#121: BJ Novak of The Office on Creative Process, Handling Rejection, and Good Comedy

This tactical episode covers principles and tactics for creating amazing careers, comedy, writing, and much more. Hilarious stories weave it all together. My guest is B. J. Novak (@bjnovak https://twitter.com/bjnovak), best known for his work on NBC's Emmy Award-winning comedy series "The Office" as an actor, writer, director, and executive producer. He has appeared in films such as Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361748/ and Disney's Saving Mr. Banks http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2140373/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1. He is also the author of the acclaimed short story collection "One More Thing" http://www.amazon.com/One-More-Thing-Stories-Other/dp/0385351836/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and the #1 New York Times Best Seller "The Book With No Pictures" http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Pictures-B-J-Novak/dp/0803741715/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 (great Christmas gift), which has more than one million copies in print. Last but not least, he is co-founder of The List App https://li.st/. In other words, he does a lot and does it well. What are the habits, tools, and routines that help him to do this? That's what we explore in this conversation. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business, which is ideal for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business. WealthFront https://www.wealthfront.com/ uses it to explain how it develops personalized investment portfolios. TaskRabbit https://www.taskrabbit.com/ uses it to tell the company's story. Twitter uses it to showcase Periscope https://www.periscope.tv/. Why are they using it instead of other options out there? Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business provides enterprise level video hosting that typically costs thousands of dollars for a tiny fraction of the cost. Features include: Gorgeous high-quality playback with no ads Up to 20 GB of video storage every week Unlimited plays and views A fully customizable video player, which can include your company logo, custom outro, and more You get all this for just $199 per year (that's only $17 per/mo.) https://vimeo.com/business There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Just go to Vimeo.com/business https://vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code "Tim" to get 25% off https://vimeo.com/business. This is the deepest discount you will find anywhere for Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business. This podcast is also brought to you by Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it's all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you—for free–exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim http://wealthfront.com/tim. Mandatory disclaimer: Wealthfront Inc. is an SEC registered Investment Advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Please visit Wealthfront dot com to read their full disclosure.

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  No, we're just sitting in a broke big time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. And in fact, a bunch of my startups already use Vimeo Pro, including Wealthfront, who uses it to explain how Wealthfront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell their company's story. And there are many other names you would recognize among their customers: Airbnb, Etsy, etc. Why do they use it? Well, Vimeo Pro provides enterprise-level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include gorgeous, high-quality playback with no ads, up to 20 gigabytes of video storage every week, unlimited plays and views, and a fully customizable video player, which can include your logo, custom outro, etc. You also get VIP support. And you get all of this for just $1.99 per year. That's $17 a month,

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  with no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. And you can try it risk-free for 30 days. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business. That's V-I-M-E-O.com/business. And use promo code TIM to get 25% off. That's a special discount just for you guys. So check it out. Vimeo.com/business, promo code TIM.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. And this is a very unique sponsor. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive, in a good way, set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years, and they now have more than $2.5 billion under management. In fact, some of my very good friends, investors in Silicon Valley, have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. So the question is, why? Why is it so popular? Why is it unique? Because you can get services previously reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but only pay pennies on the dollar for them. And this is because they use smarter software instead of retail locations bloated... Sales teams, et cetera, and I'll come back to that in a second. I suggest you check out wealthfront.com/tim.

• 2:16Tim Ferriss?

  Take the risk assessment quiz, which only takes two to five minutes, and they'll show you for free exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. And if you just want to take their advice, run with it, do it yourself, you can do that. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. And here's why. The value of Wealthfront is in the automation of habits and strategies that investors should be using on a regular basis, but normally aren't. Great investing is a marathon, not a sprint, and little things that you may or may not be familiar with, like automatic tax loss harvesting, rebalancing your portfolio across more than 10 asset classes, and dividend reinvestment add up to very large amounts of money over longer periods of time. Wealthfront, as I mentioned, since it's using software instead of retail locations, et cetera,

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  can offer all of this at low costs that were previously completely impossible. Right off the bat, you never pay commissions or account fees. For everything, they charge 0.25% per year on assets above the first $15,000, which is managed for free if you use my link, wealthfront.com/tim. That is less than $5 a month to invest a $30,000 account, for instance. Now, normally, when I have a sponsor on this show, it's because I use them and recommend them. In this case, it's a little different. I don't use Wealthfront yet because I'm not allowed to. Here's the deal. They wanted to sponsor this podcast, but because of SEC regulations, companies that invest your money are not allowed to use client testimonials, so I couldn't be a user and have them on the podcast. But I've been so impressed by Wealthfront

• 3:42Tim Ferriss?

  that I've invested a significant amount of my own money, at least for me, in the team and the company itself. So I am an investor and hope to soon use it as a client. Now, back to the recommendation. As a Tim Ferriss Show listener, you'll get $15,000 managed for free if you decide to open an account. But just start with seeing the portfolio that they would suggest for you. Take two minutes, fill out their questionnaire at wealthfront.com/tim. It's fast, it's free. There's no downside that I can think of. Now, I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer. Wealthfront, Inc. is an SEC-registered investment advisor. Investing in securities involves risks, and there is the possibility of losing money. Past performance is no guarantee. Future results, please visit wealthfront.com to read their full disclosure.

• 4:24Tim Ferriss?

  So check it out, guys. This is one of the hottest, most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley, and they're killing it. They've become massively popular. Just take a look, see what portfolio they would create for you, and you can use that information however you want. Wealthfront.com forward slash Tim.

• 4:42Tim Ferriss?

  BJ, welcome to the show.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me here. It's very cool.

• 4:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I appreciate it. And we are sitting in Venice at my friend's house, Devin and his friend Travis Brewer, who's on American Ninja Warrior. So we have this incredible workout facility to the right, to my right, I guess, in the garage. But you do not, you work in Venice, but you live an hour away.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  I live over an hour away. So I've been getting into podcasts. I actually enjoy, I was telling you on the way in, I enjoy getting to see this other part of town because LA is really like several different cities. And I've never really known the West Side, so it's worth it to me, at least for now, to spend that hour. And listening to podcasts on the drive, it's really like an extra hour of reading a day.

• 5:24Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any, any particular go-to podcasts at the moment?

• 5:28Speaker 00

  I just started getting into yours. What else do I like? I love this podcast called The Great Debates. It's a comedy, comedy debate podcast. People really, at the top of their intelligence, to Harvard friends of mine who are, you know, very well-educated, erudite comedy writers, just going at the most trivial and bizarre topics. One topic was, "It would be cool if the Pope had an affair with Maura Tierney." And one of them took the side, "The Catholic Church needs this sort of, you know, jolt and rebranding." And the other person saying, "What's the point of an institution like this?" You know, so.

• 6:07Tim Ferriss?

  So it's like Debate Club. I mean, it's.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. And then there's one, Intelligence Squared, which is sort of like the serious debate.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  The serious version of that.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, the serious version of the comedy version of the serious thing. And that was, that's been really interesting, too.

• 6:22Tim Ferriss?

  For those of you wondering what the whining is, it's not BJ, that's Molly, my dog. You mentioned two Harvard friends or fellow Harvard graduates. I have a question about Harvard.

• 6:34Speaker 00

  And you're a Princeton guy.

• 6:36Tim Ferriss?

  I went to the lesser known with the P. But it seems like there is a rich history of people coming to Hollywood from Harvard that you don't associate with, say, Yale, or maybe so, but I haven't come across it as much, or other Ivies. Why is that? Because it seems to go back quite a ways. I mean, my family at one point knew Henry Beard, who then helped create National Lampoon.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  And it just seems to go way, way back. And I'd love to hear why that is. I really don't know.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  The main correlation that I am familiar with is the Harvard Lampoon, which is a really one of a kind comedy magazine that has its own spectacular castle building in the middle of prime real estate in Harvard Square. William Randolph Hearst funded this incredibly bizarre and exciting old building. And that has fostered a lot of intelligent people trying to get into this building/magazine/party house. And those people sort of train each other really, I wouldn't quite say viciously, but really rigorously about comedy. This

• 7:53Speaker 00

  joke doesn't progress. This joke is predictable. And it's very rare that you'll get 19-year-olds being hard on funny 18-year-olds year after year. And so I think that is a training system that is unlike just about anything else you'd be exposed to at that age. So that has led to a lot of people falling in love with and becoming very good at comedy writing, which is, you know, a real A building block of entertainment that can be put to you. So a lot of people have traditionally graduated the Harvard Lampoon and gone on to write for The Simpsons or Saturday Night Live, or many, many other shows. And I think once

• 8:33Speaker 00

  you see graduates do that, you kind of think, oh, maybe I could do that. A big advantage, I think, of going to a fancy school, or my dad, who did not go to a fancy school but is a writer.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  A lot of people ask me, "Oh, did you have those advantages?" Yes, of course, to an extent, but I find the biggest advantage is just not thinking that it's a crazy idea to try to be a comedy writer or to try to be a writer. Many people waste years working as a lawyer, working, you know, whatever they do that they think of as a more reasonable choice before they finally get the courage to write. So I think that the huge advantage is if you have the talent, no matter where you are, if you believe that it's a reasonable choice of action, you're extremely fortunate. And that, I think, is a main advantage of going to Harvard. It doesn't seem crazy.

• 9:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I mean, you have these historical case studies of people who've done exactly what you might fantasize about doing.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 9:36Tim Ferriss?

  And the rigor and the training is very interesting to me because I was the graphics editor at the Princeton Tiger. So the satire magazine, cartoons, illustrations, that was my department. And I wanted that job partially because Jim Lee, who's sort of an iconic hero in the comic book world for me, had that previous post at Princeton. And I found a bunch of his drawings, actually, that did when he was shitfaced drunk after going to a party on Nassau Street, but that's a separate story. The approach really was do something funny. And there wasn't a lot of structure. I mean, there was feedback if something sucked, obviously, or just didn't get any type of laughs whatsoever. But where did that structure develop?

• 10:21Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, did people come back from, say, industry and help instill that in some way? Or did it just develop organically among the students?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  The career path of it?

• 10:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, I mean, the being hard on, say, underclassmen and looking at whether something progresses or not, etc.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I imagine that was simply imitative of other...

• 10:45Speaker 00

  You know, rigorous extracurriculars at a school like that where, you know, the ski club or, you know, rowing or the Harvard Crimson newspaper, whatever, probably it's more inherited from that because a lot of people want to do these activities and you limit it to the people that you feel, and it's incredibly subjective practice, but are the most talented at comedy writing. And so you put them through, well, can you do this? Can you do that? And you have to write a number of pieces in order to get on the staff. So I think that, you know, everything at a place like that is, is very competitive. And, and so this is just that same rigor applied to this incredibly subjective

• 11:27Speaker 00

  and often thought to be trivial field of comedy writing.

• 11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Did you?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  And this does not lead to the best comedy writers by any means. It is just, it's, that's one advantage. And the other advantage is that they believe they can do it. There are also huge disadvantages to coming from the Harvard Lampoon, which is a lack of sort of life experience or being in touch with what real people actually find funny, or a sense of cockiness that is very antithetical to comedy. So there's definitely advantages and disadvantages to coming from a place like that.

• 12:01Tim Ferriss?

  Did you, at what point in your undergrad, did you get involved with the Lampoon?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Well, I tried to get on from the very beginning. So I tried, you comp is the term for, you know, auditioning for it with your writing. So I tried three straight semesters. So I didn't get on until the middle of my sophomore year, but I wanted to be on from day one.

• 12:23Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think changed between your first attempts and getting accepted? How did you, how did you improve? Or was it just unlocked?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  I have no idea. I probably just improved because I was older and had been doing it longer. But it's also incredibly subjective. If I had not gotten on, I had vowed to never try again and decided those people didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. And then I did get on and actually I did keep a healthy sense of this is not the be all end all. But it's so subjective.

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  How does, when you then did writing?

• 12:57Tim Ferriss?

  After college. Well, actually, let's not fast forward too quickly, although I'm happy to jump around. The next step after graduating, what happened in the year after graduation?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Well, I have a sort of bizarre sort of course of events and what it has in common with everyone else is that everyone who gets a job in show business, they have a story that's not replicable. That's the one constant ironically. So what happened was I was, one of my main extracurriculars at Harvard was I put on a show called The BJ Show with another kid named BJ who was like a campus celebrity. He was like a reality show star before reality because he had stowed away on a plane to visit his family for Thanksgiving. This is before nine 11, so it wasn't quite as bad or, but it's still, you know, it made the papers Harvard students stow his away on a plane. He was the guy from the plane, you know, and so I

• 13:57Speaker 00

  saw an opportunity here, you know, to hitch my fame to his and we put on this.

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  To get attached, to get the plane guy attached to your podcast.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, you know, I have the same name as the guy who was on the plane. Maybe we should do something together. So we put on the show and I got, you know, some of my comedy friends and we wrote this sort of, it was a variety show, it was a variety show and parody of a variety show called The BJ Show. My senior year, I decided, let's invite Bob Saget to perform in this show because I had heard that he was a really filthy stand-up comic, which he is.

• 14:29Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what was the timing on this? This was probably?

• 14:33Speaker 00

  This is 2001.

• 14:34Tim Ferriss?

  2001?

• 14:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:35Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so this is before America's Funniest Home Videos?

• 14:38Speaker 00

  No, no, this is after.

• 14:39Tim Ferriss?

  Or I'm sorry, after?

• 14:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So he's well-known as a, you know, family-friendly guy.

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  But I have heard rumors that he's really filthy. So I think maybe we can book him, maybe we can, maybe we can honor him at the Harvard Lampoon and because he'll want the award, he'll come and do the show, which worked perfectly. I approached his management, I cold-called his management and said, I'm calling from Harvard, we want to give Bob Saget an award and feature him in this show. And the show, you know, the proceeds went to charity. It wasn't a scam for me. I just thought it'd be a great show. By the way, that's a great thing. Always, if you don't care about the money, always give the money to charity, because then everyone will do it. And often, you just don't care about the money. You just want to put on something cool. So that's something I learned in college that I'll probably use again, if anytime I have like some cool scheme.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Like, sure, keep them like, who cares. So I cold called his management. I asked my dad, how do you think I get in touch with Bob Saget? He said, call CAA. We're from like Boston. I don't know how he does. He said, look up, call 411, get CAA's number and ask CAA. They'll probably know. I was like, that's so smart. One of the big agencies in town. Yeah. So I call CAA. I say, do you guys represent Bob Saget? The receptionist says, no. I said, do you know who does? They say, I think Brillstein Gray. So I look up Brillstein Gray. I call Brillstein Gray. They do represent Bob Saget. They put me through to a guy. I explained my case. He says, send the, send the stuff you're writing for Bob. I'll take a look. This guy later becomes my manager. So the manager, Michael Price, likes the

• 16:12Speaker 00

  material, recommends that Bob does it. Bob comes out and does the show, which is a very highly scripted show. There's a parody of Full House called the lost episode of Full House, in which Bob learns about sex from Uncle Jesse. Very dirty, very funny. Anyway, so after the show, Bob and he had brought his show's creator. He was doing a new show that never really went anywhere, but it lasted one season. It was called Raising Dad. Oddly, it starred Kat Dennings and Brie Larson, who are now both very, very successful as well. But they hired me. They were like, oh, cool. A young, edgy writer, Harvard Lampoon, perfect. And they gave me a job on that staff while I was, you know, about to graduate. So I'm graduated. Perfect setup. Perfect in a way.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  In a way. I mean, too good to be true on a career level. But again, like, I didn't, I really had these fantasies of being a great artist, a great, you know, filmmaker and, you know, sort of a family WB show. I didn't want to move to LA. I knew that I shouldn't say no to this, and I didn't say no to it. But it was, you know, I actually wanted to be like a starving artist, you know, easy. I'm like, look, I'm from like a suburb. Starving artist means like borrow a little money and like live cheap. I have no real illusions, but I didn't, I had mixed feelings. It was sort of a dream come true and sort of career moving forward, but it was. You know, I was, I don't know.

• 17:40Tim Ferriss?

  What did you think you, what type of starving artist did you think you wanted to be when you were sophomore, junior?

• 17:46Speaker 00

  I had read this book, Easy Riders Raging Bulls, about independent film.

• 17:52Tim Ferriss?

  And Would you recommend it?

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Highly recommend it.

• 17:55Tim Ferriss?

  Easy Riders Raging Bull?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Easy Riders Raging Bulls, about sort of filmmaking in the, in the glory days of the seventies. And I wanted to be like that. And then there's a sequel about sort of the Miramax, like the nineties Tarantino, Kevin Smith, that is also good. But I really, I wanted to write like a screenplay that would like blow Hollywood apart. It was so edgy and innovative, et cetera, and then demand to direct it. And, you know, that's, that's, I think anyone who saw Pulp Fiction as a teenager, that was their fantasy. So that was very much my fantasy. And, um, you know, in my privileged wannabe artist mind, this was a sellout move.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  But, you know, I, I knew, I knew it would be even more like privileged and like eye rolly to turn it down. I mean, so it's, it's an interesting paradox. I've noticed this, when I was young, I thought, oh, I, I'll never be a sellout. If anyone ever offers me something sellouty, I'll always say no. Then you realize there's a huge integrity pull towards doing the sellout thing. Cause you think, who am I to turn down all this money for something that someone else's would, you know, struggle their whole lives to, et cetera, et cetera. And you actually feel very guilted into, towards at least, doing what you would have considered a sellout thing. So that's, it's an interesting paradox that I've observed with a lot of successful people.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  They get, you know, they get offered a really lame movie for a ton of money. And their thought isn't fuck that, I'm an artist. Their thought is, God, who am I? I'd put my kids through college just to do a, a Christmas movie. Who am I to say no? It's very surprising. I mean, it makes sense, but I, I'm surprised.

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  It does make sense, but it's a, it's a.

• 19:38Tim Ferriss?

  It's an incentive of guilt as opposed to sort of incentive of focus in a way. It's kind of like the Christmas story where it's like, there are starving kids in China, you know, and you're like, oh, okay, I'll eat this food that you put in front of me.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 19:52Tim Ferriss?

  How did you then make decisions or what happened after you were offered that gig on the?

• 19:59Speaker 00

  I took it.

• 20:00Tim Ferriss?

  You took it.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  You know, I, I took it, moved to LA, started writing for it.

• 20:06Speaker 00

  And I, you know, I looked around the room, I, I, it's interesting, I kept telling myself, I'm making so much money because for a kid at that age, it's so much money. But any job I've had since then, I made more money on The Office, for example, and I never thought I'm making so much money. So anytime I'm telling myself, I'm making so much money, I'm making so much money, that's a warning sign that you're doing the wrong thing. So I would tell myself that because I gradually realized this isn't the life I want. I'd look around this writer's room and think, these are not the jobs I want. And I really, and I'm glad I did, I really had these dreams of doing something important and visible and exciting.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And the only people in the room who I did aspire to be something like were Bob Saget, who would come by now and then in his fancy car and cool sunglasses and tell 10 jokes and leave and get to be the star of the show. And Jonathan Katz, who created the show and had previously created Dr. Katz on Comedy Central.

• 21:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Really cool show.

• 21:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, I know Dr. Katz.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And he also came by now and then, gave some words of wisdom and jokes and then left and was also celebrated for his own voice. And I thought, well, those are the guys I want to be. And they were both stand-ups. So I thought, I'd never thought of doing stand-up before then, but I realized, well, how, how insurmountable is this? Being a stand-up is writing a joke and then saying the joke. And that is what I'm doing in this writer's room. I write a joke, I say it out loud to see if it goes in the script. I guess I, I could try that and try to be like them. And so as the show was winding down, I signed up for open mics around LA and I would start, you know, saying one-liners into a microphone and I was kind of doing stand-up comedy.

• 21:51Tim Ferriss?

  What was the, do you remember any of your early bits?

• 21:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the first time was a real disaster. And one of my most important pieces of advice to anyone doing stand up is if you're really gonna try stand up, book your whole week of shows, your whole first week in advance.

• 22:08Tim Ferriss?

  So you can't quit?

• 22:09Speaker 00

  So you can't quit, because I got up all this courage to do my first show. It was at a youth hostel, the Hollywood Youth Hostel. It was October 10th, 2001. So less than a month after 9/11. All my jokes were about 9/11. And I was not a good comic. And the crowd didn't speak much English. So, and I followed a guy who killed. He did an impression of Robert De Niro taking a dump. And I have to say, it was great. It was a great impression and you didn't need to know English. And it was completely the opposite of what I was doing. And so I did this bit, it was horrible. And the host said after me to try to, you know, keep the show going. All he could muster for me was, takes a lot of courage to get up on this stage.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  And after that, I did not get on stage for three months. I had to work up the courage all over again, because it had been such a disaster. And that time, I was like, you know what? Tuesday, I'm going to this coffee shop. Wednesday, I'm going to this bar, you know, all these open mics. And, you know, the first night back, I did pretty well. And the second night, I didn't do well. But you can't make each night a referendum on whether or not you should be doing it. You just have to do a bunch.

• 23:16Tim Ferriss?

  And how did your approach change between that first bomb and the second sort of collection of attempts?

• 23:24Speaker 00

  It was really, it was exactly that. It was the idea that, that I'm gonna really do this night after night and I will evolve the act. And, you know, I was really bad for a while. But, you know, let's say you do 20 jokes and three of them get pity laughs. Well, those are the three you keep. And then after a while, one of them always does well. Well, that's your opener. And now two of them do well. Well, now you have a closer. And you sense, oh, okay, when I do this kind of joke, it does well. And, you know, it evolves that way.

• 23:56Tim Ferriss?

  And What did your parents do? You mentioned your dad wrote. He also, he wrote some memoirs or Ghost wrote some memoirs for some big people. I mean, what are some sample?

• 24:07Speaker 00

  The biggest one he did was Lee Iacocca, the biggest and first one he did. He also did the memoirs of Nancy Reagan, of Tip O'Neill, Magic Johnson, which was very exciting for me. He worked with Tim Russert on two books and George Stephanopoulos. So a lot of political people on both sides of the spectrum and a lot of just eclectic business leaders, you know, various people.

• 24:32Tim Ferriss?

  What did your, what did your mom do?

• 24:34Speaker 00

  My mom is a teacher now. She's done a bunch of things, though. She's also kind of an eclectic career.

• 24:40Tim Ferriss?

  What, what did they think of your move to startup, to not startups, that comes a little later, stand up, similar sounding word? What did, how did they, how did they feel about that? What were the conversations like?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they thought I wasn't very good. You know, they're, my dad also is the co-editor of a couple of humor books that are very good, The Big Book of Jewish Humor and The Big Book of New American Humor. And my family, like comedy's a big deal to us. Like we watch, they watch Seinfeld every night. Seinfeld and Key and Peele are the only things my parents watch, which I think is very good taste. So, you know, I think they kind of just, they definitely supported me writing, you know? I'd studied literature at Harvard, you know, my dad's a writer. There was nothing, again, huge advantage for me, that my parents thought writing was like a good, a solid job, you know? And then stand up was where they were like, ugh, like, okay, get it out of your system. This is not you,

• 25:34Speaker 00

  but whatever. You know, they never said this to me, but in retrospect, it's like, it's the same thing on stage when the audience is laughing and then you say something off the cuff and you get a huge laugh and you realize, oh, they weren't even laughing before. My parents were like supportive, supportive, supportive. And then they really supported something different. You're like, okay. So you were not, okay, you were just being polite, fair enough.

• 25:56Tim Ferriss?

  And the, that was the sort of

• 25:59Speaker 00

  But they were slow, you know? They, they're supportive people. They came around and, you know, they supported The Office, you know, and

• 26:06Tim Ferriss?

  So when did the, what happened between that startup, I really want to say startup. This is why I'm taking a break from startups, because I'm just like completely brainwashed. The, the, you took a, from that, that's first

• 26:19Speaker 00

  You have, if you title this interview from stand up to startup.

• 26:22Tim Ferriss?

  I could, that could be, that could be your memoir.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  That could be. I'll call my dad right now. From that point to the office, what happened between those? From that point to the office, well, raising dad got canceled. I continued doing stand up. I ran out of all the money that I had saved on my big money year. In about, you know, a year and a half, two years of doing open mics and, you know, gradually getting better to the point where at the end of sort of, after a year and a half, which is a long time when you are a kid from the suburbs. It's a long time. It's a long time, but compared to most stand ups, you know, I got very lucky, of course, but it did feel like a very long time because I had been working. After about a year and a half, I got decent, definitely decent at stand up.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  And I was starting to get booked at respected alternative rooms at the improv. And, you know, there's a lot of people in Hollywood that are always looking for anyone half promising to sign or to put on showcases. And I was becoming that comic that people would say, oh, there's a new guy. He's, he's pretty good, you know, that kind of guy. And at the end of that, a bunch of things, the end of that sort of two year stretch, a lot of things kind of happened at once I got cast on the show Punk'd. Sure. I replaced Dax Shepard as the new guy, which I thought that, oh, that's what I'll be famous for for the rest of my life. I'm the guy from Punk'd. So I like, I did pranks on Hilary Duff and Usher and people like that incredibly fun.

• 27:52Speaker 00

  And I got booked on Conan. I got booked on Comedy Central. Was the Usher prank, I have a big memory of this. Was this when his brother was set up to like steal jewelry? And then I tell him. Usher handled that so well. He was great. And then I tell Usher, you know, we can let this go if you record a radio ad for our store and do this rap that I wrote.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  They wrote a really funny rap and I have to rap this to Usher. It was so hard to keep a straight face. And one of the brilliant touches the writers had put in is that in the rap, Usher refers to himself as Ice. And then I apologized that we originally wrote this for Vanilla Ice who passed.

• 28:36Speaker 00

  So I got to do really funny clever things. And around this time, I was on a showcase.

• 28:43Tim Ferriss?

  Stand up.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  A stand up showcase for a network. And you know, now I'd booked Punk'd and stuff like that. And that's when Greg Daniels, who was creating the American office, saw me and thought, he was already looking for people that could write an act. And my jokes were very clearly like, you know, clever writing. They weren't like a raw personality or anything. So he thought, oh, maybe you can do. And I had had a writing job. Maybe you could be a writer actor, which at the time was, it was a very experimental idea.

• 29:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you why he was looking for that.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Because he had worked at Saturday Night Live. And he had had a good experience where there it was a small gang of people who were kind of writing their own things. And also the British office had, had been a small, you know, Ricky Gervais had written so much of it. So he was totally right. Let's, let's not have a corporate feeling show with a writing staff and a cast. Let's cast kind of funny people who can kind of do it as a little unit.

• 29:32Tim Ferriss?

  And what was, so what was the very beginning of The Office like for you?

• 29:39Speaker 00

  The beginning of The Office was very exciting creatively, especially because it was not thought to be a show that this is now I got to feel like that starving artist, like, you know, the actual integrity. This was not considered a successful, a show with any chance for success. It was a very drab, there's no laugh track, there's no colors, it's bleak, it's not a pretty cast, it's the jokes are very slow and dry. And it's a remake of a British show that, you know, NBC had a track record of disastrous remakes. So it was a six episode mid-season order. You know, it was a really, actually, no, it

• 30:20Speaker 00

  was just a pilot order. And then we squeaked into six episodes. So the beginning was, you know, but it was the, the people working on it were brilliant. Steve Carell's improvisations and Greg Daniels sort of joke pitches and story outlines and, you know, pretty soon this very lean writing staff of Mindy Kaling and Paul Lieberstein, who played Toby on the show, and a bunch of other, you know, real Larry Wilmore, who now hosts The Nightly Show on Comedy Central, you know, real, real lean group. And, you know, so creatively, it was extremely exciting. And, and then it was bizarre when it became successful because we had come to think of it as, as the show that for the rest of our

• 31:03Speaker 00

  lives, we'd meet one or two comedy fans who were like, that's a classic. You know, that's what we were going for, for like Mr. Show, like cult status.

• 31:11Tim Ferriss?

  And when did it, when did you feel the tipping point? Or was there a particular event? Or moment?

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:20Tim Ferriss?

  Or time when you're like, holy shit, this thing is actually

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  going to be successful or is successful?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Beginning of the second season, um, it was around December, I think. So we'd been out for like over a year, but only a few episodes. And they moved us from, two things happened. They moved us from Tuesday to Thursday, um, which I felt was very important because now, you know, the night you're on doesn't matter so much in the DVR era. But back then, I, my theory was that you wouldn't want to watch a show about an office at the beginning of your work week. Like, it's not funny on Tuesday.

• 31:53Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a fair assumption.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  It's funny on Thursday. It's almost over. Um, so there was that. And then the big thing was that the Apple iTunes, uh, store process began. And we, because our, our cult audience was very young and tech savvy, they made us a very big hit on the iTunes store, even though we were not a hit on NBC. And then people were walking around with like video iPods with the office on it. And they were sending each other, you know, links to download it and stuff. And so it was really one of the first shows to be a hit, like an online hit in that way. And that really was this viral, you know, proto viral way that the word spread about the show.

• 32:36Tim Ferriss?

  And, uh, so I have to ask a question that I've always wanted to ask somebody involved with the office because I have no idea how this hit came to pass. But a fan sent me a link to a clip at one point. The, the four hour work week came up in an episode of the office where there's this big debate going on amongst everyone.

• 32:56Tim Ferriss?

  And someone says, what do you mean? I sent you an email, pointing to Daryl. And Daryl says, I don't check email till 12 noon.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:03Tim Ferriss?

  Four hour work week. And then it zooms out and says, do you have any idea how that happened?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  I

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's a very specific question.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  I was in the room when that was pitched. I don't remember whose it was. It was just, I, I thank you for being part of that joke. I, I, working backwards from what we must have meant. It was, it was just funny. Like every little thing is going wrong, you know, for Michael on this episode.

• 33:28Tim Ferriss?

  It was, uh, it was really hilarious and made, I mean, really made my week. That was, uh,

• 33:34Speaker 00

  Awesome.

• 33:34Tim Ferriss?

  That was very, uh, I was very surprised to come across it. The, the, so the office, what are some lessons learned through your experience at the office? What did you get better at?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:47Tim Ferriss?

  And, and why?

• 33:50Speaker 00

  Lessons learned.

• 33:51Tim Ferriss?

  And we could talk about, I mean, you could, you could, you could have a particular person in mind that helps.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, well, one lesson that I learned from that as well as from stand up was that you really never know how something's going to play until you test it. Scenes that felt like they were just airtight winner hilarious scenes in the writers room sometimes just would not work on set. And you had to learn to not be angry at it for not working. You had to learn to listen to the audience and that's a major, major lesson. There's no one smarter than the audience.

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  And it was, so this is actually something that, so it was filmed in front of a live audience?

• 34:38Speaker 00

  No, but there's, you know, there's

• 34:40Tim Ferriss?

  That's, that's where

• 34:41Speaker 00

  But you just feel it.

• 34:41Tim Ferriss?

  You just feel it. If it's flat, it's flat.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  First you do a table read of each episode. So you have a big room of people laughing or not laughing. And then when you take it down, if it's like a rewrite scene or something, you know, Steve Carell says it and you, you're just there, you know, even just you and the cameraman, like you're smiling or you're not.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Um, or then you edit it and it works or it doesn't. And that was, I think, a humbling lesson for someone who thought of himself as, you know, a real writer, because writing is really, it's just a guess. And, you know, there's no, there's no penalty for doing your homework. So if you want to test your stand-up at a thousand rooms before you do it on TV, or if you want to test the stuff you're writing for The Office in as many groups as you can, do it. Because you're not, you're not smarter than the audience. It's for the audience. Would you test your material you're working on for The Office in other environments? In like little rooms, yeah. Everyone had their own office. So like, you know, Mindy and I would like read scenes out loud and, you know, just see if they sounded right.

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Right. You either see someone smile or not. Yeah, yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  What about Steve Carell? Did you observe anything particular? Oh, well, I learned something from him, which was one time I, you know, wrote a bunch of jokes because a scene wasn't working. And I was the guy in charge of, you know, bringing alts, as we call them, you know, other versions. So I'd bring alts to the, to the set and he looked at all of them and he said, I don't know, they just feel like jokes to me. And I was like, well, yeah, they're jokes. That's what I do. That's what we do. But for him, comedy had to come from, comedy was a byproduct of authenticity. I would compare it to the difference between a kid who knows he's cute and a kid who doesn't. A kid who knows he's cute is not cute. A kid who just says something without realizing cute is hilarious. And that's

• 36:29Speaker 00

  what he wanted The Office to feel like, like, these people don't even know how funny they are. So that was important. I'm sure I'll come up with a lot more lessons because I learned more on that than anything. Well, we could, let me- I can talk about the writing process that- I would love for you to write about- Yeah, I'd love for you to talk about that. Well, the way that we would start a season, and I've adapted this to many things I've done since, we'd start with what we would call a blue sky period, which was my favorite part of every year. For two, three, four weeks, sometimes, if we had a long time, every single day in the writer's room was just, what if? There's no penalty, there's no, maybe we can't, there's no, but this one conflicts with that one. What if Dwight goes to the moon? What

• 37:14Speaker 00

  if Jim and Pam get divorced? What, you know, just every idea is, is valid for like, for a while. That was just an amazing period. And then- How long would that last? That would last, if we didn't have much time- For, because we had different pre-production schedules between two weeks and four weeks.

• 37:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's a decent stretch of time.

• 37:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:34Tim Ferriss?

  And was there structure to the what ifs? Like, was there somebody on a whiteboard taking down the favorites?

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, a little bit, but it was sort of improvised day to day. Like, the showrunner would say, you know, "All right, we don't have anything for Dwight," or like, "How about everyone split up and come up with 10 ideas for Ryan," or, um, you know, "Let's come up with more ensemble stories." You know, there would be sort of a leadership that way. It wasn't just all sitting around, but...

• 37:56Tim Ferriss?

  What is an ensemble story? I feel like I know what both words mean separately, but I don't...

• 38:01Speaker 00

  The whole cast is involved in one thing, rather than

• 38:04Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  A story, B story. Um, so that was incredible, those, and it really was creatively important. And I, I try to replicate that in everything I do, just not shut down any ideas for a period.

• 38:16Tim Ferriss?

  Just generate and not edit.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, and then the best ideas will have their, will fuel you past the problems. After a few weeks of Blue Sky, we would love some ideas so much, it would be obvious what the best, let's say we were, we were gonna start with six stories, right? It was obvious what the best 15 were. And then we'd start talking more seriously, and then we'd look, which ones do our love for the story carry us through the inevitable? Well, how could Dwight be here if he's also there? And, you know, stuff like that. Um, but finding the love first, and then letting that carry you through the problem.

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain what you mean by that?

• 38:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, you find what you love about an episode, or in other things I've done, a story idea, or a stand-up bit. You know, you gotta just indulge, develop what you love about it, so that when you then come up with, "Oh, but then we couldn't show this on TV," or, um, "It is kind of contrived," or whatever it is, you'll, you'll love it so much that you will have the inspiration to fix it.

• 39:17Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. So you're developing the piece that you've fallen in love with enough so that you can handle all the inevitable?

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:26Tim Ferriss?

  Fixer-upper issues?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  I do that with my other writing, too. I always start with what I love, and if I'm stuck on a story, um, and I approach it the next day, I never go to the hard part first. Some writers probably do. I go to, what's my, what's the one thing I'm proud of in the story?

• 39:41Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  And not off the top of my head, but you know, like there might just be

• 39:46Tim Ferriss?

  Or hypothetically.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  There might just be a joke or a phrase or a beautiful line that I'm proud of that I I'm just so certain everyone's going to think I'm brilliant. So I started that and I get excited and then I want everything else to live up to that rather than start at the problem. That's a personal thing. I am very motivated by positive thinking.

• 40:06Tim Ferriss?

  Were there any other?

• 40:07Speaker 00

  An ego, positive ego, you know, use your own ego to fuel yourself rather than be an obstacle.

• 40:15Tim Ferriss?

  What other approaches do you take in your work life or personal life to maintain positivity or use positivity?

• 40:24Speaker 00

  I consider being in a good mood, the most important part of my creative process. So right or wrong, I don't, I personally don't get up early unless I'm awake early, if and or I have somewhere to be. I know I've read the book, we talked about daily rituals, which I love.

• 40:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Mason Curry, great book.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  I'm demoralized by how many great people start their day very early.

• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  Were you, were you also?

• 40:50Speaker 00

  I try to go to bed.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  Were you encouraged or demoralized by how many of them were drug addicts?

• 40:54Speaker 00

  That was encouraged.

• 40:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's like 90% used methamphetamine.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Amphetamine, right. But you know, this Starbucks, this venti Starbucks in front of me, like who's to say that doesn't have the same stimulation that they used back then?

• 41:06Speaker 00

  So, you know, if I try to go to bed early and wake up early, but if I need to sleep late or take a walk in the morning or whatever, I find that being in a good mood for creative work is, is worth the hours it takes to get in a good mood. So often when I was writing my books, I would, you know, someone would check in, send me a text at like 11:30, like, how are you doing? You know, what's, what's up? And I'd say powering up. I just feel, you know, the first few hours are just getting into a good mood until I think, all right, all right, you know, I have an idea I'm excited about, or I have so much self-loathing and caffeine that I'm like, gotta do something.

• 41:45Tim Ferriss?

  The self loathing plus caffeine is a hell of a thing.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:49Tim Ferriss?

  One of my friends, Kelly Starrett, who's a very well-known athletic trainer, calls it "cup of fear." So you take the self loathing and then you drink a cup of fear.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  I'll tell you my number one, while we're on this.

• 42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Number one creative productivity advice to anyone.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  I mean, anyone, if it works for you. I carry around a notebook. And if I don't have a little notebook, I have my phone, you know? But I really divide my creative work into two distinct phases, which is the idea phase and the execution phase. And I do not let either interrupt the other. Or, yeah.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the best way to say it. So if I'm taking a walk or I'm having a drink with a friend and just some funny idea comes up, something that makes me smile, or some other impulse, I write it down and I never judge, "Well, what would you do with this idea?" Or, "How would you end that joke?" Never. I just have this notebook and I feel like the richest man in the world in terms of ideas. Just fill it up, feel great, always, never question it. Then, on a separate day, I sit down, you know, 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. with a big cup of coffee at my desk, go through the notebook, and I do my best with every idea in the book. So I never am intimidated.

• 43:07Tim Ferriss?

  When you say "do your best," you're developing?

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Each one on a separate piece of paper or something like that?

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, on my computer usually. Or continue an idea on the computer that I left off the previous day. But, you know, but first I'll check my notebook. Oh, did I have any ideas for solutions or whatever? So the idea, to me, everything is idea and execution. And if you separate idea and execution, you don't put too much pressure on either of them.

• 43:31Tim Ferriss?

  I was reading an article by Isaac Asimov about creativity in groups versus solo creativity. And very similar conclusion that he came to. Just keeping them separate. Now, when you... Do you have a particular type of notebook, particular type of pen that you like?

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I use the Moleskine Cahier, is how you say it?

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  I have no idea.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  You can buy them, C A H I E R. You can go on Amazon and buy these three packs, so they're much thinner than the typical Moleskine notebook. So you can really, you can keep them in your pocket easier and you finish them, so you feel more productive.

• 44:09Tim Ferriss?

  You feel like you've accomplished something.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Fill them up in a couple of weeks. And then I have a huge box of them, but I use that and I use the Uniball Vision pen.

• 44:18Tim Ferriss?

  And

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Generally.

• 44:21Tim Ferriss?

  How do you, do you date them? How do you keep track of these notebooks?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  I order different colors and mix up the colors that I order and then I buy on Amazon these huge batches of stickers, shape stickers that teachers use to put on, you know, reports and stuff, like stars and circles and blue rectangles and stuff. And every time I start a new notebook, I write my phone number in the first page, in case anyone finds it.

• 44:46Tim Ferriss?

  Super important.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Yep. And then I put a sticker in the top left corner of the book. That lets me know what, which one I'm on currently. And then I have a yellow, I'm sorry, I have a red box for, I have a white box for untranscribed notebooks, because then I transcribe them on my computer, and a red box for transcribed notebooks. And I don't date them and I always tell myself I should date them. This is crazy, because when I go through the white box, you know, I'm jumping around six months ago, four months ago, you know, I'm not going in order, but I guess just, I'm not going to question it, because something about the creative process, I just don't want to date them. I just don't know.

• 45:28Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. What, I mean, maybe that would create some bias against older material. I mean, for the same reason that I take dates on my blog posts and I moved them from the top to as a small italicized line at the bottom and my traffic jumped like 20, 30% because people are no longer biased against older material.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  That's very interesting. That's something on the list up too, we keep an eye on.

• 45:49Tim Ferriss?

  What, and we're, we're going to talk a lot about lists.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  Not, not trying to rush you.

• 45:54Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, we're, we're going to get there. The, I love the red box and white box. When you develop these or do your best with them, as you said, on the computer, are you doing this in a particular app or program? Or is it limited to whatever your current focus is? Say, a book or screenplay or film?

• 46:14Speaker 00

  I use Microsoft Word. Same reason my dad used WordStar. It's just what I learned and got in the habit of. And I use Final Draft for screenplays because everyone does. I would like, I know there's other software out there. I would like something that kind of combines the two. Because often I would like to kind of write a paragraph and then kind of throw in dialogue easily. But I, it's not worth it to me to investigate and switch.

• 46:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's, there's a tool that I've used for my last few books that I found extremely helpful. It's not as, it's not as focused on screenwriting as, say, Final Draft, although people do use it for that, called Scrivener. I don't know if you've ever seen this.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've heard of it, yeah.

• 46:58Tim Ferriss?

  I've used it for my last two books. It's been extremely helpful for that format. I think it's mostly used by playwrights, I want to say, but there are screenwriters who use it. When you see you-

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Blake Ross, I was going to mention, who invented Firefox. He's an investor in the List app. And I've been trying to get him for years to develop with me like a screenplay writing software. Because he's actually a terrific writer. And he wrote the Silicon Valley spec script that he put on Twitter, which is such a tech way to get your spec out there. But it was, it was great. And I think he would be the guy to crack it. Because he's the writer and also the software developer. I think he'd do it like an afternoon.

• 47:33Tim Ferriss?

  Is he still in the Bay area? Or is he, yeah, I need to actually spend some time with him at some point. He was very, very kind when, I think it was 2007, gave me a quote for The Four Hour Workweek. And I feel very indebted to him.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Oh, he's awesome.

• 47:48Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're hearing this, thank you so much. I really owe you a coffee and dinner and a bottle of wine and probably more. When you, how do you think of yourself? I mean, I guess it depends on perhaps what project you're working on. But which of these many activities and artistic projects, crafts that you've attempted, do you most identify with?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Writer.

• 48:15Tim Ferriss?

  Writer?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:16Tim Ferriss?

  Any particular type or is it just across the board writer?

• 48:19Speaker 00

  Probably-

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Comedy writer, to be honest, for two reasons. One is just it's the identity I come from. I think it was Woody Allen who said, if you, you know, I do these different things, but if you woke me up and shook me in the middle of the night and said, what are you? I'd say writer. I definitely feel like that.

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good, I should, I should rephrase my question to mimic Woody Allen's wording.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Everyone that if someone woke up in the middle of the night and shook you and said, what's your job? What would you say? You know, I guess the simpler way is what do you put on your passport? Or your customs declaration? I always put writer.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  But I think that everything I do is sort of a version of writing, even if I'm acting, I'm sort of writing the way that I think this character would act. Do you know what I mean?

• 49:02Tim Ferriss?

  Of course.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  So, or if I have an idea, I really feel like, you know, idea and execution that to me is writing.

• 49:10Tim Ferriss?

  If you were teaching a,

• 49:15Tim Ferriss?

  let's see, freshman seminar at Harvard on comedy writing. What would the, what would the curriculum look like?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  Oh, great, great question. Well, PJ O'Rourke, who was one of the big National Lampoon editors, said that if he taught writing-

• 49:29Tim Ferriss?

  Confederacy of Dunces, did he write that? No, am I making that up?

• 49:32Speaker 00

  But he might have written the introduction to it or something.

• 49:33Tim Ferriss?

  Alright.

• 49:35Speaker 00

  So he said that if he ever taught English, he would assign parodies. Because that's when you really learn something is to parody it. So I would probably assign parodies of literature. I would-

• 49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular parodies that-

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Just sort of whatever you're studying in your other classes, parody that.

• 49:55Tim Ferriss?

  I see.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  And it really, I think, would open you up. I think mischief is just so important in comedy. It's really, there's just something like, am I really allowed to say that? You know, that's just the cool thing. Am I really allowed to hear that?

• 50:13Speaker 00

  I could pontificate. I know a couple of things that I feel I have discovered about comedy.

• 50:19Tim Ferriss?

  That, this is-

• 50:20Speaker 00

  One is that the perfect, first of all, the most important thing is it is sort of a, it's like a physical, it's like sex in that-

• 50:30Speaker 00

  It's about whether the other person is enjoying it or not, or you're enjoying it. You know, like, you could say, do this and that. And then if neither of you has a good time, you couldn't insist to me like, but I had good sex. No, you didn't. Like, I gave you my best advice, like, touch your ear and take your time and whisper this. Like, I could do that, but you'll know if it's good sex or not. These are just tips, like, it's a physical reaction that you're going for.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  So there's that, you know, whatever you teach, it's like, hey, you'll feel it. You'll feel it, you'll hear it, you'll know. So do it a lot and, you know, probably, you know, don't take this class too seriously. One thing I've definitely learned about comedy, I don't know how it applies to what, what, maybe it applies to editing more than it does to writing or finding what's good comedy. But I believe that a good comedy operates the exact same way a good mystery operates, which is the punchline should be something that was right in front of your face the whole time and you never would have put your finger on it. It's like the red doorknobs in The Sixth Sense. The red doorknob, yeah, exactly. Of course, he was dead the whole time, you know? Like, how did I not get that?

• 51:43Speaker 00

  That excitement, that elation, or like, it was the butler, it was the narrator, you know, whatever it was, that's the best comedy. When someone points out something, you're like, oh my God, that was so obvious, I never would have gotten it. Another thing is that observations are really the currency of comedy. Anything you do, if you observe something that touches a chord with somebody and that has not been expressed, right? You can turn that into a movie, you can turn that into a plot, you can turn that into a one liner. But anytime you observe something that, that, a good new observation, that's what fuels 99% of comedy. And the other 1% is just people falling down or whatever.

• 52:27Tim Ferriss?

  And is, are there any particular comics or comedy writers who are very good in your mind at the red doorknob effect? So hitting you with punchlines that are, have kind of been there all along. But they, they do a good.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  Well, Aziz Ansari has a bit about marriage that I find brilliant. I think it was one or two specials ago in Netflix where he's like, if we invented marriage now, if you, if no one had heard of marriage and you proposed it to a girl, you would freak her out beyond belief. You know, I want to vow that we'll never like ever sleep with anyone else. And I want like rings on our fingers to symbolize it. And I want a priest to be there and everyone we've ever met and there'll be a ceremony, it'll be in the newspaper. You know, that is so funny to me because it's completely true. Never would have noticed it. Louis CK is brilliant at pointing the stuff out, saying things that is kind of how you

• 53:28Speaker 00

  felt, but you never would have thought of it. But even, you know, an abstract one liner comic like Zach Galifianakis, who I tried to see whenever I could when I moved to LA, you know, even those are like, right, that phrase could mean that. Or why, even that is an observation, even if it's just about language.

• 53:47Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. Right. Like 24 hour banking, who has time for that? The Steven Wright kind of approach.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. You could look at it that way.

• 53:54Tim Ferriss?

  You know, who's really, really good at that is, now that I'm getting sort of a finer feel for, for what you meant is, this was a lot, I suppose, perhaps the majority of really good standup comics are good at this, I don't know, but, why am I blank? Dimitri Martin.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:12Tim Ferriss?

  Dimitri Martin is really good at the wordplay. So you mentioned, you mentioned movies, we've mentioned List App a few times, and I feel like we should dig into that because my next question would be related to, and maybe by, by means of example, we can get into List App. The, I was going to ask you for screenwriters, what would your curriculum look like? And you put up a list recently, and maybe you can explain the, the app as well, but you put up a list of some of your favorite movies. So you had Adaptation, you had Naked Gun down towards the bottom, and.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Bottom of the top five, though.

• 54:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's the top five.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  It was Adaptation, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Pulp Fiction, Casablanca, The Naked Gun.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  This is just personal, what, you know, just if I were really gonna die tomorrow and they said you could play a couple. I'm not trying to impress anybody, like, you know, it's just, it's not film history, it's just me.

• 55:08Tim Ferriss?

  Now, would those films correspond to the five screenplays that you would suggest people read if you were signing them?

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably. Probably the writing is front and center for all of them. Now, adaptation is brilliant because it breaks all the rules and comments on all the rules. So maybe I wouldn't teach that first, that sort of like.

• 55:32Tim Ferriss?

  Also, if anybody says, I want to be a writer, at least from me, I would say, watch that movie.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll talk you out of it.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  I could really use a donut. God, I'm so hungry, you know?

• 55:43Speaker 00

  You know, I guess all of these movies break the form and maybe that's why, you know, Casablanca, probably, I don't know enough about film history, but it probably broke the form. Now it is the form. So maybe I would, you know, but there are weird things in that. Pulp Fiction, obviously, completely breaks the form chronologically. Ferris Bueller, he narrates the movie to camera.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  The Naked Gun is just, they'll do anything for a laugh. You know, I guess that's kind of formal in a way. Adaptation, you know, completely commenting on itself. So I, yeah, maybe I think one lesson in all of that is, you know, it's not about the rules. It's about you and the audience, anything that you do.

• 56:23Tim Ferriss?

  So here's, I have, this is maybe at a feel a little bit. Do you like, have you seen Memento?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  Did you enjoy that movie?

• 56:33Speaker 00

  I thought it was okay.

• 56:34Tim Ferriss?

  So when I saw it, I really enjoyed it. But that, a lot of people hold that up as an example of a movie that broke the rules where it didn't work. Like, or it was, it was trying too hard to break the rules or something like that.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  I think it's a great, if I were him, if I were Nolan, I would, and that was my first big movie, I'd be very proud that I got everyone's attention. It's extremely clever. As an idea, and if that's enough to give you pleasure watching it, or if that's enough to get your attention to watch it, and then you got pleasure watching it. I agree, the premise is fantastically clever. I just wasn't personally especially moved watching the story and I, you know, he's so big, it won't matter if I criticize him, but I have a real problem with the Chris Nolan worship in cinema. I think that's a screenplay. That's a writer I would never teach if I were teaching screenwriting. Why is that? Says the guy who's never written a screenplay.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Because a movie should be a pleasurable experience. That is my one sentence answer, and I find his movies cold and formal, and I find his demeanor as a public director, cold and formal. And please don't make this the headline of your podcast. If someone listens all the way here, they can see everyone has opinions. But I find his movies completely unpleasurable. Exclusive to TMZ. Yeah, and I feel that the formality has conned people into reverence, when in fact, no one was smiling at any of these Batman movies that everyone gave such a claim to, and no one was smiling at Inception. And no one understood Interstellar.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I am a well-educated guy. I have a real interest in science. I write screen stories for a living, and I could not follow this. So who is following this? You know, a movie should be entertaining you and inviting you in. So that's a screenplay I would not teach. Got it. How did you get into tech and why tech? I find tech, and again, this is sort of the formal rules of anything. First of all, tech is the best field at being the first to tell you that there are no rules. It's about what you make and how people respond to it, which I really love. And I, you know, I think tech is leading the way for entertainment.

• 59:01Speaker 00

  And you realize, oh, everything is about, you know, very soon on the Apple TV, you'll be able to say The Midi Project, and you won't have any idea what Network it's on. It's all about whether Mindy Kaling, full disclosure, a good friend of mine. It's all about whether Mindy Kaling has made a good show, gotten the budget, gotten the cast, convinced them to do it. That's a big deal and made it well. That's a very big deal. And gotten enough publicity for it that you are curious about it, but that's it. And there has been a lot of bullshit in terms of what night is it on and what's the competition like? And how is it, you know, and who picked it up and why and who funded it and how much do they get?

• 59:44Speaker 00

  And is it going to make syndication? And that noise is, has nothing to do with the product and the audience. And I think tech is leading the way in removing that. And I think tech is really, I, the reason I've always been drawn to it and always pitched every idea I ever had in tech to my friends in tech is because it seemed like a utopian version of you have an idea and you see if it's a good idea, you know, just like with stand up, just like with writing scenes for the office. I think this is a great idea, but I won't know until it goes to the set and it succeeds or fails. Or I bring it on stage and no one laughs or everyone does laugh. That to me is the biggest pleasure is having an idea and if, and seeing if you're right. And so tech seemed to me, you

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  could have a huge idea and, and it could be right. Whereas in other fields, a huge idea, you need to be at a huge scale to even try it out. So that's why I always had like, you know, I, that's why I met Blake Ross is because in 2006 or seven, you know, I had a friend Charlie Cheever who worked at Facebook.

• 1:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  And I said, can I see Facebook? You know, can I have a tour? So, and I would cultivate these friendships and these guys to me, that was, I think, what a lot of people looked at show business and in the world I was in and thought that's so creative. I would look at this world and think, wow, you can have an idea. And then if it works, it works. That's, that's so beautiful.

• 1:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  There, yeah, there's a

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  And of course, like everything, it turns out to be way more complicated.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  But I think less complicated than other fields.

• 1:01:19Tim Ferriss?

  And less and less complicated from the standpoint of testing ideas, right? Because you have cheaper and cheaper rentable infrastructure, whether it's Amazon Web Services or otherwise, you have Global talent market where you can use people remotely or locally or in some distributed fashion like Automattic, which I advise, you know, the guys who do WordPress.com and whatnot. I mean, they have 400 plus people who are all distributed. And then you have the Kickstarter's and other means of funding that weren't available five, 10 years ago.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  So if you had an idea for a store 20 years ago, that's you really put your whole life, you're on hold to pursue that, a compromise of a compromise of that idea for a store. And now you can, you can make that store.

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  You could do it in an afternoon and then see, see how it goes. So can you describe then what it is that you're working on right now?

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  So this is, I've tried to get you on, and I know we'll get you on when we have the Android. This is the List app, and it's as simple as it sounds. It's li.st is our domain. So eventually, when we have web, we'll probably just want to be known as List. But it's, it's really that simple, and we aim to be that universal, just a place for lists socially. So that my original idea was we all have these lists in our phones, in our notebooks, in our minds of what are the good restaurants in LA, etc. I wish I could see those lists on the phones or whatever of the people I care about, or occasionally a celebrity or a publication that I would turn to for this type of thing. And I wanted

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  a place, it seemed so simple to me, why hasn't it been done, I thought, a place where you could put these lists and everyone would put them, and then you could search them and read them. And that is essentially what we built. So in this case, yeah, like, I think, I think I'm right. You know, I'm not saying I'm a genius or anything at all. I, it seemed like this was something worth testing. And if you do it right, and someone shows you an idea, and you say, oh, not that, but yes, that. And like anything else, the most important thing is, is who you partner with. And so I knew I didn't know this field, and I, I hired a company to make screenshots, because everyone I pitched this to treated

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  me the way I would treat them. If a tech person pitched me a good idea for a TV show, I'd say, that sounds like a good idea. I don't think you understand what it takes to, do you have a director? Do you have funding? Do you have a cast? Do you know how to do a rewrite? You know? No, no, I mean, just an idea. Shouldn't someone make, you know? So that's how they treated me. And I thought, well, I need to show that I'm serious and that it would be good. So I asked friend after friend, do you know anyone who could make mockups for me? So I hired this great company called Two Toasters. Two Toasters. Yeah. And apparently it's named after, coincidentally, an Office reference where Stanley ends up with two toasters because he bought one for Phyllis's wedding.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  But I didn't know that when I met, I didn't even remember the reference when I met them. So I drew up, I'm not a good artist, but I drew very simply, you know, again, I'm, this is not anything innovative. I drew up what a list would look like, very similar to Twitter, to Instagram, to Tumblr, you know, a very, you know, vertical feed of lists and how you'd search for them and how you'd add a suggestion to someone else's and how you'd compose. And I asked, can you make sort of a nice mockup of each of these main screens? So they, I paid them to make them. And then I would walk around and I'd tell people the idea and they'd say, yeah, that sounds good. I'd show them and they would try to tap and they couldn't because it was just a mockup. And that, that's how I knew, okay, they want to be using this. I showed them that I'm serious. They, they know what it feels like to want to see the next screen.

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  And I had showed, then I went to, then the guy at Two Toasters, Simon, said, I host a tech breakfast in New York once a month. I was going to be in town for that tech breakfast. So I went to it, talked to everyone. I'd say about 49% of the people were way too nice to me because I was a celebrity. About 49% of the people were way too hard on me because I was a celebrity and what am I doing here? Then there was like one guy who took me seriously, who met me at my level and said, I like it for these reasons. I think these are my concerns and, you know, and his name was Matt Witheiler and he was a VC at Flybridge, which is not, doesn't do this kind of thing generally, but he was interested. So I asked if I could have lunch with him. I almost canceled. I was hungover.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  I'm like, what am I doing? I, I'm here like to do press for a TV show and I'm, why am I pursuing this crazy tech thing? Like everyone wants to do a startup. I almost canceled, but I didn't. I show up to meet him. And he says, um, he says, I know the co-founder for you. I don't think you can get him, but it's worth a try. I've been trying to convince this guy to leave his job forever. But I think he might like this because he's done stuff like this before. And his name was Dev Flaherty. He ran product at Fab. He'd previously worked for a sort of a map based travel startup. And the original idea for this was travel lists, of course, would be big. So I said, um, let's, let me try. I was leaving the next day. I emailed Dev, had dinner with them at the Ace Hotel in New York, the Breslin. And we sat down.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Lots of fatty food. Yeah. Right away, I was like, I'm doing the, I'm doing with this guy. I'm not doing it. You know, he, we wore the exact same watch, an IWC pilot. So like a nice, simple watch with great design, great classic design. We ordered a bullet bourbon, each of us. So we have the same taste, you know? And just like Matt Woodhiler, he was hard on the idea and respected the idea, asking all the right questions. And, um, and he, and he could talk and he, his wife was a, was a television writer and he was interested in what I was interested in. And he was, tellingly, he was a Parks and Recreation fan, but not an office fan. So he, he liked the kinds of

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  things I liked, but he was not impressed by me, my celebrity. He heard I was somebody, but you know, he didn't care. He cared about Ron Swanson. So, you know, he was like adjacent. It was the perfect match. And, um, he said, Lena, let me think about it. Let me think about it. And then his wife kept getting up for jobs in, uh, Hallie Gross is fantastic writer. Um, I think she's a fantastic writer, fantastic talker and thinker. And she's on great shows. So I assume she's a great writer. Um, so she kept getting more and more attention in LA. And then she was up for this huge writing job in LA on an HBO show. And no one was rooting for that job harder than me. I'm praying that Hallie gets hired because I know if Dev moves to LA, I'm sure he'll do this. And sure enough, she got the job and he finally committed to doing this. And, you

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  know, he's really been leading sort of the, the overall, um, you know, why I think this is so good is because of Dev. I have a lot to do with the community. I obviously have a lot to do with the, the conception. And I, I argue. For all my taste, all the time, but 90 plus percent of the time, Dev has already arrived there and added more things that I should have thought of.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  What are some of the more popular lists that have popped up?

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  Well, I can look at the trending lists right now.

• 1:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I'll mention one to people and just because I found this actually very, very cool and helpful, which was a list which you put on Twitter or retweeted, I think it was Cheryl Strayed and writer of Wild, which was made into a movie. And she put out a list of writing prompts, so assignments, or I think there were more sentences or questions that you could use for writing exercises. And what is your Twitter handle?

• 1:09:05Speaker 00

  At BJ Novak.

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  So very simple, at BJ Novak. So download the app and also follow BJ on Twitter because he highlights also quite a few different lists, but that list in and of itself.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was great. And she also did a list that was very moving, which is objects found in my mother's car at the moment of her death, or the time of her death. You know, just like a pen, you know, lipstick, tickets to this play. I don't remember exactly what it was. It was, but I remember being just so stunned by the simplicity of that power in list form. And, you know, there's a lot of writers on it, so that, you know, there's a literary thing, but I'm looking here, you know, it's a mix of publications doing lists, celebrities doing lists, and of course, mostly just regular folks. But trending right now, The Washington Post made a list of the things Donald Trump has called on America to boycott. He's called for a lot of boycotts over the years. It's very interesting, including the company that makes his clothing line, which he didn't realize.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Vox made a list, what NASA picked to explain our world to aliens. So what they put on Voyager one and two, just, you know, a cool list. A girl named Jenna Martin, I know, made a list, favorite Howard Stern interviews. And that's an open list, so you can make a suggestion on that list. And if she likes it, she double taps it.

• 1:10:23Tim Ferriss?

  What is, what are the top, what are the top on the Howard Stern list?

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  Howard Stern interviews, Lady Gaga, Bill Hader, Billy Joel, which was a great one, I heard that one, Jonah Hill, Jerry Seinfeld, great interviewer, James Taylor, I did not know that. Although I've seen him be dark and funny. Chris Martin, apparently. So, you know, some of them are very helpful recommendations, a lot of books lists.

• 1:10:46Tim Ferriss?

  And some of them are very funny. Now, correct me if I have a faulty memory here, but I remember we were chatting on the phone a few months ago. Was it Lena Dunham who had

• 1:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Dead People I'd Have Sex With? Am I making that up?

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  Yes, she did. And I'm looking right now. Anthony Bourdain made one that I thought was really funny.

• 1:11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, this was, what was that, four spy novels, three written by spies, one by non-spy?

• 1:11:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, he did that. He's a big reader and writer, obviously. His most recent one is called Hotel Slut. That's me. And, you know, it's very much his writing style, but it's the hotels that he will stay. He will make an excuse to go to that town if he can stay in the following hotels, including one in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Chateau Marmont here in LA, the Raleigh in Miami. So his list is great.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Anything in New York?

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  Let me see what his New York choices is.

• 1:11:40Tim Ferriss?

  He's headed to New York, surely. Maybe I'll try.

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  There's a lot of lists of like New York hotels. But I, you know, there's also a list of if you ever stay at the Bowery, which is my favorite hotel there.

• 1:11:49Tim Ferriss?

  Bowery's great.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  There's two people at least have made lists of the best rooms at the Bowery. 1403 has this and 1401 has that.

• 1:11:59Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's very useful.

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  Very useful.

• 1:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  I tried to stay at the Bowery. They were sold out for this upcoming trip.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  So it's very useful and also, you know, very creative and there's great people behind it.

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  For someone who downloads the app, what would you suggest to get them a very good taste of the types of content? What would you suggest they do?

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  I would suggest just it's a very quick signup flow. Just sign up and there's a recommended follow menu. And you can, it's, they'll take you to that screen automatically. But one of the things you can do is you can hit follow all. It's our top like 100 diverse accounts. So I'll read them right now. Um, not all 100, but you know, the first batch. Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, The New York Times, Jimmy Fallon, The Onion, Anthony Bourdain, The New Yorker, CNN, Andy Cohen, Vogue, Snoop, Cheryl Strayed, um, Rachel Ray, you know, people, not everyone's John Mayer, Wired, Ted Talks. Not everyone's gonna, you know, like all of these, but then just unfollow. Cause it will give you a real, um, you know, assortment. And there's a lot of, you know, civilians on there too.

• 1:13:07Speaker 00

  Just people that are like making, you know, crazy personal or advice lists. And so it's a real, I would just say, sign up, hit recommended, hit follow all recommended and just see what you like.

• 1:13:19Tim Ferriss?

  Very cool. Do you have, as we have a plane zooming overhead, uh, do you have a little bit more time for some rapid fire questions?

• 1:13:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:13:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right, cool. So we're gonna shift gears just a little bit. Successful, when you hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind? And why?

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Shakespeare.

• 1:13:39Tim Ferriss?

  Why?

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  Because he made things that were both moving and permanent and, uh, and popular.

• 1:13:53Tim Ferriss?

  What was your?

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Both three things. Shows you how far I am from that.

• 1:13:57Tim Ferriss?

  What, what was your thesis on? Did you write a senior thesis?

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Whoa, you did your homework. Yeah. I did one on, uh, mine was on, it's very specific. In the films of Hamlet, how they treat the line to be or not to be. Because that line already has a lot of mystery within the play, exactly what it means. Uh, but then you add all the culture, like if you pay to see a movie of Hamlet, like you're, you're waiting for it to be or not to be the whole time. So how do the cultural expectations affect the interpretation of that line?

• 1:14:28Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. Yeah, the bard. I mean, it's, there are a lot of people that make me wanna cry into a pillow. As, as, as a writer who's trying to improve, that's, that's certainly way up at the top of the list. Uh, what book or books do you give most often as gifts?

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  There's a book called The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, which I love. It's just the most well-edited, like brilliant one-liners from history. And you can just, you can spend like hours on a page. It's just, or you can just flip through it. I give that one a lot.

• 1:15:03Tim Ferriss?

  The Oxford Book of Aphorisms.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  And I'm gonna give Daily Rituals, that book we mentioned a lot too.

• 1:15:06Tim Ferriss?

  It's a great book.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  Anyone who's creative or ambitious, you take so much solace in seeing all the different processes people just do. You know, what does Charles Dickens do every day? What do he do every day? What did Darwin do every day? What did Steve Jobs do every day? You know, it's just so reassuring to see like, eh, everyone's got their own system.

• 1:15:24Tim Ferriss?

  And it also is very reassuring to see how dysfunctional so many of them are.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  Yes. Depressing, too.

• 1:15:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, depressing in some cases. Great book. I actually produced the audiobook for people who want to try the audio. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Um, I'd love to be great-looking.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  You're not a bad-looking guy.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  I'm not terrible-looking, thank you, but you know, I look at James Franco and he does all the things he does. And I'm like, man.

• 1:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  James Franco, well, I mean, look at his brother. I mean, they're like.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  No, I'm saying.

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  It's a handsome family.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  Tim, if I could have whatever I wanted.

• 1:16:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  I, I could lie and say, oh, I'd learn to, I'd be better at empathy. No, I'd be like fucking awesome-looking. And you know, then I would like, you know, if you're James Franco, you can do anything. And people are like, well, it's pretty interesting. Anything. And I wish I had that extra level. I'm just answering.

• 1:16:22Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, I appreciate the honesty.

• 1:16:23Speaker 00

  Fucking awesome-looking.

• 1:16:24Tim Ferriss?

  This is good. Do you have any bad habits that you're currently working on?

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. I, I zone out. Any conversation, I'm not holding a microphone. I, I zone out easily. I just love daydreaming and I think it is, it's so indulgent in a good way to the creative process. But then you get used to that indulgence when someone else deserves your attention. So I try to be better at that.

• 1:16:53Tim Ferriss?

  How do you go about trying to become better at that? It's just a conscious decision not to zone out?

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Good question. I don't have a process yet. I'm just always berating myself.

• 1:17:02Tim Ferriss?

  I do the same thing. So if you come up with anything, please let me know. Words or phrases that you overuse?

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  Pretty.

• 1:17:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's my one.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Really?

• 1:17:11Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I hate it. I started trying to fix it by saying-

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  But do you use it as an adverb or an adjective? How do you use it?

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Adverb.

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  See, I use it as an adjective.

• 1:17:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  But I don't mind using it.

• 1:17:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah, I say, oh, that's pretty interesting. Oh, that's pretty, that's pretty. And I tried to fix it at one point by forcing myself to say fucking afterwards. So I'd say, that's pretty fucking interesting.

• 1:17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Tim Ferriss?

  That's fucking smart. And eventually it short circuited for a while. It's definitely, um-

• 1:17:38Speaker 00

  I overuse like, which is so embarrassing because it's not a very masculine word to overuse, but I do.

• 1:17:44Tim Ferriss?

  Like as a verb or like as a-

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  Like as an, I don't even know what it is. It's a stutter, really. Like-

• 1:17:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I see. I see. What, do you have anything in writing, long form, let's say in a book? One of mine is, for instance, like, that having been said, or some-

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  Sure. Um, I overwrite a lot and I need to pare it down.

• 1:18:04Tim Ferriss?

  God, it's just too many revisions.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  I don't know any one phrase, but, uh, no, no, I mean, I just, I do stuff like that because it's, it sounds, I don't know, it kind of, it gives extra elegance to a stupid idea. And then I need to go back and be like, you know what?

• 1:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  Put some monkey in a suit.

• 1:18:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's something I learned on The Office too. If you're, if a scene should be two pages and it's four pages, it's a bad scene. It's just you, because you keep writing when you haven't hit it. So if it, if it's a great scene, it might just be a two-line exchange. I love you. I don't love you. Like, whoa, that's a scene. But if, if the scene is like, so I was thinking the other day, my feelings, you know, like, that's not a scene.

• 1:18:47Tim Ferriss?

  You know it's not working.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So if you overwrite, it's often a sign that, that you have not hit it and you're still looking for it.

• 1:18:53Tim Ferriss?

  What, uh, what is the best purchase that you've made in recent memory for less than a hundred dollars?

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  An ice cube tray that has giant ice cubes in it. Anytime I'm at a bar and they have like a big ice cube, I feel like, oh, what this should cost like a hundred dollars. This is so nice. And then I thought, well, wait, the the rubber ice cube tray shouldn't be any more expensive. It's just a different shaped mold. So I go on Amazon and sure enough, Tivolo, I think is the company, you know, for like $7, it's six huge ice cubes. And if anyone comes over and I make them a drink, they have one huge ice cube in their glass. And it's like I have a fancy bar. Love it.

• 1:19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite documentaries?

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  You know what? Do you mind if I look at the list up?

• 1:19:42Tim Ferriss?

  I don't mind if you look at the list up.

• 1:19:43Speaker 00

  My favorite documentaries on the list up.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  I love documentaries and

• 1:19:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'll throw I'll just buy it some time. I'll throw one out. Well, I loved Man on Wire when it came out. Very uniquely put together. And the same team made a documentary subsequent to that called Project Nim, which was about a chimpanzee. This was in the 70s, effectively raised as a human child to see if Nim, in this case, could, I think it was gnome, no, Nim Chomsky or Chimpski, they called them in any case, could acquire language and just a fascinating documentary on human thought, human interaction with this chimp and so on.

• 1:20:26Speaker 00

  On my list, Catfish. It's a cliche, but Catfish is a brilliant documentary.

• 1:20:31Tim Ferriss?

  I still haven't seen it.

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  Brilliant. It's generation defining and it's just become a term, but it earned that term. Brilliant movie. To Be and to Have is on my list. A beautiful, a beautiful, simple film about a one room schoolhouse in France. And just what happens over the course of a year. There's really little story, but but it really holds your attention and gives you a spirit of a place. And if I choose one more. Oh, you know, it's a really cool one. It's called The Overnighters and it's about the oil fields in North Dakota. Came out a couple of years ago and this pastor who has a church there. The back in oil fields, which is like probably bigger than the gold rush in the 1800s.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  It's just like now that you can frack, there's so much oil in North Dakota that a whole like culture, like you, you can rent like a garage in North Dakota for like $250,000. You know, it's just, there's so much money there and such a rush to be close to it. And that's a really interesting.

• 1:21:34Tim Ferriss?

  The overnighters. So I usually ask about morning routines, but I want to ask about, and you can feel free to answer that, but I'm so curious to dig a little bit into your powering up. Yeah. How would you power up to kind of get into the zone?

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  I have a venti Pike Place coffee from Starbucks. I find that.

• 1:21:55Tim Ferriss?

  What, how is it made? Just black?

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  Yep, black. I find that brewing my own coffee at home is so unpredictable. It's like getting artisanal Tylenol. I want to know what my dose is, you know, like you wouldn't be like, oh, I made some Tylenol. No, give me two Tylenol. So I want a standard dose of caffeine.

• 1:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  You want your standard, like loading dose of caffeine. Got it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  So I have a venti from Starbucks.

• 1:22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Now, when you have it, you mean you purchase or do you just down the thing like a shot of tequila?

• 1:22:24Speaker 00

  I either drive to the Starbucks. No, I, it takes an hour. Cause I'm, I will sometimes read the paper, um, the Wall Street Journal or the recently the Wall Street Journal, which I find really good, especially on weekends, but, or the New York Times is my favorite. And I often read that, usually read that online. And, you know, just emails and I turn on music. I usually listen to, um, Morning Becomes Eclectic on KCRW.

• 1:22:47Tim Ferriss?

  Morning Becomes Eclectic?

• 1:22:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's this great show from nine to 12 every weekday, commercial free, like just cool new music. Um, I also have a list on my, on the app of music that I work to. So, and they have a 24 hour station.

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have another one that you can pull from memory that?

• 1:23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I will often do Pandora of early blues.

• 1:23:10Tim Ferriss?

  Early blues.

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  Good to just. So, yeah, I listen to music. Or Sirius XM 35 is like indie music that I like. So you just listen to music. It's just about being in a good mood. I slowly drink that Starbucks. I sometimes take a walk around Running Canyon or my neighborhood. You know, text, email. If there's a book, I'm kind of reading and read a couple of chapters. And then eventually I'm just like, all right. Like, either I'm excited by an idea or I'm, it's like 3:30 and I'm like, this powering up turned into lunch, turned into a workout, you know? And I'm like, god damn it, I cleared out my whole day and it's 3:30 and I haven't written anything?

• 1:23:53Speaker 00

  You know, then I just start looking at my files and then I finally get going. So, yeah, the power up can have a happy or a sad ending.

• 1:24:00Tim Ferriss?

  Do you, is there a particular time of day that you find you, you tend to do your best writing?

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:24:07Tim Ferriss?

  For me, it's always been super late night. I don't know why that is. For synthesis, for note taking, for interviewing, I can do that whenever. But for synthesis, I've always been kind of a 10:00 PM to 5:00 AM kind of guy for whatever reason.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  Um, it's hard for me to get myself to work later in the day. So probably my most productive time is like 11 to 2. But, um, you know, the creative ideas can come anytime. I never know when those are coming.

• 1:24:38Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see here. If people wanted to watch, besides The Office, one or two TV shows for good comedy writing? Any particular recommendations?

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Um, I love this show right now called The Grinder with Rob Lowe and Fred Savage. That's very, very good writing. Um, season four of Mr. Show is brilliant sketch writing.

• 1:25:02Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain what you mean by, I apologize.

• 1:25:04Speaker 00

  Oh, sketch like SNL, like, you know?

• 1:25:06Tim Ferriss?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say, yeah, those are, those are pretty great ones.

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. Just a few more questions.

• 1:25:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  What historical figure you must identify with?

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Oh, um.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  In my hopes, Ben Franklin, because he started in comedy. And then I, I make a joke about this in my stand up act, like he really took it to the next level. I mean, he wrote Poor Richard's Almanac and he was known as a comedy writer. And then he ended up, you know, discovering electricity and having his face on money. Like that is really, and he remained like a witty, um, guy. So my hope is that I could do some shadow where I can have, uh, ambitious, um, positive spirited ideas. But it won't be like, oh, now like he lost his sense of humor.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Like Ben Franklin always had a sense of humor and he wasn't ashamed to like, like experiment with, you know, uh, lightning, you know?

• 1:26:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Like that, that's really cool, but I, I, even in my most egotistical, I don't actually identify with him. He's just like, you know, if I'm setting myself up. Yeah, yeah, aspirational role model. So probably someone more, yeah, someone, I don't know, like funny and dark and like, I don't know.

• 1:26:32Tim Ferriss?

  For, for someone recognizing that no path is quite the same for people, certainly that, that I've met in entertainment or comedy or whatnot.

• 1:26:44Tim Ferriss?

  From going from school to the industry of, uh, if we could call it one industry of entertainment.

• 1:26:54Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just say you had a promising high school senior.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:58Tim Ferriss?

  Who's a gifted writer and they think they want to be in comedy writing. What advice would you give them?

• 1:27:08Speaker 00

  A bunch of things. One piece of advice that I stand by that I've given to a bunch of people is is really to think of it as two things. You need to get people's attention and you need to be able to back it up. So this is especially for getting, I feel that most people who want to get into comedy, what they want to do these days is get a staff job on a TV comedy show. So to do that, you need, think like the person hiring you. You're gonna want, if you were given your own show, you'd panic. This is my one big shot. It's gotta be hilarious. You'd hire your most loyal, funniest friends first, then you'd ask around, you know, who worked on, you know, my favorite shows, who's the best, best, best person, you know?

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  And those names would come to you through an agent or something. And then you'd like, anyone that you saw or heard, or you were at a stand-up show and this guy was hilarious, or someone sent you this internet video, or, you know, you just don't know. Or you'd ask around and someone would send you something. So the first thing is, get their attention. That means, could mean be friends with somebody, or have collaborated with somebody. Another thing is you might want to make something. I don't, for me it was stand-up, but I don't know what it is for anyone else. It could be,

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  probably some internet video. I feel like that's the best way to, you can be completely wild and get seen. But, you know, make something truly great that's, could be anything, absolutely anything. Then, once you have someone's attention, they're gonna want to be sure that they're not taking a crazy bet on some kid who made some funny video, who then gets in the writers' room and doesn't know what to do. So that generally means have a spec script, which is a speculative script that could be for a TV show. So you write an episode of The Office, or The Simpsons, or whatever. Just to show that if you were on that staff, you'd be able to know the voices, you'd know how to format it, you'd know how to craft the story, you can write hard jokes.

• 1:29:09Speaker 00

  So have, you know, a spec script and it'll probably take you a few to get a really good one. But back it up and get their attention. Now that's for anyone starting out. I don't know if I'd advise a high school senior to go right into TV writing. So this advice is probably more for someone who just graduated college or someone, whatever stage of life, they're just ready to start this. So, you know, if, if you're really going to go to college, I'd say, um, you know, stay funny. Be around funny people, come up with funny ideas, make your friends laugh.

• 1:29:42Tim Ferriss?

  Be mischievous.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, be mischievous.

• 1:29:45Tim Ferriss?

  Now you are moving this up thirty.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  Six.

• 1:29:49Tim Ferriss?

  Thirty-six. What advice would you give your thirty-year-old self? And where were you? What were you doing at thirty?

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  At thirty, I was on The Office.

• 1:30:00Speaker 00

  I wish I had told myself on The Office, and this might be specific to me. The whole time I was on The Office, I thought, well, this is my best shot at whatever I'd ever want to do. So I better not waste a second. I better write a screenplay. I better, you know, make a avant-garde film. I better get cast in something. I better do my big thing while I'm still in The Office because I don't want to be that guy who used to be on The Office. So, but I didn't have time. I had two jobs on The Office. Either one of them takes up, should take up your focus.

• 1:30:36Tim Ferriss?

  Now you, at one point you had three, right? I mean, was writer, producer, actor?

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  Well, producer tends to just be high-level writer.

• 1:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 1:30:42Speaker 00

  So I take that, that was the same job. But, you know, it's important. It means the writing is really, for the whole show, is part of your responsibility. So. I wish I could tell, and now people ask me, did you, what was it like working in the office? Was it so much fun? Were you laughing all the time? Yeah, but I have to admit, that's buried under, I was so anxious and always trying to write some extra thing on the side that I never finished and never had time for. And I really didn't just enjoy this incredible once in a lifetime thing. And you know, as soon as the office ended, I was talented enough to write a book and I'm proud of the book. And I made the app and I worked really hard and I was able to pull it off.

• 1:31:24Speaker 00

  Like, you know, if you can do it, you can do it. It's, you're not really on someone else's schedule ever. And you know, I also tell people all the time, like, if Will Smith isn't in a movie for three years, you're not walking around saying, where's Will Smith? No one's paying attention to anybody else at all. You think everyone is, but they're not. So take as long as you want, if you're talented, it's not really, you know, you'll, you'll get their attention again. If, if you have reason to. And so I do wish I had told myself back then, like, this is, this is very, very special. Like, own it, be in it, enjoy it.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  Instead of, you know, being so nervous and, you know, all for nothing. None of the things I tried to do on the side of the office ever got anywhere, because I just didn't have time.

• 1:32:11Tim Ferriss?

  I think that's good advice for a lot of people in a lot of places. That was the advice also that Stephen King gave to Neil Gaiman, one of my favorite fiction writers.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  Really? What was the advice?

• 1:32:19Tim Ferriss?

  Well, he said, enjoy it, because Neil was sitting at, I think it was a book signing for Sandman, which was just this incredible

• 1:32:31Tim Ferriss?

  canon of work that redefined what was possible in sort of the graphic novel genre.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know of that book.

• 1:32:37Tim Ferriss?

  Just incredible. And he's used that, of course, as a stepping stone to write novels and, and that were, have been turned into movies and so on. But he was sitting there with this huge line of people, as I remember it, and he said, enjoy this. And that's my laptop sliding, but he didn't. He had a lot of trouble enjoying it. And I think that's a constant battle. Well, I don't want to take up any more of your time. This has been a blast.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  It's been so great.

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  It's getting dark and probably time for some food. Where can people find you and what you're up to online? Where are the best places to go?

• 1:33:12Speaker 00

  I, you know, I think the best place is the List app because that's where I am. So I would say, download the List app on the App Store or it'll be on Android and web soon. And that's just three words, the List app, or go to li.st. And my profile there is all my favorites and ideas and thoughts on this and that. I'm also on Twitter. Yeah.

• 1:33:38Tim Ferriss?

  At BJ Novak.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  At BJ Novak. And that's me on the List app too.

• 1:33:42Tim Ferriss?

  Cool. Well, this has been great fun. Maybe we'll do a round two sometime. And thanks so much again. I really appreciate it.

• 1:33:49Speaker 00

  So cool.

• 1:33:50Tim Ferriss?

  And to everybody listening, you can find the show notes, links to all the books, shows, apps, et cetera, that were mentioned at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, or you can just go to fourhourworkweek.com and click on Podcast. Has show notes for this episode and every other episode. And as always, until next time, thank you for listening.

• 1:34:13Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

• 1:34:54Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 1:35:17Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:36:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:36:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:37:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:38:14Tim Ferriss?

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