Brian Koppelman On The Artist Within, Nurturing Your Voice & The Importance Of Consistent Creative Practice

Today's guest was always creative, but never thought of himself of an artist. Then Brian Koppelman shifted his mindset. He adopted consistent daily practices to nurture his voice. He finally gave that voice the respect it deserved. And his life was forever changed. As direct result, this former music industry executive turned screenwriter, director, producer and showrunner has spent the last two decades churning out an avalanche of consistently great creative output as the co-writer (alongside lifelong friend David Levien) of iconic films like Rounders and Ocean's 13 and co-creator a little hit show you might have heard of called Billions on Showtime. Today we convene for a fun and highly instructive conversation about the interior life of a master storyteller and modern day artist — and the lessons that can be gleaned from investing our own creative instincts. We discuss how he discovered Tracy Chapman while still in college, facilitated her first record deal, and the hows and whys behind walking away from the music business to pursue his dream of being a writer. We mine why devotion to process over results, mastery over success, and love of craft is the path to a meaningful life. We examine how to overcome negative self-talk and how Tony Robbins and Julia Cameron changed his life. And we dive deep into how his daily habits — journaling and meditation paramount among them — have paved his road to long-sustained success. But, as a long time admirer of Brian, what strikes me most is his generosity. A source of personal inspiration for my own creative endeavors, Brian shares his copious experience freely (what works, what doesn’t and why) on his twitter feed (@BrianKoppelman) and as host of The Moment — his stellar podcast in which he shares conversations with all manner of successful creative people about the pivotal moments that fueled their fascinating careers. I think of him as a benevolent mentor at large to anyone and everyone seeking to live more fully, creatively expressed lives of purpose and meaning. So how does he do it? What can we glean from his example, habits and practices that can inform how we think about ourselves as creative beings? And why is this important? Even if you don't consider yourself creative, Brian will leave you questioning this assumption. Because deep down, we are all artists yearning to be fully expressed in that which makes us uniquely who we are. When we engage this inclination, the world is a better place. And we all deserve permission to do the work we want to do. Final Note: This conversation took place a few months ago while visiting NYC. Alas, my film crew did not join me, so this episode is audio only. Final Final Note: Season 4 of Billions returns to Showtime on March 17. If you’re new to the show, it's truly appointment viewing. So take the next week to get caught up. Season 3 was unreal and I can't wait to see what Brian, David and their amazing cast and crew have lingering up their sleeves. The only thing I know for sure is that we won't see it coming. It's both a delight and honor to share today's exchange with a master storyteller. I sincerely hope you not only enjoy it, but that you put his sagacious wisdom to work. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  You don't have to quit your job. You can find a half-hour a day. And even if you think you can't find a half-hour a day, you can. I'm not one of those people who says you don't need sleep. Like, you definitely need to sleep, but you don't need the extra hour online, you don't need the time playing a video game. The time that you're gonna get in your car, drive to Starbucks, drive to wherever else, that's 20 minutes that you could sit and write something. And if writing's not your thing, that's 20 minutes you could be taking photographs. Or that's 20 minutes that you could be working. There are 20 minutes in the day, and those 20 minutes add up. It's much easier to say, "I can't find the time," than "I'm scared I won't be any good."

• 1:35Rich Roll?

  That's Brian Koppelman, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:53Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? What's happening? My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. Got Brian Koppelman on the show today. Very excited. Producer, director, screenwriter, former music biz executive. You know this guy, right? He's the mind, the co-writer behind some absolutely iconic films. Films like Rounders, like Ocean's 13. But he is perhaps best known as the co-creator, along with his longtime co-writer and best friend, David Levine, of the hit show Billions on Showtime, which I don't know about you, but I absolutely love. Along with his podcast, The Moment, where he has these amazing long-form conversations with all manner of successful creative people

• 2:37Rich Roll?

  about the pivotal moments that fueled their fascinating careers. Brian is a guy I've been following for a long time. He's an incredibly prolific artist, as well as this amazingly generous source of guidance and inspiration to the creative community at large. He's a guy who has inspired my own creative endeavors in so many ways. So how does he do it? How does he manage it all? How does he maintain such a high level of consistently great output? And what can we learn? What can we learn about creativity? What can we glean from Brian's example, his habits, his practices, that can inform how we think about ourselves as creative beings

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  and our own unique creative expression?

• 3:31Rich Roll?

  Okay, so Brian Koppelman. I love this guy. And I'm just so excited that he agreed to do the show when I was in New York City the other month. And there's a lot that fascinates me about him. How he discovered Tracy Chapman and helped her get her first record deal when he was still in college. How he walked away from a very successful, secure career in the music business to pursue his dream of being a writer. His love for and his dedication to his craft. The persistence that he demonstrated to become successful. And how Tony Robbins and Julia Cameron really changed his life. We talk about the many habits that he credits to his long-term success, like daily meditation.

• 4:14Rich Roll?

  Journaling, The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron's amazing book. And Brian's is really the story of someone who was always creative, but never really thought of himself as an artist. And then the path that he blazes to make this dream a reality. And then the generosity with which he shares his experience, what works, what doesn't, and why, to help all of us live more fully and creatively expressed. So this is a conversation about nurturing that inner voice, about confronting and overcoming negative self-talk and giving yourself permission to do the work that you want to do. Because, in my opinion at least, the world is a better place when we are living more fully expressed, more creatively expressed lives.

• 4:59Rich Roll?

  Final note, season four of Billions returns to Showtime on March 17th, which I'm super excited about. Season three was absolutely insane. So if you're new to this show, trust me, this is appointment viewing. So get caught up. And with that, I'll let the master storyteller do the rest of the storytelling. So this is me and Brian Koppelman.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  You know, you're about to get out the door and then you get the call that you don't have to, but the truth is, it is fun appearing on a podcast where you know the host has a clear objective, a point of view, and a reason for doing the show. So this is, you know, fun for me.

• 5:39Rich Roll?

  Well, I appreciate you doing it. You're a busy man. You're wearing a lot of hats these days and there's lots of Brian Koppelman's I want to explore. The screenwriter, the dad, the meditator, the morning routine guy, the mentor, which is one of my favorite Bryans. And I love you when you're with Bill Simmons, too. You guys just have great energy together. So yeah, I love listening to you in that context. And you're able to vacillate between all these different worlds from sports to entertainment to music. Like you really have experience and know your shit in so many arenas. But I think the thing that draws me the most to you.

• 6:20Rich Roll?

  Beyond the amazing work that you put out and share with the world is this mentorship role. You've really made yourself available to the creative community to be an encouraging presence for those that have a creative spark and are challenged in bringing it to life. So I'm interested in how you matured into this role.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I have a great catholicity of interest. I always have, but it's always been centered around curiosity and obsession. In the case of Bill Simmons, he and I have known each other 20 years, and so that's a very easy and fun exchange. And we met at this intersection of entertainment and sports in a way, because our first movie, Rounders, was in some ways a sports movie and had a lot of sports references. Simmons used it to talk about basketball, and that's how we came together. And I'm thrilled to know that you're following the work that I'm doing that closely, man. And I think that there's something kindred in

• 7:23Speaker 01

  what you do and what I do. But it goes back to the fact that when I was younger, the answer to your question, which is why am I so available to people and why am I engaged and why do I become animated by helping people break through creative blocks, by helping people figure out how to get to the core of what they want to do and then to try to help them do it. And of course, I am not someone who makes any money doing that. I do it completely pro bono on Twitter.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  But it's made you a media presence, though. Unlike your writing partner, David, he's not a media presence in the way that you are.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, that just breaks down to our personalities in a way and what we're each most engaged by.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  But it also, I think, ties into this, which is that David didn't have similar creative block when he was young. He didn't have a problem, or not the same kind of problem, figuring out that he wanted to be a creative person. And he didn't have the kind of problem I did, reconciling the feeling in me that I was trying to get out with my own perception of myself as somebody who wasn't an artist, who wasn't one of the anointed people, who wasn't chosen or picked to be an artist. I knew I was a smart person. I knew that I had a great verbal dexterity. I knew I had certain skills, but I didn't feel, and I knew I had a deep well of feeling that I was trying to communicate. I knew when I was really excited about something, I wanted to share it. I wanted to find out everything

• 8:54Speaker 01

  about it. I wanted to find out what was special about it. And I wanted to go all the way into that world and explore it. And I knew I wanted to find a way to write about it and tell stories about it. But I had an incredibly difficult time putting myself in a lane that said, artist, creative person, someone allowed to think of themselves as a storyteller. And so because I was so jammed up, and because I was so miserable despite having success, and some of this comes, as it often does for all of us, comes back to a childhood where I was that kid who was always told, you're so smart, why are you so stupid? And not by my parents, who were incredibly supportive, but by the school

• 9:36Speaker 01

  that I went to. And my own inability to see, to sort of solve that juxtaposition for myself, I couldn't reconcile it either. So it wasn't just that the teachers couldn't reconcile it, I couldn't reconcile it, you know? And I would look at some of the other kids, even as we're getting up in high school and doing the plays, and they just seemed like they had a kind of magic that I didn't have. Right, right. Right? And because of that, when I finally did figure it all out for myself, or begin to figure it out,

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I felt so much more free, and I'm happy to tell you how that all happened, but I felt so much more free and so much more like myself, that if I can find a way to help somebody get that feeling, I want to do it. So if I can give them practical tips, you know, I started doing this stuff of trying to guide people by telling them that most people holding themselves out as experts were con people, con men usually, sometimes con women. And because it bothered me to see aspirants give their money, when they had very limited money, to supposed gurus of screenwriting who'd never written anything.

• 10:52Rich Roll?

  Right, the screenwriter, the ecosystem of instructors and so-called gurus who are going to tell you the secret that no one else will tell you.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I felt so close to a kind of death. I was never a suicidal person and I was never gonna die of misery. But, you know, I've said before, and I truly believe that when a creative impulse dies, it's like any other kind of death and it has toxicity associated with it. And Amy and I had just had our first child. I was 30 years old. I was in a job where I was making a good living and I was successful at it by most metrics, but I was not happy. And I finally got to this breaking point because our first kid was born and I realized I didn't know how to be a good parent if I wasn't, if I had become bitter, I wouldn't be a good parent. And if I allowed this creative impulse to

• 11:45Speaker 01

  die, the toxicity would leach out onto the people that I loved. And that, more than anything, is what made me finally get to the breaking point of saying, I have to change my behavior. I have to find a way to believe I can do this work. I have to start doing the work. And figuring out how to break through and get there made a gigantic difference in my life.

• 12:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but there was a tremendous amount of self-awareness around that when you made that decision, right? So like planting a flag a little bit earlier, when you're this creative kid who feels like he can't bring expression to this because it's not allowed, or this is not the trajectory that you're on, or these are not the signals that are being reinforced in your schooling, et cetera. I mean, what was it like? At that time, like what was the awareness level at that time in terms of?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  When I was young?

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like you're.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's weird because I was also, I loved to play sports. And I wasn't an athlete like you. I wasn't a world-class athlete, but I played varsity sports, you know, and I wasn't, again, not great at it, but I coordinated and I could play sports and I loved sports. I would do all the plays. I would assistant direct plays. I even directed a play in my junior year of high school. The one kid got picked to direct a play. I got picked to do it.

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that. So you were doing the thing.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  I was doing those things, but this was, it, it didn't, in doing those things, I would be the third lead in a show. I would direct the thing because I, I could, you know, I knew how to talk to the actors in a way who were going to be really good at doing it. I had assistant directed and like put in the time. But my self-conception was that like, well, I'm not really going to be able to do that.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  This is not a valid career trajectory.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  And I think I, I know that I had ADHD in a way that it was, back then was really not diagnosed. I'm 52 years old, so I grew up in the late seventies and eighties. I went to college in 84, graduated in 88. So my inability to complete work, I always knew I could write a paragraph that would make you laugh or feel scared. I could write a paragraph that would kind of dazzle you, but I couldn't write two paragraphs. Or if I could write two, I couldn't turn in the paper. My last semester of college, I had seven incompletes that I had to solve in order to graduate. And it wasn't willful, man. And this is what was the torture of it was, it was the books, if something, for a person who really has ADHD, the most painful

• 14:07Speaker 01

  feeling, I mean, other than something bad happening to someone you love, is boredom. Boredom is not the way it is to most people, to people who have real attention stuff. And so a, a book or an assignment that was like, a book that was poorly written, or that was about something that wasn't completely captivating to me, I couldn't read it. The book felt radioactive. I could, in college, I started to understand how to get around it, how to manage it. A little bit, meaning I, I started to not feel as bad about myself. But when I was young, I felt terrible about myself and I felt I was lazy. And a lot of my life was about later. I went to law school at night ostensibly because I wanted to practice civil rights law.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  But in the end, what I realized, I went to prove to myself that I could do the work.

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I can, I can relate to that. I think that's why I did the same thing. Not at night, but that whole law school trajectory.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  But meanwhile, you're this, this successful music industry executive, right? Like, I read that you discovered Tracy Chapman, like.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  I did, that's true. Well, yeah, like, nothing's ever simple, right?

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And I hadn't read Viktor Frankl then. I didn't understand the way in which we have to learn to control our own emotions then. So I was prisoner to my emotions in a certain way and I was, so yes, I had the ability. I was successful at, at doing that and I had wanted to do it a lot of my life. And I don't, I've told the Tracy Chapman story on, plenty of times on my own podcast or other people's, but the shortest version of it is, I was one of the leaders on campus of the anti-apartheid, pro-divestment movement. And through that, saw Tracy playing. My father was in the record business, so I knew about that business.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And then I set about trying to get Tracy record deal and produce her demos. And executive produced her first album along with a guy named Don Rubin. And that, that all happened and it was incredible. But I was spat out of that at the end of college, having done that. Her album was number one in August of the year I graduated college. So I graduate in April, the albums are in May, the album's number one in August. I'm working at Electra Records. And suddenly, that's what I am, without the normal few years after college where you kind of figure out what you are.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Right, like, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing?

• 16:32Speaker 01

  I was, I was able to do that job, but, but I was also not the perfect person to do it. I wasn't the best person to do it. My kinship with what the artists did, twinned with my even unknown to me desire to be the one doing the art, made the whole thing really freighted. And the big moment, so, we all have a few of these moments in our lives, Rich, where we. Something happens that makes us look at where we are, where we plotted on the graph. And one of those was my, my whole life, the things that I loved so much were music, books, movies, comedy, sports. And I would dive all the way in, you know, as you say, if you follow me on Twitter

• 17:17Speaker 01

  or you see, hear me on other podcasts, I'll talk about all those things a lot. And I'll, you know, I'll go very deep on those things because of how obsessed I was. But one of the, the sort of hallmarks of the way that would express itself was I always loved to share these obsessions. And when I would hear a great piece of music, all I wanted to do was tell all my friends, right? When you're young, 18, 19, 20, nothing moves you more than a song can sort of take you to a place different than any other art form. But I was in the record business and I was, it was 1993 and the Counting Crows, August and Everything After came out. And, or sorry, the album didn't come out. What happened was a guy in an office near me had gotten a demo tape and called me into his office and said, come listen to this thing.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  And it was, he played me around here. And upon hearing it, instead of being filled with joy at, because I instantly knew how great it was, I knew they would be huge. I knew this was a world-class songwriter, a once in every 10 year kind of talent. I was filled with rage that someone had heard it before me. I was filled with jealousy, competitive instinct to hatred. Yes. And, but I, I went home that night and Amy and I had just gotten married and I, I, I knew it. So I, I, I was able to say, the strangest thing happened. I heard this thing and I became the exact person I never wanted to be. Yeah. And so that was like one of the sort of markers for me.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  And that was another three years before, three or four years before I, in earnest, started.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Riding rounders with David, but that was one of the moments where I realized, okay, Brian, you are not in a unified place right now. You are not comfortable in your own skin. You're not doing what you're supposed to be doing because your reaction was 180 degrees from what the best version of you should be. And I was able somehow to see that even and I could see it before changing my behavior. So I didn't quit my job and I didn't start writing, but I did have a moment of a dawning of a reality. And then, you know, what do we do? We show up for work the next day and get caught up in the petty stuff again. But, but somehow it lands, right?

• 19:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that that that's a beautiful encapsulation of the reality of the quote unquote moment, you know, which is the name of your podcast. You're super interested in these sort of transformative, you know, moments in time in which people change their lives. But they're not necessarily crystallized to, you know, these, you know, these episodic things, they percolate up over time with signals and the, the, the process is really one of more paying attention to them and taking tiny little actions over time that aggregate and accumulate to what then becomes like the moment that everyone wants to talk about.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree with you. I also spent a lot of time afterwards trying to collapse the time of those processes. And that's part of what like we were talking joking on the way walking into this room about how our morning routines basically get so complex and takes so long.

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  They go into the afternoon now.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, in order to get ready for the day. But the idea, right? If you're, if you're trying somehow to, to unify your thoughts and actions and you're trying to become comfortable in your skin, I have found for me anyway, finding ways to check in on a more regular basis in an, in an organized way, an orderly way, a routine way makes a gigantic difference. So, once I started journaling every day, which is the thing that I did started doing at 30 was morning pages, as Julia Cameron describes in the Artist's Way. And I'm glad to have the opportunity to talk just a tiny bit more about it. I'm sure I know other people have mentioned it on the podcast, but

• 21:14Speaker 01

  On Twitter, often people will ask me this question, you know, I'm super active there, answering questions for people, and I'll say, do morning pages the way Julia Cameron describes? But what Julia Cameron describes, and you should go get her book, The Artist's Way, if you're somebody who feels like you're at a creative roadblock, but you know, it's three longhand pages, first thing in the morning, and I do them every day. I've done them every day since, you know, 1996. I've probably missed seven days, maybe I've missed 10 days. That's amazing. Do you ever go back and read them? Do you keep them? You read them, what you're supposed to do is like, maybe read them five years later, not before, she says, not before five years. I did it, like, the first bunch of years, I went back, and it's incredible, the stuff I started writing in the beginning,

• 21:56Speaker 01

  about what I'd hoped would happen, all happened, you know, and it's not just the regular goal setting, but it was sort of taking myself, what happens when you do morning pages is, in the beginning, it's very scary and very difficult, you're just gonna keep your pen moving, you're not allowed to think, you're not allowed to be a perfectionist. So, for an ADD-ish perfectionist like me, because that was the other side of it, it was ADHD, and then when I would write, I would want it to be genius, I would have such standards that nobody could hit, and certainly that my intellect was not capable of hitting. So, I had to, through the morning pages, get comfortable with just producing pages every day. Then when you get comfortable with that, and you're not gonna read them, so there's no stakes, there's no stakes, right? What happens after a couple of months is, you can't, you're sitting there bored, because you gotta move the pen for three pages, and you start telling yourself the truth, and you start asking yourself the really important

• 22:41Speaker 01

  questions. That's not the target of the thing, and you can't go into it trying to do that, because the whole idea is just to dump your subconscious onto the page, just to write whatever the fuck comes into your mind. But for me, what always happens is, eventually, I see the truth on the page, and I see who I'm supposed to be, and I see the ways I'm letting myself down, and I see the ways in which I'm allowing emotions to rule me, and or something happens that forces me to take action, you know, and that, so what happens is, if I would have been doing morning pages when the Counting Crows thing happened...

• 23:19Speaker 01

  That whole next couple of weeks, it would have come back, right? A couple of days, I would have checked in on that moment. It just would have happened. I know it. I would have started to go deeper into it. And perhaps I would have, especially if I had also been meditating then, which I wasn't, I think I would have more quickly been able to go, oh, something's wrong in a bigger way and I have to.

• 23:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because you would have been integrated in mind, body and spirit. Yeah. I think, you know, my experience, I started doing morning pages, The Artist's Way in 96. Yeah, 19, yeah, 1996.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  That's the same year. That's the same year I started.

• 23:59Rich Roll?

  Is it?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:59Rich Roll?

  Right when I got out of rehab, a broken soul. And I was like, I don't know what I'm doing, you know? And, and I can't say that I've had the fidelity to it that, that you have. I go in spurts and I find myself always coming back to it when I feel stuck. And usually those first two pages are, you know, I don't know why I'm doing this. Why am I writing this?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Right, me too.

• 24:20Rich Roll?

  And then at about page two and a half, even if it's just one thought or sentence, it makes it all worth it. And I went back and read some that I had written in like 2009. And I had that same experience. I was like, all these things that I was struggling with, that I wasn't sure about, they've all come to pass. And I think it's an exercise in, in adherence to process and being completely in acceptance and not attached to results, because it's not a results-driven thing. It's about just giving yourself over to something for the purpose of trying to connect yourself with yourself in a better way.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  But yes, and I, I think both of us are, it's funny, you look back and, and I find that I can sound to myself a bit glib about it. And so I just want to say that when I say this creative block felt like a death.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  What I mean to say is I was really sad. If I could just say it in simpler language, I was sad. And I was, I had this really deep feeling that I wasn't living up to my potential. That there was a possibility for me to be a better version of myself. Now, we all have that all the time, right? I'm sitting here with you now and I'm 20 pounds overweight. I'm even happy at my fat weight. And I know I could be better in that way. But okay, I can look at 20 other areas where I can, I feel, I know that I'm checking in and I'm doing the right thing. And I know the way in which I'm going to deal with weight. I've done it before. But at that time, and at various times, when I've been really low, when I've been sad,

• 26:02Speaker 01

  when I've felt, and it's always, I think, the feeling between, the gap between where I feel like I ought to be and where I am. And that doesn't mean in a material way either, right? At that time, all I meant for myself was, why am I so scared to write? Why am I so terrified? Why do I think I have to put on like a friend, a Parisian's, you know, chapeau and get a bunch of pastel paints out in order to consider myself a creative person? But the fear and sadness led, leads to like anger and leads to all sorts of bad behavior. Unlike you, my, my only substance was pizza, but.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  It's going to come out in some aberrant behavior or. It is. And, and so I, I just knew I had to like find tools that I could go back to. So the fidelity of the morning pages, yeah, I say 10, 10 days I haven't done it. Maybe it's 20 days, but it's not more than that. Truly not more than 20 days I haven't done it in all that time. Cause if I go a day or two days, I found, I'm just out of my rhythm. And it's hard, like shooting the show makes it really challenging. Cause I have to get up so early. So if I can't do them first thing in the morning, because I'm getting picked up at 5:00 AM to go to set, I will do them at 11:00 in the morning. Right.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I'll bring my journal in my bag and I'll just do them there. And it's not, I've been doing it long enough that I can sink right into the mode. Right. Even if I've been working a little bit.

• 27:43Rich Roll?

  And what about the meditation component? Speaking of the protracted morning routine.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I never miss it.

• 27:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So TM is your, that's your vibe. When did you?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Seven, about seven years ago. I, it was another one of those moments. It wasn't career based. One of my, one of my kids had a health scare and it, they were, luckily they were fine, perfect. But it was a health scare that lasted a few days. They were hospitalized for a few days and it looked like it could have been serious, then it wasn't. But after that, the, the sort of ricochet of, of that, the long tail of it, really fucked with me and I became pretty anxiety ridden.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  And then my mom died and, and a kind of anxiety that I couldn't fix the ways I normally fixed it in the past through, through like writing or through exercise, like I would do those things and I would still feel fear.

• 28:50Rich Roll?

  Anxiety, yeah.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  And so, and I'll say, so I took Lexapro for six months because I feel no shame about, I think people, for, for me, I think people should use that stuff when it's necessary for the shortest window that they need to get past an acute phase and then as long as their pharmacologist tells them, they should. But after about six months, I said to the shrink, I'd like to try, I'd like to get off of this and I did and I was fine. And the next time anxiety crept up, I decided to try a different mode.

• 29:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And I went and luckily I got hooked up with Bob Roth who runs.

• 29:27Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  The, yeah.

• 29:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Bob's been on the podcast.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. So I got hooked up with Bobby and he taught me to meditate. And so, and that was like I say, seven or eight years ago.

• 29:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  And I'd say on that one, it's even better than the morning pages. I mean, I never, ever miss a morning meditation. I do sometimes miss the afternoon meditation, but I feel shitty when I miss it and I feel great when I do it. And it's, I mean, even just, if for no other reason, and that's 40 minutes during the day, 20 in the morning, 20 in the afternoon, when I'm not online, when I'm not talking to anybody else, when I have to go inward, when I have to quiet my mind. Or let my mind race, but I can't do anything about it. I can't talk it out. I can't write it out. I have to just live in it. And I, I just find it insanely incredibly valuable.

• 30:20Rich Roll?

  It's interesting that you strike me as somebody who you make a decision to do something and then you do it. Like the fact that you've been so consistent in those two disciplines alone, I think

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Oh, it's the opposite. I'll walk the fuck away from something that doesn't work the quickest. If something sticks, it's because it's giving me great value. Like, I will, I will, if, if I tried something and I didn't get, I've tried a million things and didn't get value out of them, or I didn't dig it, I just would walk away. I would say that's one of the other like lucky keys in my life. And part of that, this does have to do with like a bunch of privileged things, but like that I had, have always been relatively financially comfortable. I do very little that I don't want to do.

• 31:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but, but meditation and morning pages aren't exactly instant gratification disciplines. In terms of gauging, like, is this working or is it not?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Well, but within a month of doing meditation, I felt that, because the, the part that bothered me by the anxiety wasn't just the thoughts, it was that I had a lot of physical manifestations. You know how people have a lot of physical manifestations of anxiety, like your stomach can bother you, you have back, like all sorts of, I had a lot of physical stuff that just really very quickly like went 40% away. And then by a month and a half into meditating, what am I like 80% or something like that, where all the, the way in which my heart would race, all the physical stuff just fucking went away. So that was easy for me to want to continue. But I mean, you're talking about someone who could go to the gym for three months, four times a week, and then one day wake up and be like, nah, no. So I've abandoned plenty of things.

• 31:57Rich Roll?

  Because that does work.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I know, that works. But I could just be like, I can't, it's cold. Like, you know, it's cold outside and I just can't quite find my way there. So, no, I don't, I'm not, I'll say, you know, our online personas and our personas on podcasts, I, I don't, I haven't said this before, but it's really important to say.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Which is, in real life, I really try hard to be the person I am on my podcast, but I'm not always.

• 32:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  So, like, I don't want to present, like, no, I don't follow through all the time on everything. Like, fuck off, like everybody else does, and I can get short-tempered, like everybody else does, and all the rest of it. I aspire to be somebody who's constantly chasing this kind of unity and peace and contribution to the world, and I do it all the time, but I'm certainly nowhere near perfected, or nowhere near actualized in the ways.

• 32:58Rich Roll?

  You haven't graduated from the human condition yet?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  No, man, I really haven't.

• 33:01Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I'm so fucking haven't.

• 33:02Rich Roll?

  But that's, you know, of course, I'm in the same boat with that, and it goes back to that permission piece. It's like giving people permission to express themselves and also to be innately human with their flaws and their weaknesses.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yes, but becoming really comfortable in our own skin, that's what I've now sort of like turned my attention to, is how is acceptance? I agree with you, like, accepting the human condition, but beyond that, finding a way to be comfortable enough with who we are that we can be really kind to everybody else.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Because the more you're comfortable with who you are, the fewer hangups you allow yourself to have, the more you can just present, not the Instagram version of you, but you. The easier it is to be empathetic to other people, the easier it is to show that empathy for other people, the easier it is to engage and find people where they are. And that's something that's really challenging, and I am constantly, you know, in a battle to find, you find moments of grace, right? But most of life is hard.

• 34:09Rich Roll?

  Right, but that's beautifully put, and I think that is, you know, it's a laudable goal, like, can you be the same person in every context? Like, one of the mountains, you know, I've had to climb is just being a... Classic people pleaser where I would chameleon myself depending upon the scenario or the situation that I'm in. And it's been a journey of just getting comfortable enough with who I am that it's okay. And that the person I am presenting on the podcast, even though it's about the guests, you know, it's my show, is the same person who's going to talk to you if I bump into you on the street or whatever context. And the person who, you know, gets into a road rage incident or, you know, whatever happens, you know, in the course of the day.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Seth Godin's a genius at it. He's, I don't know if you've had Seth on the podcast?

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  No, I tried to get him on once and then I was gonna go up to, I was in New York and I was gonna have to go up to his house to do it.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  It's worth it. Do it. I do it.

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  So maybe I'll make a point.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  It's worth doing.

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I listened to the recent one that you just did with him.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  But he's exactly, so he's one of my really close friends and he's exactly the guy. He's really like the Buddha in real life and it's amazing. Cause I've seen him in many contexts and it's just who he is all the time.

• 35:18Rich Roll?

  Is he super dapper all the time?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's put, you're not gonna sin Seth, not. In a sort of like, they're just presents himself as you imagine that he would present himself. I want to say it doesn't mean you want to be a person who's run over either, right? Cause that's another default some people go to. Like you said, people pleaser where they want to be just only nice all the time. I'm not, I'm talking about trying to find a way to understand who you are in a primal way, be comfortable with that and then work with that material to be as kind and good as you can within the context of living your life and going after what you want to go after.

• 35:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And this is not the struggle of the artist. This is the struggle of

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Of the human.

• 35:57Rich Roll?

  Of every human being. And I think it's fair to say that we're in an epidemic of people who are so disconnected from their highest self or the best version of who they could be. Because life's hard, man. And people are trying to just pay the bills and they look at that pursuit as a luxury that's not available to them.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I think that's exactly right.

• 36:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So let's go back to the moment. You make this decision that you're gonna take a stab at this writing thing. So, leading up to that was, Morning Pages played a part in that. And this friendship with David.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:36Rich Roll?

  So how does this like sort of come together?

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Well, if I paint a full picture where I was.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I guess Sammy was born when I had four months left of being 29 or something like that. Yeah. So I turned 30. I was playing a lot of poker then. My wife threw this poker, this party. And that's the other thing I'll say, a podcast episode of mine that everybody gravitates towards is the one I did with my wife Amy. And it's, she's an incredible novelist. And she really recognized this stuff in me before I did, that I could do this. And it was really clearly leading me there. But she threw this poker party for me with all my closest friends. And my little boy was there on my lap at four months old. And I had this certain kind of a hollow feeling. And poker party, because I'd really been

• 37:26Speaker 01

  playing a lot of poker. I would go, my job at the time, which was in the record business, was to go out and see bands. And in between seeing bands, I would go to this poker club. And then during the day, sometimes I would take phone calls at the poker club and have meetings at the poker club. And I was really into this life of playing cards. I loved a lot of stuff about it. And played cards all through law school. And like the character in the movie does. But then there was this one moment where I was in my office during this time, after that party. Because I did have the note, I did have the notion at the party, I didn't just feel this way, but I noted it. And I mentioned it to Amy afterwards.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And the reason I brought up Amy is to say, finding, surrounding yourself with people who want the best for you is also not just, it can be a talent, but it can also be something that you focus on. And it's crucial to focus on it, right? Like, we're just coming out of the holidays. And one of the things I said online that got the biggest reaction of like, anything I've ever said online, was I, I just, I said to people that if you're going home for the holidays, be really careful about telling your dreams to the people at dinner. Because they won't mean to crush your dreams. But often, they'll say something that sounds different to you because of your relationship with them than you meant, than they meant. But it can derail you. Yeah. Pretty sure I retweeted that.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, good. Yeah. Protect, you know, protect yourself in those situations. Surround yourself with the right, surround yourself with the right people. And so I was surrounded by the right people. And that made a gigantic difference to me.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  But I was in my office one night. I had never been a cigarette smoker. I'd never smoked a cigarette in my life. And I was smoking cigarettes. I'd smoked for about four months. And I hated cigarettes, was opposed to them, got through college, high school, without millions of concerts, without ever smoking even one cigarette. And suddenly, I'm a fucking cigarette smoker, and I'm eating like a bacon cheeseburger. And I'm supposed to be listening to all these demo tapes, and I suddenly catch myself with a cigarette, the bacon cheeseburger, a big box of tapes I don't want to listen to. And I did have the crystallized thought then, that this isn't the life I'm supposed to be living. And I can't. I can't be this miserable in the work environment. I have this wife that I genuinely

• 39:50Speaker 01

  loved, and that was, and this kid that I genuinely loved. And then we had a second kid who I can't imagine loving anymore. And I went to Dave, who was bartending, and he had been trying to be a writer. He'd been writing and bartending. And I went to him and I said, and I have to give credit to Tony Robbins, too. Around that time, I read Awaken the Giant Within. And it had a huge impact on me, because it allowed me to start doing some goal setting. So this is before The Artist's Way. And through doing Awaken the Giant Within, I realized it was one of those things like, pay attention to how you're feeling, pay attention, notice what makes, notice the things that are working, notice the things that aren't, don't be afraid to change. So I had done that stuff. Not

• 40:34Speaker 01

  the NLP part of it so much, but the sort of, look at your life, look at the distance between where you want to be and where you are. I had given that book to David. And so I go to him this night, and I say, dude, I'm getting to the point where I have to figure out how to write something. I can't. What do I do? And he gave me The Artist's Way. And I started doing the morning pages. And then soon thereafter, I walked into this poker club in New York, called the Mayfair Club, and called him and said, I know what the movie is. And he said, I'll write it with you. We'll write it together. And so we decided. And then, this is one of those things. I mean, David had this incredible

• 41:15Speaker 01

  work ethic, and didn't have any of the ADHD issues, and didn't have any of the sort of exact kind of insecurities that I did in that area. And he said, well, we'll do it, but we have to meet every day, and we have to do this like it's a job. And so we worked, we met, when he would get done bartending and before I would go to work, Amy cleared out, there was a storage space that every apartment in our building had one little tiny storage space, had a slop sink in it, room for one chair. And Dave and I went into that room every day, five days or six days a week, from when we decided to start, we went for two hours, that was it, because I had to go to work. So, two hours in the morning, we wrote rounders in four and a half months.

• 41:56Rich Roll?

  Wow, four and a half months.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  We researched it, I mean, that's the only part of the timeline I'm collapsing, is we had researched, we researched for a little while, so we would go out, go to the clubs, and then we would meet and outline it. But from the moment we said, let's write the screenplay, let's start writing dialogue, four and a half months later, we had this.

• 42:14Rich Roll?

  And the next chapter of that isn't, oh, it's sold and got made right away. There's a whole saga that gets built into that. The movie ultimately gets made, but then it doesn't, it's not the sensa-, like, we look at that movie now and it's beloved. You know, I just listened to the rewatchables episode with Bill, and it was so, it's just, it's revered. And one of the questions that they ask and kind of ponder in that conversation is like, why is this movie so rewatchable? Like, trying to, like, deconstruct it. And there's so many reasons for that, but the truth is, it is incredibly rewatchable, it is beloved, it found its, you know, legs in DVD and, you know, these sort of technologies that came online, but it didn't happen in an instant for you.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  No, it was a failure at the box office, and it was, did okay critically, and it was a fresh tomato, but barely. But, well, first, it was rejected by every agency in town, and I, I don't update my blog really, but I have a blog, and on there, briancolman.com, I tell the whole story of how it was rejected. But, all the agencies in town rejected it, it was incredibly great lesson to me about gatekeepers and not, not knowing anything. I wrote down everything that they said, and then the day after it sold, literally like in a movie, the day after it sold, all the same agents who rejected it called to sign us. And I said to all these agents, like,

• 43:35Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I said, the truth, I was young enough that I was just like, dude, you, you said it was overwritten, you said it was underwritten. I don't know what those terms mean still. And then, they would all say, no, it was my assistant, no, it was the reader, they, all this bullshit. But I, Dave and I knew right then, well, You know, we have to be really careful about listening to what these people say from here on out because they clearly don't have any backbone and they don't believe the things that they say. So it sells, we, this part is incredible. We get to be on set every day. We're part of making the movie. And then we're in that business. Then that's the life we're living. I do want to say one thing, which is, I didn't quit my job. So often, and John Acuff has written about this beautifully, I think, in a couple of his books.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  You don't have to quit your job. You can find a half hour a day. And even if you think you can't find a half hour a day, you can. I'm not one of those people who says you don't need sleep. Like, you definitely need to sleep, but you don't need the extra hour online. You don't need the time playing a video game. You don't need the time at that you're, the time that you're going to get in your car, drive to Starbucks, drive to wherever else. That's 20 minutes that you could sit and write something. And if writing is not your thing, that's 20 minutes you could be taking photographs. Or that's 20 minutes that you could be working. There are 20 minutes in the day and those 20 minutes add up. I say to writers who ask me, I say, if you write one page a day, one page a day of a screenplay? A screenplay is 100 pages. You can write three finished screenplays in a year at one page a day.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  A novel, you can finish a novel in a year, one page a day. So anyone can write one page a day. And you don't have to turn your whole life upside down because the catharsis, here's, and here's the problem with quitting. It's not just the pressure you put on yourself, which you do. It's you can, you convince yourself you've actually taken action, but you haven't.

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Right? Quitting, walking away is very dramatic and it might actually fill you with endorphins. And you might feel like you did something and you can tell people you did something, but you didn't actually do anything.

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  You just made it worse.

• 45:37Rich Roll?

  And because human psychology is so strange, the fact that you, what you just talked about is an incredibly doable thing, right? And people don't want to hear that. They don't hear that because that's scary because that means that they could actually do it.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:53Rich Roll?

  They like to say, well, I can't quit my job, so I can't be like you. And that's comfortable. And I think that keeps people stuck.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Totally, completely. You're completely right.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I think Akoff's book, The Quitter is the one where he talks about this really well. Where he talks about the way in which you don't have to, I wish I would have had that book when I was young, that book and Steve Pressfield's book, I wish I would have had when I was starting out, you know, War of Art.

• 46:21Rich Roll?

  War of Art, it's the best.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Those, yeah, I wish I had that then because what I did, you know, what I learned to do essentially was keep the resistance in vain. And that's whatever your pursuit is, if you can just find a half hour where you don't judge yourself, because that's what you were talking about, you're exactly right, Rich. It's much easier to say, I can't find the time, than I'm scared I won't be any good. So instead, don't worry about whether you're good or not, just worry about define success. This is a Tony Robbins thing, but I think it's great. It's like you decide how you wanna, sorry, it's Tony Robbins thing, and I think it's great, because I, Dave and I, executive produced, I'm not your guru, that movie about Tony, and I'm kind of all in on his work. But one of the great things he says is, is that you can define what a successful day is.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  So if I decide a successful day is, I'm gonna do morning pages, I'm gonna write, I'm gonna take a three mile walk, if I've completed those things, I've had a successful day.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  And so, it is empowering. And so if you sell yourself, and then you mean it, if I spent 20 minutes chasing whatever X is, because I know that like sort of the popular, there are many books and podcasts that have come out over the last bunch of years about how this idea of chasing your passion is foolish, and that there's no reason, that giving that advice to young kids sets them up for failure. But I think that's because we forget to say the other part of it, which is, well, you have to work with incredible rigor to achieve it. Working with rigor to achieve something is never a waste of time, because what you've learned at the end of that is how to work with rigor, and you can apply that to the next thing that you want to do. But working with rigor parts, real hard, that took me years to figure out how to do,

• 47:58Speaker 01

  because, not because I was lazy, but because I was scared, scared of failing, scared of not being as smart as I thought I was, not being as good as I thought I was, scared of being rejected, scared of looking like a fool. And so, but what you find, if you do the work every day, you don't actually care about that stuff anymore, because, you know, in 100 days, you'll have 100 pages.

• 48:16Rich Roll?

  Right. But process and rigor is not sexy. We don't talk enough about that, because we want to talk about the life hack, or what's behind that velvet rope, or download this program, and this is gonna solve your problem.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  But what, that's true, but you're right.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  The thing that I fear most people who want to make a change don't know is that even for those of us who've made the change, it's still hard every day. Every day that you have to write, or every day that you have to find a way to do your show, or you have to stay on your diet, which I know is easy for, I mean, I've read all the stuff, I know why it's easy for you, but it's, it's-

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  Believe me, I have many challenges.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Right. We, but that, that we still, we've just taught ourselves how to show up every day. We just have actually put a practice in place. We've put guardrails up for ourselves, but I could easily not write. I could easily fall into feeling, you know, way after The Artist's Way, I had, way after I started becoming a professional writer, I had huge career downswings. And it was terrifying to me. And it would have been so easy to, not just easy, like, I could just see myself sliding into, well, this is over, well, this was a good run, well, but because I had a practice in place, I could revert to it and I could apply myself.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  The guardrails thing is huge, and I think making it super simple, almost binary, is super important. So whether it's like, okay, two hours before work every day, or morning pages are non-negotiable. Like, when I changed my diet, it started with, all right, well, I'm just not gonna eat, like, meat and dairy. Like, that's just off the table. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's not even a sentence. It's, it's easy to understand and easy to follow, and it's a rule, right? It's a guardrail. And I think the more guardrails you establish and set up, that brings structure to that process and a framework that makes it easier to execute on the process aspect of it.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Change feels cataclysmic, especially change that-

• 50:25Rich Roll?

  And it's vague.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  In a way, that's failed. Also, also, all of us have, right, it's totally vague. Also, all of us have-

• 50:33Speaker 01

  When you're on one side of the thing, it's easy to think that those who've succeeded at any of this stuff had something special. But that's special. And look, Seth Godin and I went deep on this podcast because I bring up Bob Dylan a lot, who I do think is special. Bob Dylan.

• 50:48Rich Roll?

  He took issue with that.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we had a long talk about it. But for me, but I don't find it disempowering to think that Bob Dylan is... So, yes, I believe there are... I'm an atheist, but you know, in the Jewish religion, there are 36 lemedvav, 36 holy people who walk the earth. They don't even know they are that, but they are that. But the way I would use that is, yeah, there are some people who have extraordinary natural gifts. I've had the opportunity to meet Mark Schara, the great baseball player. And I've heard him say, you know, when I was seven years old, I could just turn on a baseball and it hit the leather off the ball. I was just born with this. But that's not most extraordinarily successful people in the arts.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  And it's not Michael Phelps either.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:28Rich Roll?

  You know, that guy had to show up for five hours a day, every single day for 12 years.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  So, yeah, you might not be able to be Bob Dylan. I might never be able to be David Mamet, but I can be... It doesn't matter. I can still find a way, if I show up every day, to get the best out of my own point of view of the world, out of my own facility with language and telling stories and pictures. And so, but I fail all the time. And that's part of what I always want to be able to communicate with people, to people, is the most successful people, most of the most successful people that you look at, and I'm not including myself in that category of most successful people, but most people doing the thing that you wish you were doing are having hard days doing it all the time.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  They've just trained themselves to do it.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, back to the permission.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, give yourself permission to do this work.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  I was at an event a couple of weeks ago at Largo in LA and it was a live event with Rob Bell. Do you know who Rob Bell is?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  The keto guy?

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  No, no, no. He's like a former megachurch pastor.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I don't know who he is.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  Who's now become sort of a heretic in the Christian community, but is an incredible public speaker and like a really beautiful guy. But he was doing this live event with Elizabeth Gilbert. And somehow it came up, I don't know whether he asked her or somebody in the audience asked her, like, how do you describe what you do? Or what is it that's, what is your mission? Or what's important about what you do? And she said, I'm the person that gives people permission. And then she asked somebody from the crowd to get up and say, what do you need permission to do? And volunteers, she's like, I give you permission to do that. And it's so freeing from somebody of that, you know, who's successful in that regard, whether it's you or her or somebody like that, to say, it's okay.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  I talked about that a lot when I was doing the Vine series that I did, where I was really talking about that you don't have to have, nobody has to give you permission to do the work that you want to do.

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  And in this, you know, our friend James Altucher would say, all these gatekeepers have now gone away. You're in an industry where there's still gatekeepers, just by the nature of how that industry works. But in so many industries, those gatekeepers are no longer either there or important. And so with that being removed, that excuse is no longer valid. And again, it goes back to, that's frightening for a lot of people, or it's empowering, depending upon your perspective.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's scary because then you only have, a way it's scary is if you then frame it that you only have yourself to blame.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And if you think, well, this is my one shot. And if I fail now, it means I'm worthless. And one of the, you know, often it's because there was someone when we were young, who told us something about ourselves that we unfortunately believed. And that by doing and failing, we're going to reaffirm that bad judgment. So what you have to do,

• 54:41Rich Roll?

  Now you're speaking my language.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Is try to figure out.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  What that is and who that was and how to just silence that voice.

• 54:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's beautiful to hear you say that because when I watch Billions, which I love, goes without saying.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 54:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's so, it's so well crafted and there's such a precision to it that it's easy to look at that and say, well, whoever's behind this, man, these guys are like next level. I can't even wrap my head around what it would take to construct that universe in that way.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Well, what we are is working professionals and look, I'm also not going to poor mouth it, right? Dave and I have worked really hard for a really long time to become really good at doing what we do.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  And you're in the middle of production right now still, right?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:26Rich Roll?

  The season is about to premiere.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I left this couch that I like to write on to come here. Um, yeah, we've shot, we're shooting, in the middle of shooting episode eight of 12 of season four and the trailer just came out and you can find it if you go to my Twitter at Brian Koppelman, you'll, you'll see a link to the trailer. Uh, but we, we're good at what we do because we've like, we've worked incredibly hard at it, but we've also tried to like, be really careful about continuing to grow, continuing to learn best practices, continuing to ask questions of great filmmakers. So we'll show our work to people who we feel like are further along. We'll ask them questions about it. We will grind and grind and grind to make

• 56:13Speaker 01

  the thing appear effortless and great and like it just swings. You know, we're, we're, we're lifelong obsessive, obsessives about this. And you know, I also, yeah, I don't want to make it sound like I just one day decided, oh, I should be, I should create things. I should tell stories. It should be movies. Like I had memorized. When I would, was at college and I would go see a movie like She's Got a Havoc by Spike Lee or Raising Arizona by the Coen Brothers. I would go see those movies three, four, five times and I'd memorize the movies before you would just easily have it on VHS. And by then you could also, they would come out six months later and I would just watch them over and over and I would memorize them and I would really think about the language and I would adopt that language for myself. And so like in 94, when Pulp Fiction came out, Amy and I went to that the night it came out and something exploded in my brain.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Here was a guy who was clearly doing everything that I, somewhere deep inside me secretly wanted to do. So, right, 93 was the Counting Crows, then 94 I saw Pulp Fiction. That was another one of those things where it was like, well, you could do anything. Like, you could make that rectangle on the screen happen in the middle of, you know, when Uma draws the little rectangle.

• 57:13Rich Roll?

  Breaking and entering.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  You could break all those rules. And something else kind of like fired in my brain that made me become aware of it. And Dave and I have continued. One of the great lessons I took from that Counting Crows thing, a guy, a very successful guy, very, very successful guy, wrote me yesterday on Twitter. And he said, hey, I have a question for you. Do you get angry and jealous when someone else succeeds?

• 57:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  When you see someone got a show? And I said, no, dude, no. Like, I'd be a lunatic if I felt that way now in my life.

• 57:43Rich Roll?

  I was thinking that when you were describing Pulp Fiction. I was wondering whether it made you angry.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Well, that was before I'd ever written anything. So, all, everything then made me feel, no, it just made me, it all just made me feel like a failure.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Not angry. But, no, the, when Dave and I wrote Rounders, early on in it, when I realized we might have a chance at this, I, in it, I promised myself that I would never allow the way I felt in the movies and TV to be like the way I felt when I was an executive in the music business.

• 58:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  That I would never harden myself to like the beauty of the art. And then I would go in to watch movies and watch TV shows like a fan. The second or third time I watch something, I'm watching it like a professional. But the first time I watch something, I'm just watching it. And I'm just letting myself get float away on it. And so, I still get so turned on when I see something great.

• 58:34Rich Roll?

  That's cool. So, as long as you've been in this business and with all the success that you've had, you still avoided becoming sort of hardened and bitter?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. If you look on my Twitter, you'll see a lot of negative comments from me about one thing and one thing only, and that's the President of the United States.

• 58:48Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of that. Yeah, yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And those associated with him. But I'll never slam a movie, ever, ever. I know how hard it is to make them, or a TV show. It's too hard.

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Everyone goes into it with the best intentions.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Everyone's trying to do something great.

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  It's a miracle that anything gets made.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, it takes, it takes, um...

• 59:08Speaker 01

  It takes a, it does take a lot of luck. And I would also say, when I mentioned privilege earlier, and I try to say this all the time, and I think it's important to say it. When I, looking back at 52, to be like a white male in America at that time who didn't have college debt, if I didn't find a way to be successful, it was just entirely my fault. The world was set up for guys like me. It was just, it was just laying there for people like me because nobody knew about subliminal biases in that way, so executives weren't checking themselves on that. So someone like Dave and I walk into a room, we could talk sports with the guys in charge. It was almost always guys in charge.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  There was a lingua franca that we shared that made things much easier for me. There was also this idea in the culture that if you were a guy, you could sort of out, dream big and take your shot in a way that I think women and people of color felt it was much harder. And I didn't have college debt because my father was rich enough to pay for college. So I had certain structural advantages that it's important to say. So you might not be able to spend two hours a day, but so find 20 minutes at first. And, and you know, the other thing that happens is you gain momentum, suddenly 20 minutes does become an hour because suddenly that's the part of the day you look forward to the most. That's the part of the day where you feel the most alive.

• 1:00:27Rich Roll?

  I like how you just got really excited right there.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's what happened to me.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  So what do you think is, what makes a great story? What are the elements of great storytelling?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  I think it's that the storyteller is incredibly engaged to share that story with you, is dying. I, I don't think until, I, I truly don't think intellectually about storytelling. I don't think in terms of acts, like, I don't think in terms of inciting events. I never have.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  What I think about is, do I have an incredible curiosity about this story? Is there a world that's incredibly fascinating to me and to David? Because we tell each other the stories, right? Is there a world that's incredibly fascinating to me? Are there characters who I find incredibly compelling? Is there a language I start to hear? Because the language has always been a real key thing for me. Is there a language that I can sort of hear in this universe? And then, it's just not faking the funk. It's not... I'll say, I'm much more of an instinctive writer than I am an intellectual writer. And so, I can tell if something's boring.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  I can tell if something feels inauthentic or not real to the environment or the world. But I'm really bad at prescriptive sort of instruction to people. I don't... You know, if I read your script, I can tell you that you have to move this story up close. I can... If I read your script, I could take it apart like a professional. But in the abs... And by the way, I will not read your script. But in the... Generally, people.

• 1:02:03Rich Roll?

  Don't send him... Don't send Brian your script. And don't ask him if Rounders 2 is gonna happen.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I mean, you asked me for Rounders 2. It's funny. I'll make fun of you online in a very friendly, loving sort of a way. But, yeah, don't send me your script. But I could do that. But I don't... Like, really, all the things that we've done... If you think about Billions, it's completely unconventional.

• 1:02:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  These two sort of leads, this third lead in the Wendy character, and then, really, Taylor, who's also a lead, and the way we jumble their stories together.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  No clear-cut bad guy.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  We never talk about A, B, and C stories, really. I mean, once in a while, we'll throw those words around. But we're really trying to just make each moment completely compelling, and that the characters act in ways that are both true and surprising.

• 1:02:48Rich Roll?

  But there still has to be this balance between left brain and right brain. Because part of this is a math equation. Like, how do you make all of these storylines fit together? This puzzle that you have to construct in order to, like, tell the story.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  That comes back... Well, that comes back to rigor. For me, anyway. That comes back to... Not, when I say don't fake the funk, not lying to yourself. Because if you've listened to stories and told stories for your whole life, you know when a story works. So I don't actually apply the math in the way that one might think that I do. I'm aware of it, of course, because, but I'm aware of it in the way that a musician is aware of the rhythm of the two four in a rock song, right? They just start, when a musician starts writing a riff, they kind of know what a riff feels like, what a riff sounds like, what the groove, how the groove locks in. So yes, musicians have a sort of innate understanding of math

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  in the same way that screenwriters do.

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  But I don't think in terms of, when I meet people who say they're great at story math, I'm like, I don't understand that. I just like telling stories. I don't really, I can't give you the answer that.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  Is there like a, like a channel? Like when you're writing like dialogue, for example, like are you just getting into, you know, some kind of flow state mindset where it just comes to you from some other place?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Writing dialogue for me is the most fun part and it's the part that is

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  the least conscious. It is, you know, these characters, you are, I know these characters and the situation. Oh, okay, I can give you one math answer. The one math answer I can give you is conflict. So there has to be conflict all the time. I would say a scene works dramatically when someone wants something and there's an obstacle. That can be an internal obstacle or an external obstacle. So as long as the dialogue is engaged in solving a conflict, in getting someone over an obstacle, then you've solved the kind of story requirement. And then that, then the dialogue really comes from a, I don't want to undersell, I was a kid who would, remember this thing I said about boring books? They were like radioactive.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  But the things I liked, I would read, I read four books a week, but they were just the books I liked. I would read word books all the time. I loved language. I always just wanted to learn vocabulary. It's not for tests. I didn't study for the SATs. I just liked reading arcane books about like language and sentences and I would memorize movies. And so when I would memorize movies and I could quote back the dialogue to you, something became innate. It's cellular for me, the rhythm of that kind of speech. And the only thing I ever did sort of consciously is sometimes I will read David Mamet. Like when I was younger especially, I would just read David Mamet for, to understand the restraint and rhythm of his early work.

• 1:05:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Are you able to tune out all the external kind of

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  ephemera that, that is swirling around billions? I mean, you know, it's so successful. Last season was like riveting. You're going into this new season. How are you able to like tune the noise out and just focus on like trying to do the best storytelling that you can without being influenced by, you know, this, this gigantic enterprise that is this show now and all the people that love it?

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  I mean, David, I'm glad that we're this age, not younger, because I, none of that, I like it all. I, and I'm fine with it.

• 1:06:23Rich Roll?

  But you're very engaged with the fans. Like you're, you're like a fan yourself, the way that you kind of, you know, interact with people online.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  Well, that you have like-

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  Those conversations.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  What's the line in Silverado that Kevin Kline says, I decided you either, you either have to trust everybody or trust nobody. It doesn't make a difference. So, yeah, the choice is either to be fully engaged or not engaged with that, with the sort of, with fans and, and talking online. I'd rather be in the middle of it. We've already made the show. I'll say there's never been a moment that I'm writing it, that David and I are on set shooting it or editing it, that I'm thinking about a comment. Anybody made, anywhere, what critic or a fan. The world of the show is, is its own world. And part of being a working professional is being able to engage in that way and then shut that off and engage in the work. I mean, the thing lives in our imaginations, the two of us. It's, it's just, um, these characters.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Are could no sooner be sort of influenced by what somebody says in that way than a character that lives in a book you read 40 years ago. They're their own thing and their world is its own world.

• 1:07:33Rich Roll?

  And it seems like the the question that you're trying to explore with the show and what's kind of central to it, please correct me if I'm wrong, is is this idea of why is it that we can get on board with these characters who are behaving badly and doing abhorrent things, people whose values seem misplaced, who are interested in power and greed, who are very witty and charming, but are not necessarily behaving, you know, in their best self, so to speak, and not just be on board with them, but be cheering for them. Like,

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  what does that say about us as humans? What does that say about America? And what does it say about this moment that we're in right now?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  I mean, what do you think it says?

• 1:08:24Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, I'm asking you. I know you're not going to answer this question, but just in the asking, you know, it's making us think about it.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  I love that you're asking the question.

• 1:08:33Rich Roll?

  It's making us think about this.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Completely intentional that you asked the question.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, what I'll say about that is David and I, we definitely made the decision not to have it in a very conscious way. We were not interested in having a traditional hero on the show.

• 1:08:52Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  We did not want a good guy and a bad guy. What we wanted was gray everywhere. We wanted to examine why tremendous verbal gifts, a certain kind of charisma.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Power and money started to stand in for real qualities of character in our culture. We wanted to examine why wealth became not just something to go after, not a way to take care of yourself and your family, not a way to get your dreams, but an end in itself. Why we are in a country where people use prosecutorial positions to advance their own careers. We looked around and saw this. So who was popular in the culture and why? Meaning, why were, I'm friends with Mark Cuban and I've known him a long time. We looked at why were Mark Cuban and Donald Trump? This is, we were

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  saying this in interviews before Trump had even announced he was going to run. And I even then took pains to say, I don't consider Mark and Trump in any way similar, other than they were both, one is actually was a successful businessman, that's Mark, and then the other was held out to be so. And they were the most, two most popular reality stars in the, in the, in the country. And so we asked ourselves, why? And that was a backdrop to telling this story. We also both live, David lives in Connecticut, I live in Manhattan, and we were around the hedge fund world. And we were here to see what happened to guys like Elliot Spitzer, on the other side of it, Chris Christie,

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  people who were supposed to be prosecutors, who used those positions to advance themselves, to become famous, to become powerful. And something about it struck us as incredibly compelling, because these people weren't reviled in the culture, they were celebrated. We were interested in how far people would go with characters like that. And we were determined not to make either one Heroic, you know, the first half of the first season, people find themselves rooting for Axe and they don't understand it. And then as Axe does these, does worse and worse things, they somehow stay with him.

• 1:11:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  And the same thing for Chuck and throughout season two and Wendy and Taylor. And so, yes, the show wants to ask these questions without giving a direct answer to them. And I think it's important to say if someone doesn't watch the show, the show's super funny and entertaining and that's really like, the main thing is that people really have a great time watching it. If there's a message underneath it, you can take it or not.

• 1:11:32Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Well, truth is stranger than fiction as well, because the question that you're exploring in the show is being writ large in real life at the moment on a level that if you had scripted that 10 years ago, people would have said was too extreme and unbelievable.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 1:11:51Rich Roll?

  All right. It is amazing how you can vacillate between rooting for Axe, rooting for Chuck, and with the trailer that you just released, you said, you're gonna have to choose. And, you know, throwing Kate into it as well, Asia Kate Dillon, as Taylor, like, you're gonna have to choose. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to choose.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can love all of them.

• 1:12:14Rich Roll?

  Can I?

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Sure. I do. I'll say, Dave and I love all of them.

• 1:12:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  We love all these characters. I mean, that's the thing, right? You can't, you can't write them if you can't understand them. So I know how, I do understand what they think of themselves. I do understand how they see themselves in the world.

• 1:12:30Rich Roll?

  My moment with that, that I recollect, I mean, it's been a while since I watched last season, but the one that's, the moment that stands out for me, and I can't remember it completely specifically, but Axe and this other hedge fund guy, I think they were out on a balcony, the other guy was on some hard times, and Axe asked him, well, how much money do you have? Or like, how much do you need? And I can't remember the figure, it was some ungodly amount of millions. And they kind of say, well, you know, that's not going to be enough, when he explains all of his expenses.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  So that, a guy said that. That rap, I got, was in the third episode last year, a guy said that whole rap to us.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  It was in real, a real, a real.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  A real guy at dinner, walked us through why $50 million wasn't enough money.

• 1:13:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  In real life.

• 1:13:17Rich Roll?

  And it's so preposterous.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  The reason why.

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  And he really said that thing to us about the wife, he really said a thing to us about the, the, the wife is gonna, you know, you have to give two million to charity so she can be on the charity boards and you gotta have the house out in the Hamptons. I mean, he said that whole run to us. And then we said to him, we're putting that in the show. And he said, yeah, please put it in the show.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And after hearing it and thinking about it for a minute, you're like, he's right. He can't live, he can't do it. He needs more.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  Well, that's that rap. And then also at the beginning of the season, Lara and Axe say 300 million isn't enough.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, watching the show, I mean, we hope that people are gonna turn off, while they're watching it, maybe you understand the logic of their thinking. But I do hope that, that afterwards, you will

• 1:14:05Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Think to, you know, you will allow yourself to think about, what do you really need?

• 1:14:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  And, and why, and, and what all, what that stuff really means.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. Because the fact that I could hear that speech, that exchange and go, oh yeah, I can see why he can't live on $50 million, and then take a beat and connect with how preposterous that is, I think is, is a really poignant reflection on kind of where we are culturally. But in the same way that, that, you know, Gordon Gekko spawned ungodly thousands of traders and investment bankers, is this, do you have a sense that this show is having that impact on the hedge fund industry?

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  They all watch the show.

• 1:14:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I know those guys are already in there, but like, kids in their college dorm who are now gonna go into the hedge fund world.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Well, we'll see. Right? I mean, I, I certainly saw the effect that rounders had on people wanting to play poker. And how many people that brought into the game of poker. Poker pros to this day will thank us. And Dave and I can't buy a meal around them because they made so much money off of the, what they call the rounders fish who got into it. So I do think, you know, popular culture, the things can, can affect people in that way. But I have no idea whether that's gonna happen. That's not true, it's probably gonna happen.

• 1:15:30Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, and beyond that, the significance of Asia Kate Dillon playing Taylor and having a transgendered person.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  That is having a gigantic impact and we're thrilled about that. That's, that-

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  It's been really cool.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Awesome to see people react and the letters Asia gets, the letters we get. They're remarkable, remarkable actor. And the fact that we were lucky enough to cast a Gen non-binary actor to play this Gen non-binary character was a great stroke of fortune. It's a privilege to work with Asia. And the effect that Asia has had is, that's something, man, am I proud of being a part of that. And I will say, I didn't know that was gonna happen. You never know if something is gonna catch on. And that's what I, and that's one of the reasons I'm glad that there isn't math. So if we talk about how that character came to be, each of my children came home, Sam was at college and Anna was in high school, and within a very short time, they each came home and told me a story about having to say gender pronouns.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  So they're both cisgendered people, but they told stories of, Anna said that every, her school was on a more frequent than even semester program, they had these intervals. And every eight weeks or so, a teach, they would start a new one, and the teacher would say, has anyone had a shift in gender? And I said, so what does that mean? And Anna said, well, you say, you announce your pronouns. My pronouns are, I thought, well, that's, what do you mean? As a grown man, I couldn't even understand it, right? At first time you hear it, it sounds nuts. So then Sammy came back from college and he said, I went to this homeless shelter to report a story, and it's a homeless shelter for teens, and they come and they announce their pronouns.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  Now I just heard that twice. I went to the writer's room, and another writer had had a similar experience, and we started talking about it, and just came up with this notion of, well, there should be this Gen non-binary who shows up at Axe Capital. And then started creating this character who could be a blank slate, who we could think these things about, who Axe could see. We thought it would be fascinating if Axe saw himself in someone who, from the outer appearances, was so different from Axe, but they met in this special place of their intellect.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  But none of that was like calculated. It was like the opposite of calculated. It was like a fun thing I heard, a fascinating way the world was changing. I thought the stories were really moving when I started reading about it. Then we interviewed Gen Non-Binary people because that's part of how you do your job. You want to represent people properly. So we had a few Gen Non-Binary people come to the writers' room and we interviewed them. We spoke to them about it, asked about their lives, showed them dialogue, talked through it, and then were able to build this character. And then the magic happens. Asia Keaton Dillon comes walking into the audition and suddenly the thing just takes on a life of its own.

• 1:18:20Rich Roll?

  Did they just own it? Were you immediately?

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  The Asia came and read three times and each time the character in Asia started fusing. But it was pretty clear.

• 1:18:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Did you have a sense that they would become as important to the story arc as they ultimately became?

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, right away.

• 1:18:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Oh, right away. Well, we'd hope the character of Taylor would do that, but also we were smart enough. This is where the sort of... So you're making the art, just making the art. But I mean, after three episodes, we called Showtime and we said, "You have to make this person a regular cast member of the show. You have to sign this person up." And we told Asia, "You should invite Asia to be a regular on the series," because it was clear. Before anyone ever saw it, three episodes in, it was like, "Well, that person has to be right in the cast like everybody else."

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  Right. What's the movie you haven't made yet that you still want to make? What's the story beyond Billions?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  Well, there are two scripts that Dave and I have written that have come very close to getting made that ought to get made. One is called Beat the Reaper, based on a book by Josh Bazal, and the other is The Winter of Frankie Machine, based on a book by Don Winslow. Beyond that, I can't say.

• 1:19:34Rich Roll?

  You can't?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Nah.

• 1:19:35Rich Roll?

  Because you don't know or because you don't want to say?

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  Both.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  I mean, you can't talk it out, right?

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  And also, sort of, what's the, I mean, yeah, I'm not gonna say.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Are you gonna tell us anything about what's gonna happen in Billions?

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I mean, the trailer, you know, we have great new people on the show this year, awesome new characters.

• 1:19:57Rich Roll?

  Malkovich is back.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  John Malkovich is in the show, which is just awesome for us, you know, that, that's one of those things where you're doing this long enough, you know, we made two movies together at the beginning of our career, stayed friends, not super close to each other all the time, but really always never not in touch. And so I sent John a text last year and I said, would you come? We have this idea, so Russian oligarch, you come do three episodes. And he just immediately wrote back, I'd love to. And then kept good to his word and did it.

• 1:20:28Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  It was awesome.

• 1:20:31Rich Roll?

  Well, let's wrap this up, but I wanna leave people with, we covered it, I think, pretty comprehensively, but for people that are listening to this who do feel creatively stuck, who feel like they, you know, have this voice that they can't bring expression to, beyond giving permission and creating those guardrails, what's some kind of final parting?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Well, I'm so glad you asked. Well, first of all, I'd say this, go easy on yourself. Don't add to that self-hatred. Don't add to that yelling at yourself that you're disappointing yourself or whoever. So, take a breath and understand that it's okay, that everybody who's ever done this has felt what you're feeling. And then find a small action that you can do consistently. Do something. Do some little thing every day. I know, every day sounds like a lot, but do it every day. Do something every day. Do morning pages, take a walk where you're not gonna listen to a podcast, or you're not gonna listen to a book. Find a way to

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  be alone with yourself and hear your voice and nurture that voice in the way that you secretly know how. And, uh, and just do it consistently. And know that you do have 20 minutes. 20 minutes you can, let's say you say, I can't write a page. Okay. Write a half a page a day. You'll have written 150 pages in a year. And a year is a really short time.

• 1:22:07Rich Roll?

  And if you have an iPhone and you think you don't have enough time, go to that little thing that tells you how much screen time you've, how much time you've spent using your phone over the last week, and I guarantee you, there's opportunity to free up.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  I reward myself when I'm writing. If I finish a scene, I'll go on Twitter for 20 minutes. Then I'll go back and finish the next scene.

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  And you're able to cut it off at 20 minutes?

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, like, when I get the feeling, like, again, like I said, you know, I'll be writing a scene, I'll get to where I think the scene's right.

• 1:22:38Rich Roll?

  A little dopamine reward.

• 1:22:40Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Dopamine reward and then back to work. Exactly right.

• 1:22:44Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Well, thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciate the work that you do. And you are like, you are kind of like this self-help guru. I mean, the advice that you dispense on these matters is no small thing. I think this is something that we all struggle with. And

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  I'm so happy to share it because I've took such advantage of it being shared by people before me. So, and the podcast I do is the only thing I want to direct people to at the moment with Brian Koppelman, because I ask these questions to all these people. It's a great, it goes well with your podcast.

• 1:23:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. No, it dovetails perfectly. And you have fantastic guests. I've enjoyed the podcast for a really long time. I don't know how you find the time to do it while running the show.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  I don't either.

• 1:23:28Rich Roll?

  But keep doing it if you can.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. Thank you for having me here, Rich.

• 1:23:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thanks, Brian.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Oh, wait. And I want to, I want to thank my niece's boyfriend, I'd like to say fiance, but it's not true at this moment, my niece's boyfriend Noah, who introduced me to Rich Roll. And is in the room right now. He introduced me to Rich and said, oh, you gotta listen to this guy. He talks about stuff that you do and you'll love him. And that's what got me interested. And you had asked me to be on the show. It was perfect timing because you'd asked me to be on the show when Noah, right when Noah was telling me to listen. So it was great.

• 1:23:57Rich Roll?

  The synchronicity of the universe. I love it. Peace. Bless.

• 1:24:04Rich Roll?

  I dig that guy. I dig his work. I dig his message. Everything about that was just amazing. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Do me a favor. Let Brian know what you thought of today's conversation. The guy is a beast on Twitter. Hit him up @BrianKoppelman, K-O-P-P-E-L-M-A-N. And again, season four of Billions returns to Showtime on March 17th. So check that out. If you're struggling with your diet, if you're really desiring of mastering your plate, but feel like you don't have the skill in the kitchen, or the time to devote to it, or the culinary acumen you believe you require, I cannot stress enough how much I know our Plant Power Meal Planner can help you guys. It truly is an

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  amazing product. We work very hard to create, to essentially solve a very basic problem: making nutritious eating delicious and convenient. When you sign up at meals.richroll.com, you will get access to thousands of delicious and easy to prepare, plant-based recipes, thoroughly customized based on your personal preferences, with unlimited grocery lists and grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas, as well as a team of crack expert nutrition coaches at the ready to guide you seven days a week. You get all of this for just $1.90 a week, literally a cup of coffee. So for more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. If you would

• 1:25:29Rich Roll?

  like to support our work here at the RRP, there are a couple of ways to do just that. Just tell your friends about the show, or your favorite episode. Take a screen grab, share it on social media, tag me so I can reshare it. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, all those good places. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts, very helpful. And you can support the show on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. Thank you to everybody who has done that. Appreciate everybody who helped put on the show today. I do not do this alone. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music. In general, Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for video and editing services.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  We did not video this episode because I did it on the road, but they're the wizards behind the YouTube page. Jessica Miranda for graphics. David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music, as always, by Analemma. Thanks. I love you guys. See you back here in a few days with The iconoclastic pastor and New York Times bestselling author and LiveWire Nadia Bolz-Weber. This one is a treat. You're not going to want to miss it. So until then, go out, create something. Peace. Plants, namaste.