'd be having a conversation of the last hours. You know. I said, I just have to tell you I really think I need to you know a boy, how can I say this to you? I think I need to be a writer.
And he just looked at me. He said well son if you want to write right and as you know has simple and ideas that it's totally true. It's like well, you don't need to do anything except right? So I got up earlier. I literally just got up an hour earlier and you'd be amazed what you can do if you get up an hour earlier, I'm going to use writing as an example. But anything you want to do applies to this one page a day.
Even if you take off Sunday's is 300 and whatever 10 about 310 pages in a year one page a day. You can write a page and a half hour. So that many pages is a novel that's three screenplays. It's an endless amount of short stories and you can apply that to sort of anything that you're interested in doing. You have a game in your mind code a little bit every day, right you want to be so
And who figures out how to choreograph modern dance working it for a half hour a day record yourself doing your thang like to me. We can all find a half hour. There's there's nobody who can't wake up a half hour earlier.
I see a lot of people who their dream is right in front of them. They know exactly what they want in life be it a relationship an opportunity a project that they want to work on that they're going to work on this thing.
But then they start like negative self-talk and they sort of like convince themselves. They can't do it. Sure. Talk to you a little bit about your response to that. How do you think about that?
Well, I fat a lot of that is like result thinking well, I think about it this way.
One you have to calculate less.
You have to calculate less. If you the more you try to game the stuff out the more it becomes clear. The odds are against you and you can't win.
But most folks have accomplished something great. We're check kind of just unrelenting in there.
belief, forget their belief unrelenting in their determination to do it and
Momentum is an incredibly powerful tool as is inertia and Incredibly powerful force, right? So I just think commit to doing something for a few days.
and then commit to doing it the next day and then suddenly you have this kind of momentum that
Thrusts you forward.
That's beautiful. Talk to me a little bit about the writing process. How do you go from idea to fully finished movie or
show? I'll back up a little bit. I'd say anyone who really is interested in this stuff.
The way you figure this question, you're asking me out is by watching movies and then reading the screenplays or watching television shows and reading the teleplays and with the Internet. It's really easy to get access to those things. So I start David and I my partner is my lifelong best friend. We do all this stuff together and
we usually start with a world that fascinates us and so you'll go. Okay. Well this world of hedge fund operatives and United States attorneys.
This seems like a big fascinating very specific world with insular language and Customs. That would be fun to dive into.
And from there we'll start to do research to see if it is a world that we find as fascinating as we think we find it. So which means reading a bunch of stuff doing first-person interviews with people using whatever connections we have, you know, so if I know somebody who knows someone who works at a hedge fund to get to go visit the hedge fund or meet the US attorney's spend a lot of time doing that so that we feel like we can get our arms around what the world is and then it's time to figure out who the characters are.
You have a lot of conversations about the kinds of people who are drawn to this world. You're doing a lot of journaling about this you doing a lot of thinking about what would bring you into the world the right way what our forces to set against one another and so you start to really think about who these characters are what made them who they are and then you start to think about a story structure that would bring these forces into opposition because you need conflict sort of in every scene of a screenplay or teleplay.
So you then start thinking about that and you begin to do character descriptions, which you'll write up and then you'll start to outline a version of a story that might work then you'll revise that outline. And then once you kind of are outlining it and revising it we use index cards and really then start to take the outline and break it into beats which are sort of the flow of scenes then you can you break that down into scenes themselves that kind of add up into
Beats of a section of the thing and at a certain point you have a completely beaded out outline with a lot of detail for every episode of billions. Let's say an episode of billions. The teleplay is 60 Pages the outline from which we worked is usually 20 pages. So you have a 20-page document that's every scene a bunch of dialogue and what the f what's happening in the episode from there, you'll have sort of what the scenes are about and then you're just writing the dialogue the most
fun part of it is when you're actually taking that outline and turning it into scenes themselves. That's the part where your hands are going wild in your sort of you're working from the freest part of you. The outlining is the most arduous really sort of grinding on story and how to make the story better and how to create conflict and not settling and second-guessing but once you have the outline,
And you're free to sort of that's the part that's like jazz. Then you're free to improvise. Then you're free to go because you have a base to return to and because you know, you can always rewrite if the scene is it goes on out too far away from what you were thinking and it doesn't work. You know how to rein it back in back to this outline.
That's fascinating. Do you notice gaps in the other line when you're trying to like actually fill it in?
Yes, but you don't notice that until you've really written all the seats. So then right you you know,
Just that in the outline phase, but once you're through the outline and you really grinded on it.
When you're writing the scenes, you'll write all the scenes then when you put that back together. Absolutely. You read the whole thing. And you go. Oh this section here is boring or this section goes too fast or oh these three scenes we got to put something between them to create more tension, but that's all the fun. I mean, that's all the most fun part of the fence.
Do you test these before you run them or is it just you guys test them? How like, do you give them to people to look over the script and be like, does this flow does this make sense? Do you feel
What we're trying to get you to feel
yeah sure on billions. We have a writers room. Yeah, how
does it writers room even work like a pretend? I'm a kid.
No, we're you know David and I are the showrunners. So we run the writers room. We have a group of seven other people in the room with us and we all talk through this outline stuff of the episodes. We work together and get the outline into what we think is pretty good shape. We then share that outline with our whole writers room team.
They give us notes. We then incorporate the notes that make sense to us. Then we share it with Showtime. Then Showtime gives us their thoughts their incredible Partners, they leave it to us to make all the decisions but they're out like their questions are great because they haven't been in the writers room. So they don't know what we're planning. They know the Arc of the season because we've told them that ahead of time but they don't know what each episode is going to be so they might get it and say oh, this is great. We don't understand what happens there when acts talks to Taylor.
Was accident playing a game or did he they'll ask questions that then allow us to refine what we're going to do then we don't turn the outline back in but we take their questions and bring those into when we graphed the actual Stella play
does the economics at all Impact how the story gets played out the economics of the show.
In any show
well sure. You have a budget so you
so if you're the showrunner of a TV series your responsibility is to tell the story that you want to tell within the amount of with using the resources that you're given so the beginning of the Season our line producer really deals with the finances will talk to show time we'll talk to us we'll together all figure out well this is the what we think you know they'll say well this is what we feel like you guys should have this year
We'll talk it through and then we'll make the show for that amount. I mean that's part of the job right where we are in a business partnership with the finance here and they give us a tremendous amount of creative freedom and our responsibility is to make a show that really works for us in our audience and that works for them financially them being Showtime financially, we take that obligation really seriously to them, you know, because they're in trouble.
Trusting us with this, you know, we that's a real thing
to Showtime have any say in how many seasons is goes for is that totally up to the creative
process know that if I guess it notes I'd say it's a cop by this point five seasons in it's a conversation but they have ultimate authority of tomorrow. They could say we're done with billions. That's completely I mean, they're the financiers. They're putting up all the bread we could see if Dave and I wanted to start want to stop we could stop obviously and that would be that but we love making the show and we don't
Stop and it certainly seems to us that Showtime doesn't want to stop either.
I don't think you should stop just my humble opinion. Thanks, man. What's the difference between a show in a movie when you're writing and creating
it in writing and creating it? We don't really think of it very much differently. The businesses are different and on television now, you can make the kinds of stories that we like to make and we've made throughout our career. They're harder to make in movies now, but I mean look at this time right now shame. I don't know what
The future of the movie business is who's going on movie theater right now movies exist on streaming platforms now, so I think these things are all becoming one thing pretty quickly just some stories tell better in two hours and some tell better in Sixty or eighty or a hundred hours.
That's really interesting. I mean one of the things when I thought of it that question was
I
would think that going into a movie you sort of like, you know, the arc You Know How It Ends whereas with a show that's multiple Seasons. You might not really know how it ends. You're sort of exploring it as you
go. You ought to know though something about How It Ends I find it's hard to tell a story if I don't have some idea of where these characters are going to end up it is true that for a movie you absolutely have to know and for a television
You don't absolutely have to know it but it's useful to know it and look David and I are trained. Our training really is in movies. So we do think in terms of story in terms of Beginnings middles and ends and we absolutely had a few possible endings for the series in mind pretty early on and we definitely knew how the first couple seasons were going to end and I'll tell you we cannot start writing a season of the show.
Show without knowing how the season ends you have to be able to plant stuff. You have to be able to set the characters off on their Quest knowing the way in which that Quest is going to resolve.
What do you know as a professional Storyteller about the cornerstones of a good story that we don't know or we can't see
well, I think you do know actually I think people get bound up when
They have to you know, if you have to go make a speech. What if one has to make a speech and knows that they want to tell a story in that speech. They might get really nervous because suddenly they have to write and some teacher told them that there was a form they had to adhere to and that was unnatural for them. But if I put you in a coffee shop or a bar and you had to sit down with somebody and it was important for you to make them laugh or for you to keep them engaged and I said,
And tell them a story that you know, people always react to you would tell them that story and that story would have an inciting incident the moment that it comes alive would have a beginning a middle and an end the middle of it would probably build the some sort of a climax there would be some sort of a resolution and that's all the same stuff that's happening when we're telling a story professionally. I guess. We're probably better at recognizing or more practice not even
Better at recognizing the stuff that gets in the way of that but we all know how to do all of this stuff. It's all just about getting comfortable with it. It doesn't mean everybody has I'm not being falsely humble, but doesn't mean everybody has the same utility with language that I have that utility with language is hard one. It comes from years of reading and writing and thinking about language. So now it's a certain stage in my life. That's something that I have.
A great deal of control over but that's really just sort of like a tool that I'm using anybody all of us pretty much know how to keep someone else interested. If it really matters to us in the right kind of story now maybe has to be the Right audience like, you know people go on dates all the time and sometimes you sit across the table from somebody and it just flows you're just able to connect on a wavelength and tell the story so and someone else could sit there in the
same story might fall flat. That doesn't mean don't know how to tell it. It just means that wasn't the right audience for the story so finding if you don't figure out how to get in the wavelength of an audience is again, that's also something that all of us do in life. I've got I'm just a professional in it that knowing how to do it in a fictional context.
Is there a difference between somebody who started in movies and then writes TV shows and somebody started in TV shows and then writes movies, I
guess the reason a few different ways one. Is that television writing?
Is a career path and that people can come up through writing rooms. You can get a job as a writers room assistant. If you're in a writing program in college potentially or film program film and TV program. And then if you're in a writers room, you can kind of learn what that means to contribute ideas in a writers room and work your way up a system and you can not count on that progress and happening but it's a progression that can happen and it's a it is a career path.
Being a movie writer. You really have to survive by your wits. There's nothing holding you in place. There's nothing there's sort of no safety harness. You're just floating out there trying to come up with the next good idea trying to get hired trying to sell the next spec script. I think it forces you to become an original Storyteller in a way that being a TV writer coming up through the system does not and I think
Gives it gives you an edge when it comes to being in TV coming from the subtle world.
Look at you. So interested about the world of hedge funds was that the power dynamic between ultra wealthy people and sort of the people that are supposed to regulate them.
It's the fact that
walking Among Us were these nation states
by that. You mean billionaires? Yeah like there. Yeah effective Nation
says they are. Yeah. It's exactly right. I mean, these are people with armadas of ships and fleets of aircraft and people who walk around them with armaments and they're sort of nothing that they
He can't accomplish in a way that they want to I mean you would just look at the United States presidential campaign in the way billionaires. Although they didn't win the way billionaires are able to influence the process. And so we look at these nation states. Then we looked at these people in law enforcement these United States attorneys who were like kings because they have this tremendous amount of discretion. And as far as what they're going to prosecute when and how
and what we look at these as immovable Force as we could set against one another and that would allow us to have a really almost Shakespearean type of construct to tell the story but we'd been fascinated by Hedge funders for a very very long time David and I started trying to write about them eight years before billions ever happened and almost did a project about them at HBO and the last minute didn't happen because of the financial crash of 2008. And so it had long held
Fascination that there were these people with this kind of outsized power and influence that most Americans weren't really aware of and we were also interested in why people with great wealth were held in such Fascination why this is long before Trump was president or even running for president
but why these characteristics like verbal Acuity a kind of thin facile intellect and a kind of raw Charisma were standing in for real qualities of character like generosity empathy kindness true intelligence and why that first batch of characteristics seemed to capture the imagination of so much of the populace we noticed it and we wanted to put figures on the screen
Who would embody some of that and see whether people would be able to get past just merely rooting for them to understanding that they ought to look at them with a bit more of a jaundiced eye.
one of the things I love about billions is that
there's a lot of points for it's really hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
Yes,
and I find myself rooting for Bobby and Chuck at different
points. Yeah. Well for sure because the other thing we realized was a lot of these prosecutors we looked around at people like Giuliani and Chris Christie and we saw that there were people using these positions of the public interest for their own personal good.
yes they would do things that were for the public good but at the same time they were serving their own career Ambitions and when you notice that and you notice that these people would go from a position like for the public good to running for office and they would campaign on things they did when they were in those offices it made us see that those people all those are the traditional Heroes of television series but one ought to look at them sometimes in the bed of a jaundiced eye to and
and we want to put this whole thing of power money and influence and the legal system on display so that viewers would be forced while rooting for these people while laughing at the funny lines while noticing their Charisma and power and fearsome intellects they would also have to ask themselves where the moral culpability lies and where we are all culpable in allowing all this to take place
How do you feel that you?
And I don't mean this in any negative way, but how do you feel in creating a character? Who's a billionaire and you know borderline skirts, the law that people root for you've made him so
likable, I'll Damian Lewis makes him incredibly likeable and nominal the answer to your question is
Why are why were Mark Cuban and Donald Trump the two most popular reality stars now? I'm a front marks a friend of mine. And I really like Mark and I think he's a good person. But why are those why were those figures the subject of so much Fascination and adulation it would do us no good to make a mustache twirling villain out of Acts the way to raise the question for people is
Acts to have as much personal Charisma charm intelligence verbal Acuity self-justification self mythologizing as possible, but then show him doing absolutely terrible things that we all believe people in power would do so that you have to ask yourself.
Why am I ruining for this guy? Who should I really be rooting for? What does it mean that I'm rooting for him? What does it say about our culture? What does it make me? Ask myself about where I'm placing my loyalties how should I act differently in my regular life now? Look we're primarily trying to allow you to be entertained to have a good time watching our show to laugh, but we definitely want these questions too late.
GE and it's much more effective to to us anyway to create a guy who would fool you in life on the show. I'd rather someone who would fool you in the real world because maybe and watching it and asking yourself that question you won't be fooled as easily in the real world. Next time we hear in our country put somebody in office who is utterly incapable of managing this pandemic utterly disinterested in managing this pandemic.
I accept as to the way in which the pandemic redounds as judgment on him. He has no empathy and no critical thinking skills in this area. But what he was a guy who portrayed himself as rich and sat on a gold throne and Americans were fooled and so I have an obligation to put an even better version of that guy on television or various versions of that guy right acts is way smarter than Trump and way more personally engaging
But you have to put people like that on TV so that so that the audience will be forced to ask themselves the question.
It's a good way to put it. Can you take me behind the scenes a little bit into your favorite scene and walk me through it or a scene. I won't ask you to pick your favorite child.
Yeah, it's more just I can't look at the show that way, you know, I'm so in it when I'm making it I can tell you that there are episodes that I think are particularly special you nowhere.
Different themes rise to the top. I'm always interested in what other people respond to and I think when the show's finished it'll be easier for me to sort of catalog things in the way that you're that you're asking for
that makes sense is like what keeps you from being a perfectionist like how do you know when enough is enough is you sound like the type of person who and I'm just guessing so correct me if I'm wrong is tends towards
perfectionism. Well the like we do have a Time.
There's time pressure. That's but yeah, we're crazy perfectionist David and I will work on a cut of the show meaning editing the episodes. I mean right up until the last moment that we can before they take it out of our hands.
Well, I would say this I'd say being a perfectionist in this regard is useful, but we do have to deliver the show by a date certain each time. So that that is a guard rail against sort of insanity. What keeps
you going like with all the success you've had like what keeps you motivated to wake up in the morning and just sure keep going after
this work makes me the work makes me feel it does make me feel alive. You know, it's the same reason I do my podcast the
Is I made the decision when I was 30 that I was going to follow my curiosity and the things that fascinated me. And as long as I'm doing that, I feel like a version of myself that I want to spend time with for me. I think that in anybody's career, you got to take care of your family. You have to make money. I'm not a pollyannaish idealist in that way. But if you can find a way to do work that makes you feel fulfilled. It's really easy a part of keeping.
That it becomes much easier. It was an it's a hard business my business. It requires a tremendous amount of commitment a lot of time, but the rewards are outsized to Shane right the rewards in terms of people telling me.
How much they dig the thing, you know the sort of feedback I get the financial rewards. I mean, all of it is outsized to especially considering I just love doing it. So what keeps me going is all of it, man. I mean, it's much harder to ask somebody who's riding the back of a garbage truck every day. What keeps them going which is of course what keeps them going as the need to put food on the table and take care of their family and the sense of a job well done and all that other stuff.
But someone who has the opportunity to do what I do who wouldn't want to keep going. I have a hard time relating to
but you are that dream for a lot of people Riley here financially successful here your outwardly successful in terms of recognition and creating something people value and then you get to a point where you can you could walk away sail off into the sunset, but you keep going and I love that.
Well, I think it's really important to say that a career a long career in Hollywood has a lot of ups and downs. I mean in in 2013. I thought I was drummed out of the business David and I wrote him.
Be that completely bombed at the box office was a disaster on Rotten Tomatoes. We were involved in a high profile project that was going to be on HBO and never happened. We got fired from it before it even begun and we had a movie agent call us and basically tell us it's possible that our career was over and it was out of that that we started writing billions. And so I had those conversations with my wife in 2013. My wife Amy complement is a filmmaker to and I remember having a conversation about whether we have to sell our apartment.
And downsize and how we were going to look at how we were not living extravagantly. We've never lived extravagantly and I remember really feeling like this might come to a crashing Halt and then I remembered being 30 and I remembered the only way they gain control of this is to control the stuff that I can handle which means showing up again and starting to write again. And so that was 2013 and by 2015 we were in production on the pilot of billions and a
To sort of shift into this other gear and so I never take it for granted that it's going to continue responsible about the money Damien. I responsible about the financial part of it so that I won't be in a position where I have to sell my apartment ever again. I hope but I have absolutely been right up against it because of my commitment to this particular career and you know the whims of town like Hollywood can absolutely go any which way so one has to
As to love this work enough to withstand it that put a lot of
strain on your relationship with Amy.
No, that's the luckiest thing in my life. Is that like we married reach bury the right person for us. So no we were in it together. We're really lucky in that way. I we were too young to make a rational decision Shane. Like I was 25 and Amy was 22 when we had I guess I'd just turned 26 when we got married like, oh no, I was 25 and then I turned 26, I guess 20 days later, but
We just happened to pick the right person and we just fit and we have incredibly on a we would say a lot of people's favorite episode of my podcast is the one that Amy was on and it was one her movie. I smile back was coming out and we had a great combo about all this stuff and I would say it's a real great peek into functional marriage that has withstood whatever disappointments from the outside by sort of being together.
It's amazing. It's really good to
hear. It's so lucky dude. It's just super lucky.
What have you learned? I would say maybe in the last 20 years sort of about living a meaningful life.
Well something I think about a lot. This is where you get into trouble talking about this stuff, but I think it's it's because it's nothing novel right? It's a life that involves.
Doing work. You think is Meaningful being good to as many people as you possibly can contributing in whatever ways you can.
In a societal way and I try to do all that stuff the best I can I mean for Amy and me raising our kids was the single most meaningful Thing by far. It's the thing that gave our lives meaning that and doing work that we cared about him and that takes care of a huge huge part of it, right and then trying to be there for as many people as you can in whatever way you can again, that stuff is its basic and I think in different phases
of your life you can do different parts of it you can do more of
it even to being there for other people are you there for yourself like in what ways do you need to put your own mask on first to power you to be there for other people
say more about that what do you mean your own mask like how do you take care of
yourself to give you the strength and energy to take care of other people
well I think that goes back to like the stuff we talked about like meditation and morning pages and exercise I mean these things which are hard to force yourself to do they are they sound like just
received wisdom or something but the thing is that they work I guess the only other thing is like the way the Tibetans talked about it you know contemplate your death that makes a lot of things very clear to write if you really try to understand the idea the concept of death it does help clarify a lot about the concept of life and how you should live but it's mostly simple things I mean oh well one thing for me is when eating well if I eat well eating and sleeping
think those things are really important eating well and sleeping. Well meaning not eating too much like, you know sugar and flour
taught me more about the death. How did it do you talk to yourself a bit this often is it looks fun taneous is it like scheduled is that
again? If you go back to the product podcast Delaney we talked about it a lot on there. It's just having an understanding of the finite nature of life and a lot of that comes from reading right if you read a lot which I do.
Do you come to see that this theme of want to talk about The Human Condition before right the fact there's this great singer songwriter named Slade Cleves SLA ID Cleves who has a song called cry where and he says everything you love will be taken away. And if you walk through life with the knowledge of that that everything you love is going to be gone someday for me. It makes me love harder. It makes me aware of
of how fortunate I am to be present in this moment talking to you here knowing that the people I love breathing and living and thriving and it makes me want to be more expensive more giving and more connected because it was line of billions where Bobby Axelrod is making a speech to his whole all of Acts capital and he says in the
Great expanse of time were already dead. And that's something that I believe right. If you look at the great expanse of time. We're not even a DOT the dot is already over. It's already in the past. And so we may as well be super connected to the fact that we're here and alive right now this also
empowering to help you go after what you
want. Yes, right like
to live your dreams.
Well to help you focus in on what that means. What do you what you
want? I think a lot of people don't even consciously think about it and then unconsciously they just sort of go about like, what do I want today? What I wanted a and then they wake up. Yes, and you're the end of your life you sort of like realize that oh these things that really matter to me at this point. I didn't see earlier.
Sure Shane. That's the gift of the morning pages and meditation. Do you meditate do you do any of that stuff?
I do. I'm not as
ritualistic as it as I want to be about it after do it before bed. Yeah, that's great too. But sometimes I'm so exhausted. I
just fall asleep, right? Yeah. I just think like those things allow you to check in and allow you not to get in a situation where like you said, you're just chasing sort of short-term. Yeah endorphin hits but and and look all of us chase short-term endorphin had
Times all of us go through periods of time where we are going after the more thin Pleasures than the thicker deeper richer Pleasures, so you can't hold yourself out to a standard that's impossible to achieve either. It's not that I'm not also fall prey to those other things. We all do right? I'm not a Tibetan monk. I'm not sitting out in the woods. I'm engaged in the material world.
But I just try to also have an awareness of what?
That means and of what's important at a deeper level and I think times like this like what we're all going through as a society right now with covid-19 the Corona virus with social distancing. It's a great time to practice getting in touch with that stuff. It's a great time and I'll say the work that I have done personally really pays off in a time like this because able inside again doesn't mean I never free.
Gout doesn't mean I never get anxious. Of course, I do. I'm a human being but it does mean that I have certain tools. I've stoked to be prepared to deal with it.
I'll talk about two things for we wrap this up. That was beautiful. I want to go into failure. You mentioned you had a box office failure. I think it was 2013. How did you think about that? Did you think of it that as like, you know, a certain percentage of movies are going to fail this happen to be one or did you walk away from that going like, oh, like I failed I need to do something.
Friend, like how did you how did you think of it that situation
every know that that was a really brutal. I mean that was a brutal blow part of that was that in the making of that it was a very difficult fraud filming process or process if you'd prefer and it was I knew the movie was going to be bad and that's why I was waiting and waiting for it to be released knowing it was terrible and I did really get a call from a film agent.
He saying your career is might be over. You might not be hireable. Unless you find a way to write yourself out of this and so it was cataclysmic man. And it required all those resources. I'd started meditating a couple years before them. It was incredibly helpful, but it was jarring. You know, I walked I used to walk across Central Park to go to my office and on a normal day crossing the park would take 25 minutes and I'd say in the shadow of that movie coming out.
I was walking so slowly it would take me like an hour and 20 minutes to get through the park because I was just so beat up and miserable. But then you start to do things. I started my podcast in the shadow of that. I started making these vines that were called 6 second screen riding lessons where I was talking to people about giving themselves permission to do this creative work and I was really really talking to myself and trying to remind myself that I didn't need some authority figure to tell me I was horrible that I had a career, you know, these are lessons we have to relearn over and over again. They're not there. I wish life force.
Um symbol that once you made a distinction for yourself you were able to just Hue to it, but the truth is we get knocked off course by life's events and if we don't remind ourselves of first principles consciously we can just drift so you have to remind yourself first principles and then you have to lock down again and then you have to move
forward. I love that talk to me about reading you big reader. What are you reading
now? I'm reading a wonderful book right now. That's not
Out yet. It's about ostensibly about Tiger Woods, but it's about a lot more than that's written by this guy named Michael bamberger's a great writer bamberger wrote this incredible book about I might shyamalan's making of Lady in the Water and this book is about how tiger put himself back together to win The Masters and it's just a beautiful book and then I just asked Twitter for bunch of book recommendations. And I think the next book I'm going to read is a novel called, Ohio, but I'm forgetting the
His name right now.
Hey mister reading fiction.
I got rotate I rotate between nonfiction and fiction
what appeals to you the most of it the Tiger Woods story. Is that the it come back after failure is that the what draws you into that story as a
person? Well, we can have a whole podcast on Tiger Woods, but Tigers sort of an obsession of Mine He's My failure. I say my favorite sports team is the next but Tiger Woods of my second favorite sports team and I do find the fact that
at
he was able to Marshal his resources one more time in that way is just stunning also my son was like to when tiger won the first Masters and it's just been a it's something that ties my father who's 80 me and my son altogether when Tigers playing well we're all talking to each other were all connected I mean it's a great magic a sport
as a great
And this thank you so much Brian. I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.
Shane, and thanks for doing what you do, man. I look forward to this coming out.
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