0
SPEAKER_00
By the way, your producer s name is also Jason, so what other elements of your show have you taken from The Art of Charm?
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SPEAKER_01
That s exactly right.
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I ve stolen all of it.
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SPEAKER_00
This is The Art of Charm.
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SPEAKER_00
Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
0
SPEAKER_00
We have an incredible guest today.
0
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He s the co-creator of Rounders and Ocean s 13, and most recently, Showtime s Billions.
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He s also the host of a podcast called The Moment.
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We re going to talk with Brian Koppelman about the creative process, finding co-creators inside the writer s room and inside the brains of highly successful creative people.
0
SPEAKER_00
and how to get past creative blocks or even bigger blocks if you don t feel like you re doing what you re meant to be doing in your career or creative endeavors, and also some behind the scenes on Showtime s Billions that will really resonate with AOC fans.
0
SPEAKER_00
And with that, welcome to the Art of Charm.
0
SPEAKER_00
I m Jordan Harbinger.
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The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work.
0
SPEAKER_00
Imagine having a mix of experienced mentors teaching you their expertise
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SPEAKER_00
packing decades of research, testing, and tough lessons into a curriculum.
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SPEAKER_00
We may not have all the answers, but we certainly have all the questions.
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SPEAKER_00
Make sure to stay up to date with AOC and get some great stuff that we don t or can t share on the show by signing up at theartofcharm.com or text charmed to 33444, that s charmed, to 33444.
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We ll send you our fundamentals toolkit that covers topics like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, business networking, public speaking, negotiation, and a whole lot more.
0
SPEAKER_00
I m also doing regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
0
SPEAKER_00
I also want to encourage you to join us in the Social Capital Challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or again, text charmed to 33444.
0
SPEAKER_00
This will make you a better networker, it will make you a better connector, and of course, you can invite your friends as well.
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SPEAKER_00
But in the meantime, let s talk to Brian Koppelman.
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SPEAKER_00
I noticed also that you went to Fordham Law.
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SPEAKER_00
Are you a non-practicing lawyer like me as well?
0
SPEAKER_01
Yes, that s correct.
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SPEAKER_00
Does that skill set come in handy for you?
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SPEAKER_00
Have you noticed like, oh, I learned about this in law school?
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SPEAKER_01
My wife and I were talking about this today because we walked past Fordham Law School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
0
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We talked about the fact that I never used it professionally, and I never was a lawyer for a day in my life.
0
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But she said to me, but that character in Rounders never would have shown up if you hadn t met that professor at law school.
0
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And so right from the beginning of the fact that we set Rounders,
0
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You know, we set the main character at law school as a law school student at night, as I was, and gave him a professor very similar to a professor I had, a guy who used to stay up all night drinking gin.
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So no matter what, it paid dividends.
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It also pays dividends in a system of thought that I find really valuable, and it taught me how to write on deadline, another skill that I think is really valuable, and it gave me a contact base.
0
SPEAKER_01
So for me, law school was a win in every way, especially because I knew early on I wasn t going to practice law, so I didn t have any grade pressure.
0
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focused on stuff that was interesting to me.
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I knew I could do enough to get through law school and do fine, but I wasn t grinding.
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I was there to pick up stuff that would be useful to me and to make relationships.
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SPEAKER_00
and not having that same grade pressure, because I, too, knew I wasn t going to be a practicing attorney, at least not for very long, and so it was easy for me to go, oh, there s a test in a week.
0
SPEAKER_00
Well, yeah, I should look over everything, and I ll be pretty complete about studying for it, whereas other people were staying up for four nights in a row, trying to out-compete each other, worrying themselves sick, literally, a lot of the time.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, one of the great benefits of being a bright, entertaining person in that setting is that the really grindy students were happy to share all their stuff with me.
0
SPEAKER_01
I would show up at their study sessions, I would make them laugh, I would tell them good stories, I would give them life advice, because I was already out in the world, and they would then teach me over two days all the stuff that I had missed during the semester.
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This is uncanny.
0
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This is exactly how I got through law school.
0
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I m sure it is.
0
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It s the same thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was really like, and there were I wasn t there as you weren t, I wasn t trying to learn life lessons.
0
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But I did end up, you know, you just saw I just saw that sort of, as always, is the case.
0
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And it s surprising each time you learn it as you when you re young, being a genuinely good person, meaning not looking to get over on anyone, just listening, sharing a laugh, telling a good story.
0
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Even when you re not in any way being calculating that stuff,
0
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lands on people.
0
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They look at you and they go, Jordan s a good dude.
0
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Jordan, are you ready for the torts test?
0
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You re like, dude, I m so fucking not ready for the torts test.
0
SPEAKER_01
All right, come here.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is my outline.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is an outline the kid from two years before gave.
0
SPEAKER_01
Read that.
0
SPEAKER_01
Meet me tomorrow at nine.
0
SPEAKER_01
We re all meeting here.
0
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It ll help me to teach you torts or remind me of what I don t know.
0
SPEAKER_01
And then it d be like, all right, fantastic.
0
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I ll show up at nine.
0
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Then, you know, you show up at 845 and you bring the fucking donuts and everybody loves you and you pass.
0
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and you re not competing with them for grades.
0
SPEAKER_00
They re like, ah, well, what could we teach him in three days that s gonna endanger our curve?
0
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Nothing.
0
SPEAKER_00
Right, and like you, you know, you still walk out of there with plenty of A s and B s.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yep, exactly.
0
SPEAKER_00
I noticed something that you had written, and it sort of surprised me, actually, and I m not sure in what context this was now that I look at it.
0
SPEAKER_00
I sort of clipped it out.
0
SPEAKER_00
You said, if you do something great, people will notice, and I was wondering if you really believe that in the context of, say, podcasting or show writing, because I think,
0
SPEAKER_00
It seems like now there s so much media that doing something interesting is no longer good enough.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, alright, but you just changed the key word.
0
SPEAKER_01
Right, you read me my quote and you said, doing something great.
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And then when you said it back, you said, just doing something interesting isn t good enough.
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I didn t say do something interesting, I said do something great.
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And another word that you could use to substitute for great in the way that I mean great is undeniable.
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And so I think that we focus so much on the hustle that sometimes we forget to focus on the work.
0
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And that if, yes, I am idealistic, but that idealism is born from the facts that I have witnessed and the success that I have had, when I always just go back to the fact
0
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that i went in the basement with my best friend and wrote a screenplay and we didn t come out of the basement until we knew we had an undeniable screenplay and the fact that we know it was undeniable meant that we could bear
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the rejections that came, because rejections always come, right?
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Because people who are in the market, the buyers, the supposed experts, are very comfortable saying no.
0
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And in fact, they re so comfortable saying no that they say the no very often before they even look at the work and regard it.
0
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But if you somehow are able to know you ve put everything you had into it, you ve used all your skills and all your effort, and also you applied tremendous rigor
0
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and that the thing itself is objectively undeniable, then yeah, I believe that that work transcends.
0
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I was just sitting here before this podcast started, Jordan, and I was playing acoustic guitar.
0
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I m a bad acoustic guitar player, but I love to play and sing.
0
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I was playing an old Garth Brooks song, Much Too Young to Feel This Old.
0
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I had the opportunity to spend a few days with Garth, and Garth told me the story that I was like, wow, man, when you wrote that song, everything must have changed.
0
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And he said, well, when I wrote that song, I knew I had done it.
0
SPEAKER_01
But I got up at the Bluebird, and I played that song for like four months in a row, and people walked in and passed on me.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I said, well, what do you mean people passed on you?
0
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You re Garth Brooks.
0
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Like, when you took the stage, you were Garth Brooks, and you had this song?
0
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And he said, yeah, but I knew.
0
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I said, how d you know?
0
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He said, because I had the song and I m Garth Brooks.
0
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And so I do think that when you have written much too young to feel this damn old, the world will find you if you don t give up.
0
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, this is so interesting, Brian, because, you know, when you talk about the word undeniable, I feel like there are two different, you know, ways to anchor that one is undeniable to you the way that your script was undeniable to you and David, and then there s undeniable to other people, like, for example, the agents who initially passed on rounders when you first sent it out, and that later became kind of part of your armor, you know, as you continue to take out your work.
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So how do people like you and how do you think artists should think about
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understanding when their work is undeniable in the absolute sense.
0
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Sure.
0
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Well, I ve said this before, but it s really true, right?
0
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The line between being an artist and being delusional is very thin.
0
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And often you don t know until years later, which you were.
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So I accept that in the arts, it can be difficult.
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That said, I always say like, it s binary, right?
0
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You re either crazy or you re not.
0
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So let s say you re not for the sake
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If you re crazy, I can t help you.
0
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But if you re not crazy, if in other areas of your life, people think that you re smart, rational, somebody that they can reason with, then you can find people to help you determine when the work is undeniable.
0
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Also, if you re a sane person, that little voice inside tells you the difference.
0
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You can deny it.
0
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It s like when you meet somebody,
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That saying that people tell you who they are in the first 10 minutes or the first half hour, it s true.
0
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But we ve trained ourselves sometimes to ignore it, right?
0
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Because it s the sad reality of that first 10 minutes on a date when you realize that person isn t for you.
0
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You kind of fool yourself and have another drink.
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Oh, and she laughed.
0
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And you know what?
0
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I can make this work.
0
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Well, if you want to be successful in the arts, you ve got to get rid of I can make this work.
0
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And you have to be willing to put a real cold eye toward the work, why you re doing it, what you re doing.
1
SPEAKER_02
So yeah, it s like an investor doing a channel check or something.
1
SPEAKER_02
You have to find ways.
1
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One of the ways you do it is by, let s say you want to be a screenwriter, but it applies if you want to be a novelist or you want to be a ballerina.
1
SPEAKER_02
If you want to be a screenwriter, read 1,000 screenplays and watch 1,000 movies, and then you will have a frame of reference for the work if you re honest enough with yourself.
1
SPEAKER_02
And so, yes, that is a lesson I learned and applied to my own work and apply it all the time.
1
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I mean, people ask me how I knew that billions, it would be a good idea to write billions on spec.
1
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I don t know we ll get to that.
1
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And how I knew when we finished it, that it was right.
1
SPEAKER_02
And the answer is like, I have the reps, right?
1
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I ve done the reps.
1
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I ve done reps for years and years and years in terms of thinking about doing the work, revising the work, applying rigor to the work, so that I m not looking at it with just boundless enthusiasm.
1
SPEAKER_02
I m looking at it with a clear and cold eye.
1
SPEAKER_02
And also, another aspect of this that I think is crucial is knowing yourself is really important.
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you guys talk about it.
1
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You have to know who you are.
1
SPEAKER_02
So I know that, say, the first 24 to 36 hours after I write a scene, you can t talk to me about that scene, because that scene is fucking perfect, man.
1
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It s the greatest, funniest, most important scene ever written.
1
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For those first 24 hours, if you try to get me to change a line, I might punch you in the face.
1
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But I know that about myself.
1
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So I won t show it to you until it s 48 hours or 68 hours from now when I m ready to look at it and go, oh, you know what?
1
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One line of that scene is useful.
1
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The rest is garbage.
1
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Because I know that to get the work done, I have to basically put myself in a state of hypnosis that prevents me from really evaluating its quality right away.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I know that that effect lasts for about 24 hours.
1
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So I don t try to revise or look at it or judge it for that period of time.
1
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I hope that by the time I come back to it, I m cool enough to be able to look at it fairly.
1
SPEAKER_00
Does that make sense?
1
SPEAKER_00
It does, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
It seems like, is that where the whole maybe not so superstitious superstition comes from?
1
SPEAKER_00
Where creators and artists and writers always say, never talk about work in progress.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is that part of why they don t do that?
1
SPEAKER_02
I think that s part of it.
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, Hemingway used to talk about, don t talk the book away.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s a famous sort of Hemingway quote.
1
SPEAKER_02
Like some people, it helps them to put, it s funny because that s in conflict.
1
SPEAKER_02
Like Tony Robbins sometimes says,
1
SPEAKER_02
that it s good to put the pressure on yourself by telling other people that you re working or what you re working on.
1
SPEAKER_02
I remember when we were writing rounders, I didn t tell people what it was about or what we were doing, but I did tell people I ve committed to two hours every morning to go into the basement because I wanted to put that pressure on myself.
1
SPEAKER_02
But yeah, I certainly would say you don t want to show stuff around until you re really sure that you can handle it and you re ready.
1
SPEAKER_00
What does writing do for you besides pay the bills?
1
SPEAKER_00
I would imagine that in order to create something undeniable that you think is bulletproof, there has to be a fire in there that s more than just, okay, I m gonna grind this out because I need a project.
1
SPEAKER_02
Oh, yeah, that s 100%.
1
SPEAKER_02
Man, I can t say I ve never written anything for money.
1
SPEAKER_02
But I can say I pretty much never written anything good for money.
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, Samuel Johnson famously said anyone who writes for anything other than money is a blockhead.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I understand that.
1
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That s talking about professionalism and being a professional.
1
SPEAKER_02
But every one of the important or really good screenplays, movies, TV shows that
1
SPEAKER_02
I ve been a part of, have come from an incredible amount of curiosity and fascination with the subject, and an incredible desire to share what I found with others.
1
SPEAKER_02
That I looked around at the world of poker players, underground poker players, and I felt like I was looking at modern day gunslingers, and I didn t have people to talk about, you know, only my, Dave, my lifelong best friend, and my wife, Amy, I could tell them about it, I d go to a poker club and tell them about it, but I knew
1
SPEAKER_02
This is something that will fascinate a lot of people.
1
SPEAKER_02
Same with years and years that we put into researching the hedge fund world and United States attorneys for billions.
1
SPEAKER_02
It was like, wait a second, these people exist.
1
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They walk among us.
1
SPEAKER_02
They re like nation states, but they re people.
1
SPEAKER_02
I have to share what I ve learned.
1
SPEAKER_02
Holy shit, listen to how these people talk.
1
SPEAKER_02
Look at how they conduct themselves.
1
SPEAKER_02
I have to tell everybody about this.
1
SPEAKER_02
How do I do that?
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, the thing I know how to do is do it in a fictional construct.
1
SPEAKER_02
Set up challenges for these characters and watch them fight through it.
1
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So, yeah, 100%.
1
SPEAKER_02
Now, that s just the way I work.
1
SPEAKER_02
Like, other people don t work that way, but the way that I have to work from a place of fascination, curiosity, and boundless enthusiasm.
1
SPEAKER_00
I completely agree with the sentiment that it has to be enthusiastic, but it has to go to almost pathological levels with some of this stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because you re swimming upstream against people that are actively, not just the current resisting you, there are people constantly going against you.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I ve noticed you re very critical as well of these so-called screenwriting experts that don t write themselves, and these sort of gurus that creators and artists and entrepreneurs are filtering in and out.
1
SPEAKER_00
What role do those people play in your world, these so-called experts, and how do us as creators and artists and entrepreneurs, how do we evaluate and filter in the right things and filter out the armchair quarterback who just wants our money?
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, I think the armchair quarterback is easy to filter out, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, you just look and see what kind of work they re producing.
1
SPEAKER_02
Like, to me, I read Sidney Lumet s books, and I read David Mamet s books, and I read William Goldman s books, you know, and Spike Lee s books, like books by people who made work that I loved.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I was not at all interested in the work by people who just talked about it from a perch that they said that they d earned.
1
SPEAKER_02
But when I would look and see, well, what work have they produced, there was no work produced.
1
SPEAKER_02
The reason that I get really annoyed about supposed screenwriting experts
1
SPEAKER_02
is because, to me, they re con men, they re charlatans, they re in a Radisson somewhere trying to tell you what genre you should write in, but they ve never written anything.
1
SPEAKER_02
And they take people s money, and I feel like it s completely illegitimate to do that, and it s morally wrong to do it.
1
SPEAKER_02
I love self-help, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
I ve used it.
1
SPEAKER_02
Tony Robbins has been an incredible help to me.
1
SPEAKER_02
My friend Seth Godin has been an incredible help to me.
1
SPEAKER_02
But these are people who do a tremendous amount of work, and you can just see it.
1
SPEAKER_02
You pick up Seth Godin s book, The Dip, and it s just immediately apparent that
1
SPEAKER_02
telling you the truth about something, a discovery that he really made.
1
SPEAKER_02
He s not guessing.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I guess that s a big part of it, is I want information from people who aren t guessing, from people who came by the information the hard way, like by searching.
1
SPEAKER_01
Right, right, you want the real deal, because there s something unique about screenwriting that attracts that figure in the ecosystem who s there to tell you how to do it, but isn t necessarily doing it himself.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that authenticity, I think, actually carries into so much of your work.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we could talk about
1
SPEAKER_01
Almost any project you ve taken on, but Billions in particular, is so steeped in the details of Wall Street, of the AG s office, of all these many worlds that come together to conspire to create the plotlines of that show.
1
SPEAKER_01
Tell us a little bit about how you think about research, and just to call it what it is, I feel like at times you re just obsessed in the most wonderful way.
1
SPEAKER_01
You get off on the reality of worlds, on authenticity.
1
SPEAKER_01
So tell us about that in the writing process.
1
SPEAKER_02
Well, yeah, thanks.
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, there s nothing better than uncovering a jewel like that.
1
SPEAKER_02
You know, I was watching Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern.
1
SPEAKER_02
And there was a big tuna head that he had.
1
SPEAKER_02
And he went inside with this incredible amount of enthusiasm.
1
SPEAKER_02
He s like, ah, the part I want
1
SPEAKER_02
is like the inside of the eye the muscle that moves the eye because that it tastes like the sea and the way that that guy went after it was like you know how many years and how much time it took him to know that the muscle inside the eye is the thing that you want when it s prepared a certain way
1
SPEAKER_02
And i m always looking for that in any world that i m exploring as a writer right i m looking for that thing that is that maybe someone else thinks is gross or off putting or that they take for granted like i want to earn those special details and because i can take these people.
1
SPEAKER_02
Many of them are like genius level like you.
1
SPEAKER_02
and a level of ambition and need to have success that I can t quite understand, that I m somebody who obviously has wanted to be successful and worked for this success in an incredibly impossible industry in which to have it, but I can picture myself becoming satisfied, like feeling like this is enough, or wow, this is an incredible ride I m on, or how lucky I am, and then I would watch these people
1
SPEAKER_02
with someone who has 300 million and it s not enough, and 500 million and they need more, and a billion, but that other guy has two billion and they have to have more than that.
1
SPEAKER_02
So to me, the challenge of how do I get next to those people?
1
SPEAKER_02
How do I get those people to want to tell me about their lives?
1
SPEAKER_02
How do I become a person that they want to confide in?
1
SPEAKER_02
How do I then want to be able to take that and honor them by telling their story in a way that feels true to them?
1
SPEAKER_02
There s just something about that that really fucking turns me on, man.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s obvious.
1
SPEAKER_01
And let s talk about that too.
1
SPEAKER_01
So when you get in the room with these guys,
1
SPEAKER_01
you re trying to get information that not only nobody else has uncovered, you know, in television, at least, but information potentially that might not be very favorable to them that might not look great or sound greater, you know, make them look like heroes.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s the good stuff.
1
SPEAKER_01
So how do you open these guys up?
1
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, great question.
1
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it s a lot of the stuff that you guys talk about on the show, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
First of all, I m not in there to f*** them over in any way, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
Like I said, I m in there to honor who they are and their experience.
1
SPEAKER_02
I m never going to use their names.
1
SPEAKER_02
I ve never told anybody who I sat down with.
1
SPEAKER_02
You can t find an interview anywhere where I ve talked about who the billionaires are that I ve spent time with.
1
SPEAKER_02
So they know that I m going to give them total
2
SPEAKER_03
anonymity, they know that if they say, hey, this one piece is not something you can use, even fictionalized, I m going to be cool with that.
2
SPEAKER_03
And also, I m not in there judging them.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, people don t like to feel judged, they want to feel understood.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so if I m in there with a posture of, hey, I want to understand how this all works,
2
SPEAKER_03
you re amazing how did you do that tell me about this deal tell me about a fucked up time you walked into a room and somebody underestimated you were you good in school what teacher did you want to see you know you guys know you re just in there trying to find that little magical switch that will suddenly turn them on feel like you understand them and get them to want to
2
SPEAKER_03
prove to you or show you that you re on the same wavelength.
2
SPEAKER_03
And because I m genuinely fascinated, that s part of the answer to the earlier question.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m not in there unless I m already totally engaged in this search and in this need to discover something about a world that I find compelling.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so they feel that coming off of me too, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
They feel that Dave and I, Dave, my lifelong best friend and writing partner, I mean, they feel us in there
2
SPEAKER_03
with passion and enthusiasm and commitment and without judgment.
2
SPEAKER_03
And you know, you have to be willing to share about yourself and you have to find a way to become a good storyteller also.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it doesn t hurt if you can make them laugh.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it doesn t hurt if you can provide access to a world that they re interested in that maybe they don t always get.
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, you know, it all takes a lot of work and then it takes somehow feeling very comfortable in your own skin, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
Because you can walk in to a guy with $3 billion and 400 people who work for him
2
SPEAKER_03
and it d be easy to be intimidated or to feel out of your element.
2
SPEAKER_03
And you know, when you give up those vibes, then people feel judged even if you re not judging them.
2
SPEAKER_03
So a big piece of it is what kind of process do you have to go through to feel comfortable in your own skin so that you can relax in that setting?
2
SPEAKER_03
Because nothing makes somebody else relax more than feeling like you sitting there with them are relaxed.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so it s all that stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I can definitely identify with that.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, the process of becoming comfortable in your own skin, making people laugh, making people feel at ease, getting them to like and trust you is, you re right, it s exactly what we do at AOC.
2
SPEAKER_02
I do wonder, though, what s in it for them?
2
SPEAKER_02
I understand how you get them to open up tactically.
2
SPEAKER_02
These guys don t need exposure.
2
SPEAKER_02
Is it just the novelty of, oh, they re gonna make a TV show about us?
2
SPEAKER_02
Finally, the recognition.
2
SPEAKER_02
Does it appeal to this weird, like, narcissistic side that their success breeds?
2
SPEAKER_03
Jordan, who have you ever met who doesn t want to be understood?
2
SPEAKER_02
That s a great question.
2
SPEAKER_02
I ll ask the questions here, Brian.
2
SPEAKER_03
So, I mean, that s it, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
I mean, it s this sense that, look, I didn t go into these billionaires having no track record, so the first people I had to get to trust me in this way were poker players underground, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
When you do a piece of work that resonates in the culture, that helps a tremendous amount, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
Because I m not just somebody calling a billionaire a hedge fund manager and saying, will you give me some of your time.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m somebody who s made these other movies, and maybe made a movie that meant something to them along the way.
2
SPEAKER_03
Or I ve made a television show, or they ve heard my podcast, or they ve watched the 30 for 30.
2
SPEAKER_03
Dave and I have done enough stuff in the culture that somehow it s possible that there s a handhold there that makes it sort of interesting to spend time with us.
2
SPEAKER_03
Also, being in New York, we probably, and on this show we partner with Andrew Ross Sorkin, who knows a lot of these people,
2
SPEAKER_03
That s another way Andrew could say, these guys are cool, they re worth spending time with.
2
SPEAKER_03
But beyond all that, once you re in the room with them, and you re able to look them in the eyes, look, they know I m gonna go write about this stuff.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m gonna try to tell this story.
2
SPEAKER_03
And they, I believe, want to know that the world they re living in and putting so much time in is going to be represented in a way that it ends up being recognizable to them.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so it s that need for understanding that I think makes people want to share.
2
SPEAKER_04
And that understanding is a huge part of your podcast, which we definitely have to talk about for a moment, because it is really such a gift, I think, to creators and artists.
2
SPEAKER_04
I mean, people from all walks of life, I think, walk away from your podcast with something universal and essential.
2
SPEAKER_04
I certainly have, Jordan has.
2
SPEAKER_04
And I m curious to know, like, what you re describing about wanting to understand people minus the agenda is the DNA of the moment, your show.
2
SPEAKER_04
And the one question you keep asking people is, you know, what is or what are your
2
SPEAKER_04
moments, you know, like these inflection points in your life where things might have gone south, or you didn t know whether you should continue or all was lost, you know, and after asking that question so many times from so many interesting people, do you have a sense of what the common elements of people s key moments are?
2
SPEAKER_04
And and is there something we can take away from what all creative people have to go through when they do what they do?
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I love thinking about this.
2
SPEAKER_03
I was talking to my son about it yesterday.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know,
2
SPEAKER_03
I thought that it would be easier to graph it all, that I could put it all in the same quadrant, but it seems like there are a few answers, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
For some people, it s a great ability not to notice how bad things are.
2
SPEAKER_03
and sort of blinders that keep them moving forward.
2
SPEAKER_03
For others, it s putting into practice a process that lets them revert to process so that they re not thinking about results.
2
SPEAKER_03
To others, it s locking in on just will and anger that won t let them lose.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think one common thing is when you talk to people who ve found a way to hit those moments and move forward, they don t tend, in the moment that the bad things happened,
2
SPEAKER_03
they haven t let themselves really marinate in it.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think that a lot of us want to, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
A lot of us want to wallow.
2
SPEAKER_03
The thing Tony Robbins calls, like, there s our story.
2
SPEAKER_03
We want to tell ourselves our story over and over again.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it could be the bad story.
2
SPEAKER_03
But I think that a common theme is sort of like, okay,
2
SPEAKER_03
this is a setback, I can sit here and like live in it, or I can take whatever lesson I can quickly and move forward.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I think that that ability and the sort of decision to move forward is in all of the stories.
2
SPEAKER_03
Maybe that s the one thing, it s like a conscious choice of, nah, I m not gonna allow this thing to define me.
2
SPEAKER_03
But you know, I m as interested in the moment, I think as many people fuck their lives up in the moment of success,
2
SPEAKER_03
the first blush of real success as in the failure.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m as interested in that in a way, you know, and I think it s largely the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s like the people who, in those moments of success, instead of going, hey, I ve done it, I m a success, go, okay, I m here now, this is nice, what s next?
2
SPEAKER_03
And I think that that idea, that what s next, I know for me, Dave and I, when we, the weekend that Rounders came out, and it was our first movie,
2
SPEAKER_03
that friday night we went out with our friends and we went to movie theaters and then the next day we got on a plane and went to montana and started researching our next movie and i remember we went into this town where nobody knew us where nobody had heard of the movie because it had just opened
2
SPEAKER_03
And we were talking to these people in this really desolate farm town, and we were starting to put together the beginning thoughts for how we were going to write our next film.
2
SPEAKER_03
And it was very conscious on our part to say like, okay, you know, we re not going to do is spend a week and a half or two weeks in New York, like kind of dining out on the fact that, hey, we made it, we got a movie released.
2
SPEAKER_03
we re gonna go and figure out, okay, that thing s done now.
2
SPEAKER_03
How do we start on the next thing?
2
SPEAKER_03
And also, how do we start on the next thing by rolling up our sleeves and actually working, getting back into the practice of working?
2
SPEAKER_03
And I think that that, as simple as that sounds, is a huge part of it.
2
SPEAKER_04
No, that is huge.
2
SPEAKER_04
Because yeah, you re right, those moments in our minds, usually we associate them with being
2
SPEAKER_04
down or having a challenge.
2
SPEAKER_04
But what you re saying is that those moments can just as easily or more often be the moments when things are going well.
2
SPEAKER_04
And then the next move is that much more critical, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, in each in both of those areas.
2
SPEAKER_03
I think that the next move is crucial.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_01
I gotta say, you re quite the Vine star.
3
SPEAKER_01
Looks like 57, almost 57 million loops, as they call them, over there.
3
SPEAKER_01
That seems like such a weird medium for somebody who spends like 100 plus hours on a script that turns into 45 minutes of TV.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I ve got this other medium, Vine, that s six seconds long.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I assume a lot of those take pretty much zero planning other than making the coffee you re drinking during the shot.
3
SPEAKER_01
Am I wrong about that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Why is that important to you?
3
SPEAKER_03
It s funny, it s not important to me anymore at all.
3
SPEAKER_03
What s important about it, because I had these rules and when I got to the end of it, I stopped.
3
SPEAKER_03
The rules were I would do one a day for as long as I had something true to say that I believed would help somebody.
3
SPEAKER_03
It was very simple to do.
3
SPEAKER_03
The shock was that people responded the way that they did.
3
SPEAKER_03
I did it out of anger, anger at these charlatans we were talking about earlier.
3
SPEAKER_03
I was doing Twitter Q&As, and I really love to do things like that.
3
SPEAKER_03
I love being able to answer and help people because, as I said, I looked to other working writers, and so if I can help somebody who wants to do this by doing a Twitter Q&A or ask me anything, I m happy to do it.
3
SPEAKER_03
But I noticed that some of the questions that would come to me had an underlying premise that was faulty.
3
SPEAKER_03
And this underlying premise would say, like, I know that you have to have a five-act structure, or I know that you have to break in by writing only in one drama.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I would wonder, like, well, what is this presumption?
3
SPEAKER_03
Where does it come from?
3
SPEAKER_03
And I realized that there were a few people
3
SPEAKER_03
supposedly teaching screenwriting.
3
SPEAKER_03
And it got me so annoyed that because they were teaching it wrong, almost like the Steve Martin joke of, you know, I m going to teach my kid English wrong before nursery school that I decided, I just looked into the vine camera one day out of nowhere.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I just said, all screenwriting books are bullshit, all of them, read screenplays, watch movies, let those be your guide.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I just called it Six Second Screenwriting Lessons Volume One, and I put it up.
3
SPEAKER_03
And immediately, it started getting retweeted and sent around, and I got tons of emails from famous actors and directors like, ah, thank you for fucking doing that.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I did like seven of them the first day.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I just saw that there was this incredible hunger for somebody to speak in a non-bullshit way about the stuff that actually mattered about living a creative life.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so I did one a day for like 330 days.
3
SPEAKER_03
I ended up getting a really big following for them.
3
SPEAKER_03
And when I got to the point where I felt like I d said all this stuff, I feel like if someone goes and watches those three, and a bunch of people have collected them and rewritten about them, and then all sorts of people wanted to write about it, I felt like if somebody goes and watches 300 of those things, I ve given them what I can give them in that area.
3
SPEAKER_03
If something occurs to me, I ll say it on Vine, but
3
SPEAKER_03
It s been over a year since I was doing that on a regular basis.
3
SPEAKER_03
And yeah, it s as funny to me as it is to you that 57 million loops of that thing have gone out there.
3
SPEAKER_03
I mean, that s ridiculous.
3
SPEAKER_04
That s a huge number, huge, ridiculously huge.
3
SPEAKER_04
But also that makes sense because I think it worked for people because it worked for you.
3
SPEAKER_04
Like you tweeted almost a year ago or about a year ago that you were making those vines while you were writing the pilot script for Billions and you were almost talking to yourself, right?
3
SPEAKER_04
And so
3
SPEAKER_04
It s interesting, like you were giving advice, living the advice that you wanted other people to follow that you yourself needed at that moment.
3
SPEAKER_04
And I think that s the difference.
3
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, 100%.
3
SPEAKER_03
It was like so much bullshit in the world.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I knew that Dave and I were taking this big chance of writing this thing on spec.
3
SPEAKER_03
And that, you know, it was a weird time, like the first true bomb that we d ever been a part of had come out, which was runner runner.
3
SPEAKER_03
We did other things that weren t commercially successful, but then they would have
3
SPEAKER_03
critical renowned or some scene in the movie would become we would know me i kind of knew the things were good like not ground guys got really shitty reviews but i knew almost immediately that there will be a group of kids who would fucking love that movie and be able to quote it and i knew that there was enough in it that it was cool didn t bother me
3
SPEAKER_03
But Runner Runner is a shitty movie and it was really painful to make and painful to be around knowing it was gonna be shitty.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I never tweeted about the movie in a positive way or gave interviews like, hey, it s a great movie.
3
SPEAKER_03
I knew what it was.
3
SPEAKER_03
But the result of that was I came out of that experience and I felt rocked for the first time.
3
SPEAKER_03
Because it s a real public sort of, even if you re sort of having a long enough career and you re mostly a nerd to this stuff, it s one thing if people are reviewing badly something that you know is good.
3
SPEAKER_03
But it s another thing to have to kind of live with a movie out that you know is not good.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I knew that what I wanted to do, Dave and I wanted to like go back and just write something undeniable and control it ourselves and not let it get out of our hands and not sell it in advance.
3
SPEAKER_03
You get in trouble when you sell things in advance.
3
SPEAKER_03
So we were going to write the script and then either sell it or not sell it.
3
SPEAKER_03
And that was going against all the conventional wisdom because in television, if you re like us and you have a track record, you can get a deal
3
SPEAKER_03
Any time that Dave and I want, we could get a deal to go write something.
3
SPEAKER_03
Someone would pitch an idea, someone would pay us to go write it.
3
SPEAKER_03
But for us, it s binary.
3
SPEAKER_03
It s yes or no.
3
SPEAKER_03
It s either something gets made or it doesn t get made.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I felt like the way to get this thing made and get it made well with us in charge of it, in control creatively, was to write it on spec.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so yeah, I was telling myself to go against the conventional wisdom right when I was telling people in the vines to go against the conventional wisdom.
3
SPEAKER_03
So you re correct about that.
3
SPEAKER_04
Yeah, so let s talk about that for a moment, because it sounds like the way you guys went about writing billions was almost getting back to the privilege you had earlier in your career of doing things for yourselves without
3
SPEAKER_04
some of the constraints, which are, you know, blessings, but they come with their own constraints of having a track record or having a deal or selling something before you make it.
3
SPEAKER_04
So do you think writers or creators of any kind almost have to invent those conditions for themselves again, at a certain point, almost, you know, artificially invent them so that you can get to that place of, I want to make something undeniable for me before I share it with the entire world?
3
SPEAKER_03
I mean, I love that idea.
3
SPEAKER_03
You know, yeah, I mean, I know that we needed to do that.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I ve done a public solitary man, which I think is our best movie, and certainly is the best reviewed movie that we ve ever done.
3
SPEAKER_03
I mean, I wrote that on spec also, and took four years, and I wrote it in off hours by myself.
3
SPEAKER_03
But yeah, I do think there s something incredibly powerful about doing a thing, knowing you might fail, knowing no one might care, but you re going to do it to the best of your ability.
3
SPEAKER_03
And
3
SPEAKER_03
It s the advice I give people all the time, which is it s a great thing about being a writer or a creative person.
3
SPEAKER_03
You can write your way out of any situation.
3
SPEAKER_03
This gets back to the question you guys started with about undeniable to who.
3
SPEAKER_03
And the answer is, I do think there s an objective version of this stuff.
3
SPEAKER_03
And I feel like I ve proven it for myself time and time again of sitting down in a room,
3
SPEAKER_03
knowing that I didn t hedge it at all, I didn t get money ahead of time, I didn t protect myself, I didn t get a trade announcement that says I m doing it, just in a little room with Dave, and we re gonna go create something.
3
SPEAKER_03
And there is a magic to that.
3
SPEAKER_03
And like sometimes famous authors too will say I m not gonna make a book deal, I d rather write the book and then have somebody take it who I know is in love with it and is gonna promote it the right way.
3
SPEAKER_03
And so yeah, I think that there is something for me that is kind of magical about doing it that way.
3
SPEAKER_01
It looks like from my amateur inspection of the credits that you and David pretty much write every episode.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell us a little bit about the writer s room, because I assume it s not just you two sitting there surrounded by empty Krispy Kreme boxes.
3
SPEAKER_03
No, and also we don t write every episode.
3
SPEAKER_03
I mean, our job as executive producers and showrunners is to guarantee the scripts, is to make sure that the scripts all sound like they have the same voice.
3
SPEAKER_03
we have a writing staff that s terrific, and we are showrunners who don t, we re executive producers of every episode, but we re not the writer of every episode of Record.
3
SPEAKER_03
Like, episode four of Billions that was on Sunday was written by a guy named Young Il Kim, episode five is written by a woman named Heidi Schreck.
3
SPEAKER_03
But we ve all sat in a room together, and we ve gone over the story a million times, and Dave and I have given these people notes, and helped them with dialogue, and ultimately, it s up to the two of us to make sure the show sounds like the show.
3
SPEAKER_03
That may mean doing a dialogue pass on every script where we re going through and keeping the lines that other people wrote that feel like the show and then adding lines, but the way we found it s best to get the writers to feel a sense of ownership is that if a writer on our staff starts the script, even if we ve done work on that script, it s that writer s script and that writer s name goes on the script.
3
SPEAKER_03
I always wonder about some things when it comes to dialogue
4
SPEAKER_02
and nonverbal communication in shows.
4
SPEAKER_02
For example, there was an episode, I think it was episode four, Axe is going to fly to this Metallica concert, and he says something to one of his colleagues on the tarmac, and he has this like, you know how he does that subtle wink, it s almost involuntary?
4
SPEAKER_02
Is that something where it s like, give subtle involuntary wink, or is that just something that he, as an actor, is throwing in there to color this for, on his own, and you re like, that was awesome, that s why we hired you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he s, I mean, look, Damien Lewis and Paul Giamatti and Maggie Sip and Malin Ackerman and Dave Costable and Toby Leonard Moore, all of a shot.
4
SPEAKER_01
These are like incredible top flight professional actors.
4
SPEAKER_01
And all you want is for them to take your characters and make them three dimensional.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re standing there on set with the actors and the director of the episode 90% of the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you know, we re by the time episode four rolls, I mean, Damien Lewis is Bobby Axelrod.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no difference.
4
SPEAKER_01
So
4
SPEAKER_01
No, in the script you wouldn t say, Bobby gestures this way, but you might say, you might say Bobby gestures, or Bobby looks over at him, or Bobby nods to him, but then Damien s gonna do whatever Damien s gonna do in a great way to communicate, you know, to be Bobby Axelrod.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, his job is to physicalize what we write.
4
SPEAKER_01
Obviously we have to write airplane, or else you show up on the day and none of that stuff is there.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you write every word of dialogue that they say, and then you hope that the actors take something and make it additive, and our actors do.
4
SPEAKER_02
I used to work on Wall Street.
4
SPEAKER_02
That was my only experience as an actual attorney.
4
SPEAKER_02
How do you make something like that interesting for television?
4
SPEAKER_02
Because you have done so.
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, a lot of the stuff, especially with hedge funds and things like that, is done by computer.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s amazing it s not just a show about people sitting behind desks.
4
SPEAKER_02
How do you bottle up the politics of Wall Street and turn it into a show?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think that s like years of learning how to tell stories that are, you know, I mean, how do you make poker compelling?
4
SPEAKER_01
How do you make any movie story interesting?
4
SPEAKER_01
You put obstacles in front of the characters and you watch them have to get past the obstacles.
4
SPEAKER_01
But also,
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that the hedge fund world is inherently fascinating because hedge fund managers, especially big time hedge fund managers, they re not just sitting in front of their screen all day, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Because they re raising money, they re trying to keep their investors happy, they re managing their portfolio managers, they re managing their analysts, they are motivating those people.
4
SPEAKER_01
So to me, you re looking at people who are five tool players.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so the five tool players are always interesting to watch the closer you can get to how they do what they do.
4
SPEAKER_02
The whole show so far up to episode four, and feel free to send me an advanced DVD of all the other episodes if you want to.
4
SPEAKER_02
It s really fundamentally about the power dynamics of Wall Street so far.
4
SPEAKER_02
How do these power dynamics compare to the power dynamics in Hollywood, where you live and work?
4
SPEAKER_01
Listen, you get good at recognizing those kind of power dynamics as you move further and further into any kind of career, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
As you become successful, you start to recognize
4
SPEAKER_01
the habits of all sorts of different people or group dynamics you start to recognize, you walk into a room and you start to subtly understand where the power is, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And of course, there are similarities.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean,
4
SPEAKER_01
that these people operate on.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that we got to do is we got to go and watch morning meetings.
4
SPEAKER_01
We got to go hang around hedge funds.
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We got to watch hedge fund guy A, who manages $3 billion, pitch hedge fund guy B, who manages $10 billion.
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We got to watch the power dynamics play out.
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Also, living in New York for as long as we have,
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there are power dynamics every time you walk into a restaurant, right?
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Because somebody knows the maitre d somebody else knows the chef, somebody else knows the person sitting at the table that they really want.
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And you just kind of if you re interested in that stuff, you kind of tune yourself to it, and then you pick it up everywhere.
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I think this makes sense, and obviously just part of being human and being an astute human is noting these power dynamics.
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I think the brilliance comes in being able to put it into film, into television.
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Well, we catalog all this shit.
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We ll watch something that ll happen.
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I mean, in episode six of our show, there s a tiny little moment that came from Hollywood.
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It s a moment people love in the show, and I ll just tell you what happens between
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Ax s right-hand person, who s played by Dave Costable, the character s name is Wags, and his analyst, Ben Kim.
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And there s a moment revolving around the delivery of food that Dave and I witnessed in a movie studio president s office
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17 years ago.
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And for 17 years, we carried that around with us.
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And then we were able to finally deploy it in a believable way here, that it mirrors the power structure exactly.
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And literally 17 years ago, we looked at each other like, well, that ll go on something someday.
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And then 17 years later, it s going to be on Showtime.
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I totally understand that, right?
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For example, I know a lot of my comedian friends, and even me, who s far less funny than your average comedian, will say something or see something that happens and you go, oh my gosh, alright, I gotta write this down or just burn it into my brain because this is such a good bit and it has to have the right context or it s wasted.
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And I ve been holding onto some stuff for five years, literally.
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I totally get it.
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Yeah, that stuff s really fun.
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And then with music too, like that song that opened episode four and closed it, Oh No by Andrew Byrd, like we ve been walking around with that song in our pocket since it came out.
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Like, oh, wouldn t this be incredible to use?
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And then the perfect moment came to use it.
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And then it s real rewarding because a bunch of the recaps singled out the song and picked up on the words and understood why we deployed that song where and when we did.
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And so that was super rewarding.
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Now your point of view on the world and of hedge funds and the US Attorney s Office in general, the government in general, there s always gonna be some bias in writing.
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Feel free to jump in and correct me if I m overstepping here.
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But it seems like there s always gonna be bias when it comes to storytelling.
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Characters that are black and white, for example, are just not that interesting.
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And few people are just good or bad, kind of blanket or on their face.
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And the same is true for the industry, parts of government.
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so much of storytelling these days seems to aggressively pursue some sort of agenda one way or another and doesn t really let the audience have their own point of view.
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How do you control for that bias or is this something that you kind of deal with subconsciously now that you ve been doing it for so long?
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Well, it s not subconscious in that we certainly had an awareness that we were going to try and deal with the fact
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that both Chuck Rhodes, the United States Attorney, Bobby Axelrod, the hedge fund manager, would be people who, if you met them in life, you d find pretty compelling.
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That meant that they would have a bunch of characteristics that would make them seem good to you or engaging to you.
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When we look at people in those positions, there are abuses of position and power sometimes.
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And so we re really interested in how that stuff gets bundled together.
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You know, we re really interested in the idea, I mean, if you start thinking about people like this, and you start thinking about, okay, someone who has a prosecutorial platform like that with almost unfettered powers,
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do they all just use them for the public good?
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Well, the rhetoric is that they use them for the public good, and they certainly do a lot of public good.
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But then, do they also use those positions for career advancement?
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Do they, say, run for president, or governor, or mayor?
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And if they do, then do you want to go backwards and do an autopsy on some of the things they prosecuted and try to figure out, well, wait, was that one for the public good or for their own good?
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By the same token, some hedge fund person who does a tremendous amount of good for charity or employs a lot of people or is a leader in his community, but as you look back on the deals or the way that that person got in the position or the culture of the environment that that person s created,
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Is there some gray area there too?
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Is it possible that that person isn t exactly who he holds himself out as?
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And isn t that interesting also?
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And so, yeah, of course we re gonna look at these worlds and try to peel the layers back to figure out the truth of these things.
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And perhaps the truth is that these people, like we all are, are multifaceted, multidimensional, right?
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I know my podcast does a tremendous amount of good for people.
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People are moved by it.
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the only reason I do it?
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Do I also do it because it s a great excuse to get in a room with somebody I really admire and get to pick their brain and then have a relationship with them?
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Sure, I do.
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Does some part of me like being the person?
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Do I get turned on by being the person who s able to unearth the gem from that person and show it to someone else?
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Do I get an endorphin rush from that?
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I do.
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Does that invalidate the fact that my prime purpose is to share?
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No, but I have to own that I also get an endorphin rush from it.
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And so I love looking at these things, and Dave does too, and trying to see them in a fully multidimensional way.
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But that is a delicate balance, right, Brian?
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Because, like, on the one hand, you re trying to dramatize something and show it as it is, but writers have a plan and a wish to show something in a certain way.
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So I have to imagine that that s an ongoing conversation in the writer s room when it comes to billions.
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Like,
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yeah, let s figure out what the tension between the SEC and the AG s office says about the politicking inherent in the way people go after the hedge fund industry.
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But at the same time, let s kind of let these characters do the work for themselves, and let s just let the audience decide how to feel about it.
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Sure, but like, okay, when you guys were asking earlier about, it goes back to the research, because when you guys were asking earlier about why people tell you what they tell you, I mean, the most mind-blowing thing anyone said to us is, and I did say, I said this on Charlie Rose the other night, but it s absolutely true.
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We were sitting with somebody in a really, really high prosecutorial position, and it s not Attorney General on our show, it s the United States Attorney s Office, they re different things.
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We were sitting with somebody in a really high position of power, a prosecutorial power, not a United States attorney, but somebody very high up in the prosecutorial ranks.
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This person had been offered a $2 million a year job at a private law firm, and they had turned it down.
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We asked them, well, what kept them at this prosecutorial position?
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What we assumed they would
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I m serving the people. 
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But we were kissed into the meeting with this person by a trusted third party.
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And so the prosecutor didn t lie to us.
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He looked us in the eye and he said,
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I have so much power.
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I get to decide who s a good guy and who s a bad guy.
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I get to decide who I m going to prosecute and who I m going to let free.
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I get to decide which little crimes I get to say, well, you have to let those go so that business can function, and which crimes you get to say, nope, I m going to stop business from functioning.
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It s about the power and David and I, you know, in those moments, Jordan, I m sure you ve had some of those kind of, you just want to say as still as possible.
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So the person doesn t realize what they ve just said to you, right?
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But I actually want to keep them talking, but I couldn t believe that he admitted to us that he was motivated by power.
5
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So once somebody says something like that to you,
5
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You don t have to consciously think about how you re going to put that in the character.
5
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That s just the character.
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That s part of the character.
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You then understand that that s a huge plank.
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That s a huge motivating plank.
5
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Then you find the other motivating planks, and they re just there.
5
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I really like Mark Cuban.
5
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I know Mark Cuban personally, and I m a big fan.
5
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But why as a culture do we celebrate billionaires?
5
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Why is he the biggest reality star?
5
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Forgetting Trump, the politician, why was Trump such a huge reality star?
5
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What is it about a certain kind of success that we in America have decided is heroic?
5
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And so if you re interested in those questions, I think maybe that s a way to drill down into it, is I m not trying to give you the answers on the show, Dave and I aren t.
5
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What we re trying to do is continue to ask the questions and ask ourselves why these people are like they are, what they tell themselves they re like, and what the truth is.
5
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which is so much more refreshing for the audience.
5
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Thanks, and then we want to make it entertaining and funny.
5
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Going back, I want to take a figurative jump back in time.
5
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You were a blocked writer until you were 30.
5
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First of all, what does that mean?
5
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And that gives a lot of people hope, that you weren t doing this when you were 13 years old and then focused on it for your whole life, because I think,
5
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In order to get great at something, a lot of people have this misconception that they ll even say, well, Jordan, you know, you re a decent talk show host.
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Did you want to do this when you were a kid?
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And it s like, yeah, when I was eight, I kind of thought it d be cool to be a radio host.
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And they re like, oh, see?
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And that s really, it deflates a lot of people s ambitions, I think, to think that you have to start so early.
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But if you started at 30, I don t want to insult you, but if you can do it from that age, a lot of people can start something from that age.
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It s not too late.
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I couldn t agree with you more.
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I mean, yeah, that s foundational for me, 100%.
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That s a foundational belief that you don t have to be 20 years old or 18 years old.
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Now, I did a lot of stuff before that that gave me certain tools, right?
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I always knew I could write, I will say this, I always knew that I had the ability to make you feel something when I wrote.
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So even in college or law school, if I had to write a paper,
5
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I knew that my problem was like ADD and not being able to finish anything.
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But I could certainly write a page that would make you go like, oh, that motherfucker can write all the time.
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But I couldn t finish anything.
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I was really blocked, and I couldn t write any kind of fiction.
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I would just beat myself up.
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I was the worst kind of perfectionist and attention deficit person.
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And I drove myself crazy.
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And I had a successful career doing other things.
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my son was nine months old.
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And I had this realization that I wanted to be the kind of parent who would tell his kids to chase their dreams, but that I wasn t that I had the secret dream that I was an artist.
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And that if I didn t attack it somehow,
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something in me would die.
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And when things die, they become toxic.
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And I knew that that toxicity would spread.
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And that instead of being a dad, I would come home and be like, Hey, what is it that turns you on today about school?
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What are you passionate about?
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I would just be like, bring me a beer, I m gonna sit in front of the TV.
5
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And so
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I made the decision that I was going to make the change.
5
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And so I had read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins and did a bunch of those exercises to figure out what I wanted to do.
5
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And then I read The Artist s Way, and I did those exercises, and that is what broke me through.
5
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By doing the morning pages, almost instantly upon starting the morning pages, I was able to write every day.
5
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Being able to unblock yourself is huge.
5
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I think a lot of people who write in, I get hundreds of emails every week from people who seem to have similar issues.
5
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How do other people who are blocked in whatever way, how do they uncover what they re good at or what they should be doing if they don t know what that necessarily is?
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Right, that sort of feeling inside that there s something more, but I don t know what that more is.
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Right.
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I mean, I still think that Awaken the Giant Within is the best tool I ve ever come across at figuring that stuff out.
5
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I mean, Jordan, I m sure you ve read some of Tony Robbins stuff or gone to some of his programs, or if you haven t, you re missing something that, especially in this area, is crucial.
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You know, the way that Tony sets out the questions, which is really what it is, it s like, forces you to
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ask yourself why and what it is that you want to feel, what emotions you want to feel, and it helps you to figure out what decisions you have to make.
5
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And then it s about finding the resources.
5
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So once I realized I wanted to be an artist, it was easy to then find the artist s way, right?
5
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Then I just was talking to Dave, my lifelong best friend, and I was like, I m really frustrated.
5
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I know I have to unblock myself.
5
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I m finally willing to say I need to be a writer.
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All my friends are writers.
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All I want to do is read and watch movies.
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How am I not doing this?
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And Dave was like, well, you have to do the artist s way.
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It s like once I figured out the what, figuring out the how was easy.
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What role did David play in helping you unblock and step into that new phase of your life?
5
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A huge role.
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First of all, he gave me the book and told me to do the exercises that then really unlocked everything.
5
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And he was willing to throw in with me and write the screenplay together.
5
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I would love to talk about that partnership for a little bit, if you re open to it.
5
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I think the creative partnership is one of those, it s so powerful and personal and intimate, you know, there s so much that goes into that relationship and there s conflict and there s collaboration.
5
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Tell us, and I realize this is a huge question because this partnership is a huge partnership, but like, what is the DNA of that relationship and how have you guys managed to stay so close working on so many projects over such a long period of time?
5
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You know, it s so hard to answer anything that won t sound almost too idealistic or dreamlike.
5
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But like, the truth is, we met when we were 15, and I had just turned 16, and Dave was 14 and a half, he s a year and a half younger than I am.
5
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And we met in a summer bus trip, and with students.
5
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And I don t know, we were like the only two kids who liked reading.
5
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So we were like passing books back and forth, you know?
5
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We had a similar sense of humor.
5
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And somehow, we were each at an age that we were really ready to make sort of like our first real grown-up, like real friend, you know?
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And to us, we defined it probably because we were both Godfather fanatics.
5
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We defined the term really strenuously, and there was just immediately packed with a tremendous amount of like loyalty.
5
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And then when we decided, so for years, we would trade books and music and movies, right?
5
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Constantly be talking about this stuff so that we were tuning our artistic instruments without even being aware that that s what we were doing.
5
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And we were getting them on the same frequency.
5
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And then at a certain point, you know, Dave went to one college, I went to another college, and we would have different experiences, but then bring them back.
5
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So Dave would watch a movie and tell me about it, and we would get on the phone in the middle of the night and talk about the movie.
5
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And then when we decided to work together, we committed to this, this no bullshit thing of like two hours every day, we were going to show up in this little room and had a slop sink and one chair.
5
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And I sat on the floor a lot of the time he sat in the chair, this gross room underneath my apartment.
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And
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We worked for two hours every day.
5
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We decided right away that the project was what mattered, that our egos were not going to get involved, meaning he could tell me an idea sucked.
5
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I could tell him an idea sucked.
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We were not going to take that personally.
5
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We were just going to try to tell this story in the best way we could.
5
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And, you know, we re incredibly fortunate that we each have done the work on our own, meaning neither of us have ever stopped trying to grow and learn and then bring that stuff back to the other guy.
5
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And that s a big part of it.
5
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Have any of those principles evolved over the years of the partnership, like obviously putting aside your ego or feeling open and you know, trusted to speak your mind probably is universal.
5
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But like, have you guys had to redefine the terms or ever introduce new ideas?
5
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No, I mean, it s like, I m, I ll say this, there have been like a few lucky things in my life, many.
5
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My wife and I talk about this all the time.
5
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Like, I ve been married 24 years.
5
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My wife is the person that I m the closest to in the world.
5
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We tell each other absolutely everything we are
5
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fully open with each other.
5
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People always talk about how much work this shit takes.
5
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It doesn t take any work.
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It doesn t take work with Dave either.
5
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It takes a tremendous amount of work to produce the actual work product.
6
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But the relationship part of it, if you re just like honest, and I guess consciously always assume that the other person s acting in the best interest of the project, right?
6
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Like, you know that law school thing where you stipulate the fact pattern in the way that most benefit the other party?
6
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That is a practice that I m in all the time, right?
6
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If someone does something, if Amy does something, that s my wife, Dave does something, my immediate thing is to frame it in a way that most benefits that person, makes that person look good.
6
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because there s no use in doing it the other way.
6
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And then proceeding from there.
6
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So, those things don t take work.
6
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Just don t be an asshole, man.
6
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I ve been lucky enough that in the most important relationships I have, which is Dave, my wife, and my children, that stuff s just never been on the table.
6
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I like those principles, Brian.
6
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It s basically, don t treat your partner the way any of the characters in Billions would treat the AG s office.
6
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That s exactly right.
6
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How do you find enough discipline to be a self-starting writer?
6
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I personally don t have problems with motivation, but people ask me this stuff all the time.
6
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How do you stay focused?
6
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How do you stay motivated?
6
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I m of the opinion that when you find something, it s not a matter of how do you stay motivated.
6
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It s actually harder to not do that thing that you feel burning.
6
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Well, yeah, I love doing it, even when it s hard.
6
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Look, there are days that it s difficult,
6
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I ll tell you something I fail at.
6
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You will never find me doing legs in any gym anywhere in the United States of America.
6
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I just won t do legs.
6
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Truthfully, I m not even in the gym doing chest or arms right now, but let s say I was doing that stuff, I wouldn t be doing legs.
6
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I m just bad at it.
6
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It s not something that I care about and it s not something that I do, but I love writing.
6
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I know that if I start, even if it seems impossible and annoying,
6
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In a half an hour, it s going to be fucking great because I m going to be in that place that I only get to, that hyper-present alpha state that only happens to me in a few different modalities, and one of them is writing.
6
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What I learned from when I started doing The Artist s Way was to put a creative practice into place so that I deliver myself to the screen every day to work.
6
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I wake up, I meditate, I do morning pages, and I take a long walk.
6
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And I do those things every day.
6
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And I define a successful day by whether I ve meditated, if I ve meditated twice, done my morning pages and taken a long walk, I ve had a successful work day.
6
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Morning Pages, just in case this went over my head, is you creating something in the morning, or is this a specific drill?
6
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Morning Pages is this thing that comes out of the artist s way, and it s three longhand pages that you write, free write in the morning.
6
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What does that do for you?
6
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It taps into the subconscious somehow.
6
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It s sort of like dipping the pen in ink.
6
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a way that before you re able to activate your critical, you know, we all have like this critic inside us that might try to shut us down or tell us we re not good enough.
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And when you do morning pages at the way that Julia Cameron describes them in the artist s way, it s a very specific
6
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It s three longhand pages.
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You re not allowed to lift the pen.
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You re not allowed to go back and reread it.
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You re not allowed to censor yourself.
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You have to fill three pages.
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And what happens when you do that every day is you just get in the habit of dumping your stuff out, whatever you ve been saying.
6
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Do it early in the morning, and you dump your stuff out, and it just has this result of getting you firing and ready and active for the day.
6
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Is this something that s only for writers, or is this something that you recommend for friggin  everybody?
6
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It s really great for anyone who wants to do anything, tap into the most creative version of themselves.
6
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What happens when you do The Artist s Way is you realize, it starts you figuring out what it is that you want to do.
6
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We ll link to that book, of course, in the show notes, the book by Julia Cameron, The Artist s Way.
6
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Yes, do.
6
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How do you find a partner that s gonna make something successful?
6
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Like David, how do you find your David Levine?
6
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How do you find any partner that s gonna be able to even have a functional or super high functional relationship like this?
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Because it seems like that s the question, right?
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People do this wrong all the time.
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We see it in marriage and in business.
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It s true.
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It s very difficult to answer that
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in a way that isn t glib, because nobody knows the answer to that question.
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I haven t met the person who has the answer to that.
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I mean, so much of it has to do with preparing yourself, right?
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It has to do with getting yourself to a place where you re ready to give the best of yourself to somebody else, right?
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So that you re ready to actually not allow your need to be a star or your need to personally thrive to get in the way.
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so that, how can you add value?
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And if you re there, out there, trying to add value, you know, something Seth Godin talks about really well, John Acuff talks about it really well, too, then I think that you ll find people who are willing to add value to you.
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And we ll link to both of those episodes of The Art of Charm as well in the show notes.
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Do you not kill each other, or wanna kill each other occasionally, or do you avoid that pretty skillfully somehow?
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Yeah, no, we don t, man.
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I mean, again, it s a lucky thing.
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There s something about the fact that we ve been like brothers since we were kids.
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We have all the good parts of being brothers, but none of the bad parts, none of the part where we were raised in the same home and had to fight for our parents  attention.
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We found in each other the brother that we never had.
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Yeah, you re right, it s hard to, I can definitely see why this is tough to answer without sounding glib, because it s like when you ask people what s the key to a happy marriage, and they re like, just be understanding, and you re like, oh, go jump off a bridge.
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I mean, yeah, the marriage thing is just really make sure you like the person a lot, and they make you smile, and you think they re a good person.
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Yeah.
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Foundationally, you really think they re good.
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I understand, in some way, how partners can share credit.
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It seems like it s probably not as hard as sharing something like blame or defeat if something doesn t go well.
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How do you share that?
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You know, that s the best.
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I mean, to have a partner when things are going badly, a real partner, not someone you re just looking to blame, I mean, that s the best thing ever.
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Like, going through failure with a partner when you know that person has your back, boy, that gives you a tremendous amount of strength.
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She can look at that person be like, man, this is fucked.
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What are we going to do?
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How do we get ourselves out of it?
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You re going to show up here tomorrow.
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And are we giving up?
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Oh, no, you re actually going to show up tomorrow.
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Fuck, I better show up.
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If you re showing up, I got to pick up my end of this thing.
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I can t leave you hanging.
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I mean, serving somebody else is tremendously empowering, right?
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Because let s say I wanted to cash it in after like, runner runner comes out, it s bomb, David, I know it sucks.
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But like, if Dave showing up Monday morning to start work, what am I gonna let him sit there alone?
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No, I m gonna fucking get out of bed, show up.
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So that s tremendously powerful, I think, in the bad times.
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And specifically about the credit thing, early on, just as a policy, an unspoken policy, I will say, constantly people ask who wrote what line, and we will never, neither of us will ever answer that question.
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We wrote all of it.
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The most you ll ever hear is, I ll say Dave wrote a line.
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You know, Dave wrote my favorite line in Rounders.
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Like, I ll point out the line that he wrote that I had nothing to do with.
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which is Mike, you should have played the Kings.
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But that s his, like he wrote that line, and I remember falling down on the floor laughing when he wrote it.
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But basically, you will never hear me say, oh, do you like that line?
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I wrote it, right?
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Because it s all something that we did together.
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All right, back to the show.
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And having a partner like that,
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and treating the partnership in that way, I imagine helps deal with the fear that a lot of creators feel.
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I mean, you ve written that there is a way to use fear as fuel.
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You say when it s channeled the right way, then it is fuel.
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Tell us a little bit about that.
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How does a person turn fear into fuel when you re being creative?
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I would say I do it
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you know, it s habit by now.
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So I m trying to think about how the real concrete way that I would say it started in the beginning.
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I guess when you feel that kind of fear of, I m scared to put this on the page, I ve now learned
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that that feeling means maybe what I m gonna do is really gonna be good.
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And that if I have the guts to just sit there and not run, maybe something special is going to happen.
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And so I ve just, and it also has to do with like a meditation, again, like these things that I do.
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make me use the feelings as opposed to running from them, right?
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I want to recognize what I m feeling and then I want to be able to use what I m feeling instead of turning off what I m feeling.
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One thing is I used to listen to podcasts when I would walk to work.
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and walk to my office to write, and then I realized that was a way to escape.
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So I ll listen to them on the way back, but I listen to music on the way to the office because I want to be living in these thoughts and feelings and fears so that I can be actively grappling with them.
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In your own world before you dip into someone else s.
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When you look at adding someone in temporarily, like the pilot, at least the credits say that Sorkin helped with the pilot, bringing someone into a partnership like this seems like bringing someone into your marriage.
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What happens when you- It could be, but no, Andrew did write the pilot with us, no question about it.
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Because David and I are like one, it s really like just, we felt like Andrew had a lot to offer, a very specific skillset in regards to this world and a specific point of view, that it was worth it
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And that we would welcome him in the same way that we welcome each other.
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And so that did work.
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And we were able
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to be able to create the pilot together.
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Yeah.
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Do you have to research or is there somebody who researches certain characteristics, how this person would handle situations?
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It seems incredibly involved.
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And who does the legwork of finding out, all right, she s a wife who s a spouse reacts in a fight at home.
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I love that you picked up on that.
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I mean, that is about.
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I think that s just about like having writers eyes on the thing.
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Like, I mean, you sit and think about this stuff and you leave the characters three dimensional to you.
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you re just as you re writing, you re putting yourself in the in that person s point of view and frame of mind.
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So they re reacting, if you re doing this well, and you re kind of locked into it, then the contours of those scenes sort of show up to you as you re doing the thing, because you ve done the work of fully imagining the character.
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So then, you know, that scene in outline form was, um, Chuck and Wendy argue about this.
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And then whichever one of us did the first pass at it starts
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That thing, of course, that s the way in which Wendy would gain control of the scene, and then together we all work on it.
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Dave and I are then grinding on figuring out how do we really shape that, and then how does that inform our character going forward?
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Wonderful moment to pick up on.
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That s really close watching.
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That s great.
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Thanks.
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It was something that jumped out, because you expect arguments on television to go a certain way, and it didn t go that way at all.
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And I remember I paused it, and I was like, Jenny, get over here.
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So I called my girlfriend over, and I was like, look how they handled this.
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This is so expert because they stop it from escalating even though they re both emotional and they kind of let that happen.
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She s like, wait, hold on.
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And then I m like, oh, that s the shrink training right there.
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That s exactly right.
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And that s definitely something that we said to in discussions with Maggie Siff before was like, this woman is aware of where she is at all times in these conversations.
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She is who she is.
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Like, it s great that you picked up on it.
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Last thing, I promise.
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They re deposing someone in Paul Giamatti s office, in Chuck s office.
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The guy says, they re like kings, there s always someone coming to assassinate him.
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The next shot, they re golfing on the course, and the guy takes a club out of the bag and it goes like, whooshing, like metal on metal, sword leaving a scabbard.
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Who picks the sounds, because that s not an accident, that s symbolic beheading.
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That s right, that s right.
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Is there a sound guy that s like, oh, I m gonna throw that in there, or is this written in?
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Man, that s a phenomenal, another wonderful insight on your part, and so rewarding to know that you picked up on that.
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I mean, that s why it s so exciting to work with great collaborators.
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The editor for that episode is a woman named Susan E. Morse, Sandy Morse.
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She was the editor on the 17 or 16 Woody Allen movies, including Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters.
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She was the editor of our 30 for 30 documentary on Jimmy Connors, This Is What They Want.
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Sandy came in and is the editor on that episode.
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And we wrote the scene, you know, we wrote the scene before the King s thing, and then the golf thing.
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But in the editing room, Sandy did a very put up, just a very basic version of that sword thing, and she showed it to us.
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And Dave and I both started howling with laughter.
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And we said, Sandy, that s fucking brilliant.
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And she was like, well, I figured that I wasn t sure if you guys would love it or not, but I thought I d give you the option.
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And so Sandy came up with that as an idea.
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Then we go to the sound stage, and then we re working with top sound professionals to craft the exact perfect version of that.
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But that was a thing where we create an environment with all of our craftspeople, where it s like, if you have an inspired idea, please share it with us.
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We may say no, but we ll really salute the effort and we ll reward you for the effort.
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And so we try to create a culture of everybody sharing their best creative ideas.
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And that came because Sandy Morris was like, hey, wouldn t it be fun if it sounded like someone unsheathing a sword?
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And she didn t say it to us.
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She just showed that she d seen us.
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We started howling and we were like, that s gotta go on television.
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Ryan Kopelman, thank you so much.
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Billions Showtime On Demand.
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We will link it all up in the show notes.
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Thank you so much for your time.
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This was really fun.
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I love what you re doing on your show.
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Thanks for having me.
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You got it, man.
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Take care.
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Take care.
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Bye-bye.
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Bye.
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Man, that was a really good show, Jason.
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Gabriel killed it too, he s not here on the post-rap, but wow.
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Great guest, great prep, great show.
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Indeed, that was one of my favorites.
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Yeah, you were quiet.
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You had all the stuff revved up, but then you were just like...
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You put it on cruise control.
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Well, you and Gabriel hit every point that I wanted to make, so, you know, good job.
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Yeah, thanks.
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It was really, first of all, I love Billions.
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I would never have watched that had I not needed to do it for prep.
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I love the show.
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I think he s clearly a brilliant writer.
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Loved Rounders, liked Ocean 13 a hell of a lot as well.
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This is somebody whose brain I m definitely glad we got in there and were able to deconstruct some stuff.
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I think there s a lot here for AOC family as well, the people that really are interested in the creative process, or just people who are interested in being spectators thereof.
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Absolutely.
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No, this was chock full of goodies.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Brian on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as all the other resources and books and podcasts and movies and videos mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art and most mobile podcast players to see the show notes right on your phone.
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I m also on Twitter.
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I post a lot of stuff that never makes it to the show, like articles, insights, and other funny stuff, at least in my own opinion.
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I m at The Art of Charm on Twitter.
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You can also find our episode sponsors in the show notes, or go to theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
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Bootcamp details on the website, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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Subscribe and review on iTunes, iPhone and Android apps available.
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Special thanks to both the Jasons and to Gabriel and to Fogarty for their help in production of this episode of The Art of Charm.
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Go ahead and tell your friends because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now have a great week and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks everybody.
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Thanks for listening to the Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.