#565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect”

Brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement, Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses, and LinkedIn Jobs http://linkedin.com/tim recruitment platform with 770M+ users. Michael Schur (@KenTremendous https://twitter.com/kentremendous) created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Is-Fine/dp/B01L3GQG7K/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and co-created Parks and Recreation https://www.amazon.com/The-Banquet/dp/B0026Q9XJA/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Brooklyn Nine-Nine https://www.amazon.com/The-Tagger/dp/B00ESB6EUC/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and the Peacock series Rutherford Falls https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/rutherford-falls?cid=2104originalsrtffpaidsearch2726&utm_campaign=2104originalsrtff&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidmedia_search_branded_searchcopy&utm_term=71700000073555109&utm_content=58700006921633015_44700035040966067&gclid=Cj0KCQiA5aWOBhDMARIsAIXLlkfUtTe73pkgnCbr9-_3u3ODWrlMYzEJreuDQq1iMnk39Ifw3C7wz-oaAgyZEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds. He is also an executive producer on HBO Max’s Hacks https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GYIBToQrPdotpNQEAAAEa and Netflix’s Master of None https://www.netflix.com/title/80049714. Prior to “Parks,” Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy Award-winning NBC hit The Office https://www.amazon.com/The-Office-An-American-Workplace/dp/B002KE3C6S/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. His first TV writing job was at Saturday Night Live https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/saturday-night-live, where he spent seven seasons, including three as the producer of “Weekend Update” with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. Michael’s new book is How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Perfect-Correct-Question/dp/1982159316/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim! Helix was selected as the #1 overall mattress of 2020 by GQ magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. With Helix http://helixsleep.com/tim, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete http://helixsleep.com/tim—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, to my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to 200 dollars off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim http://helixsleep.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim! What is LMNT? It’s a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix http://drinklmnt.com/tim. I’ve stocked up on boxes and boxes of this and usually use it 1–2 times per day. LMNT http://drinklmnt.com/tim is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or Paleo diet. If you are on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. LMNT came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can claim a free LMNT Sample Pack—you only cover the cost of shipping. For US customers, this means you can receive an 8-count sample pack for only $5. Simply go to DrinkLMNT.com/Tim http://drinklmnt.com/Tim to claim your free 8-count sample pack. * This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim. Whether you are looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you may have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you’re looking for and puts your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match what you have to offer. Using LinkedIn’s active community of more than 770 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Jobs https://linkedin.com/Tim can help you find and hire the right person faster. When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit LinkedIn.com/Tim https://linkedin.com/Tim. * How did Michael get involved with The Harvard Lampoon, and what did the audition process look like? How was the writing process different during his time there than it might be in a comparable publication today? [05:58] How performing live comedy is like Roman gladiator combat, and what Michael learned during his seven seasons as a writer for Saturday Night Live. [12:53] Michael shares his David Foster Wallace story, and his own thoughts about adapting Infinite Jest into a miniseries. [20:03] Why did Michael decide to leave SNL and continue his career in Los Angeles? How did he wind up writing for the US adaptation of The Office in spite of being unsure that such an adaptation was even a good idea? [31:10] Why does Michael consider the opportunity to work with The Office showrunner Greg Daniels “the greatest stroke of good fortune” that’s ever befallen him? What did he learn from the experience that SNL didn’t teach him? [39:12] What is the F = ma of sitcom writing, and how did this play into character development on The Office? [44:35] If Michael’s house were burning down and he only had time to rescue five things, what would they be? [53:20] How did Michael become a rare book collector? [57:45] Where did Michael’s alter ego of Ken Tremendous (and Fremulon, his equally fictitious place of employment) originate? [1:01:13] With television networks often skittish about deviating from proven formulas, how did a show as unique as The Good Place come about? [1:08:10] How the seed of the idea that became The Good Place was planted by an outrageous car repair bill. [1:16:15] Michael once joked that he would love How to Be Perfect to do for moral philosophy what A Brief History of Time did for astrophysics. If that’s a tall order, what would he consider an acceptable takeaway for its readers? [1:27:58] What qualifies the legitimacy of a philosopher? Is it when they can get people to actually read (and understand) their work? [1:32:58] If Michael could have a drink or dinner with any philosopher, living or dead, who would he choose? [1:39:53] What two philosophers would Michael choose to have on speed dial for his own personal instruction? [1:43:36] What comics in my own collection do I most treasure? What kind of D&D characters did I tend to play in my youth? [1:49:11] Michael’s most worthwhile failures (and one recurring failure that still gives him nightmares). [1:51:17] Michael is sorry if his billboard offends you. [2:01:28] Who are Todd May and Pamela Hieronymi, and how did they become The Good Place writers’ room emergency contacts? [2:06:00] Why Michael encourages us all to get educated about ethics by any means comfortable (and if that includes reading How to Be Perfect, so be it) where the proceeds of book sales will be directed, and other parting thoughts. [2:10:12] * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end all be all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com/tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering

• 1:21Tim Ferriss?

  up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So, check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim.

• 1:58Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 2:42Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which is a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 3:26Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends, three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Element came up with a very Special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can claim a free Element sample pack.

• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  You only cover the cost of shipping. For US customers, this means you can receive an eight-count sample pack for just $5. Simply go to drink element.com/tim. That's drink element.com/tim to claim your free eight-count sample pack. One more time, that's drink element.com/tim for this exclusive offer. Drink element.com/tim. Check it out. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Now would have seemed appropriate time.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Michael Schur. Schur. Schur. Depending on who you ask, on Twitter, at Ken Tremendous. We're going to ask about that. Mike. Michael created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the Peacock series Rutherford Falls. He is also an executive producer on HBO Max's Hacks and Netflix's Master of None. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy award-winning NBC hit The Office. His first TV writing job was at Saturday Night Live, where he spent seven seasons,

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  including three as the producer of Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. His new book is How to Be Perfect, subtitle, The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here. I thought we would start with something we chatted about just a little bit before pressing record, and that is the Harvard Lampoon. I have this fascination with the Harvard Lampoon, and I would just love to perhaps offer you the mic to introduce the Harvard Lampoon to people and also describe how you entered the fray, how you actually became part of the Harvard Lampoon.

• 6:21Speaker 03

  The Lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in, I think, 1876, and it is this weird, satirical comedy magazine that has just been kind of plugging along for now almost 150 years. And there's a couple of interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving. Like, William Randolph Hearst was in the Lampoon, and so was John Updike, and so was George Plimpton, and a million comedy writers in the, from like, the 80s to the present, who have written for Letterman, and The Simpsons, and SNL, and all these shows. Conan O'Brien was the president of the Harvard Lampoon twice,

• 7:05Speaker 03

  which is a very rare thing. So, it's just this kind of weird little humor outlet that people who are obsessed with comedy kind of learn about at an early age. I learned about it from just noticing that it kept popping up when you would see certain movies that you thought were funny, or like Doug Kenny wrote Animal House, and he was on the Lampoon. And Jim Downey, who was a legendary comedy writer at Letterman, I think he was Letterman's first head writer, and wrote so many of your favorite SNL sketches throughout history, he was on the Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college, that was like, on my essay for Harvard, was I want to come here

• 7:47Speaker 03

  because I want to join the Lampoon. So when I got there, that was like, goal number one for me, was joining it. And there's like, an audition process. You have to write material, and then you get the pool of people get to winnow down, and then they accept a few writers every semester.

• 8:01Tim Ferriss?

  I have to imagine, by the time you got there, certainly, it was thought of almost as a feeder into these careers in comedy. And therefore, there had to be quite a wide funnel in terms of people interested in becoming part of the Lampoon. They can't accept everyone. What did the audition process?

• 8:24Tim Ferriss?

  Look like what constituted the audition process?

• 8:27Speaker 03

  The Lampoon is a pure, to the extent that it could be, was a pure meritocracy. It was there were artists, writers, and there were business people who sold ads. And if you were trying to get on as a business person, it was like, did you sell enough ads? If you did, you got on. If you didn't, you didn't. If you were an artist, you drew a bunch of pieces. You were critiqued and and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff. Then they voted on who their favorite artists were. And same with with writing. You wrote three pieces, comedy pieces of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down from the total number of people trying to get on to, you know, half that and then half again. And then they would bring, you know, six to eight people to the election and then vote however many that they wanted. They would vote on.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  This was part of the sales pitch was that it was a meritocracy. So I decided to kind of test that theory because I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces. The first time I tried out, I submitted anonymously to the extent I could. I I only wrote my my first and second initials. So they didn't know whether I was male or female. They didn't know really who I was at all. And I got admitted to I made it past the first cut and I should they have like a cocktail party for people who make it past the cuts. And I showed up and they were like, oh, you're that guy. Welcome, congratulations. And I was like, wow, they really you really was anonymous. Like, they didn't know who I was, didn't care. They just were like, are these things funny or are they not funny? So then you did that again, you submitted three more pieces.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  You had got notes, there was another round of cuts, and then there were elections. And you just waited in your room for the full day, not having any idea what was going on. And then they would show up and say yes or no. And if the answer is yes, and then you got brought into this week long semi, not really hazing. It's kind of a parody of like a frat hazing week. But you spend a week like getting indoctrinated into the world of the Lampoon. And then you're a member and everything is great.

• 10:23Tim Ferriss?

  The writing pieces, and this is rewinding the clock, so I recognize that this is asking a lot, but do you have any recollection with that paradox of choice situation where the topics are up to you, how you chose what you would write about? Are there any constraints? Like 500 words or less, 1,000 words or less, is there?

• 10:45Speaker 03

  There were. I wish I remembered. They put a page limit on them, you know, because it's prose comedy. It's a kind of comedy writing that isn't done that much anymore. The closest analog that people might be familiar with is something like the shouts and murmurs page in The New Yorker. Like, a lot of Lampoon people have gone on to write shouts and murmurs pieces for The New Yorker. Prose comedy used to be much more common. Magazines used to have the humor. You know, PJ O'Rourke wrote humor for Rolling Stone, and people would write humorous pieces for The New Yorker or for any number of different magazines. It doesn't really exist anymore, like many things involving print media. But the only one I remember offhand is I wrote a piece, speaking of The New Yorker. The premise was it was like

• 11:26Speaker 03

  a series of increasingly angry letters being written to you by The New Yorker because you hadn't re-upped your subscription yet. Because at the time, I'd been gifted a subscription as a freshman in college by someone, probably my dad, who thought, "You're a college man now. You ought to read an intellectual magazine." And then it lapsed, and I started getting these like really angry letters that were like, you know, like, "What's the deal? What? How could you have betrayed us like this?"

• 11:54Tim Ferriss?

  So you legitimately were getting these indignant letters from The New Yorker?

• 11:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:58Tim Ferriss?

  That's incredible.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  I was. And they kept offering me the free tote bag if you re-upped. And I remember just continuously thinking like, "I don't want your damn tote bag, man. Like, leave me alone." So I wrote a piece that was like five or six in a series of letters asking you to re-up. They just got increasingly antagonistic and aggressive. So it was that sort of thing. And that would fit on one page. You know what I mean? Like, that's 500 words or 600 words or something. You know, brevity is the soul of wit. And so if your piece was too long, they would often hack it down and tell you to make it shorter and stuff. You're not talking about 20-page-long humorous short stories. These are like short little bursts. These are shouts and murmurs-level bursts of humor. I'm sure Somewhere in a Box,

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Somewhere in My House is my original pieces that I submitted, but at least from my memory, they're long gone.

• 12:51Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Well, you know,

• 12:53Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sorry.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say that that is one of the great things about comedy as a discipline is that, you know, stand ups will tell you that the reason they like being stand ups frequently is because there's a vote. You write a joke and you perform it and the audience votes immediately whether or not that joke is funny. And it's not quite as immediate in TV or movies or some other forms of comedy. But there is a sense of you don't know whether you have gotten it right. And then you get a reaction from people that's visceral that says you're on the right path, or you're not, or you kind of are, but you could spruce it up a little bit. That's what made Saturday Night Live so great. We would do a dress

• 13:35Speaker 03

  rehearsal at eight on Saturdays and there would be a live audience and you'd run the sketch and then some jokes would work and some wouldn't. And then it would end at 10 and the show goes live at 1130. This thing would occur to you, which is, I could either leave it alone, do nothing, and get exactly probably the same reaction that I got the first time, or I can try to fix this. I can cut this joke that didn't work. I can try to write a better punchline. There was an immediacy to it that was weirdly comforting because sometimes you make things and like months and months and months go by and then they sort of flowed out into the universe. Comedy, very frequently, especially comedy for performance, is just, it's like a Roman Colosseum, you know, a bunch of people gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then it's up to you to figure out what to do next.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  So I really like that about comedy in general. There's not a lot of, you can certainly write jokes that don't work, that you still believe in, and you can cling to them if you want to. But you also know, like, no one's ever gonna laugh at this. And if you're okay with that, that's fine. You can leave it in your movie or your show, but you at least have the information that you were looking for very quickly.

• 14:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, let's talk about SNL for a moment. I was gonna ask you about lessons learned at SNL, but there are a number of different ways I could frame the question. Another would be How do you think you would be different had you not had the SNL experience as a comedy writer slash producer slash fill in the blank? I'm just curious because I think I have read somewhere and I'm paraphrasing here that you you think everyone or any comedy writer should sort of do a tour of duty if possible at SNL for a period of time. I'm sure a lot of more people would like to than Ken. But what were some of the lessons learned for for lack of a better way to phrase it?

• 15:20Speaker 03

  So many. I do believe that, by the way. I think that if everyone who worked in Hollywood had to work for one year at SNL, in general, things would be a lot better. So from a creative standpoint, the thing that SNL teaches you is to not be precious with your own material. You generally have about four minutes to do whatever you're gonna do. With rare exceptions, you're talking about four minutes. And so you write a sketch and it's five minutes and 38 seconds long and you go in with a red pen and you just make giant X's on your script like, cut this, cut this, cut this, this didn't work, change this.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  And after doing that every week for, you know, seven years, there's almost no joke or piece of writing that I could put into a script that I would think that cannot be cut. Like, it just trains you to say, anything can be cut. And if it improves what you're doing, then cut it. And I think that's a really hard lesson for some people to learn, especially when, depending on where those people, where people come from, what their backgrounds are, if you grow up in a system, I mean creatively grow up in a system that doesn't train you not to be precious with your own material, and then you achieve any kind of success, you are

• 16:43Speaker 03

  almost always way too precious about your material because you have this sort of personal belief that you you did this alone, you figured it out, you cracked the code, and how dare anybody tell me to cut this or cut that, or how dare the these executives think that this is too long? And as a result... You can look around right now on your streaming service of choice and you can find a lot of shows and movies where you think to yourself, "That was about 25 minutes too long." Like, "I liked it, it was good, but man, why was that so long?" And the answer is almost always like, "They just didn't get tough enough on their own material." So SNL is just ruthless about that. SNL is like a...

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Lorne Michaels has many aphorisms that he likes to dole out to you and, as you sit at his feet and he dispenses his wisdom. But one of the things he has been saying for, I think, about 50 years is, "The show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 11:30 on Saturday night." And that ethos is, it sort of permeates everything and it reinforces this idea that you work on it and work on it and work on it until it's done and then you're done. But the level of success you have with any individual sketch is a little bit up to whether or not... It's based on whether or not you are tough enough on your own material. So that's a great lesson. That's a really, really wonderful lesson for a writer of any kind to learn.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Another thing it teaches you, and by the way, I should note, if you meet and work with anyone who went through the SNL gauntlet of fire, everybody has that same sort of attitude toward their own material. So when you're talking about an actor, like Andy Samberg... So my friend Dan Gorn had created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Andy Samberg. We got Andy Samberg to star in it. Andy Samberg is a very... Was a very well-known and beloved comedian and was pretty famous on his own right, thanks to his own work. And yet, when we would show him cuts of Brooklyn episodes in the early days, he would go like, "I'm bad in this scene. Cut me out of this. Cut this. Cut my joke here. It doesn't work. Cut this, cut this." It's a very rare star of a TV show.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Who will say, cut my material, you know, like, that's not, that's not the typical attitude for like, number one on the call sheet, star of the show, guy on the poster. Usually those people are like, wait, I want more, I want more, put me in this more, put my face on TV more. People who went through SNL judge comedy and material based on only like, is this good, is it funny, does it work, is it fast, is it quick, is it enjoyable? That's a wonderful trait in a producer slash actor. Amy Poehler is the same exact way. So everybody who goes through this system has this sense of like, it's not about me, it's about the end product. And if the end product is made better by removing me, or

• 19:38Speaker 03

  removing scenes I'm in, or lines that I have, or jokes that I have, then remove them. We all win if this thing is better. So there are other ways you can learn those lessons. SNL is just a particularly blunt, force, trauma way to do it. It's a very like, it's a very intense kind of like sledgehammer to the head over and over again, that kind of drills this idea into you.

• 20:04Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna return to the, the end of your SNL tenure. But before we get there, I wanted to ask about, I'm not gonna say the antithesis, because I don't think that's totally accurate, but perhaps a contrast in styles, or at least, uh, someone who is not purely encapsulated by brevity is the soul of wit, and that is David Foster Wallace. How, how did, I mean, it seems like you have a longstanding fascination with David Foster Wallace. How did that start? Why is that the case?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Well, there's an extremely long-winded version of this story. I'll try to, I'll try to make it only slightly long.

• 20:47Tim Ferriss?

  This isn't morning TV, so we can go as long as you want.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  So February of 1996, I am at the end of my junior year in college, an infant just comes out and my friend Rebecca says to me, hey, have you heard about this book? Everybody really likes this book. We should go buy it. We went to the Harvard bookstore and we both bought a copy of the book. I read the book. I started reading it that night and I didn't stop until I was done. It really, something about it just altered my brain chemistry and changed the way that I thought about literature and writing and the world. It's one of those things. Everybody has a story like this about some piece of literature, right? It just clicked. I heard an audible click in my brain as I was reading it and I was looking for a senior thesis topic for my senior year and I went to my

• 21:35Speaker 03

  advisor and I said, this book literally just came out this month and I know that you want, what I'm supposed to do is pick like a D H Lawrence novel or a Henry James novel or some other Billy Budd or something, but I just kind of want to write about this. And to his credit, he was like, sure, go ahead. It's your thesis. You write about what you want. So I ended up writing, spending an entire year then, writing about the book and thinking about it in terms of like how it fit into the post-modernism canon. And around, I can't remember now, maybe October of the following year, Wallace came, he was on a tour and he announced that he was coming, or maybe it was that spring, I think it was that spring, he announced a book tour and he was coming to the Brattle Theater, which

• 22:20Speaker 03

  was in Cambridge. So I was president of the Lampoon at the time and one of the things the Lampoon does is it gives out awards to people and it's always sort of a joke. The Hasty Pudding is the old, famous 18th century social club at Harvard and they give out a man and woman of the year award and it's always, you know, literally like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts or whatever. It's like the most famous people of the world and they all come. So the Lampoon would do a parody of that and they would say, our man of the year is Randy Macho Man Savage. So, and then we would have Randy Macho Man Savage come and give him a big fancy dinner and present him with a giant trophy and whatever. So we used to have the, you know, celebrity dinners from time to time. So unilaterally,

• 23:01Speaker 03

  without even asking anyone else who worked at the organization, I decided that David Foster Wallace was going to get an award from the Harvard Lampoon. Which I titled, I think novelist of the millennium or something. And I'm just a college junior and I called his agent and said, hey, I'm going to level with you. Like, we're making this up. We're just completely making this up, this award. But it's a really cool building and it's a fun group of people and he's going to be in town. And if he, if he wants to come, we would love to host him for a dinner. So I was working on my thesis about a week later. My phone rang and I picked it up and said, hello. And the person said, hey, this is Dave Wallace. Is this Mike Shore? And it was just Wallace calling me on the phone and he wanted to know.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  So like my heart is pounding like I, it was very surreal. And he was like, look, I, he'd gone to Amherst and he knew about, he knew what the Lampoon was. He was at Amherst in the early eighties and he said, it sounds really fun to come there. But like, I'm very sort of like press shy and you know, I don't, I don't want a whole big hullabaloo. And I was like, listen, man, we're just making this up. Like, we just want to have you come hang out with us. If you want to come hang out with us, we don't have to do any kind of public ceremony or whatever. Just come and hang, we'll show you the building. I think you'll really dig it. So he did his reading. We brought him back to the castle and we just had a big dinner with him, with the whole staff. And by then, a bunch of people on the staff had read the book and really loved it. And we just hung out with him and he was great and we, we had an amazing conversation.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  I have a picture on my wall, I'm staring at it right now, of me lighting a cigarette for him, which is like, if my house is, if my house is burning down and I have only time to grab five objects from my house, that's one of the ones I'm grabbing. So that began a correspondence between the two of us. He was an excellent correspondent. He wrote letters to hundreds and hundreds of people. Frequently, when you would get a letter from him, it was like a half of a piece of paper that he had just torn off from a, it was like a jagged edge. And he would just scribble a note and say like, checking in, seeing how you're doing or whatever. He was at Illinois State, teaching English and we corresponded for a while. And I tried to get him to come to SNL to see the show because he was obsessed with television.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  And I thought it would be really fun for him, but he was too shy and he never made it. He eventually moved to California and taught at Pomona and we sort of lost touch. And I kept it thinking in my head because I moved to California. Like, oh, I should reach out to him now that I'm out here and I never did. And then tragically, his mental health problems caught up to him and he committed suicide. And it's one of the sort of great tragedies in my own personal life that I didn't more aggressively pursue. I mean, he had a million correspondence, I think. I've, when you read stories about him, you'll often read, a lot of people have the story of like, I wrote him a letter out of nowhere and he wrote me back and we corresponded for five years. It was a thing he did. So I don't

• 25:58Speaker 03

  think I'm special in any way, but I really do regret not sort of trying to rekindle our little epistolary friendship when I moved out to California. So, long story, only slightly longer. At some point, I had the thought that it would be really interesting writing challenge to adapt Infinite Jest into not a movie, because that's impossible, and not an ongoing TV show, because that's also impossible, but some kind of limited series. And this is years ago now. This is probably 12 years ago. At the time, a thing that's very commonplace now, which is a sort of like mayor of East Town, was like this, like a sort of six or seven hour mini-series that has like a very high budget and stuff like

• 26:43Speaker 03

  that. That didn't really exist back then. But I tried to convince people that it would be a really good book to adapt into something like that. I had optioned the rights to it. I had sort of gone to his estate and made my case as like a guy who could be trusted with this book, which is so important to people of my generation. And they had given me the rights to it. And I sort of tried to get people interested in it. And it was sort of taking off a little bit. And it looked like it might happen. And then, for a number of reasons, it just kind of didn't happen. Among them, that his, the people who control his estate became just kind of generally wary of Hollywood for a number of reasons

• 27:24Speaker 03

  and kind of didn't really want there to be a lot of adaptations of his material. And I was like, well, I don't want to do anything that would ever make any of you feel uncomfortable or make you feel ill at ease. So I just sort of backed away. I let the option lapse. And that was sort of the end of my involvement. But there was a brief moment in time back in 2000, I'm going to say 2008, 9, 10, somewhere around there, where I was like, I think I'm going to spend the next four years of my life trying to adapt this enormous ridiculous book into a eight-hour mini-series. It would have been a very, there's a sliding doors thing where like, that could have been the way my professional career went.

• 28:02Tim Ferriss?

  Have you ever thought?

• 28:05Tim Ferriss?

  Or would you ever resurrect that goal to adapt in some fashion, Infinite Jest?

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Have you read the book? I hesitate to ask.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't. I'm not gonna lie. I have not. I've read a bunch of his writing, mostly shorter stuff, string theory and a lot of the shorter stories, but Infinite Jest, I was just too intimidated by the sheer magnitude.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  But the bulk of it?

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just the bulk of it, yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  I won't say that I would never consider it again, because if you ask me what my favorite book is, it's probably the answer. Like, that's probably my favorite book I've ever read. There's a problem with adapting it now, which is that the book was, so it came out in 96, he wrote it, you know, over the, call it, eight years prior. And the book imagines a very near future. It's almost a little Black Mirror-y, if you've seen that show.

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  I have.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Where he's imagining, it takes place in, so it came out in 96 and it basically takes place from like 2000 to 2008 or so. He's projecting forward and extrapolating into what he saw going on in society and imagining the kind of slightly warped, slightly funhouse mirror version of what the world is gonna be like. Now, of course, we're 20 years past the date when he was imagining it. And so in order to do it, and in order to honor the book properly, you would sort of have to do your own version of what he did, which is look at the world now and project forward from here. And you also would have to be as good at that as he was, which is saying something. Because among other things in

• 29:42Speaker 03

  that book, he basically predicted FaceTime and video messaging, literally what you and I are doing right now. There's a whole section in the book about that. The President of the United States is a celebrity who is obsessed with germs and is a kind of a moron who doesn't really understand the way anything works, but it doesn't matter because he's really popular. He called his shots and a lot of them kind of came true. And you'd have to be as good a sort of fictional futurist as he was in order to do a good job. And I don't know that I am or that anybody is, really. So I'll never say never, but it would be even tougher to do it now than it would have been then.

• 30:23Tim Ferriss?

  That's a tough assignment. Yeah, that would be.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:25Tim Ferriss?

  That'd be very, very tough. Not impossible, but tough for the reasons that you mentioned. You know, as you're describing the challenge, I was, I was thinking of Motherless Brooklyn and what Edward Norton did with that and his, obviously his colleagues and everyone else did with that novel, because they had some creative challenges with respect to how the characters, although it's set in a somewhat contemporary landscape within the novel, speak like old timey gangsters to one another.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:57Tim Ferriss?

  And so they, they had to make a lot of changes with the film adaptation, which I thought worked really, really well. But I'm way deep in the ignorance pool on this one. I'm, I'm, this is way beyond my pay grade. So let me flee the landscape of David Foster Wallace and go back to the end of SNL. How did you choose what you would do after that? And how did you choose the timing if you chose it? I don't know.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  I didn't really choose it. It kind of chose me because I was dating a woman who is now my wife, who had moved to LA years before and we had been long distance. And it had gotten to the point where it was sort of like, well, if this is going to work, either I have to move to LA or she had to move to New York. And it made a lot more sense for me to move to LA because that's where all the jobs were. So I had been at SNL for, at the time I'd made the choice, I'd been there for about five and a half years. And I had this realization, which was SNL is a little bit of a, I guess you call it like a golden handcuffs kind of a situation. Because normally, when you work

• 32:05Speaker 03

  on a TV show, even in the best of times, you're hyper aware of the fact that this is going to end. At some point, this show will end and you will need to find a new job. SNL, unique among television shows in the last five decades, never ends. It just goes on forever. So the situation is you're working in New York. You make a very good living. You have a really cool job that anyone that you meet, when they find out what you do, wants to talk to you and hang out with you. And it could never end. You could just kind of do it forever. And so I had this, I basically gave my twenties to that show. I started when I just turned 22 and I worked there until I was 29.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  And I left in part because I realized that if I didn't achieve escape velocity, I might just stay there forever. And that's not the worst thing in the world. You only work like half the year because you have all these weeks off and make a good living. And I bought an apartment in Manhattan when I was 25. It's kind of an amazing life, but I just had this sense that if I wanted to do more creatively, I had to leave. And so all of these things kind of lined up. My feeling like I had sort of gone as far as it was, as I could go, or that I wanted to go really. My then-girlfriend, now-wife, living 3,000 miles away, the end of my twenties, like all of those things kind of coalesced.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  And I just decided, okay, this is going to be my last year. So halfway through that year, I went to LA for the first time professionally and started meeting executives and taking these general meetings, which were all identical. You're having like, it's really crazy making, like you have six identical meetings a day. You go into a room and you're meeting with the vice president of comedy at Fox. And the assistant says, would you like anything to drink? A water, Diet Coke? And you say, no, thank you. And you go in and you meet the senior vice president of comedy at Fox and you chat amiably for 50 minutes, almost to the minute, it's 50 minutes long. And then you leave and you get back in your car and you drive somewhere else and you go

• 34:18Speaker 03

  to another waiting room. And now you're meeting with the senior vice president of comedy at 20th Century Fox. And you're like, wait, these are different places? Yes, one of them is a network and one of them is a studio. And you go into a room and the person says, would you like a water or a Diet Coke? And you chat amiably with this new person for 50 minutes. And it just keeps going and going and going. And so, and you write samples, you write, I wrote a curb your enthusiasm spec script. I think that was it actually at the time. If those people like your samples, they'll send them to their, the people who have new shows coming on the air or the existing shows looking for writers. And you'll go on a hundred more meetings with those people. Well, I'm so and so. I created, I wrote this pilot called Welcome to Happy, and it's a sitcom about six people who are friends

• 35:01Speaker 03

  and they live in Chicago. And you watch their pilot and then they go, I really loved your script. And you say, thank you so much. Your pilot's so good. And then you chat amiably for exactly 50 minutes. And then you get back in your car, and you drive across town to some other person. And it's this kind of like endless, just treadmill of meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So out of that giant morass of meetings, there were a couple people who really liked my sample and had an opening. A couple of them were new shows. One of them was an existing show, but the guy who was the most interested in me was Greg Daniels, who was adapting The Office from the British version to the American version.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  So I loved The Office, the British Office. It was my, I found it to be maybe the greatest comedy that had ever been made. I thought it was a work of pure genius. And I thought that the idea of adapting it for America was incredibly stupid and foolhardy and would never work in a million years. Nonetheless, I took the meeting with Greg. And he, instead of like going to a place and having to go in here in 50 minutes and then you leave, he and I talked for about two and a half hours. He was immediately much more kind of specific and also much more interested in going in depth about many more things

• 36:25Speaker 03

  than anybody else had been. He wanted to know all about how I wrote my script, why I did certain things within the script. He wanted to know about, my wife had written for another show called Coupling, that was an adaptation of a British sitcom that hadn't worked. He asked me a million questions about it. Why did I think it didn't work? What was it about the adaptation that fell short? At one point in the middle of the meeting, he said, I have a bad back. Would you mind if I lay down on the floor? I said, no, go ahead. And so he just laid down on the floor in front of me. And the whole thing was just after 50 identical meetings, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, with 50 different people at in every level of Hollywood.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  That meeting was special and interesting and weird and captivating. And I left that meeting and I'd sent my agent an email and it said, I don't know if that guy's going to offer me a job, but if he does, I'm going to take it because I think he's going to teach me how to write. I just get the sense that he's like a professor and he knows how to do this. He sees the matrix code behind stories and I think he could teach me how to write. So he offered me the job and I took it and that's exactly what happened. He taught me that absolutely in a collegiate professorial kind of a way, how to write stories, what makes them good, what makes them bad, what makes character work good or bad, plot

• 37:51Speaker 03

  and motivation and character, all the stuff that you need. He taught a class. He taught a PhD level class and I soaked it all up and it's the greatest stroke of good fortune that's ever befallen me, I would say, is falling into Greg Daniels' world.

• 38:10Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. These days, it can be hard to find and hire the right candidates for your small business. That's why LinkedIn Jobs made it easier to find the people you want to talk to faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach the world's largest professional network of more than 770 million people. Focus on candidates with just the right skills and experience and use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified within your network and far beyond. Then use the simple tools on LinkedIn Jobs to quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. It's why small businesses rate LinkedIn Jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. LinkedIn Jobs

• 38:53Tim Ferriss?

  helps you find the candidates you want to talk to faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/Tim. That's LinkedIn.com/Tim to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 39:12Tim Ferriss?

  I have so many questions about your time with Greg. It's hard for me to even pick a place to begin. The first thing that I'll ask, which is probably the easier question to answer is, when you sent that email to your agent, did you still think the show was not going to work, but you didn't care because you were going to get an education? Or did you come out convinced that it had a chance of working?

• 39:38Speaker 03

  In the email, which my agent still sends back to me every once in a while as a reminder of like the beginning of this journey, I believe I said something like, I don't know if this show is going to work, but if it doesn't work, it won't be because of that guy. The reason won't be that the guy in charge doesn't know what he's doing. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But there's no one that gives it a better chance of working than Greg Daniels. And I, I had that instinct after that one meeting. I just kind of knew from the way he was talking about it and approaching it, that if there was a hail Mary's chance of this actually succeeding, that he was the quarterback who was going to throw the ball.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  So it really was based on, I don't know that I was immediately like, oh, wait, I was wrong. This is a great idea to adapt the office. I don't think I got that far. But I definitely felt like he was approaching it from a completely different angle than I would have ever imagined anyone would approach it. And I was right, he did, and, and that's why it worked.

• 40:44Tim Ferriss?

  What did you at that point, recognizing that's, and I'm going to use the wrong terminology, so I apologize, but that skit comedy is very different from what he was aiming to do. What did you feel that you were missing in terms of skillset? Or that you most wanted to learn from him?

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I was missing everything. The answer is everything because.

• 41:08Speaker 03

  The deal is, so sketches are single ideas, single comedic premises executed as quickly as possible. And then you have one big joke at the end and you get out. That's all it is, right? It's an observation about the world or a comedic premise that you introduce to the audience, develop as quickly as you can, milk it for all it's worth, and then it's a tissue you throw in the garbage. You pluck it out of the box, you blow your nose and you throw it in the garbage and it's over. And you don't have to worry about anything else. You don't have to worry what happens to these characters tomorrow. Who cares? Tomorrow's Sunday, there's no show. Right? So, so long form TV writing is a completely different animal. The thing that SNL can teach you,

• 41:54Speaker 03

  potentially that is relevant, is just how to be funny, like what's funny? What are funny ways of observing the world or things you've noticed about people? Or ways to write jokes, craft language, that sort of thing. But long form TV writing is you're establishing characters and you're slow cooking them over, hopefully, in the office's case, 200 episodes. These are not tissues anymore. These are like carefully honed and crafted dollhouses with like miniature furniture in them that all need to be properly sanded and painted and like placed in these really specific ways. And you have to keep coming back to them and you're building them. You're building this dollhouse slowly, piece by piece, brick by brick, over the course of

• 42:38Speaker 03

  a decade when it works, right? So all of that stuff was new, all of the whole idea of saying, how do you pace out a character growth over multiple episodes, multiple seasons? How do you establish interesting relationships and dynamics that you can go back to over and over again? What are the deep veins that you're, when you're mining the ore? Like, how can you tap into the deepest possible vein so that there's the most material there? All of that stuff was brand new and completely unknown to me. And by the way, to most people who were on the writing staff. And so that was what he was teaching us. What he was teaching us was this is not about being funny. Jokes are easy.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  If you get a bunch of funny people in a room and you say, hey, this is a scene where Michael Scott is leading a diversity seminar and he doesn't have any idea how to run a diversity seminar. You get eight comedy writers in a room. They'll come up with a bunch of funny jokes. What's important is why is he doing that? What is the like character trait that's led him to be the kind of person who thinks he has the ability to run a diversity's training seminar when he definitely doesn't? What are the circumstances under which he would try to pull this off in front of documentary cameras that are there documenting his every move? Why is he looking at the camera here? What's going on in Jim's life that he's in love with this receptionist named Pam and

• 44:03Speaker 03

  she won't, and she's engaged to this guy named Roy who he hates? How does that fit in? Like all of those layers, all that grist for the mill, that was unknown to me. And it was what Greg was so good at sort of imparting was this is the stuff you have to care about now. It's not about making a funny joke and then getting out and, you know, letting the audience clap and then like throw to the musical guest so they can perform a song. Like that's just not, that's not, that's the old, that's SNL. This is not SNL. This is an entirely new animal.

• 44:35Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so I'm going to follow up on the professor. I've read in, I think it was an interview of sorts, profile in Vanity Fair, this is from 2008, that one of the mission statements or the mission statement for the office could have been, let's make sure they're all changing, right? Speaking to that character development that you mentioned. You can't be too fast, it can't be overnight. It has to not necessarily mirror reality, but it's one possible mission statement. And what I would be curious to know, and if there's a better way of phrasing this question, feel free to answer a different question, but let's just say that the professor were

• 45:18Tim Ferriss?

  actually teaching a PhD class or a seminar. What do you think he would lay out in the first class or a few weeks of class? Are there any other lessons? An alternate question would be, can you tell a story about a specific instance?

• 45:35Tim Ferriss?

  Teaching moment that you recall while being at the office?

• 45:39Speaker 03

  This is a real how much time, how much time you got kind of a deal.

• 45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Cause I got as much time, as much time as you'd like.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  I'll answer both of the questions, which are different. The day one stuff, the PhD level class, day one, in the same way that a professor of Newtonian physics would say, would write F equals MA on the board and then everyone would scribble it down in their notebooks or type, I guess. This is how, this is showing you how old I am, that I'm still imagining people taking notes with a pen.

• 46:12Tim Ferriss?

  I still scribble.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  There you go. So the F equals MA of sitcom writing, it's stuff like, okay, here's what matters in stories, right? What matters is characters motivations for doing what they do. The plots having good twists and turns in them so that they're, cause comedy is all about thwarting expectation. And if people see something coming, then they'll, they won't laugh, being surprising. Escalation is another big one, right? If, if you see a story where the same thing happens two scenes in a row, you get bored. So whatever happens in the second scene has to be bigger and more intense than what happened in the first one.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  There are certain things that I think you would establish as F equals MA type rules that you would then undermine. Like you would say, there's a, there's a certain quality that executives like to refer to as likability, which is a kind of a reductive term, but it essentially means that if people, if audiences don't in some way identify with characters, they don't like those characters. And that doesn't mean, in the world we're in now, and this has been true probably since roughly speaking, The Sopranos came on board. And that suddenly the main character of the biggest show on TV was a sociopathic mobster who killed people regularly. You wouldn't call it strictly speaking likability, but you might call it relatability.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  You might say the main characters on a show or that have to have some aspect of them that people can see in themselves, or at least identify with, or say, I have a cousin who's like that, or something like that. Those are the amino acids, right? That's like the The fundamentals. Building blocks of life. Yeah. As far as teaching moments, there as many aphorisms as Lorne Michaels had about comedy, Greg has just as many. And there was, so I'll give you one example. So I wrote an episode of The Office in the second season that was about, it was a Christmas episode. And it was an episode where they were doing a Secret Santa. So they'd each drawn a name and they had, you know, this person is buying a little gift for this person and this person's buying a little gift for this person or whatever.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  And the premise, which was really funny, was that Michael didn't like his gift. Michael's gift came from a character named Phyllis on the show and she had knitted him some oven mitts. And he just didn't like them. He didn't think they were a big enough gift and he, and he had gotten, he had drawn Ryan. Ryan was the temp played by BJ Novak. He had drawn Ryan in the Secret Santa gift exchange draw. And he had bought Ryan a video iPod. So even though it's a classic Michael Scott thing, because there was a $25 limit or whatever. And he, because his, he was so desperate to be loved, just bought this kid a $400 video iPod. So he gave a video iPod to his person and then he got for his gift, a woven oven mitt and just lost his mind.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  And so he changed it from a Secret Santa to a Yankee swap, which is where you can swap your gift for any of the other gifts as another game, right? Cause he wanted to unload the oven mitts and get something better. So when I wrote the episode, I did this thing where I, I was like, okay, well, the reality, I've been a part of many Secret Santas and many offices and I, I know how you do it. You do a draw. So I put all the characters' names into a hat and I did a real draw. I said like, okay, Oscar is drawing now. And I picked out and it was Creed. Okay, Oscar's going to buy a gift for Creed. So I did it the way it would really be done. And there was a, one of the characters had Angela. Angela was a character on the show

• 49:42Speaker 03

  who was very uptight and fairly religious. And she was very prim. She didn't like to, she didn't curse. She didn't do anything that was sort of, she was just very, very uptight. And so I had in the script that someone bought for her a sort of vaguely Christian kind of self-help book. It was like Seven Habits for Following in the Light of God, or something like that. It was just like a sort of, one of those, one of those books that are perfectly lovely and helpful for people who are looking for some guidance in their lives and who are religious. And it didn't factor into the plot at all. It was just a detail of the script that that's what she got. And Greg was like, no, we should come up with something else.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  And I was kind of confused because I was like, it's not even a joke. We don't even make a joke about it. It's just literally like she opens the gift and, and then that's what it is. But he was like, yeah, here's the thing, though. We already know that Angela is religious and we already know that she is the kind of person who would buy a book like that, or would like a book like that. And what would be better is if there was something that were like overlapping, in the overlapping area of the Venn diagram of what we already know about her and what we can learn about her that would broaden her character, that would make her into a more interesting person, dimensionalize her a little bit. And so what we came up with was that she loved those kind of photographs

• 51:10Speaker 03

  that people take where babies are dressed like adults. You know, like, there's like, there's like a baby, there's like a weird corner of the photography world where it's like a baby, but dressed like a jazz musician with like a, with like a, like a fedora and like a toy saxophone. And somehow, I don't know why, but somehow that was like, that's perfect. Like, that is exactly the kind of thing that she would like.

• 51:36Tim Ferriss?

  How the hell does that come out of the ether? Did it just pop into someone's head? I mean, how did that, how did it land there?

• 51:44Speaker 03

  I can tell you definitively that I did not pitch it because I believe I was completely unaware of this phenomenon. But so it's that's why you have a room full of funny people because you just say, okay, here's the character, here's the subject matter, pitch on what she would like, pitch on some aspect of the culture and some I wish I remember too, someone pitched that and immediately was like, oh my God, that's perfect. I don't know why, but that's perfect. So, so we changed it to someone got her this poster of two babies dressed like jazz musicians.

• 52:15Speaker 03

  And again, it didn't factor into the episode in any meaningful way, but that poster with that was then added to the set. She put it up next to her. Later in the season, we designed an entire episode over the fact that another person who sat near her hated it so much that there was like an HR complaint lodged against her. And it flowered, it just bloomed into this thing that was that lasted for for years and years and years. And so Greg's thing, and this is what that Vanity Fair article is referencing was at the end of every episode of the show, you should have at least a little bit more information about some of the characters than you did before the episode started. And it doesn't have to be a huge thing. It doesn't have to be like, my dad

• 52:59Speaker 03

  was, you know, arrested as a serial murderer or something. It doesn't have to be some gigantic thing. It just has to be a little bit more than what you knew before. And as long as that's the case, the show continues to be more interesting and kind of grow and expand.

• 53:13Tim Ferriss?

  That was a fantastic example. Thank you.

• 53:20Tim Ferriss?

  That was great. I am going to ask you about the pitch for The Good Place and how it was pitched. Before we get there, though, I want to come back to, I don't want to say a throwaway comment, but a passing comment that you made, which was, you know, if I could only take five things from my house as it were burning down, and you mentioned the photograph of you lighting a cigarette for David Foster Wallace, what are some of the other things that would be on that shortlist? And why?

• 53:49Speaker 03

  I play this game a lot with myself. Here are the rules of the game if you want to play it with me. The rules are your family and your pets are safe. So you don't have to worry. One of those objects doesn't have to be a human being or an animal, right? And you assume that nothing in the house is going to be salvageable after you remove these five objects. So it's not, you can't hedge your bet. You can't say, I'm going to take these things and then hope that this other stuff survives. You're saying, this is it. The house is burning to the ground. You get five things, right? So I'm not actually sure. That photograph is probably top five, but I also have a copy of Infinite Jest

• 54:33Speaker 03

  that Wallace inscribed to me when I met him. That is probably, if I had to choose, that's probably the one I would take. I might take both of them. That would be, maybe that's too much David Foster Wallace. But I think I would take that book. I also, I'm a book collector. I collect first editions. So the rarest book I have is I have a first edition copy of Moby Dick. That is in incredibly good shape. It's really, really a rare copy of that book. Cause obviously back then, no one really cared about paper quality or acidic paper or anything else. This copy happens to be extremely bright and crisp. I would probably save that just because I feel like that would be cruel

• 55:17Speaker 03

  to let that burn up in a fire. Most of the objects, in fact, the only real objects that I care about, I think are probably books. So there's a writer named David Halberstam, who is a sports writer. He was a friend of my wife's family and he was a Red Sox fan. I'm a Red Sox fan. And in Christmas of 2003, he inscribed a copy of one of his books to me with a long message about how he really thought 2004 was going to be the year. The Red Sox had just gotten Keith Folk, a relief pitcher, and Curt Schilling, a starting pitcher, who they might put them over the top. And they just lost a heartbreaking playoff series to the Yankees. And he wrote this thing that was like, I really think this could be the year.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  And then it was like 2004 is the year they won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It would be awfully hard not to rescue that piece of, piece of literature from my house. So it, the answer is when I play this game is usually five books. Oh, I'll tell you, there's one thing that isn't a book that I would save, which is after The Good Place ended, I got a call from my agent that said, where are you? I need to send you something. And I was like, just send it to my house. And he was like, no, it has to be hand delivered. And I was like, all right, what is it? And he was like, I don't want to tell you what it is. Just, just wait. So a messenger came to my office and handed me an envelope and

• 56:40Speaker 03

  it was a handwritten note from President Barack Obama, saying that he had watched The Good Place and really liked it. And it was so like the, the cognitive dissonance, I guess you would call it of receiving that object and opening it and reading it in his own hand was so, my hand started shaking because I thought this is like, I shouldn't be holding, I should be wearing gloves or something in order to read this. But in it's, it's incredibly meaningful to me. And I framed that letter. That letter is also on my wall underneath the picture of David Foster Wallace smoking a cigarette.

• 57:18Tim Ferriss?

  Is it on White House letterhead? Or is, does it have a jagged edge? Is it from like a restaurant placemat?

• 57:27Speaker 03

  It's the back of a, it's the back of a Denny's menu. Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:34Tim Ferriss?

  Contrast and styles.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Even better. I wish it were. I wish it were on the, I wish he had done the maze on the front of the Denny's menu and then on the back had just written off, dashed off a note to me. That would be amazing.

• 57:45Tim Ferriss?

  How did your book collecting of first editions start? We're not gonna, don't worry, I'm not gonna spend an hour here, although I could, but how did, how did that begin? Like what was, what was the beginning of the collection where you're like, oh, oh, this is, this is now a thing for me?

• 58:02Speaker 03

  My uncle Steve, who now lives in Ireland, was a book collector. And he sort of introduced me to it when I was a teenager. And I've always been a kind of a collector of things. When I was a kid, my dad's former college roommate for my fifth birthday bought me a bunch of baseball cards. And to this day, I can recall the sense memory of opening the plastic around. They were, it used to be called rack packs, where there were like sort of three sections of cards. And I remember ripping them open. I remember holding the cards in my hand and flipping through them. And that tactile sensation of that is like incredibly drilled into my memory. And I became obsessed with them and I bought, I spent all my money on baseball cards and

• 58:46Speaker 03

  plastic sheets to put them in and I organized them and I collected full sets. And later, when CDs came out, like the feeling of buying CDs and holding them and opening, it's almost fetishistic in the way that I think of those collections. I just loved it. I just loved that feeling of like building a collection of something. So I was, I'm clearly predisposed to this, but my uncle bought me a couple first editions of books that I liked. And when you collect books, you get incredibly fussy about they can't be in direct sunlight and the humidity in the room has to be at the right level. And they, it's all this, it's all this kind of ridiculous hobby stuff. But one of the things you do is you take the book cover off and you put it in this

• 59:29Speaker 03

  plastic sort of Mylar stuff to keep it from getting spilled on or keep it dust off it or whatever. The feeling of that plastic in my hands, like and the sheen, the sort of like shininess that it made the book look like. I mean, it's literally no different than what libraries do, right? It's the library, it's that plastic that goes around the covers of library books. Again, something just kind of like lit up. It hit some pleasure center in my brain. And I started becoming a completist where I would say, okay, I have a first edition copy of Panin by Vladimir Nabokov, because I really love that book. But now I have to get all of his books.

• 1:00:09Tim Ferriss?

  You need the flight.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  And the whole thing, I gotta get all of them. And so there were certain authors that I just started collecting. And I just wouldn't be truly happy until I had gotten first editions of all of their books. And for a while I was doing this with no money. We did not have a lot of money growing up at all. And I had, I took on, like most people in this country, I took on an enormous amount of student debt. And yet it didn't slow me down at all. Like I was still like any money I had for my, for my student jobs. It was going right to like reused and rare bookstores. And I was scouring in the early, early days of the internet, I was scouring eBay for obscure copies of Don DeLillo novels that someone might not know the value of and stuff.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  So it just, it started from that. It just was like a thing that my uncle did who got me into it. And it's continued. It's only burning brighter as I age and now actually make money. So I can, it's dangerous. I have enough money to spend on these things now. And it's not slowing down if you're, if you're wondering.

• 1:01:13Tim Ferriss?

  Man, I would love to see your library sometime. That's for, I know, I know this is just a first date. So I'm getting ahead of myself, but in any case, we, we are going to get to the pitch for the good place. I promise. But you've mentioned a number of things that I have to pick up on. And you can make this as long or as short as you like. You mentioned sports writing. Can you please explain Ken Tremendous?

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  The explanation is not super interesting. I was in college and I was walking home from somewhere.

• 1:01:48Speaker 03

  And I'm obsessed with crazy names, always have been. Like, I loved Monty Python growing up. And one of the best things about Monty Python is that all of the characters in their sketches have bananas names. And I loved, loved, loved crazy names. So I think I was, again, this was like, something got rewired in my brain at a fairly early age. But I was walking home and the name Ken Tremendous popped into my head as a funny name to use in something. I didn't know what. It was just like, that's a funny name. Because Ken is kind of a normal, boring, straightforward name. And then putting the word tremendous after it just made me laugh. I went back to my dorm and I jotted the words Ken Tremendous down on a piece of paper.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  I thought maybe there was a short story or a comedy piece for The Lampoon or something where I would use that name. Later, when the internet sort of really began to be the place where everybody spent their time and avatars and handles, online handles became a way for people to cloak themselves. I thought, well, this scares me. The internet scares me. It's dicey. I don't really want anyone to like, track me or know who I am. So I'm gonna just do everything I do on here anonymously. And I chose Ken Tremendous as my sort of internet name. So when, I used to run a blog with a couple of my friends. But there was a sports blog called Fire Joe Morgan.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  That was us complaining about bad sports writing and bad announcing. On that blog, I was Ken Tremendous. When Twitter started, I was like, I don't know what this is, but I don't want it to be me. So I'll make it Ken Tremendous. And just everything I do online just became Ken Tremendous. And what's endlessly funny to me is that, first of all, long ago, stopped trying to hide the fact that that's me. Like, if you Google Ken Tremendous, my picture shows up. Like, it's not like I'm trying to pretend to be anonymous. But- About two or three years, I think, into being on Twitter as Ken Tremendous, they sent me one of those notices. It's like, we'd like to verify you. And I was like, but it's a fake name. What do you mean, verify me?

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  Like, this is ridiculous. And I was like, you know, I wrote back, like, on the DM thing. I was like, you know that this isn't my real name. And they're like, yep, don't worry. We're verifying you. And I was like, okay, so I'm verified on Twitter as an imaginary fictional personality. It's kind of amazing.

• 1:04:14Tim Ferriss?

  That is amazing. Ken Tremendous. Yeah, I remember when.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  It's a good name, right?

• 1:04:19Tim Ferriss?

  It is. When I was doing some, some original research before we even booked this and found, I found you as Ken Tremendous on Twitter. I was like, is this possibly accurate? You just never know, because on one hand, it could be. And, you know, I love these stories. I know a number of people are pretty well known, but they have these ridiculous handles because they, in the beginning, A, might have had concerns about security or privacy, or B, they were like, Twitter, this is never going to be anything, right? So then that's how you end up with like Angela Merkel's like Hot Fuzz 487 or whatever. I'm making that up. That's not a real example, but yeah. And you're like, how the hell does that happen? So I had to ask about it.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It is a very weird aspect of my life, but it is very funny to like, have an alternate personality. The backstory for Ken Tremendous, for some reason, is that he's a pension plan monitor at a made up company called Fremulon Insurance.

• 1:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  And, um, and I know that word for some reason. Why do I know Fremulon?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Well, Fremulon is now my, became my production company's name. So now at the end, yeah, at the end of all by shows, there's a graphic for an imaginary company called Fremulon. It's a, it's a whole, there's a whole other metaverse thing going on where there's a, there's a company called Fremulon and a guy named Ken Tremendous working at it.

• 1:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's fantastic. It's so good. You mentioned. The five things in the house you take with you, you're like, this is a game I play quite often with myself. Is that an exaggeration? Or is that true? And if it's true, why is that a game that you play with yourself so often?

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  It is true. And I think it's because I'm not a particularly materialistic guy. I'm not bragging about that. I'm just sort of stating a fact. I don't have a lot of things that I care about. Like, I'm not like a wristwatch guy, or a clothes guy, or a car guy. Like, I just, for whatever reason, I've never, I literally never wash my car. Never. Unless it's so dirty, I can't see through the windshield, and it feels like a potential death trap. Like, I just, because I don't care, and I just think like, it's a box that gets me from point A to point B, and I don't care what it looks like. And if they get dented, I don't care. The thought of like, spending money on car upkeep is bananas to me.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  And that, I don't hold it against people who do care, honestly. Like, if that's your thing, that's your thing. Great. More power to you. But because I don't, I have a lot of objects I care about, when an object enters my life that I do care about, it gives me a sort of moment's pause, or an opportunity to kind of reflect on what I have that matters, and what that means about me at a different age. When I was 25, what were the five things that mattered to me? How is that different from 35 or 45? It is weirdly a game I play a lot with myself. I've never really thought about why, but I would guess that it's like, a way for me to kind of check in on my life, to see like, what's in my surroundings

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  that, that has value to me, or that matters to me, and why does it have value to me, or matter to me at that moment, you know?

• 1:07:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do. Sounds like I, I need to play this five things game more frequently with myself. I wish I had done it and recorded it, though. Over time, that would actually really provide a lens, a lens.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, if you could go back, if you could go back and say, like, here's my list every year, and that would be a more, certainly a more effective way of achieving what I'm, what I'm hoping it's achieving, which is like, to give you some kind of pattern in your life, or to sort of give you some kind of path you can follow of like, here's where I came from, here's where I am now. Yeah.

• 1:08:10Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's, let's talk about one place you were, which is, I assume now, I'm not going to go play by play through the entire chronology, of course, because I think that people can do plenty of their own research on that. But the Good Place in the pitch, how did you, how did you pitch that? I mean, did you basically have carte blanche to do whatever you wanted? And therefore, you didn't really have to pitch? Or how did it come to be? And for those people who do not subscribe to my newsletter, I am a huge fan of The Good Place, wrote about it in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday, which went out to a few million people, long, long, long ago. And it was a real Trojan horse for me, because it was recommended to me as a funny

• 1:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  show. And that was it. And that's how I got started. Then I was like, wait a second here. This is a Trojan horse for all sorts of stuff that I would not expect. Emmanuel Kant, didn't see that coming. So what was the pitch?

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  When Parks and Recreation ended, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was still on the air. But Parks and Rec ended, and the people running NBC sort of said to me, like, we'd like you to do a new show, and you can kind of do whatever you want. It was one of those deals, and we will guarantee 13-episode season. Now, even today, the business has changed so much that that's far more commonplace today than it was at the time. At the time, that was a very exciting, kind of, oh, my God, like, they're not gonna make me do a pilot, and then look at the pilot, and then determine whether they're gonna put it on the air, and then order a small number of them, and maybe

• 1:09:49Speaker 03

  cancel it after five if the ratings aren't good. All of the sort of pitfalls of a new show were at least temporarily removed. So when they made that offer, which was very kind of them, I had a thought, which was like, man, I kind of owe it

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  To myself and I kind of owe it to the idea of being a creative force on television to try something insane, you know, like I had been doing, I had been doing something essentially the same at that point for a decade, which was writing stories about a group of people in a place on earth. The Office was a group of people in an office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Parks and Rec was a group of people who worked at a government office in Indiana. And Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a group of people who were police officers and detectives in New York City. And it was like, those shows were so fun and great, but they were within the same general umbrella. And I sort of thought like, man, I, I could do it again.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  I could come up with a group of people who were working on the International Space Station or a group of people who work at an ice cream parlor in Belize, but it feels like I've been given this opportunity and I ought to take a kind of crazy swing. So they really wanted a family show. I had never done a family show. And so I, being a good rule following soldier, I put a lot of thought into like, what would it look like for me to do a family show? And the truth is, there's not that much that's very interesting about my family. Like I'm from, I'm like a, I'm a sort of middle-class white guy who grew up in like a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  And there's a lot that's been said about people like me on television and my family on television. And so I had this idea, I had the nascent idea for The Good Place rattling around in my head and had for a couple of years, like it's in little tiny pieces. This idea had been kind of like bugging me. And so I thought about that and I started it excited and I developed it in my, on my own time. And it just became very obvious that like, that was the interesting idea. And of the many, many rules of creation or of writing that have been taught to me over the years by a number of very smart people.

• 1:12:19Speaker 03

  The best and most trustworthy is write what's interesting. Don't fake it. If you have to fake it, if you have to try to tell people that your idea is interesting, then you're dead, right? So like this, it just seemed like the best idea I had and the most interesting. And then that presented a number of challenges. Like, for example, how do you sell a TV network on the idea of doing a show that's explicitly about moral philosophy? That's a tough sell. And so I-

• 1:12:48Tim Ferriss?

  Right, question number one, what is moral philosophy?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And how does it work on Tuesday at 8:30 on NBC? So I did a couple of things to try to make it palatable to my bosses. One of them was I worked way harder and for way longer developing the idea than I think I would have normally if I were writing a show about six goofballs in an office somewhere in Pennsylvania. Although, pause for a second to say that Greg worked for an entire year on developing the office before he ever met with me or any of the other writers. Like, he put an enormous amount of work into that show. But my point is that I worked harder on figuring out what the story was for the entire season,

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  because they'd given me an entire season to work with than I would have normally. I had the entire season mapped out before I pitched it. The second thing I did is I talked to Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, who I wanted to play the main parts, and they had expressed interest in playing those parts. So when I went in to pitch the show, I said, here's the show, and I laid it out for them. I told them what the pilot would be. I told them what the themes would be. I told them what the general arc of the entire first season would be. I was, and I said to them- I've been working on this for a long time. If you have a lot of questions, answer them. I promise I'll have answers for you. Like, there's no aspect of this that I haven't thought about.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  I also told them that Ted Danson and Kristen Bell were, at least in theory, interested in being in the show, which helped a great deal, because once you have Ted, Danson, and Kristen Bell on your show, they don't care what it's about. Like, it can be about anything. Like, those are two big stars, right? And the last thing I did, and I think the most important thing I did, was I said, "Listen, this is a show about what it means to be a good person, and the engine for this, the mechanism, is the study of moral philosophy. And that's not going to be shoved into the margins. It's not going to be like a casual reference here and there. It's going to be the guts of the show. It's going to be in every episode of the show. One of the characters is a moral philosophy professor,

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  who is going to be like, teaching people stuff. And I know that that might seem like a risky idea, but I promise you, it will not feel like homework. It's going to be funny, and it's going to be entertaining, and I think that moral philosophy, in a way that no one maybe would think at first glance, is actually a very funny discipline to me. It's like, the thought experiments are really funny, and the people who invented these theories are really weird and funny. So I said, "I promise it won't feel like homework." Now, that being said, the third episode literally begins with the character Chee Dee standing at a blackboard with "Philosophy 101" written on it. And I was like, "Oh, boy." Like, maybe I spoke too soon.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  But that was how I not only convinced them to let me do it, but also tried to reassure them that I wasn't going to bore people to tears. That it was like, "I know this is a show about moral philosophy, but I also fundamentally understand that it's a half-hour sitcom on a major network that needs to have jokes and funny stories and plots that are entertaining." And I kind of just asked them to trust me, and they did. And it was really cool of them that they let me kind of take this wild idea and run with it.

• 1:16:15Tim Ferriss?

  You are very good at taking these thought exercises, right? Or these problems that philosophers are attempting to tackle and divorcing them from the "I'm so serious" kind of pedantic vocabulary that can just be so problematic. And the language that usually accompanies it, which is just impenetrable in some cases. And I really appreciated the trolley problem episode.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:16:48Tim Ferriss?

  Which people should check out. You mentioned that the idea or some semblance of the show was kind of percolating in some fashion for some time. Why was that?

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Well, I think because it's a subject that's that interested in me before I even really understood that it was a subject. Like the the concept of making ethical choices or trying to make better ethical choices than the ones you made, or coming into contact with ethical dilemmas and then wrestling with them. That was something that I always found really interesting. There was an event that happened in my life where my wife bumped into a guy going about one mile an hour in traffic. And there was a cop there. They were both rubbernecking, or at least my wife was rubbernecking at another accident that had happened next to them. And so there was already a cop there. So he saw that there had been this little kachunk and he came over and he looked everything

• 1:17:46Speaker 03

  over and he says, "I don't see any damage here." And my wife and this guy exchanged numbers and went on their way. And then we got a bill in the mail for $836, I think, because the guy said his fender needed to be replaced. And I kind of lost my mind a little bit because, again, I'm a dude who doesn't care about cars and I found this to be ridiculous and overly fastidious and sort of car culture just annoyed me. Also, it was literally the day of Hurricane Katrina, almost destroying New Orleans. And I had friends who lived in New Orleans and I love New Orleans. My wife and I had gone there on a vacation. Fairly recently before that had happened and it was just one of these moments where I

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  just kind of, I just lost my mind. And I said to the guy, I went and looked at his car and if you shined a flashlight on it, you could see that there was a little sort of L shaped, not even dent, like a mark, like a little tiny indentation. I think that my wife's license plate holder had just kind of pressed into his fender a tiny bit. And you could barely make it out. And I said, you know what? This is not $836 of damage. I know that that's what it costs to replace a fender, but this is ridiculous. And this is why car insurance rates are so high. And how about this? I said, I'll donate $836 to the Red Cross and we call it even. And the guy was like, I kind of want my car repaired,

• 1:19:13Speaker 03

  man. And I was like, well, that's my offer. Think it over. Tell me, tell me what you want me to do. And so I went back to work. I was at the office. I went back to work and I told everyone the story and then they started getting angry and being like, that's so obnoxious. Like, how can this guy do that? And then other people started going, I'll add a hundred bucks. Tell them it'll be $936 to the Red Cross. And then people started piling on, another 200, another 50, another 20, whatever. So then I was like, wait, there's something here, you know? So I, I started like a blog, basically. And I said, like, how much money will you donate to the Red Cross for the Katrina relief fund if this dude decides not to fix the bumper on his car? And it exploded. And it went to

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  $5,000, then it went to $10,000, then it went to $20,000. And it started circulating. And I started getting press requests from like Good Morning America and NPR and these places. And my wife and I were like, this is amazing. Like, we're gonna save New Orleans all by ourselves. We're gonna do it, you know? And then all of a sudden, like one night, like the second night or the third night, We were talking about everything that was going on and we suddenly both got like sick to our stomachs. And we're like, we feel bad and we don't know why. What, there's something wrong with this. This is bad. Oh my God, this is bad, but we didn't know why. And I was like, I need someone to tell me why what I'm doing is bad because I'm pretty sure it's bad.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  So I went on the internet and I looked up a bunch of philosophers who taught ethics. And I called them on the phone and was like, will you talk to me? I'm just this guy. Here's what happened. Will you talk to me about what I'm doing? And they all said yes, because it turns out, as I write about in the book, philosophers love talking about philosophy. Like, they're so, they're so excited to talk about philosophy at any hour of any day. So they sort of, in different ways, walked me through a bunch of arguments as to why what I was doing was bad. And by the way, some of them didn't think it was bad. Some of them thought, look, there's, Aristotle writes about shame and the importance of shame. And if you feel no shame, you have no sense of disgrace.

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  What you're doing is essentially shaming this guy into what you see as a better value system than the one he currently has. And I was like, okay, but also shaming people doesn't sound like a great way to spend your time. And they're like, well, no, it's not great to shame people like this and whatever. And so I just ended up having a dozen conversations about this. I talked about it to every, I was so annoying. I've never been more annoying in my life because this is all I could talk about. We went to a wedding, my wife and I went to a wedding and we sat next to this guy I'd gone to college with, who I knew was very smart. And I was like, hey, give me your take on this. And I told him the story and he was like, I'm outraged. And I was like, I know, right? And he was like, no, I'm outraged on his behalf. You're being an asshole. And I was like, oh no.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And so I just couldn't stop, I couldn't get over the idea that there was a right answer. That was my, both my main mistake and the beginnings of this, what's now a lifelong interest in the subject is, I was like, well, there's gotta be a right answer. And what I eventually realized is, no, there's no right answer. There's a bunch of theories that will say, here's why what you're doing is a little bad, or a little good, or more good than bad, or whatever, but there's no one, you're not gonna like suddenly turn a page in a book, read something and, and be completely satisfied that everything is answerable. Like, this is a complicated, weird, confusing situation.

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  So the effect that this had on me was to kind of coalesce years and years and years of what I would call a amateurish interest in the subject. It was a thing that I would like read an article about some ethical dilemma and be like, oh, that's interesting. I'm interested in this or something would happen in my friend group or with my family. And I would sort of, something would flitter around in my brain and I would think this is a subject I'm interested in. But it was very, very casual. And then that incident with this minor car accident and the way that I pursued trying to get to the bottom of what was right or wrong about it, something clicked into gear. And then it became a thing that I thought about all the time and that I really cared about and was sort of at the center of my life.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  And so that was, that's all the backstory for how the show came about. But it really is, I can trace the show to that event. And that event was in 2005 and the show started in 2015. So it was at least 10 years of kind of prep in, in some way or shape or form to get me ready to write the show.

• 1:23:51Tim Ferriss?

  So very important question, what did you do in the end of the day with respect to the bumper?

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  I talked to a lot of professors and professional types. And the last guy I talked to said, listen, I don't even really think this is a philosophical question. I think what I would say is you're kind of being a jerk to this guy and you shouldn't be a jerk to people. Those are the exact, he used the word jerk, which was a great old timey.

• 1:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  Did you call this guy out by name or did you leave him anonymous?

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  No, as I write about in the book, I made a couple of good decisions amongst many bad ones. And among the good ones I made were I never named him. I never showed a picture of his license plate. I never like sent, you know, there's.

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't dox him on the internet.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  But yeah, before doxing was a thing, I didn't dox him. So that conversation with that particular professor made me think this guy has no idea any of this is going on. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. And so I called him up. The way it had it had been left a mere like three or four days earlier when I had gone to see his car was because all this happened so quickly. So three or four days earlier, it was like, here's my offer. I'll donate this money to the Red Cross. And he was like, let me think it over. And we just sort of made vague plans to talk again soon. So like three or four days later, I think I called him and was like, hey, buddy.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  Let me explain what has happened. And I told him the whole story. I told him everything. I was like, I'm going to come completely clean to you. I told him everything that had happened. And I apologized profusely because I what I really realized is that the thing I was engaging in that made it so unfair was what most people today would call what aboutism. He was saying, hey, your wife bumped into my car and I need to replace the fender. And I was saying, yeah, but what about Hurricane Katrina? And it's like, all right, yeah, like I Hurricane Katrina is terrible. It doesn't have anything to do with your fact that your wife bumped into my fender, right? So I basically said, like, I'm really sorry. This was not fair of me to do.

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  I had cut him a check and it was in the mail. I said, like, their check is in the mail. And he said, okay, thank you. And maybe I'll make a donation. Maybe I'll give part of it to the Red Cross. And I was like, great. I hope you do, but you're under no obligation to do that. Nice doing business with you. And that was the last time we ever spoke. And so it was just a really fascinating, weird little moment that kind of, for whatever reason, ignited this thing in me that was like, I think what it made me realize importantly, and this really is what led to the book and the show, was the idea that like, these things happen all the time. That is obviously a fairly extreme example, but

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  we're constantly milling around and bumping into people and having kind of interactions that where one person feels slighted or wronged in some way. Somebody cuts in front of them accidentally at the line at the grocery store or pulls into a parking spot when another person was about to pull into the parking spot or whatever. That these little mundane interactions that we have with other people. Have, I realized, significant ethical dilemmas to them very frequently. And our choice becomes, am I going to care about that or not? I could not care about it. I could just say like, whatever. You could forget about it the moment it happens, move on with your life, never think about it again.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  But I felt like, because I went through that, I couldn't shake the idea, both that there are ethical components to almost everything that happens, and that we are better off when we pay attention to them and really try to untangle them and wrestle with them. And so, that was really the, 10 years before the show was pitched and written, was really the beginning of this journey for me, was coming to the realization that ethics matters, that I think that it's important that ethics matters and that you try to get to the bottom of these things when they pop up.

• 1:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  So, How to Be Perfect. So, we have How to Be Perfect subtitle, "The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question", which is tantalizing, to say the least. How did you decide to do a book, right? I mean, I think that most people think of you as a writer, but they would think of you as a TV guy. And books are writing, certainly, and one would hope, but they are a different animal. Why do a book? And I should just preface my preface by saying, I read, I read somewhere, I don't know for research for this conversation, a line of sorts that I just, I just loved.

• 1:28:37Tim Ferriss?

  And so, I'd love to hear you expand on it, which is, you would love the book to do for moral philosophy what a brief history of time did for astrophysics? I think something along those lines, which is a hell of a, hell of a goal. So, the mic is yours, wherever you'd like to go.

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  What I meant by that, and I was being a little facetious, because I think that book sold like 38 million copies or something. So, I don't want to, it was tongue in cheek. But what I meant by it, and continue to believe, is that that book, which I read when I was, I think, in high school, took this subject that most people would say, there is no way in hell I am ever going to engage with that subject. I am not going to spend my free time, my precious free time, reading a book on astrophysics about black holes and singularities and event horizons. And, no way, no way, I won't understand it and it's pointless, right?

• 1:29:35Speaker 03

  And yet, he had a way of making all of that stuff both entertaining and also fascinating without being condescending. Like, that was what's really remarkable about that book, is that he does not condescend to you. He says at the beginning of the book that he's not going to include any mathematical formulas because his editor told him that every mathematical formula he included in the book will reduce his audience by 50%. So he's like, "All right, there's only one mathematical formula that's equals mc squared. I promise that's the only math." But it wasn't like in a condescending way. He was just saying like, "Look, I get it. This is weird and hard, but I think it's fascinating. I've devoted my life to thinking about it, and I feel like you can get something out of this." And then he talked to you like you were a grown-up. He talked to you like you were an adult with a brain.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

  And I set out as my... that as my goal because I feel, after spending so much time wrestling with this stuff, again, in an amateurish way, I'm not a professional, I'm not an academic, I don't have a PhD, I didn't really even study this stuff in college, I just read a lot of it, talked about it a lot with a lot of people. I think that it's the kind of subject, like astrophysics, that people would think, "No way, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to understand it, it's pointless to even try." And when I was reading it, I had this thought that I couldn't escape, and the thought was, "These are the smartest people who ever lived. Generally speaking, they're among the smartest people who ever lived.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  Aristotle, and Kant, and Locke, and Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham, and David Hume, and all of these people, you would put them in the top millionth of 1% of all of humanity who have ever lived in terms of just brain power." And they spent their lives, or at least parts of their lives, trying to figure out how we could be better people. That was their goal. What is right, what is wrong, what's good, what's bad? How do we improve ourselves? How do we make the process of being alive on Earth as maximally good as they can be?

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  And yet, they wrote their books so densely and opaquely and at times impenetrably and boringly that no one wants to read them unless you're like a major, unless you're a philosophy major in college. Like, I remember thinking, it's like someone wrote a recipe for a chocolate chip cookie that's both delicious and helps you lose weight and build muscle mass, but the recipe is 600 pages long and it's written in German and no one's ever reading it. And if you could just kind of, if you could somehow take what they wrote, synthesize it and talk about it conversationally with people in a way that isn't condescending,

• 1:32:25Speaker 03

  but it is like engaging, that that might be of use to people. People might enjoy that. And so, the reason I wrote the book was that feeling mixed with a feeling, a personal feeling of when the show ended, simply that I wasn't quite done talking about this stuff yet. I just felt like I wanted to talk about it a little more. And the show was over and it's like, I wouldn't know what to do. So I sort of said like, well, what if I write a book that sort of summarizes all of the stuff that I feel like I learned as I wrote the show? And that's where we ended up.

• 1:32:59Tim Ferriss?

  Have you done any long form, really long form writing between thesis about David Foster Wallace and the book?

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:33:11Tim Ferriss?

  Legitimate question. Okay.

• 1:33:13Speaker 03

  Wow. Yeah, I have not. I haven't written anything longer than a feature film script since 1996.

• 1:33:21Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that, I think that that tells, that speaks to how important you think it is. And I'm going to push back just a little bit, in a sense, and that is you are not a professional philosopher. And I don't say what I'm about to say to insult any philosophers. I've had some on the podcast, but there is no bar exam for philosophers, Brad. And I think that you are. But the point I was going to make is that, you know, there's a quote that I wrote down, which I think you've invoked at points from David Foster Wallace. Novels are about what it means to be a fucking human being. And I think moral philosophy, in a sense, is also.

• 1:34:01Tim Ferriss?

  Could be described along those lines and you seem to me to be a student of humans, human nature, relatability, character, character development. So I, it strikes me that you seem very qualified, actually, to write such a book.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  It's kind of you to say, and to a degree, I think you're right, in the sense that I think that anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about the human condition and whose job is to actively observe it, interpret it, discuss it, write about it, engage with it, which is what the job of being a TV writer really is. Being a TV writer, if you are lucky enough to be on a show that lasts for a long time, you have spent seven years, eight years, 125, 150 individual episodes with the same characters and you have done that thing that Greg taught me to do, which is slowly expand their personality profiles and their worlds and their, their

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  sets of motivations and you've tracked them over big life events of sometimes getting married or having children or changing jobs or whatever. And it does, I think, first of all, you're drawing from real lives of real people you know, or real feelings that you and other people you know have had, or you're imbuing the characters with those feelings. But you also, at the end of the line, you really have this sense of like, I kind of get that character. I know that character really well now. I've studied that character. I'm fluent in that character in a way that you're rarely fluent with other people, other than those really close to you, a spouse, or a child, or a parent, or a sister, or

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  a brother. So I believe that you're right when you say that if you've spent that amount of time doing that, where that's your job, the observation of the human condition and the sort of interpretation of the human condition. imbuing characters on TV with those traits and those observations and that kind of stuff. And you have a secondary interest, even a casual one, in a humanistic discipline like philosophy, or it could be anything. It could be music, or academia, or whatever, that you're not necessarily a professional, but you at least are qualified, I think. You're qualified to talk about the subject in some long-form way. Now, that doesn't mean that

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  I want to go on live TV and have a debate with a professional philosopher about who knows more. Like, I think I would be in over my head to teach a class. Like, I don't think I'm qualified to teach a class. But to the extent that you're talking about just qualification based on just time spent thinking about something, then I think I agree with you. Because I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and mulling it all over.

• 1:36:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, also making it digestible, not just digestible, digestible and entertaining enough that people will actually ingest and think about what the hell you're trying to convey. I mean, as you mentioned-

• 1:37:13Speaker 03

  That's the key. Yeah.

• 1:37:14Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, if you go to any campus bookstore and pick up the required texts from like, Philosophy 101, or 201, or 102, or whatever it might be, I mean, good luck. I mean, if you want to get like a million people to read those books, like, yeah, best of luck. That's going to be a really hard task.

• 1:37:36Speaker 03

  That's the reason I wanted to write it. It's that, the exact thing that you're pointing out, which is, I think there's a tremendous amount to be gained from engaging with the basic ideas that a lot of these philosophers put out there. And not the real deep, intense, you know, philosophy, grad school-level philosophy stuff, just the basics, like, the very, very basic theories are really valuable and can be really helpful. But-

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  In many cases, even engaging with the basic ideas is really hard. And it's the primary texts are not, I would say, strictly speaking, enjoyable to read. Like, they're just not that fun. Pick up Critique of Pure Reason, flip through a couple pages and tell me how psyched you are to polish it off in your free time on the beach. Like, it's, it's, forget it. Like, you'll never, the average person, even the way above average person, who's more interested in philosophy than the average person, is not gonna read Critique of Pure Reason on a chaise lounge by the pool on his or her summer vacation. So that's exactly the impetus, really, to write the book, was like, if I can just relay

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  the nuts and bolts of this stuff as I understand them, and as some of my professional philosopher friends have helped me understand them, I think there's real potential value for people in terms of how it can improve their lives.

• 1:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  And I think the, the basics are the basics for a reason, in the sense that, you know, Michael Jordan would still practice free throws, right, at his peak.

• 1:39:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:10Tim Ferriss?

  Because there are certain foundational elements, right? They're sort of the, the irreduc-, I shouldn't say irreducible, but these sort of foundational pieces that have incredible utility. And then you can get into like the intellectual masturbation, stratospheric level, where it's like, okay, you wanna like hang out with Wittgenstein and talk about, you know, logicians and like, you know, it depends on what is, is, isn't it? You know, and you're like, oh, come on, like, we don't need 700 pages on that. Give me a, I need to go get some fucking groceries and I need to decide, and I think this is an example given, you know, whether or not I, do I take the grocery cart and put it back or leave it where it is? Like, okay, that's something I need to process today.

• 1:39:51Speaker 03

  Yes, 100%.

• 1:39:53Tim Ferriss?

  So, let me ask, if you could have drinks or dinner with any philosopher, alive or dead? Just for entertainment value, like, is there anyone who comes to mind?

• 1:40:06Speaker 03

  For entertainment value?

• 1:40:08Tim Ferriss?

  Not entertainment, no, no, you know, you know, let me redact that. Doesn't have to be for entertainment value. I'll leave it broader than that. Just drinks or dinner. You can choose one or two.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Okay, a lot of philosophers' lives are sort of unknown. No one knows what Aristotle was like as a guy. So some of them I have to like eliminate just for that reason. The name that comes to mind is Jeremy Bentham, who was an 18th century English philosopher, who is essentially the guy who invented what's called utilitarianism, which was very much in favor for a while, then completely fell out of favor and recently has come back into favor in academic circles. Utilitarianism essentially is do more good than bad. That's how you're an ethical person. If the things you do create more good or happiness or pleasure than they do pain or suffering or unhappiness.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  The reason I would want to have drinks with him, though, is because he was also a true weirdo, like a truly weird guy, who, when he died, he told his friend that he wanted his body to essentially be preserved and his head to be specifically preserved and his skeleton to be preserved. And he wanted to be put on display at this university in London. He didn't found this university, but he was a sort of spiritual founder of it. So he said, basically, stuff me like a scarecrow and preserve my head and put me on display so that as students for the next 100,000 years walk into this university, I will greet them as they walk in. So they tried to preserve his head and it didn't work.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  And his head, it was like disgusting failure and is miserable. So they, they created a wax head and they put it on his skeleton and they dressed him in one of his old suits. And he's still there. You can go see him. In his like wax head and skeleton and his suit are still at this university. And he was just a sort of oddball eccentric guy who seems like and in his writing, some of which is, you know, impenetrable in the way that a lot of 18th century writing now seems impenetrable, but some of it is really fun to read. And he wrote little fun poems, sometimes little jaunty rhyming poems about his philosophy. And he was a goofball. He was a weird guy. And I feel like he would be a very fun to like drink brandy with at some

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  like dark wood panelled club in England somewhere. I mean, there's a lot of philosophers that it sounds like it would be fun to eat or drink with, but some of them, I'll bet Nietzsche would be fun to have a meal with, but also he kind of accidentally helped create the Nazis. And so it would be hard not to bring that up over your chicken paillard or whatever you're eating. A lot of the philosophers in the book and a lot of philosophers in general, like a lot of people from the last 400 years are now problematic for a number of different ways. And I don't know of offhand, I'm sure that Bentham, Bentham also argued for a lot of things that not a lot of people argued for back then. He was a, I would say a proto feminist

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  and a big sort of equal rights guy. He was an animal rights advocate. He seems unbalanced from what I know of him, which again is not super deep, but he seems unbalanced to be less potentially problematic than a lot of the people that you might choose for this dinner you're imagining.

• 1:43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, you know, I wonder how problematic we will be in 50, 100 years, probably very. But let me ask you then, if you could have the call a friend or Siri feature for two philosophers, another way to approach this question would be if you could pick one or two to just rely upon.

• 1:43:55Tim Ferriss?

  Instructionally, and this is individual to you, but are there two who you

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:44:00Tim Ferriss?

  particularly identify with as finding tremendously helpful to you how in whatever sense that translates?

• 1:44:09Speaker 03

  Aristotle's the first one that comes to mind because Aristotle's whole thing, Aristotle created what is now called virtue ethics and his, he didn't try to write a rule book, right? He didn't say, do this, don't do that. This is okay. This is not okay. What he says is there's a number of things, qualities in a person, personality traits, call them what you will, and that that matter and those things are courage and generosity and magnanimity and things like that. And his goal was find the exact right amount of all those qualities. He called them virtues and he said, if you can nail that sort of like dead solid midpoint of all of these qualities, that's what a good person is, right?

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  So it's important that you be courageous. But if you're too courageous, you will be rash. His example is a soldier storming over a hail and trying to take on an entire army by himself and just getting shot. If you're not courageous enough, you'll abandon your, you know, at the first sign of trouble, you'll abandon your unit and flee in the other direction. And then that's not good either. So the key is be courageous enough to do your job, but not so courageous that you act rashly. So that process, I find the most forgiving of human foibles and weirdnesses and the most sort of humanistic of all the theories. I find it to be the most inviting.

• 1:45:33Speaker 03

  It's the most forgiving, I think, of the mistakes that we are bound to make as people because you're gonna screw up. He knows you're gonna screw up. You're gonna be too magnanimous or not courageous enough or too generous or whatever. And he sort of says like, that's okay. You're gonna blow it. Just check in, do an accounting of what you've done and then adjust and keep aiming towards that dead solid middle, perfect spot, right? So I find him to be the most friendly, I guess is a word for it, right? He's like the friendliest philosopher because Kant basically says, if you screw up, you're dead to me. Like, I won't even look at you if you make a mistake, right? He's just very, very stickler-y and

• 1:46:14Speaker 03

  Aristotle isn't like that. He's sort of like, hey, life is hard, it's complicated and it's weird and we're all gonna make mistakes. The key isn't whether you made a mistake, the key is what do you do now? Like if you've registered that you've been too much of this or not enough of that, next time, aim, get a little better. And that is just very lovely to me. I find that philosophy to be the most inviting. So he is definitely one of the two I have on speed dial if I can. He also, by the way, granted, he lived 2,400 years ago, but he thought slavery was totally fine. He has a lot of Aristotle writing that's like a defense of slavery and you're like, oh, come on, dude. Come on, don't blow this for me. I was so into you and now you're talking about how great it is to have slaves.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  But the other one would be William James. So William James, much more recent, lived in the late 19th century, early 20th century. His theory is called pragmatism. I also find pragmatism incredibly inviting. He didn't really invent it, but he kind of developed it. And pragmatism basically says the only thing that matters is what's true. Right? Like if something is true, then we can rely on it and we can use it. And pragmatism will use any means necessary to get at a fact, a truth, something that we can rely on and hold in our hands and know that it's real. So he doesn't say you have to be a utilitarian, or you have to be

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  a religious dogmatist, or you have to be a Kantian. He doesn't care what method you use, as long as you get to some kind of truth or fact and then base your decision on that truth or fact. And that, there's something just very lovely. I describe it in the book as the jambalaya of philosophy, right? It's like, throw everything into the pot, everything we've got, use whatever we can. He doesn't care what theory you use or how you arrive at the truth, as long as what you're arriving at is the truth. And so I really like that approach because in a modern world, I mean, for him, the modern world was 1896 or whatever. For us, the modern world is 2022. Things have already gotten so much more complicated than they were 100 years ago.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  But he was sort of looking around at an increasingly complex world and saying, we don't have time to only use one theory here. We gotta use all of them. We gotta use everything we have, every tool in our tool belt. We should be able to use. At any moment, in order to arrive at something that we can agree upon is true. And so I feel like on my speed dial, I've got Aristotle to just like rub my back and tell me everything's gonna be okay and then I keep trying, man, keep going, like putting, putting one of those silver marathon blankets around me when the world is too, is too wearying. And then I've got William James to be the guy who's like, all right, let's walk through what we know. Let's get to some kind of fundamental truth that we can rely on. And

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  I feel like those two guys would work well in concert with each other.

• 1:49:12Tim Ferriss?

  I have a lot of, I have a lot of reading to do. I've life, I'm looking forward to my, my first edition of How to be Perfect, I think.

• 1:49:22Tim Ferriss?

  I need a plastic, a plastic jacket and an inscription.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  You gotta get your Mylar, man. You gotta protect, protect that dust jacket. That's where all the value is.

• 1:49:29Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I do know Mylar because I still have every comic book I collected as a kid, which is several thousand comic books, all Mylar bagged and backed. Not that I've done much with them. They've just, they've really just sat there, but still.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  What is the crown jewel of your collection? What's the, what's the, if you could only save five comic books, what are they?

• 1:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you know, for me.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  I'm not a comic book guy, so this is all, this is all new to me. I don't know anything about comics. What do we got?

• 1:49:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, these are not, I mean, you keep in mind, I was, I was working as a busboy on Long Island and buying what I could with, you know, very meager funds. So I don't have any particularly valuable comics, I don't think. I would probably save the comics that introduced me to specific characters and specific artists. So a lot of Jim Lee, basically resurrecting the X-Men. I would save McFarlane. I would probably grab some Punisher War Journal. Long story. Things that had some.

• 1:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  Made some indelible mark on my childhood, which is the same reason I still have all of my Dungeons and Dragons. I have my modules. I have Fi and Folio. Dungeons and Dragons had a formative impact on my childhood. And for those wondering, gray elf was my particular race, preferred race. Dro elves or drow, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, were interesting to me. Chaotic good also preferred, but I'm getting into the weeds a bit. So let me, I completely lost track of where I was, but that's nothing new. You know, we're not really deviating from philosophy because philosophy is everywhere, even if you don't recognize

• 1:51:24Tim Ferriss?

  it. And if you decide not to care about philosophy, well, that's your flaw, I mean, that's part of your philosophy.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:51:33Tim Ferriss?

  Is deciding not to care. So it's sort of inevitable not to, I feel like all, all roads lead back to David Foster Wallace, but the commencement speech about, what is it? This is water? Or I can't, I can't.

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  This is water, yeah.

• 1:51:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Just so people aren't lost on the reference. I think he begins with this joke slash parable of two young fish swimming along and they pass an older fish and the older fish says, how's the water, boys? Something like that. And the younger fish continue on and then they go, what the hell is water? So.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent commencement speech. Actually ties into a lot of what we're talking about. But when we look at your bio, because you're talking about Aristotle and the marathon blanket and when life gets, it's tougher, when you're feeling particularly weary. When we look at your bio that I read in the introduction, I mean, it just seems like step up to the plate, homerun, homerun, homerun, just batting a thousand, right? That's, that's maybe the impression because that's what bios are intended to do. They don't list the mistakes and the failures. Do you have any favorite failures by which I mean a mistake, a failure, whether

• 1:52:47Tim Ferriss?

  it was viewed that way by you or by other people, that you learned a lot from that was particularly valuable, that set you up in some unexpected way for a success later? Anything? Do any failures come to mind, however you might define that?

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  I mean, I've never failed once.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  So no.

• 1:53:07Tim Ferriss?

  That's good because I was, I was, I was kind of trapping you. The how to be perfect title. Cannot, a book with such a title cannot be written by a charlatan. Please continue.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so my failures that are valuable are sort of smaller scale than you, I think, would think. There have certainly been projects I've developed, pilots I've made, show ideas I've had that never went anywhere. Like they, you go along the process, you're making them, you write the script, they say, no, thank you. You make the pilot, they look at the pilot, they say, no, we're not making this. Like that kind of failure is very common, very typical. I don't think that they have taught me as much as some, I guess what you would call smaller scale failures. So going back to SNL for a second. So here's how SNL works. On the Monday and Tuesday of every week, you sit around your office and you goof

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  around and you write sketches. And you usually, the way it usually goes is you stay up Tuesday night until like nine in the morning. You stay up all night and you write all night. And then on Wednesday, there's a read through. The host comes in and Lauren comes in and the cast sits around a giant table and the crew piles into this room. They read through 45 or 50 sketches over four hours and just one after another, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then there's a meeting afterwards and Lauren and the head writers and producers and the host all kind of pick, here are the dozen sketches we're going to do this week. So there's a specific kind of failure at SNL that is so painful and visceral that

• 1:54:44Speaker 03

  I still, and this is not an exaggeration, I'm not saying this for effect, I still have occasional nightmares about this particular failure. Okay. The particular failure is it's the third hour of the read through. Your sketch is number 28 in the rundown.

• 1:55:02Speaker 03

  Lauren reads the title of the sketch here. This title, okay, next sketch is, you know, Caveman Olympics by Mike Schur. And the people start reading the sketch and then whatever the joke of the sketches is sort of sprung, the first joke comes up and it dies, like no one laughs even a tiny bit. And what you know is that there's nine more pages on that joke premise coming. And, and the first one didn't work and all you have is nine more pages of it. And what happens next is the sketch is dutifully read by the cast and the host and the only

• 1:55:42Speaker 03

  sound in the room is the sound of like 110 people turning pages in a, in a sheaf of stapled, stapled paper. That's the only sound. It's just the like whoosh, whoosh, over and over again. And if you've ever wondered whether flop sweat is real, I actively flop swat, flop sweated so many times in those moments where I was like, I want to die. I want to get up and run out of the room screaming because this is so painful. It's all of these funny people. In my era, it was, you know, Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon and Tracy Morgan and Tina

• 1:56:23Speaker 03

  Fey and Jimmy Fallon and the funniest people in the world and all of your peers, all of the writers who were also the funniest people in the world. And you cannot make one of them laugh for one tenth of one second. And as painful as that is, and I experienced it so many times, as painful as that is, what happens is if you can survive it, you get to the other side of it and nothing bothers you. There's literally no kind of institutional failure that can faze you anymore. I mean, that doesn't mean you don't get upset when things don't work out. Of course you do. It doesn't mean you don't get sad or depressed or need someone to talk to or rely on, or

• 1:57:05Speaker 03

  you don't need Aristotle to wrap a metallic blanket around your shoulders when things don't go your way. Of course you do. But in the creative world. That pain, that failure, that weekly sometimes failure, just absolutely thickened my skin to such a wonderful degree that I just realized like, this doesn't matter. This is sketch comedy. This is all goofing around. This is silliness. It's not life or death. It's not the stakes of this are not the end of the world. The stakes of this are like, did your sketch work this week? And that really evens you out a little bit because then the flip side of that coin is you write a sketch and it kills and it gets solid laughs

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  all the way through and then it gets produced and you mount it and it works on the stage. It works in dress rehearsal, it works in rehearsal, it works in dress rehearsal. It goes on the live show. It works on the live show. You made the people in the studio laugh. Maybe even in a rare case, in my, at least for me, the sketch kind of gets like, goes a little viral, you know, like, you know, you see it pop up on the internet and people remember it fondly. When that happens, a thing you don't think is, I've nailed this. Like, I'm good, man. I know how to do this job. I'm a rock star. I've got this down. Like, because you know that your next four and a half minutes

• 1:58:29Speaker 03

  of brutal, silent, paper shuffling failure is one week away. It's gonna happen next week. And so it just keeps you in this range of reasonable reaction to the world that is pretty narrow and that you don't get a big head. Your successes don't make you into a monster and your failures don't make you into a, like, a depressive, a miserable person who complains and yells and screams and lashes out at people because it just is a matter of, it's a matter of course in your life. And I really think that kind of failure, especially at a young age for me, was so valuable and I, I love it. I love that failure. I love thinking about it and keeping it like, close to

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  my soul because I really think if you've experienced that failure, you cannot become a monster. And that's why not all, but the vast majority of people I know who went through SNL. Are really nice people. They're just nice and good and kind and they have a level head. And I think it's because we just got all beaten up and we ate that failure. We shoved that failure down our throats over and over and over again. And it just taught us that you can't ever let yourself think too much of yourself because you just have that institutional memory of failure, you know?

• 1:59:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that retelling just makes my palms sweat just thinking about it.

• 1:59:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:59:57Tim Ferriss?

  It sounds so bad, so bad. And what a gift also, right? To be over and over again.

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  Just, yeah, I'm telling you.

• 2:00:10Tim Ferriss?

  That you cannot take yourself too seriously, right? Because God, the consequences of that will be just so severe.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not just that you can't take yourself too seriously. It's that you are not God's gift to the world. And you know, I saw the greatest comedians of our generation bomb week after week after week. I saw Will Ferrell take huge swings and bomb. I saw Tina Fey take huge swings and bomb. And granted, their successes were much more frequent than mine or really anyone. Tina Fey's batting average on that show in the six years I was there was the highest of anyone's. And she probably hit 400, which is great for a baseball player and incredible for an SNL sketch writer. But for most people, if you failed at your job 60% of the time, you would be crushed. But because of the nature of the job and because

• 2:01:00Speaker 03

  it's constantly reminding you, this is an absurd way to make a living, right? Like this is ridiculous. You're, you're hanging out with your friends in an office and making jokes all day. Like, you can't ever get to a point where you get too worked up or too angry or too upset about things because it's absurd. And you learn to take the successes with a grain of salt and the failures with a grain of salt. And I really believe that that failure, for me at least, was a tremendous gift. And I'm so, so grateful for it.

• 2:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm glad I asked that question. Not that I'm taking credit for the answer. I can't take credit for the answer. But let me just ask a few more questions. I could go for hours, but let me ask a question that is very often, a question that leads to a dead end. So I will take the blame for that if that's the case. But here goes nothing. So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, non-commercial,

• 2:01:56Tim Ferriss?

  To get a message out to billions of people, let's all assume they speak English. It doesn't have to be a quote, it could be a question, it could be an image, it could be anything at all. Is there anything that comes to mind that you might put on such a billboard?

• 2:02:11Speaker 03

  This is what I think I would say, and this goes back to a thing I wrote about in the book. The last chapter of the book is about apologizing. And what I say in the book is, this isn't really ethics, you know, it's not like apologizing isn't an ethical question because ethics has much more to do with whatever it is that you did that make you have to apologize, right? Whatever you do, whatever you blew it, that was probably an ethical question, or in many cases was. So apologizing isn't really ethics, but I think it's sort of ethics adjacent. It's like I describe it as an exit interview after you've made an ethical decision that blew up in your face. Now here's your exit interview. Why did you do it? What have you learned? Try to heal the wound a little bit of whatever the action was that caused

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  this little problem. And what's interesting about apologizing, I think, is that everyone is bad at it, and I will absolutely include myself in this. No one wants to do it. Everybody flinches and holds back when you know you should apologize to someone for something, you never want to do it, you put it off, you procrastinate, you have a conversation with the person you should apologize to, and you just don't apologize to them. You're like, god damn it, why can't I just apologize to this person? It's a really hard thing for people to do because it's icky. It's like you feel shame and your face flushes and you get hot and you start sweating and it's just, it's a hard thing to do. But I also

• 2:03:35Speaker 03

  think that it's really important. And it's a thing that in my life, I've worked on really, really hard to get better at it, to become a person who recognizes when I've made mistakes and apologizes for them, not eight months later or 10 years later, but in the moment. I really try to be a person who says, oh no, I blew this and I made a mistake and I should immediately apologize and try to heal this little wound. I don't think I'm succeeding at least 100% or even 50% at being that person, but I think I'm better than I used to be. And it's not easy. And I'm very, very

• 2:04:19Speaker 03

  Understanding of people who have a hard time doing it. There's another version of a bad apology that we see all the time in the public sphere, which is when people say, "I'm sorry if you were offended," or something like that, which is not, "That's not an apology, man. That's not an apology. That's you saying, "I did nothing wrong and you're stupid enough to think that I did something wrong, "so I'm sorry you're so stupid." That's what that is. So, there's a lot of bad apologies. There's a lot of procrastinating. There's a lot of delayed apologies. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I think if I could put up this imaginary billboard or push notification or whatever, I think I would just say, the message would be, "Say you're sorry." And I would trust that all 5 billion people who

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  read it would think like, "How did you know that I have someone I should apologize to?" Because we all do. Everybody's got something to apologize for to someone. And I don't think that all 5 billion people would apologize for whatever they should apologize for, but I'll bet that some people, if they got a message from the netherworld that said, "Hey, say you're sorry," they would go, "Yeah, you're right. I should call Jim and apologize for that thing that I did to him last week," or whatever. That would be maybe the greatest chance of mass success on a utilitarian scale that I could probably achieve.

• 2:05:38Tim Ferriss?

  I'm now imagining in my mind, you know, driving down the highway, and there's actually a sequence of billboards. And the first one says, "Say you're sorry." And then the next one says, "I know it sucks, but it's important."

• 2:05:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And the next one says, "You still haven't done it. Come on, man. You know you gotta do it."

• 2:06:00Tim Ferriss?

  Todd May. So you spoke to a gazillion different, you spoke to slash harassed, slash pulled into conversation, many different philosophers, many different professors. Professor Todd May of Clemson ended up, as I understand it, being an advisor of sorts to The Good Place, also was involved in the book. What makes Todd special? Why Todd?

• 2:06:30Speaker 03

  The first thing that makes him special is that we were working on The Good Place in season two, and season two, spoiler alert, stop listening for a second if you haven't seen the show yet, that season two involves a Michael, Ted Danson's character, is a immortal being from the afterlife who is trying to learn essentially human philosophy, right? And we had this moment where we were like, well, how in the world is an immortal alien, whatever he is, gonna give a crap about human philosophy, right? He's eternal, he's an eternal being. Why would he care about whether you correctly interacted with a human being in some small moment?

• 2:07:14Speaker 03

  So we went looking, we were like, I wonder if anyone's ever written about the morality of immortality? What happens if you're immortal? Does morality matter? And turns out, someone did write about that, it's Todd May, and he wrote a book called Death, where it's very great, a great book, it's very short, it's like maybe 100 pages, easily readable, and he talks about how mortality gives sort of shape and definition to our lives, because we know that everything ends, and morality is what helps us make sense of those lives while we're living them. If you're immortal, then none of this matters. Like, if you're immortal, whatever, you make a mistake, big deal, you're gonna live for

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  infinite number of years, the memory of your crummy mistake will fade over time and it won't matter anymore, right? So he happened to have written this book that was about the exact thing that we needed to learn about at that time. So I read the book, and then I was like, God, this is a great book, this guy could really help us. I reached out to him, I had a Zoom meeting with him to talk about the book, and I found him to be the most lovely, congenial, intelligent, friendly, conversational person I had ever met, certainly within the realm of academia, but also maybe in life. Like, he's just a lovely person. And I said, would you ever want to come into our writer's room and just talk to us about philosophy? And he was like, sure.

• 2:08:39Speaker 03

  So he popped into our room, we did a Zoom meeting with him, he came to LA once, and he came in and talked to us about a bunch of stuff that we didn't understand, and he just became this kind of- It was like an emergency, break in case of emergency, like we would, if we had a question about philosophy, we would smash the glass, pick up a red phone, it would be connected directly to Todd May, and we would say, please, explain existentialism, and he would explain it to us, and we'd say, thank you, and we would hang up and go back to writing the script. And so he just became that guy, he and a woman named Pamela Hieronyme, who taught at UCLA, became our two go-to advisors. And when I had to write the book, or I wanted to write the book at the end of the show, I had just had such a lovely time working with him, that

• 2:09:23Speaker 03

  I said, I think I need someone who really knows his or her stuff, to sort of sit next to me and look over my shoulder and make sure I don't really blow it. That's the role he played. He was the guy who made sure that when I talked about philosophers and what they said, that I wasn't getting terribly wrong, and then would also explain to me a bunch of stuff I didn't understand. So it was just a happy coincidence that he happened to have written about the exact thing that we needed to know about at that moment, and then he just sort of joined the team and helped us out for the rest of the time the show was on the air.

• 2:09:55Tim Ferriss?

  Just so I make sure I'm getting this right, the other name you mentioned is Pamela Hieronyme, so that would be professor-

• 2:10:01Speaker 03

  Hieronyme.

• 2:10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hieronyme, as a philosophy professor, that is-

• 2:10:05Speaker 03

  Pretty great, right?

• 2:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible. It's so good.

• 2:10:09Speaker 03

  It's a wonderful name. Yeah, I know.

• 2:10:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's really outstanding. This has been a lovely and much longer-than-expected conversation, and I really appreciate you being so generous and patient with my never-ending stream of questions. The book, I'm very excited about this, How to Be Perfect, subtitle, The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, by Michael Schur, S-C-H-U-R, AKA Ken Tremendous on Twitter and elsewhere. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments, complaints, requests to the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up?

• 2:10:53Speaker 03

  I guess I would only say that whether it's my book or another book, and there are plenty of them, that I think deal with this topic. Well and conversationally, I would urge you all to do a bit of your own educational reading on the subject of ethics. I think that ethics is, I would so much rather that my kids take classes in ethics in high school than advanced math or biochemistry. And nothing against those subjects, but I think that the two subjects that are woefully undertaught in this country, and that are really the foundational underpinnings of

• 2:11:36Speaker 03

  everything that I think is important for the continuation of society, are ethics and civics. I think understanding the way governments work and understanding the way that ethics work and the way that we treat each other are vitally important. And I hope that whether it's from my book or from some other, some other survey or some other set of articles or anything, I really believe that people could greatly benefit from just the basic understanding of what these people said about ethics, how they work, the different theories that are out there, applying them to your own lives. I know that I have gotten a tremendous amount of happiness and satisfaction from just even when I do the wrong thing, which is frequent.

• 2:12:21Speaker 03

  I take a tremendous amount of pleasure from wrestling with the questions and from at least having some kind of scaffolding or structure that I can go to and think about and use to examine the problems that I face in my life. So I just recommend ethics as a life improvement strategy. I think they're really interesting and really valuable, and I encourage everyone to just poke around, even if it's literally reading a Wikipedia page or something. It really can, I think, be of great benefit to just about everyone on earth.

• 2:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. I fully agree with that. And I'm going to, so that last question was a false summit. I apologize. I'm gonna, I realize that I need to mention or ask you to mention something because I don't think you're gonna mention it without some prompting. What happens to the proceeds from this book?

• 2:13:14Speaker 03

  And when I wanted to write this book, I had two thoughts back to back. One of them was, that sounds really hard and really fun. And I think the fact that it sounds really hard and fun means I ought to do it. And the second thought was, it would be really weird to personally profit from a book about ethics and being a better person. So I am donating every single cent that I make from the book, from anything involved in the book, from foreign sales of the book, the advance, the royalties, the, any speaking honorarium that comes from the book, it's all being donated, 100% of it to charity, to one of five charities, potentially more down the line if Todd and I, Todd isn't on this too.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  I forced Todd to take a small payment for his professional time, but he is also joining me and donating the majority of what he makes as well. So the first payment went to the IRC, which is a wonderful charity that you can find at rescue.org that helps people in need all over the world. We're donating one-fifth of it to the Rainforest Trust, which buys and preserves rainforest land. We've got other charities lined up in the worlds of social justice and legal justice and World Central Kitchen was the second one I think we donated to. So anyway, we're donating, I'm donating every single dollar I ever make from this to charities. So that's another good reason to buy it is you know that you're also contributing to some good cause somewhere in the world.

• 2:14:41Tim Ferriss?

  I love everything about this, you know, which is premature because I haven't read the book, but I plan on it. But I have really enjoyed this conversation and I really appreciate you taking so much time. I know you have many options for what you may do with your time. And this has just been great. I really encourage people to check out the book, How to be Perfect, The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. If it only delivers 20%, even 20, 20, 25%, just think about

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  Think about how, think about how better off you'll be. That's right.

• 2:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything, including the book and anything else that we've mentioned. We didn't even get to the specific episodes of TV shows that you re-watch, like The Constant from Lost, or The Fly from Breaking Bad, maybe another conversation. But I find you to be very fascinating, very engaging, and a very good teacher, just from this conversation, which makes me very optimistic about this book, which is also reflected in the writing from The Good Place and Elsewhere. So I'm very, very optimistic about this. And for those people listening, you can find all the links and resources at the show notes at tim.blog/podcast, as per usual. And until

• 2:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  next time, just say you're sorry, goddamn it, just get around to it. And thank you for tuning in.

• 2:16:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 2:16:53Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day.

• 2:17:36Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:18:21Tim Ferriss?

  You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born. So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends.

• 2:19:05Tim Ferriss?

  Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA Weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Element came up with a very special offer for you, my dear For a limited time, you can claim a free Element sample pack. You only cover the cost of shipping. For US customers, this means you can receive an eight-count sample pack for just $5. Simply go to drinklmnt.com/tim. That's drinklmnt.com/tim to claim your free eight-count sample pack.

• 2:19:46Tim Ferriss?

  One more time, that's drinklmnt.com/tim for this exclusive offer. drinklmnt.com/tim. Check it out. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all, be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything, seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on.

• 2:20:29Tim Ferriss?

  Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side in like a super soft bed. No problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com/tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty and you get to try it out for 100 nights, risk-free.

• 2:21:13Tim Ferriss?

  They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com/tim. That's helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim for up to $200 off. So, check it out. One more time, helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim.