#83 Brian Koppelman: What Really Matters

Writer and director Brian Koppelman discusses his career ups and downs, dealing with fear, and learning to live a meaningful life. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, there's a line in Billions where Bobby Axelrod is making a speech to all of Axe Capital. And he says, "In the great expanse of time, we're already dead." And that's something that I believe, right? If you look at the great expanse of time, we're not even a dot. The dot is already over. It's already in the past. And so we may as well be super connected to the fact that we're here and alive right now.

• 0:40Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and you're listening to The Knowledge Project, a podcast dedicated to mastering the best of what other people have already figured out. This podcast and our website, fs.blog, help you better understand yourself and the world around you by exploring the methods, ideas, and mental models from some of the most incredible people in the world. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a premium program that brings you even more. You'll get ad-free versions of the show, early access to episodes, transcripts, and so much more. If you want to learn more now, head on over to fs.blog/podcast or check the show notes for a link.

• 1:19Shane Parrish?

  Today, I'm talking with writer and director Brian Koppelman, who's the co-creator of the Showtime show Billions and whose film credits include Rounders, Osens 13, and Solitary Mind. We talk about the writing process, pushing through fear, living a meaningful life, meditation, and so much more. Brian's ability to hone in on what really matters will have you thinking about your life differently. It's time to listen and learn.

• 1:55Shane Parrish?

  This is unlike any other podcast I've ever done. I'm normally one of the people that does the most intense research, but we decided to do this like 45 minutes ago. So we're just gonna have to spitball this.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd wondered because I know how research-heavy you are and all the stuff that you do. How, you know, you're, whenever I read a post of yours, I feel... Not just a substantial brain behind it, but I feel that you've worked on your point of view. And I wondered how you were gonna research in this compressed period of time because I, you know, I'm a podcaster too, and I find it really hard unless I'm quite familiar with someone's work to do it on, on short notice. But you did tell me before this that you watch my show and you might know some of my stuff. So maybe it won't be as difficult. We'll, we'll figure it out as we go though.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Listen, these are, these are interesting times and they demand new ways to attack things.

• 2:54Shane Parrish?

  I totally agree. I love Billions, huge fan, so.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 2:59Shane Parrish?

  One of the things that did strike me, I did a little bit of Googling before, is that you're a big fan of meditation. How did that get started?

• 3:07Speaker 00

  I am. I practice transcendental meditation. I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. Well, I've long tried to find ways to outsmart the part of my brain that wants me to give in to doubt and fear in all areas of my life, right? The part of my brain that makes it hard to sit down and do the work because it tells me that probably I'm not as good as I hope I'll be and I'll never be able to capture the feeling I have on the page or when I shoot it. The part of my brain that could keep me up at night, how with fears, particularly in a time like this. And so, a long time ago, when I was 30, I'm 53 now, a long time ago when I was 30 and

• 3:52Speaker 00

  I was in an acute stage of writer's block and really feeling like I, I wasn't going to be able to ever access the part of myself that was the most alive and do work that mattered to me. I found morning pages as described by Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way. And I, that worked not only as a solution to my writer's block, but kind of as a salve for many of these kind of issues. But over time, and, and that continued to work and I do that every day. But over time, I found myself jousting more frequently with the physical manifestations of anxiety than I would have liked and started searching.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And the more books I read, the more people I spoke to, it seemed meditation was an answer. I'd always been worried about whether I'd be able to. I read David Lynch's book, Catching the Big Fish, and he talks about the way in which meditation just calmed those voices and enabled him to do his work. I'm a big admirer of Lynch's. I was concerned about TM, Transatlantic Meditation, about the sort of legacy of the cult of personality parts of it from the 60s. But the more I looked into it, the more I spoke to people, the more it seemed that the tool of this practice of meditation would be useful.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And so I went and I took lessons and learned how to meditate. And I've been doing it for close to 10 years now.

• 5:25Shane Parrish?

  You said you do it twice a day. When do you normally do it?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  So I wake up, the first thing in the morning, I make coffee, I meditate, and then I do morning pages. That's my routine every day of my life. And then in the afternoon, somewhere between 3 and 7, I'll do the second meditation. And it's 20 minutes each time. The afternoon one, I'd say I do five out of the seven days a week. There are times that I miss it because we're shooting the show and I haven't planned my day well enough. But I'm much better off, the people around me are better off, if I make it a point to do it.

• 6:08Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned sort of part of your routine. And is there anything else in that routine before I ask you what morning pages are?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, those are the, those are the main things. I take each part of that, the coffee I take seriously, the meditation and the morning pages. And then I, pre-billions, every morning included a long walk, too, of a couple miles to my office in the making of the show, and then I would walk home at the end of the day. Once we started making the show, it became much harder to do the walk in the morning. So I still do cardio exercise, but I have to figure out how to get it in every day. I can't necessarily add that in, or I just have to get up at, you know, three forty-five every day, which I'm not quite able to do. What does it mean to take coffee seriously?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  Well, it means grinding the beans freshly in the morning. I'm not obsessively crazy about it, but I love the smell of coffee when you're, when you grind it. So I usually will grind it in the morning. And I used to only do French press, but now for some reason I'm in the phase of making drip coffee. But I, I will, I will grind it right that, you know, I want to grind it. I want the kitchen smelling of coffee and then I want to make the coffee. Talk to me about morning pages. So I imagine you've had other guests in your seventy-nine or eighty episodes here who do them. Morning pages are a technique. I've seen versions of it in various sort of creativity classes, but Julia Cameron really

• 7:42Speaker 00

  codified the way that I do it in her seminal book, The Artist's Way.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  And the way Cameron describes them is the way that I do them exactly. That is three longhand pages. You must use, you know, pen or pencil. You just keep your pen going. You don't try to write. You're just, you're not, you're not crafting sentences. You're not thinking about paragraphs. All you're doing is moving your pen across the page until you fill three pages. And it has this incredibly magical effect. It, for me, anyway, it tips whatever is in my subconscious onto the page.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  It frees me from whatever's stopping me from being productive. Doesn't happen immediately, but after, after a month of, of doing this every day, even three weeks, you will find that not only is it easier to produce work, but you're just slightly lighter in the way you move through the world. It's, I, I would say I've bought Cameron's book for a hundred people. Maybe 20 of those people actually took the time to do the book. Of those, more than half ended up publishing work that they'd been unable to produce before that.

• 9:06Shane Parrish?

  Do you write about the same thing every day? Or is it just literally like a stream of consciousness, whatever comes in?

• 9:11Speaker 00

  No, it's stream of consciousness, man. And, and there are people, business leaders who do it and educators who do it and, and artists who do it. It, no, it's whatever is on your mind. But I will say this, Shane, you might find yourself writing about the same thing for three or four days in a row. And that thing might then teach you something about something you need to deal with in your life. And you reveal a lot about yourself. You reveal yourself.

• 9:39Shane Parrish?

  How did you overcome fear? You mentioned fear earlier. What were you scared of?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Well, listen, we, we all have these existential fears, right? All these fears are some kind of a replacement for the idea that we're here for a short time. It's the human condition. But then these fears manifest in different ways. And people who want to do what I do and who feel that somewhere in them, there's an artistic impulse. Or even if you're somebody who works in an office and you know that if you work from the most creative part of yourself, that means you're going to take risks. That means you might put an idea forth that hasn't been thought of in your firm before. You might get laughed at. Your idea might not, you might reveal to yourself when you finally manifest it.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  Oh, crap, this wasn't actually a good idea. And the fear of not being special, of not being good enough is, can be crippling to people. And the truth is, what I've discovered is that's all just stuff. It's what Steven Pressfield in his book War of Art calls resistance. But to me,

• 10:54Speaker 00

  As soon as I get past it and start doing the work, I remember that the result, the external result doesn't matter at all. I've been cured so many times of whatever's ailing me just by the doing of the work, by engaging with this question inside of me, by getting, listen, in these times, I'm never going to talk about a writer or an artist being brave. But there is something of an internal fortitude that when you find a way to engage it, you just come out the other side a better figure. You've come out the other side of a better version of yourself. And, look, these are fears all of us have, all of us, or most of us anyway,

• 11:39Speaker 00

  I don't want to, I guess, not all of us, but most of us are afraid of exposing that part of ourselves that we hold most dear for fear that it will be rejected. But the artist has a duty to risk that. And it's a duty to risk it so that you're, you're able to be better. For me, what I finally realized, Shane, was that if I allowed these creative impulses to die, it would be like a real death. And like any form of death, it would be toxic. And this toxicity would ooze out of me onto those that I loved. It would make me a worse father, a worse husband, a worse friend

• 12:24Speaker 00

  for the bitterness and jealousy that I would allow to grow in me. And I realized that as soon as I allowed myself to do the work, all that stuff went away. It dissipated. And I knew after Amy and I had our first child, that if I wanted to be the kind of father I wanted to be, and this is 23 years ago, if I wanted to be the, 24, the kind of father I wanted to be, if I wanted to tell my children that they should chase their dreams, then I had to, or I'd be a liar and I'd become bitter. And a bitter father is not really the ideal version of fatherhood that I had in my head.

• 13:00Shane Parrish?

  I want to hear more about living your dreams and sort of like you mentioned earlier, anxiety, walk me through how you, how you convince yourself to live your dreams. Like is there, is that just diving into the work or is there, is there more to it?

• 13:16Speaker 00

  Well,

• 13:18Speaker 00

  As I say, for me, it was an acute moment, right? It was an acute moment when I, I realized fatherhood's really important to me. I'm gonna be bad at it. And that quickly, I was able to shift. But what I, you know, I saw that there was a chance that by doing this work, I would free myself. And I'll say, it happened so quickly. As soon as David and I started writing our first movie, we had no contacts. We had no thought that we could sell it or that we'd make a movie out of it. But the moment I was waking up earlier, going into a room, generating pages, I started walking straighter.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I started, as I say, moving more lightly through the world. And I have found that whenever I talk about this, I get hundreds of letters from people who realize that they're in the same bind I was in and that they hear this quiet voice and they've been scared to let it out. And as to the root of where the fear comes from, I don't know. I think it's primal, but I do know that if you can somehow manifest it, you will feel better long before the world recognizes it. So, living my dream, I don't translate that into when I got to make the movies. I really translate that into when I started to be able to identify myself as a writer,

• 14:44Speaker 00

  as a creative person, so that as long as, and I decided, I made a decision, that as long as I wrote every day, I was a writer. I didn't need someone else to say it. I needed to do that work and if I did it, I could tell it to myself. And if I could tell it to myself, I was that thing.

• 14:59Shane Parrish?

  Maybe it became part of your identity.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yes, I didn't quit my job. I'll say one thing that I think is crucial is, I think, sometimes sort of taking huge, drastic action that's external to the actual project or external to the, the actual mission is dramatic and it feels great in the moment, but it turns out to be another way of self-sabotage. Right? I must quit my job in order that I may paint. Well, that's not true. All you need to do if you wanna paint is paint. I remember saying to my dad, who's a businessman and a, a successful businessman who worked closely with artists but wasn't one, I remember saying, screwing up the courage and saying, you know, Dad, I really, and I figured we'd be having a conversation that would last hours, you know? I said, I just have to tell you.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  I really think I need to, you know, uh, boy, how can I say this? Do I think I need to be a writer? And he just looked at me and he said, well, son, if you want to write, write. And as, you know, as simple, uh, an idea is that it's totally true. It's like, well, you don't need to do anything except write. So I got up earlier. I literally just got up an hour earlier. And you'd be amazed what you can do if you get up an hour earlier. I'm going to use writing as an example, but anything you want to do applies to this. One page a day. Even if you take off Sundays is three hundred and whatever, ten, about three hundred and ten pages in a year. One page a day. You can write a page in a half hour.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  So that many pages is a novel. That's three screenplays. It's an endless amount of short stories. And you can apply that to sort of anything that you're interested in doing. You, you have a, a game in your mind? Code a little bit every day, right? You want to be someone who figures out how to choreograph modern dance, work at it for a half hour a day, record yourself doing your thing. Like to me, uh, we can all find a half hour. There's, there's nobody who can't wake up a half hour earlier.

• 16:59Shane Parrish?

  I see a lot of people who, th- their dream is right in front of them. They know exactly what they want in life. Be it a relationship, an opportunity, a project that they want to work on, that they're, they're dying to work on this thing. But then they start like negative self-talk and they, they sort of like convince themselves they can't do it.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 17:20Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me a little bit about your response to that. How do you think about that?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Well, I, that's, a lot of that is like, um, result thinking. Well, I, I think about it this way. One, you have to calculate less.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  You have to calculate less. If you, the more you try to game this stuff out, the more it becomes clear the odds are against you and you can't win.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  But most folks have accomplished something great. We're kind of just unrelenting in their.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Belief, forget their belief, unrelenting in their determination to do it. And momentum is an incredibly powerful tool, as is inertia, an incredibly powerful force. Right? So I just think, commit to doing something for a few days. And then commit to doing it the next day. And then suddenly you have this kind of momentum that thrusts you forward.

• 18:25Shane Parrish?

  That's beautiful. Talk to me a little bit about the writing process. How do you, how do you go from idea to fully finished movie or show?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  I'll back up a little bit. I'd say anyone who really is interested in this stuff. The way you figure this question you're asking me out is by watching movies and then reading the screenplays. Or watching television shows and reading the teleplays. And with the internet, it's really easy to get access to those things. So I start, David and I, my partner is my lifelong best friend. We do all this stuff together and we usually start with a world that fascinates us. And so you'll go, okay, well, this world of hedge fund operatives and United States attorneys.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  This seems like a big, fascinating, very specific world with insular language and customs. That would be fun to dive into. And from there, we'll start to do research to see if it is a world that we find as fascinating as we think we find it. So which means reading a bunch of stuff, doing first person interviews with people. Using whatever connections we have, you know, so if I know somebody who knows someone who works at a hedge fund to get to go visit the hedge fund or meet the US attorneys, spend a lot of time doing that. So that we feel like we can get our arms around what the world is. And then it's time to figure out who the characters are.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  So you have a lot of conversations about the kinds of people who are drawn to this world. You're doing a lot of journaling about this, you're doing a lot of thinking about what would bring you into the world the right way. What are forces to set against one another? And so you start to really think about who these characters are, what made them who they are. And then you start to think about. A story structure that would bring these forces into opposition because you need conflict sort of in every scene of a screenplay or teleplay. So you then start thinking about that and you begin to do character descriptions which you'll write up and then you'll start to outline a version of a story that might work.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Then you'll revise that outline and then once you've kind of are outlining it and revising it, we use index cards and really then start to take the outline and break it into beats, which are sort of the flow of scenes. And then you you break that down into scenes themselves that kind of add up into the beats of a section of the thing. And at a certain point, you have a completely beat it out outline with a lot of detail for every episode of Billions. Let's say an episode of Billions, the teleplay is 60 pages. The outline from which we worked is usually 20 pages. So you have a 20-page document that's every scene, a bunch of dialogue and what the what's happening in the episode.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  From there, you'll have sort of what the scenes are about and then you're just writing the dialogue. The most fun part of it is when you're actually taking that outline and turning it into scenes themselves. That's the part where your hands are going wild and you're sort of you're working from the freest part of you. The outlining is the most arduous, really sort of grinding on story and how to make the story better and how to create conflict and not settling and second guessing. But once you have the outline, then you're free to sort of that's the part that's like jazz. Then you're free to improvise, then you're free to go because you have a base to return to and because you know you can always rewrite.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  If the scene is it goes on out too far away from what you were thinking and it doesn't work, you know how to rein it back in, back to this outline.

• 22:20Shane Parrish?

  That's fascinating. Do you notice gaps in the outline when you're trying to like actually fill it in?

• 22:26Speaker 00

  Yes, but you don't notice that until you've really written all the scenes. So then, right, you you notice that in the outline phase, but once you're through the outline and you've really grinded on it.

• 22:36Speaker 00

  When you're writing the scenes, you'll write all the scenes, then when you put that back together, absolutely, you read the whole thing and you go, oh, this section here is boring, or this section goes too fast, or, oh, these three scenes, we gotta put something between them to create more tension. But that's all the fun, I mean, that's all the most fun part of the thing.

• 22:55Shane Parrish?

  Do you test these before you run them, or is it just you guys?

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Test them how?

• 23:00Shane Parrish?

  Like, do you, do you give them to people to look over the script and be like, does this flow? Does this make sense? Do you feel what we're trying to get you to feel?

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. On Billions, we have a writer's room.

• 23:09Shane Parrish?

  Yeah. How does a writer's room even work? Like, I pretend I'm a kid.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  No, we're, you know, David and I are the showrunners, so we, we run the writer's room. We have a group of seven other people in the room with us, and we all talk through this outline stuff of the episodes. So we work together and get the outline into what we think is pretty good shape. We then share that outline with our whole writer's room team. They give us notes. We then incorporate the notes that make sense to us. Then we share it with Showtime. Then Showtime gives us their thoughts. They're incredible partners. They leave it to us to make all the decisions. But their outline, their questions are great because they haven't been in the writer's room, so they don't know what we're planning. They know the arc of the season, because we've told them that ahead of time, but they don't know what each episode is gonna be.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  So they might get it and say, oh, this is great. We don't understand what happens there when Axe talks to Taylor. Was Axe playing a game, or did he, you know, they'll ask questions that then allow us to refine what we're gonna do. Then we don't turn the outline back in, but we take their questions and bring those into when we draft the actual teleplay.

• 24:25Shane Parrish?

  Does the economics at all impact how the story gets played out? The economics of the show, in any show?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  Well, sure, you have a budget. So you...

• 24:39Speaker 00

  So if you're the showrunner of a TV series, your responsibility is to tell the story that you want to tell within the amount of, with using the resources that you're given. So the beginning of the season, our line producer really deals with the finances. We'll talk to Showtime, we'll talk to us, we'll together all figure out, well, this is the, what we think, you know, they'll say, this is what we feel like you guys should have this year, we'll talk it through and then we'll make the show for that amount. I mean, that's part of the job, right? We're, we are in a business partnership with the financier and they give us a tremendous

• 25:19Speaker 00

  amount of creative freedom and our responsibility is to make a show that really works for us and our audience and it works for them financially, them being Showtime financially. We take that obligation really seriously to them, you know, because they're entrusting us with this, you know, that's a real thing.

• 25:41Shane Parrish?

  Does Showtime have any say in how many seasons this goes for or is that totally up to the creative process?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  No, that if I guess it, no, it's, I'd say it's a, by this point, five seasons in, it's a conversation, but they have ultimate authority. Tomorrow, they could say, we're done with billions. That's completely, I mean, they're the financiers, they're putting up all the bread. We could, if Dave and I wanted to, want to stop, we could stop, obviously, and that would be that, but we love making the show and we don't want to stop and it certainly seems to us that Showtime doesn't want to stop either.

• 26:13Shane Parrish?

  I don't think you should stop, just my humble opinion.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  Thanks, man.

• 26:17Shane Parrish?

  What's the difference between a show and a movie when you're writing and creating it?

• 26:21Speaker 00

  In writing and creating it, we don't really think of it very much differently. The businesses are different and on television now, you can make the kinds of stories that we like to make and that we've made throughout our career. They're harder to make in movies now, but I mean, look at this time, right now, Shane, I don't know what the future of the movie business is. Who's going to a movie theater right now? Movies exist on streaming platforms now, so I think these things are all becoming one thing pretty quickly, just some stories tell better in two hours and some tell better in 60 or 80 or 100 hours.

• 26:56Shane Parrish?

  That's really interesting. I mean, one of the things when I thought about that question was. I would think that going into a movie, you sort of like, you know, the arc, you know how it ends. Whereas with a show that's multiple seasons, you might not really know how it ends. You're sort of exploring it as you go.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  You ought to know, though, something about how it ends. I find it's hard to tell a story if I don't have some idea of where these characters are going to end up. It is true that for a movie, you absolutely have to know it. And for a television series, you don't absolutely have to know it. But it's useful to know it. And look, David and I are trained, our training really is in movies. So we do think in terms of story, in terms of beginnings, middles, and ends. And we absolutely had a few possible endings for the series in mind pretty early on. And we definitely knew how the first couple of seasons were going to end.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  And I'll tell you, we cannot start writing a season of the show without knowing how the season ends. You have to be able to plant stuff. You have to be able to set the characters off on their quest, knowing the way in which that quest is going to resolve.

• 28:15Shane Parrish?

  What do you know as a professional storyteller about the cornerstones of a good story that we don't know or we can't see?

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Well, I think you do know, actually. I think people get bound up when they have to, you know, if you have to go make a speech, if one has to make a speech and knows that they want to tell a story in that speech, they might get really nervous because suddenly they have to write. And some teacher told them that there was a form they had to adhere to, and that was unnatural for them. But if I put you in a coffee shop or a bar and you had to sit down with somebody and it was important for you to make them laugh or for you to keep them engaged. And I said, Shane, tell them a story that you know people always react to. You would tell them that story and that story would have.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  An inciting incident, the moment that it comes alive, it would have a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle of it would probably build to some sort of a climax. There would be some sort of a resolution. And that's all the same stuff that's happening when we're telling a story professionally. I guess we're probably better at recognizing, or more practiced, not even better, at recognizing the stuff that gets in the way of that. But we all know how to do all of this stuff. It's all just about getting comfortable with it. It doesn't mean everybody has, I'm not being falsely humble, that doesn't mean everybody has the same utility with language that I have. That utility with language is hard

• 29:51Speaker 00

  won. It comes from years of reading and writing and thinking about language. So now, at a certain stage in my life, that's something that I have a great deal of control over. But that's really just sort of like a tool that I'm using. Anybody, all of us pretty much know how to keep someone else interested, if it really matters to us, in the right kind of story. Now, maybe it has to be the right audience. Like, you know, people go on dates all the time, and sometimes you'll sit across the table from somebody, and it just flows. You're just able to connect on a wavelength and tell the story. So, and someone else could sit there and the same story might fall flat. That doesn't mean you don't know how to tell it. It just means that wasn't the right audience for the story.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  So, finding, figuring out how to get on the wavelength of an audience is, again, that's also something that all of us do in life. I'm just a professional at knowing how to do it in a fictional context.

• 30:47Shane Parrish?

  Is there a difference between somebody who started in movies and then writes TV shows, and somebody who started in TV shows and then writes movies?

• 30:54Speaker 00

  There is in a few different ways. One is that television writing is a career path in that people can come up through writing rooms. You can get a job as a writer's room assistant, if you're in a writing program in college, potentially, or a film program, film and TV program. And then, if you're in a writer's room, you can kind of learn what that means to contribute ideas in a writer's room, and work your way up a system. And you can not count on that progression happening, but it's a progression that can happen, and it's a, it is a career path. Being a movie writer, you really have to survive by your wits. There's nothing holding you in place. There's nothing

• 31:37Speaker 00

  There's sort of no safety harness. You're just floating out there trying to come up with the next good idea, trying to get hired, trying to sell the next spec script. I think it forces you to become an original storyteller in a way that being a TV writer coming up through the system does not. And I think it gives, it gives you an edge when it comes to being in TV, coming from this other world.

• 32:06Shane Parrish?

  What kept you so interested in the world of hedge funds? Was it the power dynamic between ultra wealthy people and sort of the people that are supposed to regulate them?

• 32:15Speaker 00

  It's the fact that walking among us were these nation states.

• 32:25Shane Parrish?

  By that you mean billionaires?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:27Shane Parrish?

  Like their own, yeah, their own effective nation states.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  They are. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, these are people with armadas of ships and fleets of aircraft and people who will walk around them with armaments. And there's sort of nothing that they can't accomplish in a way that they want to. I mean, you would just look at the United States presidential campaign and the way billionaires, although they didn't win, the way billionaires were able to influence the process. And so we looked at these nation states, then we looked at these people in law enforcement, these United States attorneys who were like kings because they have this tremendous amount

• 33:14Speaker 00

  of discretion in as far as what they're going to prosecute, when and how. And we looked at these as immovable forces we could set against one another. And then it would allow us to have a really, almost a Shakespearean type of construct to tell the story. But we'd been fascinated by hedge funders for a very, very long time. David and I started trying to write about them eight years before billions ever happened and almost did a project about them at HBO and it, the last minute, didn't happen because of the financial crash of 2008. And so it, it had long held our fascination that there were these people with this kind of outsized power and influence that most Americans weren't really aware of.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  And we were also interested in why people with great wealth were held in such fascination? Why? This is long before Trump was president or even running for president. But why these characteristics like verbal acuity, a kind of thin, facile intellect, and a kind of raw charisma were standing in for real qualities of character like generosity, empathy, kindness, true intelligence? And why that first batch of characteristics seemed to capture the imagination of so much of the populace? We noticed it and we wanted to put figures on the screen who would embody some of that

• 34:43Speaker 00

  and see whether people would be able to get past just merely rooting for them to understanding that they ought to look at them with a bit more of a jaundiced eye.

• 35:00Shane Parrish?

  One of the things I love about Billions is that there's a lot of points where it's really hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:11Shane Parrish?

  And I find myself rooting for Bobby and Chuck at different points.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, for sure. Because the other thing we realized was a lot of these prosecutors, we looked around at people like Giuliani and Chris Christie, and we saw that there were people using these positions of the public interest for their own personal good. So, yes, they would do things that were for the public good, but at the same time, they were serving their own career ambitions. And when you notice that, and you notice that these people would go from a position like for the public good to running for office, and they would campaign on things they did when they were in those offices, it made us see that those people, although those are the traditional heroes of television series, that one ought to look at them sometimes

• 36:02Speaker 00

  with a bit of a jaundiced eye, too. And we wanted to put this whole thing of power, money, and influence and the legal system on display so that viewers would be forced, while rooting for these people, while laughing at the funny lines, while noticing their charisma and power and fearsome intellects, they would also have to ask themselves where the moral culpability lies and where we are all culpable in allowing all this to take place.

• 36:35Shane Parrish?

  How do you feel that you, and I don't mean this in any negative way, but how do you feel in creating a character who's a billionaire and, you know, borderline skirts the law that people root for? You've made him so likeable.

• 36:52Speaker 00

  Well, Damian Lewis makes him incredibly likeable.

• 36:55Shane Parrish?

  He's phenomenal.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  The answer to your question is, why are, why were Mark Cuban and Donald Trump the two most popular reality stars? Now, I'm a friend, Mark's a friend of mine, and I really like Mark, and I think he's a good person. But why are those, why were those figures the subject of so much fascination and adulation? It would do us no good to make a mustache twirling villain out of Axe. The way to raise the question for people is for Axe to have as much personal charisma, charm, intelligence, verbal acuity, self justification, self mythologizing as possible,

• 37:40Speaker 00

  but then show him doing absolutely terrible things that we all believe people in power would do, so that you have to ask yourself, why am I rooting for this guy?

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Who should I really be rooting for? What does it mean that I'm rooting for him? What does it say about our culture? What does it make me ask myself about where I'm placing my loyalties? How should I act differently in my regular life? Now, look, we're primarily trying to allow you to be entertained, to have a good time watching our show, to laugh, but we definitely want these questions to linger. And it's much more effective to, to us anyway, to create a guy who would fool you in life. On the show, I'd rather someone who would fool you in the real world because maybe in

• 38:36Speaker 00

  watching it and asking yourself that question, you won't be fooled as easily in the real world next time. We here in our country put somebody in office who's utterly incapable of managing this pandemic, utterly disinterested in managing this pandemic, except as to the way in which the pandemic redounds as judgment on him. He has no empathy and no critical thinking skills in this area. But what he was, a guy who portrayed himself as rich and sat on a gold throne and Americans were fooled. And so I have an obligation to put an even better version of that guy on television, or various versions of that guy, right?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  Axe is way smarter than Trump and way more personally engaging. But you have to put people like that on TV so that, so that the audience will be forced to ask themselves the question.

• 39:29Shane Parrish?

  It's a good way to put it. Can you take me behind the scenes a little bit into your favorite scene and walk me through it? Or a scene? I won't, I won't ask you to pick your favorite child.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's more just, I can't look at the show that way. You know, I'm so in it when I'm making it. I can tell you that there are episodes that I think are particularly special, you know, where different themes rise to the top. I'm always interested in what other people respond to. And I think when the show's finished, it'll be easier for me to sort of catalog things in the, in the way that you're, that you're asking for.

• 40:02Shane Parrish?

  That makes sense. Is it, like, what keeps you from being a perfectionist? Like, how do you know when enough is enough? Because you sound like the type of person who, and I'm just guessing, so correct me if I'm wrong, is, tends towards perfectionism.

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Well, the, like, we do have a time, there's time pressure that's, but yeah, we're crazy perfectionists. David and I will work on a cut of the show, meaning editing the episodes, I mean, right up until the last moment that we can before they take it out of our hands. Well, I would say this, I'd say being a perfectionist in this regard is useful, but we do have to deliver the show by a date certain each time. So that that is a guardrail against sort of insanity.

• 40:49Shane Parrish?

  What keeps you going? Like with all the success you've had, like what keeps you motivated to wake up in the morning? And just keep going after it?

• 40:57Speaker 00

  This work makes me, the work makes me feel, it does make me feel alive. You know, it's the same reason I do my podcast, The Moment, is I made the decision when I was thirty that I was going to follow my curiosity and the things that fascinated me. And as long as I'm doing that, I feel like a version of myself that I want to spend time with. For me, I think that in anybody's career, you got to take care of your family. You have to make money. I'm not a Pollyanna-ish idealist in that way. But if you can find a way to do work that makes you feel fulfilled, it's really easy. The part of keeping at it becomes much easier. Listen, it's a hard business, my business. It requires a tremendous amount of commitment, a lot of time.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  But the rewards are outsized too, Shane, right? The rewards in terms of people telling me how much they dig the thing, you know, the, the sort of feedback I get, the financial rewards. I mean, all of it is outsized to, especially considering I just love doing it. So what keeps me going is, is all of it, man. I mean, it's much harder to ask somebody who's, you know, riding in the back of a garbage truck every day, what keeps them going, which is of course what keeps them going is the need to put food on the table and take care of their family and the sense of a job well done and all that other stuff. But someone who has the opportunity to do what I do, who wouldn't want to keep going, I, I have a hard time relating to.

• 42:28Shane Parrish?

  But you are that dream for a lot of people, right? Like you're financially successful, you're outwardly successful in terms of recognition and creating something people value. And then you get to a point where you can, you could walk away and sail off into the sunset, but you keep going and I love that.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's really important to say that a career, a long career in Hollywood has a lot of ups and downs. I mean, in, in 2013, I thought I was drummed out of the business. David and I wrote a movie that completely bombed at the box office, was a disaster, Unrotten Tomatoes. We were involved in a high-profile project that was going to be on HBO and it never happened. We got fired from it before it even begun. And we had a movie agent call us and basically tell us it's possible that our career was over. And it was out of that that we started writing Billions. And so I had those conversations with my wife in 2013. My wife Amy Koppelman is a filmmaker too. And I remember having a conversation about whether we'd have to sell our apartment and downsize and how we were gonna look. And we were not living extravagantly, we've never lived extravagantly.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  And I remember really feeling like this might come to a crashing halt. And then I remembered being 30 and I remembered the only way to gain control of this is to control the stuff that I can handle, which means showing up again and starting to write again. And so that was 2013 and by 2015, we were in production on the pilot of Billions and able to sort of shift into this other gear. And so I never take it for granted that it's going to continue. I'm responsible about the money, Amy and I are responsible about the financial part of it so that I won't be in a position where I have to sell my apartment ever again, I hope. But I have absolutely been right up against it because of my commitment to this particular

• 44:12Speaker 00

  career. And, you know, the whims of a town like Hollywood can absolutely go any which way. So one has to love this work enough to withstand it.

• 44:23Shane Parrish?

  Did that put a lot of strain on your relationship with Amy?

• 44:26Speaker 00

  No, that's the luckiest thing in my life is that like we married, we each married the right person for us. So no, we were in it together. We're really lucky in that way. I, we were too young to make a rational decision. Shane, like I was 25 and Amy was 22 when we, I mean, I guess I'd just turned 26 when we got married, like, oh no, I was 25 and then I turned 26, I guess, 20 days later. But. We we just happened to pick the right person and we just fit and we have incredibly hon- we I'd say a lot of people's favorite episode of my podcast is the one that Amy was on and it was when her movie I Smile Back was coming out and we had a great convo

• 45:09Speaker 00

  about all this stuff and I would say it's a real great peek into a functional marriage that has withstood whatever disappointments from the outside by sort of being together.

• 45:22Shane Parrish?

  That's amazing. That's really good to hear.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  It's so lucky, dude. It's just super lucky.

• 45:27Shane Parrish?

  What have you learned, I would say, maybe in the last twenty years, sort of, about living a meaningful life?

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Well, it's something I think about a lot. This is where you get into trouble talking about this stuff, but I I think it's it's because it's nothing novel, right? It's a life that involves doing work you think is meaningful, being good to as many people as you possibly can, contributing in whatever ways you can in a societal way. And I try to do all that stuff the best I can. I mean, for Amy and me, raising our kids was the single most meaningful thing by far. It's the thing that gave our lives meaning. That and doing work that we cared about. I mean, that takes care of a huge, a huge part of

• 46:16Speaker 00

  it, right? And then trying to be there for as many people as you can in whatever way you can. Again, that stuff is it's basic and I think in different phases of your life, you can do different parts of it. You can do more of it.

• 46:32Shane Parrish?

  You mentioned being there for other people. Are you there for yourself? Like, in what ways do you need to put your own mask on first to power you to be there for other people?

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Say more about that. What do you mean your own mask?

• 46:43Shane Parrish?

  Like, how do you take care of yourself to give you the the strength and energy to take care of other people?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Well, I think that goes back to like the stuff we talked about, like meditation and morning pages and exercise. I mean, these things which are hard to force yourself to do, they are, they sound like just received wisdom or something, but the thing is that they work. I guess the only other thing is like the way the Tibetans talk about it, you know, contemplate your death. That makes a lot of things very clear, too, right? If you really try to understand the the concept of death, it does help clarify a lot about the concept of life and how you should live. But it's mostly

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Simple things. I mean, oh, well, one thing for me is eating well. If I eat well, eating and sleeping, those things are really important. Eating well and sleeping well, meaning not eating too much like, you know, sugar and flour.

• 47:35Shane Parrish?

  Talk to me more about the death. How do you, do you talk to yourself about this often? Is it like spontaneous? Is it like scheduled? Is it?

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Again, if you go back to the podcast I did with Amy, we talk about it a lot on there. It's just having an understanding of the finite nature of life. And a lot of that comes from reading, right? If you read a lot, which I do, you've come to see that this theme of, when I talked about the human condition before, right? The fact, there's this great singer songwriter named Slade Cleves, S L A I D Cleves, who has a song called Cry, wherein he says, "Everything you love will be taken away." And if you walk through life with the knowledge of that, that everything you love is going to be gone someday. For me, it makes me love harder.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  It makes me aware of how fortunate I am to be present in this moment, talking to you here, knowing that the people I love are breathing and living and thriving. And it makes me want to be more expansive, more giving, and more connected. Because, you know, there's a line in Billions where Bobby Axelrod is making a speech to his whole, all of Axe Capital. And he says, "In the great expanse of time, we're already dead." And that's something that I believe, right? If you look at the great expanse of time, we're not even a dot. The

• 49:09Speaker 00

  dot is already over. It's already in the past. And so we may as well be super connected to the fact that we're here and alive right now.

• 49:20Shane Parrish?

  It's also empowering to help you go after what you want.

• 49:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:24Shane Parrish?

  Right? Like to live your dreams.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Well, to help you focus in on what that means, what do you, what you want.

• 49:30Shane Parrish?

  I think a lot of people don't even consciously think about it. And then unconsciously, they just sort of go about like, what do I want today? What do I want today? And then they wake up.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:39Shane Parrish?

  And you're at the end of your life, you sort of like realize that, oh, these things that really matter to me at this point, I didn't see earlier.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Sure, Shane, that's the gift of the morning pages and meditation. Do you meditate? Do you do any of that stuff?

• 49:53Shane Parrish?

  I do. I'm, I'm not as ritualistic as it, as I want to be about it. I often do it before bed.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's great, too.

• 50:03Shane Parrish?

  But sometimes I'm so exhausted, I just fall asleep, right?

• 50:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just think like those things allow you to check in and allow you not to get in a situation where, like you said, you're just chasing sort of short term.

• 50:20Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  Endorphin hits, but and, and look, all of us chase short term endorphin hits sometimes. All of us go through periods of time where we are going after the more thin pleasures than the thicker, deeper, richer pleasures. So you can't hold yourself out to a standard that's impossible to achieve either. It's not that I'm, I'm not also fall prey to those other things. We all do, right? I'm not a Tibetan monk. I'm not sitting out in, in the woods. I'm engaged in the material world. But I just try to also have an awareness of what that means and of what's important at a deeper level.

• 51:06Speaker 00

  And I think times like this, like what we're all going through as a society right now with COVID-19, the coronavirus, with social distancing, it's a great time to practice getting in touch with that stuff. It's a great time. And I'll say the work that I have done personally really pays off in a time like this because I'm able, and again, doesn't mean I never freak out, doesn't mean I never get anxious. Of course I do, I'm a human being. But it does mean that I have certain tools I've stoked to. Be prepared to deal with it.

• 51:40Shane Parrish?

  I want to talk about two things before we wrap this up. That was beautiful. I want to go into failure. You mentioned you had a box office failure. I think it was 2013. How did you think about that? Did you think about that as like, you know, a certain percentage of movies are going to fail? This happened to be one. Or did you walk away from that going like, oh, like I failed. I need to do something different. Like, how did you? How did you think about that situation?

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Every, no, that, that was a really brutal. I mean, that was a brutal blow. Part of that was that in the making of that, it was a very difficult fraught filming process or process, if you'd prefer. And it was, I knew the movie was going to be bad. And so I was waiting and waiting for it to be released, knowing it was terrible. And I did really get a call from a film agent basically saying, your careers might be over. You might not be hirable unless you find a way to write yourself out of this. And so it was cataclysmic, man. And it required all those resources. I'd started meditating a couple of years before that, which is incredibly helpful. But it was jarring, you know?

• 52:50Speaker 00

  I, I walked, I, I used to walk across Central Park to go to my office. And on a normal day, crossing the park would take 25 minutes. And I'd say in the shadow of that movie coming out, I was walking so slowly. It would take me like an hour and 20 minutes to get through the park because I was just so beat up and miserable. But then you start to do things. I started my podcast in the shadow of that. I started making these vines that were called six second screenwriting lessons where I was talking to people about giving themselves permission to do this creative work. And I was really, really talking to myself and trying to remind myself that I didn't need some authority figure to tell me I was hirable or that I had a career. You know, these are lessons we have to relearn over and over again, man. They're not, they're, they're, I wish life were so simple that once you made a distinction for yourself, you were able to just hew to it.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  But the truth is, we get knocked off course by life's events. And if we don't remind ourselves of first principles consciously, we can just drift. So you have to remind yourself of first principles and then you have to lock down again. And then you have to move forward.

• 53:53Shane Parrish?

  I love that. Talk to me about reading. You're a big reader. What are you reading now?

• 53:58Speaker 00

  I'm reading a wonderful book right now that's not out yet. It's about ostensibly about Tiger Woods, but it's about a lot more than that. It's written by this guy named Michael Bamberger, who's a great writer. Bamberger wrote this incredible book about Amat Shamilan's making of Lady in the Water. And this book is about how Tiger put himself back together to win the Masters. And it's just a beautiful book. And then I just asked Twitter for a bunch of book recommendations. And I think the next book I'm going to read is a novel called Ohio, but I'm forgetting the author's name right now.

• 54:31Shane Parrish?

  Are you mostly reading fiction?

• 54:32Speaker 00

  I rotate. I rotate between nonfiction and fiction.

• 54:36Shane Parrish?

  What appeals to you the most about the Tiger Woods story? Is it the comeback after failure? Is it the, like, what draws you into that story as a person?

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Well, we could have a whole podcast on Tiger Woods, but Tiger's sort of an obsession of mine. He's my, I always say my, my favorite sports team is the Knicks, but Tiger Woods is my second favorite sports team. And I do find the fact that he was able to marshal his resources one more time in that way is just stunning. Also, my, my son was like two when Tiger won the first Masters and it's just been a, it's, it's something that ties my father, who's 80, me and my son all together. When Tiger's playing well, we're all talking to each other. We're all connected. I mean, it's the great magic of sport.

• 55:30Shane Parrish?

  That's a great way to end this. Thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciate you taking the time.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  Thank you, Shane. And thanks for doing what you do, man. I look forward to this coming out.

• 55:45Shane Parrish?

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