Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network. This is James Altucher, and I am once again happy to have Brian Koppelman on the show. Brian was on the show a few months ago. But, Brian, you only gave me 40 minutes 5 minutes of your time. And then afterwards, and we discussed this the other day. But afterwards, I kept thinking to myself, oh my gosh. I'm such an idiot. There are so many other questions I wanted to ask Brian. And he you you gave me you you you you kind of suggested that I should be asking these questions almost, and I didn't ask ask them. But now I'm gonna ask them. I had a great time doing your podcast, and then, yeah, when you did mine, Tuesday or the other day, it's mine, my podcast, The Moment, was up 2 days ago with you on it. I tried within our hour to get everything in. It's, you know, it's just hard to get everything done in the limited amount of time, isn't it? It is. And, you know, the other thing is I mean, what do you okay. Forget all my questions for a second. What do you think about the format of podcasting? Because if I were to watch 2 guys, 2 talking heads on TV interviewing each other, I get bored probably listening for an hour. I don't think you would get bored, if they were able to forget the cameras and just be themselves. I think that the cameras have a disruptive influence on the conversation in a way that the microphones don't that interesting. Because it's almost like the brain's multitasking there. Somehow you're aware, you know, whereas here, there's an intimacy to podcasting. I love podcasts. I I wrote about WTF a couple of years ago. And as I was writing about it, it it was part of what made me know I wanted to do one. WTF being Marc Maron's excellent podcast. I wrote about this episode you did with Jim Brewer. I wrote about that for Grantland at the end of the year in, I guess, 2013. And, I guess I'd already known I I wanted to do it. There's something about people who are drawn to this, as hosts. There's, because it's not an industry that is quick money and because there's not even it's not even clear, that there's real money in it, except for a few people. The the the folks who wanna be on the side of the mic asking questions are there because they're incredibly curious and they have a point of view. And so listening to what they then are able to dig out is really compelling in a way that many other things aren't. So I wanted I do think there's a way to do it on television, but I it's it's hard podcasting because of the length of the form, allows the adrenaline to wash away, allows the calculation to wash away, and and and, forces people, I think, to be legitimate and to have these conversations in a real way. So so so I wanna I wanna briefly intro you if if for anybody who hasn't, heard our last podcast. You, wrote some of my favorite movies, Rounders, Ocean's 13, a Solitary Man. Solitary Man, one of my all time favorite movies, and Rounders. I would I would put both of those in my top ten. Thank you. Well, 2 of those I wrote with my lifelong creative partner David Levine. Who's also good on this podcast? Yeah. And the 3rd, Solitary Man, I wrote and Dave and I directed together. So yeah. Thanks, man. I'm so glad to know that you are our demo. Solitary Man, I've watched 3 times now. I've watched, twice on my own and once with my wife. And and I'm a big fan also of Jesse Eisenberg, Michael Douglas. So everybody, in the movie was great. You know, that's that's the movie of ours that means the most to me. And so the fact that and and, you know, it it And Rounders, of course, as I mentioned on the last one, changed my life. I started playing poker nonstop for a year after I saw that. No. I know. But if you tell that whole story again, then you're gonna walk away from this podcast feeling like you didn't ask me the question. So you ask me. So here's here's where I what I missed. What you what you threw down on the mat in the last one, and I didn't ask about it. You said during A Solitary Man, while you were writing that, you got stuck. And you you started you got stuck in a really bad way is the impression I got afterwards. And and you started doing stand up comedy. And I I what do you mean? I mean, it was it was a brilliant movie about kind of the way a a man who's who's slightly older, who's kind of down and out, like, he's he's kind of hitting a low point, but he's grasping for his youth again. And how did you get stuck, and and what happened? And I I wanna get granular as you put it. We can get granular. What happened is that I we have to go backwards. I have to go backwards, which is that accepting for me, I came to being an artist later than most do. You know, I was 30 when Dave and I wrote Rounders. And That doesn't seem old at all to me. Right. Well, now it doesn't. From from here, I'm 48. But when you're 30, you do think to yourself, if I were gonna do it, I probably would've. And but, you know, I somehow, you know, Dave and I got together and and lifelong best friend and we wrote that script and then got ourselves, in in a position where we were able to quickly do few more movies. We had made 4 movies or 5 movies that we'd written. We directed 1, always as a a team. And the I and and I will say there was an incredible power. There is an incredible power in having a creative partner because the the burden isn't entirely on you. There are days that Dave carries the ball downfield. There are days I carry the ball downfield. The other guy blocks. So that's a sports metaphor. I apologize, James. But most of the people in your audience will understand it. I mean, I got it. But a few a few things happen with with sauce. So so for a long time before I was 30, a big part of me knew that I wanted to write. I knew that I knew that I had the ability to create an emotional reaction in the reader. Basically, the response my friend Derek Hass, who's created, all the Chicago Fire and, Chicago, PD and those shows and rewritten a bunch of books, told me about himself that that he realized at a young age, if he wanted the reader to feel scared, the reader would feel scared. If he wanted the reader to laugh, the reader would laugh. And so he knew. I I I didn't think of it in that conscious a way. But I knew that for 2 paragraphs or 3 paragraphs, I could, kind of dazzle, a reader whether it it was a teacher, a girl I'd write a letter to. But I could never get past a page, 2 pages. I I lived as a blocked creative person. I couldn't, I couldn't find a way to power through the the moment after the initial inspiration wore off. And Is that because you wanted to finish fast? Or, you know, or is it just you ran out of things to say? I the I at the time, I would have said it was a lack of discipline, a lack of focus, laziness, but it was fear is what it was. It was, it it was that the the moment I had to start really working or I would allow myself to kinda catch up and read it, I would see the limitations in what I was doing. I would think, oh, well, it's glib or that comes easy to me or the fact that it comes easy means, you know, that it's thin or basically, what would happen is I would find other things to occupy my time. So, you know, as you know, I had a successful career doing stuff. I went to law school at night and graduated. I was kinda doing everything I could not to to do this thing. Dave and I started making these movies. They, you know, we both told the story each of us have told the story on your podcast that, you know, the initial idea for rounders being a movie set in this poker, world. I mean, I came up with that idea, told it to Dave. He said, like, let's figure out who these characters are and we sat down and went to work writing it. When the idea but but what I had never done in all that time was really drill down on, that I had changed, that I had got I gotten past thinking of myself in this old way that, that I had lost this atavistic idea about myself. Right? This idea that it out outlived its its usefulness, which was that I was an executive. I was not an artist. I was not a creative person. There was something terrifying about being that. So when I had the idea for Solitary Men, and it was so important to me. And I wrote the first 20 pages very quickly. Can I ask why was it important to you? Because the inciting incident, the thing that made me wanna write it, happened to somebody that I cared about, and I knew very well. And So that is somebody who kind of lost everything in some kind of No. The the the the well, I knew a couple of people who were like the main character of Michael Douglas's character. But the woman that Jenna Fischer plays, whose dad acts towards her in these ways, I saw that happen in front of me. I saw that transpire. And in anger, I wrote, like, the first 20 pages, and I think I told you this last time. But I knew a couple things. 1, I knew that that character of Ben Kalman, I knew that was really good. I knew that I captured a voice that I'd always wanted to and that he spoke and and and was like a living breathing creation you hadn't really seen on a movie screen before. Well, and it and it's sort of, you know, everybody goes through that. We get people get older, and and they wanna grasp at youth. But they combine that with kind of the story of loss and gain and Well, so I remember I I wrote these 20 pages, then I quickly wrote down very quickly. It's only happened a couple of times in my life. I I I wrote down, scene scene scene meaning I knew, okay. We're gonna meet Ben with his daughter. We're gonna meet his ex wife. He's gonna be asked to take his Is that how you write it? You wrote a scene and then kind of just an outline? I no. I wrote I wrote, initially, like, 15 or 20 pages, the the opening scene, and I wrote them longer, but I basically wrote a whole bunch of stuff that happened. I wrote the scenes, like, with the dialogue and everything. There's gonna a fit one morning. Like, in a few hours, I just, like, blitzed out a bunch of pages, and I called my wife in. And I was like, read this. She's my best reader, always has been. She's a great novelist. She's written and published 3 novels and wrote a movie that was at Sundance this year and called I Smile Back starring Sara Silverman. She's a great writer and has an incredible bulls**t meter. And she said, this is great. This is a movie. And, and you got that character right. But so I'd but I written those pages and then I I knew a whole bunch of stuff that happened up to, like, the midpoint of the movie. But I knew that stuff in an instant, James. So with the moment I start writing the movie, I knew, he was asked to take, the the the woman he was dating, he was asked to take her daughter back to his alma mater. I knew what would happen there, and I knew the result of what would happen there. And so I knew where he would be left, and I knew then that he would go back up to that college one more time. So even though I knew all that stuff the first day I started writing, but then I had no f**king ID. So I was able so then I went to the office and I read LaVine, these first, like, 18 pages or something. And I knew the movie was called the song, Solitary Man, was there. I had put that song. I knew that that Johnny Cash version of the Neil Diamond song would play over the opening, and I'd written that all in the script. And I read it to Dave, and he said, you did it. Like, that's an incredible voice, but we're not gonna write this one together. You have to write it because it's clear that you have the tone, down. So you gotta write it, and then, yeah, we should direct it together, but you gotta write it. So, I then in my in in odd time when I had the time, I would go back to it. And I was able to write up to the midway point of the movie. And I would it would it was hard. I was writing by my really by myself for the first time. Now I'd written essays, and I'd done a bunch of stuff, but part of me still felt like a fraud. Part of me still felt like somebody who, relied upon a partner who was I was a kid with ADHD, so finishing anything was always hard for me. But and I knew my partner, Dave, is one of the most he he is the single most, rigorous, responsible human I've ever met. So anytime that I would, my discipline would wane, Dave's there to go like, no. We're gonna work another 2 hours and, like, fight our way through and do this stuff that would then stoke my creativity one more time. But when I had to do it for myself, a a few things happened. 1, I was like, I don't think I'm smart enough to really figure out where this character should go. So even though you had done 5 movies by then or Including yeah. I mean, I was blocked, stopped in the middle of, I mean, we were making notions 13. And, I was on set every day of that movie and had written that movie with Dave and the, you know, 2 of us wrote, you know, all the lines in that movie. Steven Soderbergh probably kicked in a couple. Definitely did. But the 2 of us wrote that movie, and, and I still couldn't quite No. This is when the reflection of time, but that all I could tell you back then is my head would hurt. You know, I couldn't find a way. And what was maddening was I knew I had these, like, 55 pages that, represented something incredibly real. And then if I could finish it, I knew we could cast it, and I could get the movie made, and we'd be directing a movie star in a movie. And I couldn't do it. And, and it wasn't a conscious choice. Like, what would happen? You would sit down, and you had you had your your outline, basically. But I'd I've written to the end of the outline. I knew I had written to the end of the outline. I also knew the very I'll say, I knew the very last scene. I knew it would take place on this bench, and I knew basically what would happen. I didn't know exactly, like, the the the exact thing that the character would decide, but I knew they would be on this bench, and I knew what that meant. But then there were 50 pages that I couldn't figure out what would happen. I had this one because I had a a thought of what it should be, and I couldn't figure how to make that happen. So, yes, I would I would look at the document. I would read it and reread it, and I would, just think of myself as a failure and a loser. And, so that's that was great. So you're you're looking at a blank screen and you were like, this this is it. My career as a writer is over. Well, no. I mean, it was fun. No. Because I'm still doing this thing, but I think I just thought, well, I can't I can't solve this problem. It's maddening that I can't solve this problem. Going down different directions and then back up and Well, I had this one clear thought that, of what I thought needed to happen to get to to the end. Somewhere along there, I started as I was would you know, I would back then, I would sometimes do the artist's way, this journaling as in Julia Cameron's book, and sometimes I wouldn't. And, I realized that a thing I was 40 years old and that a thing I had always promised myself was that I would do stand up comedy, but that fear was holding me back from doing that. And I didn't really connect it in the that that really what was holding me up in solider man was, like, the fear that I would finish it, and it wouldn't be good enough, and I wouldn't be good enough, and I'd be a failure. So when I got this notion in my head as I was approaching my 40th birthday that, the the main thing I was afraid of doing was stand up. I decided I was gonna do it, and I was gonna do it the way that that way the people began. I was gonna go to open mics, and I was gonna take a stand up comedy class, and I did all that stuff. So let let let me ask. Let me back up on that. So so you you you made this conscious decision. Okay. There's something I'm afraid of, but I've always also been afraid of doing stand up comedy. I was much more out of control than that. Like, I was much more just walking around. You know? It it wasn't afterwards, I realized that the stand up comedy enabled me to deal with failure a certain way. Because you stand up there and you could, the When you bomb, it's brutal. And that it kind of kicks something loose that enabled me to go back to solitary man, which I then so I did stand up for a year and a half, and I did it. So so I I wanna understand that. So we can go slowly. So so so so you took a comedy cla*s. You started going to open mics. Now it does seem to me that 40 is old to start doing stand up. Yeah. I mean, what were your what were your some of your acts? Like, what were you doing stand up about? Well, I was talking I was talking about my life. I I mean, I still have the tapes. I have, like and I must have recorded, like, 85 shows. I still have the recordings of 85. Yeah. I did it. I approached it with real seriousness. Mhmm. I, Did you think you're gonna be, like, a professional comedian? No. I didn't think I was gonna be a professional comedian, but I yeah. I I needed to I knew I needed to pass at least one club where I could go during the week and really do it. I knew that, Passing a club means you can go get up and perform there, and you're not doing, like, open mic nights, You're not doing bringer shows. Mhmm. And, I ended up getting together, like, 7 to 10 minutes that worked so that one out of 3 nights, it would go really well. Mhmm. And one out of 3, it would be bumpy. And then one out of 3, it would be crappy. And I was learning how to do it. And I made friends in the comedy clubs who were still my real friends now, guys who've become famous. 1 who was famous already. 1 has become famous since. And we did open mics together. And, it's getting up. And so I do it 4 nights a week. I would meet David in the morning. We would write. I would go home, see my family. And then at 10 at night, I would go out. And, Amy is incredibly supportive. My kids were incredibly supportive of it. They knew how much it it meant to me. From the time you decided to start doing stand up to the time when you went to your first open mic, how long period was that? Short. Once I said I was doing it, I knew I had to do it right away. Like, so I found a cla*s. I went to an yeah. I found a class, then I went to an open mic. Open mics are so strange. Most of the people are crazy in them, really, you know, they have no business being there. You find, like, one smart person. There were, like, 2 smart people who I could tell could do it. So I knew right away just being, sane and relatively smart gave me some leg up, and or a possibility of being able to do it. Then a few comedians saw me do early open mics and told me I could do it. They were like, oh, you're funny. You're not funny yet, but you're funny. And, What does that mean? Like, what did they say? Well, well, I think they saw that I was, kinda comfortable on stage and that I was if if I got knocked what I realized is, if I was able to get be present so if I got knocked off of whatever I'd gone up there and, like, at first, you know, because I'm a writer, I really wrote the stuff. I wrote it out and memorized it, which is not what you should most very few comedians, that's how they work. But when I would get kinda knocked off course by something that would happen, I would able to be quick enough to make funny stuff happen, and I could survive. But but I bombed enormously. I mean, early on, I would get up and, I mean, just, you know, I beefed time after time after one funny joke. You know, one thing that would work and the rest of it, nothing. Just silence. Apathy. Angry apathy, from the audience. Like, you could feel it. Oh, it's the most palpable thing you can yes. It's and, but I would go, you know, man. I would, like, go from an open mic to, like, a friend would know there was a show at a bar downtown, and we would go to the like, 4 of us would go to this bar downtown where where people were drinking and not even listening, and you would pay $3 to get up and do 5 minutes at this bar. You'd have to buy 2 drinks, which I don't really drink. I'm not a non drinker, but for me, 2 beers, and I'm f**ked up. So I would give my drinks to some other comedians or something. I would go. We would go to another bar. We would go to some place, uptown. And I just slowly, in doing that, a bunch of the fear lifted. You know? Because then I would start to take pride in embalming and hanging in the room or showing up the next day, or then you would turn the crowd and buy and, you know, somehow get them. And and so while it was going on, I guess, Salterman was playing in the back of my head. And I would say I would think about it almost every day. I would open it, look at it, and not understand why I was stalled. And, finally, I took this I'd scratched out to page, like, 60, and I gave it to a friend of mine, one of my best friends, somebody named Davitt Sigerson, who's had just an incredible life, actually. And, he's a brilliant person. And I said, Dev, I wrote these 60 pages. And can you just read them and tell me if I'm crazy? And he read them, and he said, you're totally not crazy. What do you think the next thing should be? And I told him, and he said, I think that's, you're going down a blind alley. We don't wanna see that thing happen. What what was the thing that he didn't wanna see? Well, people haven't seen the movie, but Okay. This would be a good time to, like, go watch the movie because I'm about to say spoilers. So I'd always thought that he would go back up to the college to really go chase the girl that Imogen Poots played, and that they would end up having, like, a real thing for a period of time there at the house. So this is where you're at. Blew him off, and I was stuck trying to figure that out. And Davitt said, no. No. No. That character got everything he because Davitt said because that doesn't make sense. Right. Davitt said that he got everything he needed out of that thing. The movie has everything it needed out of that moment when the mother sees them. He can go back over the college, but that's not why. I think that's an important point. Like, everything that had happened until then made sense. But now you wanted to go down a path that didn't that was sort of But I couldn't figure it out. And he didn't know what the yeah. He didn't know what the path should be. He just said, I think that's a mistake. But the path ended up being I'm not gonna give a spoiler, but the path ended up being about friendship. Yeah. Sure. About figuring out who he was. And he still goes out to the college. I I the thing is I conflated these ideas, but that those specifics matter less than, than that I finally had the guts to, like, give the 60 pages to somebody. He looked at them. He tossed out this thing that I'd been carrying in my head the whole time. But because I had been doing stand up, which was about getting up, getting rejected, trying again, changing it, staying in the moment, staying present, somehow when he said that, it enabled me to look at the thing in a fresh way. Now I will say this is about three and a half years after I first started solitaire, and then it was coming to be August. August, I know my Amy and I were taking the kids somewhere for a few weeks. We'd rented a house, and I decided I was gonna put in a couple of hours in afternoon and just, no matter what, get to the end of it. And I'd I I did it. She the kids would they would go out for a couple hours. I would sit down, and I just said forget the quality. Don't be a perfectionist because that was the other big problem was wanting knowing how how, you know, that knowing that to my own standards, the beginning was super strong and and feeling the pressure that every page had to be that strong. And and I just sat down and immediately just banged out the outline for the rest of it and then forced myself to just write the scenes. Even if I thought they sucked, I was like, find a way to write the scenes. And I wrote all the scenes. In like 3 weeks, I wrote the final 55 pages. And then except for one scene, I wrote wrote it, finally finished, rewrote that stuff. I knew it was, like, tied together with the beginning, and I had something. But I was missing one scene, and I couldn't figure out what it was. It was driving me crazy, and then I was on a crosstown bus, and, suddenly, I realized he needed to return the shirt to Jesse Eisenberg. And that scene popped into my head, and I sat down on the bus, and I just wrote it in longhand in, like, this little black notebook that I carried everywhere with me. And I wrote that scene By the way, that's a key point. Many people I've spoken to carry around notebooks. You cannot wait to write down No. I mean, I really write everything down on my iPhone on the notepad on my iPhone, but, but I did have a notebook then, and I I I still do, but I use now I use this thing. But I did wrote the scene down. I got to the office. I said to Dave, like, I need 5 minutes. I went in the other room. I just I just transcribed what I had written, and then I knew when I wrote that scene where he gives his shirt back to Jesse Eisenberg, I was like, okay. That character has now come to where he needed to come to. The and I knew that the movie was basically done. I showed it to David and Amy. They both, very quickly said, like, well, that's really a movie. Like, you know, you did the thing. Like, figure out how to put it together. And then, you know, equally, I I will say, people asked me to change the ending, and, they I knew we could've gotten more money if we would've changed the ending. And I talked about this a little bit on WTF, but I the thing I don't think I I said was, all these experts were telling me that we couldn't get it made, that we couldn't raise the money because it was a dark movie, because it was about an old man, because of all these issues. And, I started to believe them. And so I went on Nike ID, and I made shoes for myself. I made these, sneakers. And I had the word, solitary, put in bright pink a 100 times on each shoe. And I wore the shoes every single day from when I finished the script, and people told me we couldn't get it made until the 1st day of shooting. And so that I would look at the shoes. And anytime I looked down and saw Solitary, it would I would make myself take one step towards getting it made. I would make one phone call or send one email to one thing to push the movie forward. And I wore the shoes every single day until we got the movie made. Were you scared during that period that it would never get made, or were you did you have this eerie confidence I knew the movie would get made. I was like because I knew that it has to It's like the 1% a day thing. Like, if as long as that one email goes out, it's the effect compound. I knew I had to do something every day, that I was believing it was something Tony Robbins had said to me, or had said it, in a book, you know, about or actually, it's something he had said on his Get the Edge program, which was that we give too much power to experts because it's it's easy then to tell ourselves it's not our fault. And then I had given power to the people whose job it was to raise money for the movie. What was the first breakthrough? Did, like, an actor come on? Or Steven Soderbergh read it and said, I I can get it to Michael Douglas. I believe in this. You guys should direct it, and Michael should star in it. And I he agreed with us. And he sent it to he said, we said then you produced the movie. So he gave it to Michael. But even with Michael, it took a year to raise the money. And so that's what I'm saying. I knew I had Michael. I had Steven. We were directing it. But early on, people said, well, if you make the ending more just I'm clearly happy. We'll give you the money. There were things we could have done to soften it, to to really get more money, but because of the, you know, cost of writing it, how hard it was, I just refused. And, you know, it's not like, I just wanna say, you know, I didn't know you know, the movie wasn't some big hit. It made its money back for everybody. It was, it it ended up, on Roger Ebert's year end best list, on the New York Times year end best list, on, like, Matt Zoller's sites. Like, these very important critics, you know, kinda an A and Entertainment Weekly, all this stuff. But it wasn't a huge commercial hit or anything. It was just, it did end up being the movie that was in my head and then in my end David's head when we directed it together. And it it did it did live up to the the the the thing I'd hoped and was terrified that I couldn't pull off the day that I first sat down to write it. I don't want people to think they're gonna go see The Godfather 2. It's a small little movie, and it's a small little character study. That's that's all that it is. It just was something that was really important to me because it was you know, my my dad had gotten sick and then gotten better. So that was another thing that had happened. My dad's great now, and he and I have always been incredibly close. But I think seeing my dad struggle with mortality and me struggling with it helped that was another piece that helped me understand what that character might also be going through. But it seems like a big defining factor in the create both the creativity process and the execution process is some amount of fear. Like, so something inside of you was telling you, I need to shake things up a little bit. So the first time you went out and you did something totally different that you were completely afraid of, which was go in front of an audience and tell jokes, something that no other guy you knew probably was doing. And so I I don't even know, like, what like, the first time you went up on stage, like, what did you think of you you probably had something written because of the class, and this shook you up a little bit somehow writing writing comedy. What what are your, like, tips on comedy? You're giving you give screen screenwriting tips all the time on Vine. But what made you think you can do comedy? What made you think your first set was gonna be funny? Or Well, I didn't know. Even though I'm I'm I'm completely dry, I'm not funny now. Because I'll tell you I don't even know. Stand up takes doing stand up just takes all the pressure off of you to be be funny in other times. But, no. I could always make, like, a roomful of people. That was just a skill I always had. Like, if I went to pitch a movie, I could make everybody laugh. Dave and I together could you know, in law school, I could make the whole I I was always, one of the I always stage? Well, no. But I'm saying when you ask what it is, right, it's like, you know how they always say, like, the best looking person in every town goes to Hollywood? So everybody who's the funniest kid or second funniest kid in his class thinks, that he could you know, can go be a comedian. And I'd I'd studied. I mean, I loved comedy. I knew comedy albums by heart and all that stuff. Who were your favorite comedians when you started? Well, it depends on the time. And this comedian named Alan Havey, who's a New York comedian, was my favorite comedian. But George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Steve Martin and, but I knew every I knew all the, you know, Paul Reiser and, I just knew every comedian's work. Big j at that time when I first was going in the clubs, Big j Ogerson, who's been on my podcast recently with somebody who I thought was incredibly hilarious, Gary Goldman. All all these people, I was doing originally the stuff I was doing at first was was probably not very autobiographical at at at first. It was, it was odd. It was very writerly. And then, you know, you get called the the what happens in the beginning is all you want you get desperate to get laughs, so you go to the most base material that you have. So, you know, Lot of fart jokes? Well, I wouldn't tell fart jokes, but you end up telling dick jokes because they get laughs. And, so I started doing that. And then I started no. I started, like, building, a a routine that that that mostly, you know, that held together and had, like, a unified tone. But once I proved to myself that I could do it and that flame was extinguished for me in that in that I didn't I'd answered the question. You know? Do I have the balls to do this? Can I do it consistently? Can I not quit? Can I deal with, the hardship in it? Can I stay calm when a heckler shows up? Can I be mean enough to dispense with the heckler while not losing the rest of the audience? And I kind of went through all those reps and then became friends with a bunch of the comedians and felt accepted and felt a part of it. And and somehow was able to then you know, look. I realized, oh, I have this incredible life where I'm making movies, which is really what I wanna do. I have this family. I I I'm not cashing all that in to put in you know, I got definitely got to a moment where I realized, I don't know if I can be great at this. The only way to find out if I can be great at it is to devote everything I have to it, meaning to do 25 sets a week, only think about writing jokes, and I didn't need to. Now I'll say weirdly, James, it pays off. You know, I was on Seth Meyer show 3 weeks ago. Sure. I watched it. And, Funny. I was funny on the show. Yeah. It was great. And, Yeah. The joke he told about Paul Giamatti, looking at the ground, he was really embarrassed. It was great. Thank you. But, there's no way that I could've done that Mhmm. If I hadn't done the year and a half stand up. No way I could've walked out there and kind of been funny on command and ripped with the You had a challenge because you go up there. It's like you point out. You're a writer, so it's not like you're in front of a screen every day. The audience doesn't know you, so you kinda have to, like, stand out a little special. Right. Now I knew, you know, Seth's, listens to his guest on on my, podcast, The Moment, and he's, a fan of the podcast. That's why I think he wanted me to come on on the show. But I did feel this obligation to be out there and to be able to pitch and catch with him. And and, so I thought about what I was gonna say. And and, like, I'm not I didn't go out there and, you know, I didn't I didn't rip it up, like, you know, the first time Seinfeld was on the tonight show or something. But and Seth was incredibly generous to me and made sure that my jokes landed. But, the adrenaline that hits you in the moment before the curtain opens and you walk out is only stand up prepared me for the jolt of adrenaline that I had to somehow reign in as I went out to do that, to go talk to him. So so connect that back to then giving you the energy to to bring you back to solitary man. So it seems like you got stuck in one area. Yeah. You took a kind of Yeah. Peripheral area, not completely different, but peripheral. And but also one where you can use your fear to move you forward. And you but you got out of the box enough that that sort of shook up this other box. But, I mean, we constantly I mean, I started the podcast probably for some where I was like, I love this. I'm really interested in it. I love podcast the way I love comedy and movies, because of the intimacy of the form, because of the amount the way you know, I have this, incredibly curious, and I'm constantly trying to learn in every area. And, I don't know. I don't know if I you know, I did a couple of guest appearances on on pods. They went well. But I had no idea that I could really do it. I had a big forum, because, Bill Simmons trusted me and gave me, a show on Grantland and he and Dave Jacoby. And, I could have really flamed out, you know, and it could have been terrible. But, again, like, I just always wanna put myself on the edge of, creative failure. I I don't wanna put my family at risk. I'm not gonna I don't need to I don't need to be on the edge of, financial ruin. I don't need to, ruin my marriage. But but I do need to challenge myself creatively. I do need to, become very familiar with and friendly with looking down and knowing that the ground is no longer there and having to find a way to stay afloat so that I don't become complacent in the work, so that the fear that everybody has when they face the page isn't insurmountable so that I can keep moving forward because it's always scary, dude. Right. So so so let's say I'm a listener, and I'm sitting in my cubicle, and my job my my dream has always been to either write a novel, screenplay, do stand up. But I I blame it on time. I blame it on kids. I blame it on responsibilities. What do you tell that person to kind of break out of that? A few things. 1, you talk about the value of relationships, and I just luckily married the perfect person for me. That's an enormous thing. I found a partner who's smarter than I am and incredibly supportive of me. And those that was luck because I was young, and that could've I easily could've married the wrong person, and, I was lucky that she agreed to marry me. And, so I'm sure I'm sure now I have a new podcast listener. Amy, welcome to listening to the show. No. No. I think she hears me talking off. I'm no way she's listening. But, but she so that enabled me, first of all, always to have somebody to bounce this stuff off of. So I would say for for people, right, if you do have if you're a woman and your husband is like, hey. You know, you can never you know, is not supportive. I don't that that is the one piece that feels like I don't understand how to tell somebody how to how to transcend sort of if their intimate relationships can't share the dream. I I don't because that's not my experience. That's the one piece of it that I had that I know separates me from a lot of people and that I had a supportive I have a supportive wife who's my best friend and who's there for me. Other than that, though, you we all have the time. I remember Right. Time is never an exciting that guy who wrote Snowfalling on Cedars because we all heard that story when that book came out, like, 20 years ago. That person worked, like, 3 jobs and we get up at 4 in the morning, and then that book won the National Book Award. And I remember reading that and it feeling like a curse against me because that was when I was still scared to write and telling myself, well, my job requires me to be out late and get and I there's no way I could do it. And that I remember, like, I was, like, a teacher and worked a second job and had a family, and he would wake up early in the morning and write it. And I was, like, you know, you can find the time. But you have to just be comfortable with failure. You have to take your ego out of it, and you have to figure out, you know, what you want and why you want it. So why do you wanna play in whatever area you wanna play in? Like, what is important about that to you? Why do you need, why do you need to do that? And so when I I would a lot of the work I did on myself was, like, figuring out, you know, what I what what I wanted and why I wanted it. Because then when that becomes powerful enough, then you have to sort of follow it, I think. How do you know what it is you wanted? Like, that that it has to come from some Feelings at first of being dissatisfaction. Right? So you're dissatisfied. I mean You're dissatisfied. Think as you've talked about in your show, Awaken the Giant Within is one of the the great resources out there. You know, people look at Tony Robbins sometimes and they think that he's, full of s**t, but I I I found that that book is just an was an invaluable resource to me because it made me look at my life and look at where I wanted to be and accept what the dissatisfaction was and then figure out how to close that gap. And so, you know, you do those exercises and you you look at the limiting I would say this, you know, you look at the limiting beliefs that you have and then about yourself. The unconscious belief might be, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough talent. My kids. I'm not smart enough. I don't have the time. My boss will hate me if I do that. My friends will hate me. And a lot of times I'm selfish. A lot of times it's because people have told you this. Maybe they didn't say you were stupid, but they might have said you can't write a novel. You should have done it 10 years ago. You can't do stand up. You should have done that 20 years ago. But, also, like, a lot of people think that it's selfish. They think, it's selfish to chase a dream, but this is a discovery that I've made, and I'm certain of it. I'm not certain of that much. But I am certain that, and what's the Springsteen lie, line? Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse? You know? And to me, if you know if a part of you knows that there's a thirst that you're not even trying to quench, that there's a creative breakthrough that you are desperate to make but you're you're kinda shutting your eyes to it, I think you become toxic. I and I think that that the being thwarted in that way makes you toxic to yourself and to those around you. I mean, the thing when I was 30 and finally had to break through, I mean, I was sitting in my office. I was never a cigarette smoker. I got through my whole teenage years and college years without ever smoking a cigarette. I started smoking. I was overweight. I was miserable. And I I was like this finally, I have to accept that the life I'm living is making me bad to be around, is making me a bad husband because I'm gonna be short with Amy. I'm gonna be a bad you know, you become you become toxic to those around you. And I just like, that was unacceptable to me. You know, my what happened when my son was 9 months old, I wanted to be able to go home and tell him, go chase your dreams in life, and I wasn't doing it. And I didn't wanna be a f**king liar. And power that got strong enough in me that I had to crash through. So so let me ask you this, and I agree with everything you're saying. But the big question that comes up is, okay, you went off to become a screenwriter and you made rounders. What would have told you to stop? When would you have said, you know what? I can't do it. Well, the line between being an artist and being delusional is very thin. Right. Because I'm sure you've met a lot of delusional people. Yeah. I it's unanswerable. You know, other than if you're a sane person, there are clues. If you're a sane person, there are clues that this area, there's something in this area that you, you know, you've you've been rewarded in some way. You got a certain you get a certain kind of endorphin rush doing this thing. You're not faking it. Because as you know I mean, I did talk about this in the last podcast. Rounders was rejected by every agency when we first wrote it, and I've had that experience repeat itself many times. And Do you have to deal with rejection? You know? But but you have to deal with rejection. You try to deal with it. It's painful for a day, and then you, you know, like, you you try to, dispassionately look at it and figure out where what's legitimate and what's not. Look, I I'm it's very hard to really give a prescription for any of this. You can only talk about your own experience. I mean, as you said on on my my podcast, about yourself. So I only say, like, I I it was unacceptable to me to not try this stuff because I wanted more than anything to be a good parent and a good husband. And I felt somewhere in my bones that if I didn't do this stuff, I would be bad at those things, because I would, be short-tempered. I would be feel like I wasn't making progress. I would feel like I'd sacrificed who I really could be, in in in too great a way for financial short term financial certainty. And and so I I had to like no. I'm thinking it. I had to I had to crash through it. But I had a lot of stacked in my favor, man. You know? I had, like I said, a wife who was super supportive relationships with other writers. Right? I had a best friend who was willing who was working at being a writer, who who was incredibly disciplined and rigorous and focused, who was willing to hear my idea and say, like, oh, I know how to make it better. Let's do this together. And, I was set up to be able I had put myself in a position that if I could finally just apply myself rigorously, I could succeed at it. But it was incredibly uncertain. But I will say this. You know what I knew? I knew that those 2 hour and this is maybe how you can tell. Without lying to myself, I knew the 2 hours in the morning that David and I were riding rounders were the 2 hours that I felt most alive in my work day. So, again, it's like it's like your body told you this is the right thing for you to be doing. And it wasn't a bulls**t thing that lasted one day. Like, even when the writing was hard, those 2 hours were getting rejected. Yeah. But forget the rejection part because the the actual doing of it was hard. Right? You sit there and write it's I mean, it's hard. Your brain hurts. You're trying to create this. You don't really know how. You have an idea. I mean, you know, it's the thing Salinger quotes at the beginning of, one of his books, the Kirk Kierkegaard quote, like, the characters turn against you right away. You know, you fail. You have this idea, this tone, this feeling in your head, and you fail it. But you you keep at it. That 2 hours, I I just felt, I felt awake and alive. And I I just wanted that all the time. And, you know, so I built this life now where whether I'm in the editing room, which is where you are, we're doing this podcast here at the editing place where we're shooting we're cutting our pilot billions for Showtime, when I'm doing my podcast, when I'm home with my family. You know, I have I I guess I realized then at 30 that that feeling of being alive, that doesn't mean things aren't hard or you don't have bad days or you don't have failure. But, I don't put myself in situations where I feel dead inside. Boredom, feeling dead inside, on we those things are so painful to me. And because I've had a taste of being on the other side of it, I won't live in those. I I won't my standard is I will never be in those spots, and I will do anything I can to avoid them. So it's interesting because endorphins come from the fight or flight thing. So a lion's chasing you, you're running for a mile, and then suddenly you need those endorphins to kick in so you can run faster and more and not get as tired. You feel pleasure running from the lion. So what you did while you're writing solitaire man is you sort of took a step back and either consciously or subconsciously figured out how am I gonna get that endorphin kick. I'm gonna throw myself at this end of comedy. Well, I was miserable. I mean, yeah. I was I can't you know, it's hard to explain to you, but I knew I'd had half of a thing that would be life changing for me because if I could finish it and go make it, it would just tell me forever that, I wasn't it wasn't fraudulent. Like, I could really do this thing. And so I I don't understand that because clearly you had already done rounders in Ocean's 13. Because human beings are complicated and so destructive, man, and then insecure sometimes. Right? So I had made that the gauntlet and maybe getting up and failing a lot of stand up, and it took the pressure off so I could just write the thing, and just do it. You know? But I'm and by the way, I mean, some of these sometimes I'm terrible dinner company if, you know, I'm I I will say, like I've said, in these binds I do, the 6 second screenwriting lessons, I've said, you know, one of the keys is learning if you wanna if you wanna change your life, you have to learn how to say no. You have to say no to social obligations. You have to say no to all sorts of different things people want you to do, to only say yes to the stuff that either is really important for your family or for this your work or for this new thing you're trying to do. So, you know, I would not I don't I you know, for years, I wouldn't go out socially with I won't I still I don't go out socially with your if you see me out at dinner with Amy and another couple, I wanna be there. I do not do I zero social obligations. I will never have obligation plans. I will never have to go to an obligation event, a school dinner, a a show I don't wanna see. I like how you call it an obligation event. I will never do it. It doesn't exist for me. I agree with you. I cut it all out of my life years ago because I need that time and because I can't allow myself to settle for feeling crappy and bored. And I will say, yes. That doesn't mean if you're if you're at work and, you know, your boss says you have to come tonight, just that's part of doing your job. You gotta go. Like, so, hey. I'm taking the team, out bowling tonight. Yeah. You gotta you gotta go do that. But short of those things that are, like, you know, real work related obligations, don't do it ever. I mean, I think it's safe to say no practically gives you a double life, like a second life because you save so much time. Yeah. And I just say it willingly and with impunity all the time. So you you really test every creative medium. Like, you're doing podcasting. We're in the editing room where you're you're editing billions, which is gonna hopefully, you know, be a TV show. We'll talk about that in a second. But also these, 6 Second Vines, you did, like, over 300 of them about screenwriting. What what made you do that? And what's what I really like is you've done you repeated it several times. Experts it's not that they don't know anything, but don't listen to the experts. That that's kind of a big theme in the past. Gatekeepers and experts are, it's easy for them to talk about no. It's easy for them to say a different kind of no, because, in the short term, they only get fired for a wrong yes, a wrong no. It takes a long time to redound against them. But, I well, I have a real hatred for charlatans who pretend to be, expert and think you know, claim they can give you the answer to, like, how to write, a movie or how to write a novel because there is no answer. You know, you have to you have to cover that difficult ground, that terrain by yourself. And and so out of peak one day, I just said into and I was interested in fine, and I just turned on the phone and looked into it and and said, all screenwriting books are bulls**t. All of them read screenplays, Watch movies. Let them be your guide. And I posted it and called it as a joke. Sick and sick second screenwriting lessons, number 1. And then I just got this tidal wave of positive feedback. You got 15,000,000 views in, like, a few weeks. Right? Well, one of the Vines has 43,000,000 views. Wow. So Well, what did that one Vines say? I don't I don't remember that. I don't even remember. It's number 319. I don't know what it says. Something about giving one more push when you wanna quit. But, no, my Vines in total of I'm way over 50,000,000. And, I'm sure way over that. I don't even know what the number is, but I know the one has over 43,000,000 views. So, that and I I my I had a rule for that, which was I would do one a day for as long as I had something new to say that I believed was, 100% true. And as soon as I didn't, I would stop. So I did, like, 336 of them. Now I may have done 340 of them. I do them when I feel like it. And the feedback from that has been amazing. People thank me for that. Almost every day, I get someone write me to thank me for having for having done that. And they're just supposed to be little guides to creativity. So so what's, like, 2 or 3 what are 2 or 3 of your favorite tips on that from that? I mean, we've sort of covered them in a longer in a longer form. I mean, I don't I didn't memorize them. I would think of them and say them because part of it also was just keeping that really loose and and free. But the idea is that every day, you know, whatever you're creative whatever you wanna do, whatever unlocking your own creativity means to you, do something every day to develop, like, develop a practice that allows you to do that every single day. Right. So so what I gathered out of the ones I watched right every day Yeah. Don't listen to the experts, and, don't be anything that you're afraid of, try to tackle it. Yeah. Pretty much. I mean, you know, I'm afraid of heroin, but I'm not sticking a spike in my arm. So if Heroin sounds to me pretty good, actually. I've never tried it. That's the that's the that's right there is the, exact reason for my fear. Yeah. No. But yes. Within reason. I mean, examine the things that you're afraid of and and dive in if there are things that ultimately and and are to your benefit. You know? Now now tell me about and and and when when billions you know, if god willing, it makes it to the air, you know, becomes a show, I want you back on. But what's what's billions, the TV show? Yeah. Dave and I come on together when when that is it's a show that we created with Andrew Ross Sorkin, the financial journalist, and, it's, stars Paul Giamatti, Maggie Siff, Damian Lewis, and, Malin Akerman. And it's, set in, the world of the United States attorney's office and, a hedge fund a giant's, offices. And it's a a big, hopefully, a big powerful look at the, entire, financial legal sector and the way those things, intersect. And, you know, it's not gonna be on for a long time. So, well, we can talk more about that down the road. You came and visited the set, which I thought it was awesome when you visited because I watched you spent a whole day, and I I watched you just sort of taking the whole thing in. And I thought it was great. You know, you didn't you you stayed out of everybody's way. You paid attention. And I I thought to myself, this is James living exactly what he says he he lives, which is you were not there for your own ego. You weren't there to talk to you were there to sort of watch these creative people doing what they did and sort of see how they manifested what it is they are. Can I tell you what I thought was the most interesting thing to me? Sure. In in the in the show, and then we can we can close with that. But, I was curious why so so, Neil Burger is directing the first show. He directed Limitless, Divergent. Limitless is also one of my favorite movies. It's a great movie. And so I wanted to understand what a director of a TV show does because I had no idea. You just follow a script and just have everybody do things. But then I saw something that he was doing that I had never thought of before in a TV show. And he was he's of course, it's the 1st episode as a pilot, so he's gonna set the tone for the entire series whether he directs it or not. And I noticed every time he shot the hedge fund manager, who's a multibillion dollar hedge fund manager, it was these wide sweeping shots of a guy controlling the world. You're watching a guy up there Neil is visually brilliant. I mean, Dave and I produced his first three movies, and we, have been collaborators for a very long time. And we wanted to work with him because he has a ferocious intellect and a huge visual talent, and he applies those things together to tell the story. Right. What he did was he made the camera a character of the story, which I never thought of before in a TV series. A great pilot director adds a tremendous amount for sure. Yeah. No. I liked watching you watch all of us do our thing. What was the hardest part in, writing this first episode for you and making this episode? Oh, man. Making things I mean, that's so okay. The because you were very involved. I was watching you. You were going over every note with him. You were standing right behind him. And, oh, and he was saying stuff like that car needs to pull out a quarter second faster. And, like, everything was happening beautifully. When you're doing this stuff, you're, like, all the way inside it. But here's the part, you know, about chasing your dreams and and then the thing you said, I say right every day. I've said this before on my own podcast, but people often tell you know, people who who will often tell you to chase your dreams or they'll say take a they don't really talk about the fact that, then you just have to work ferociously hard. So when you ask what's the hard part, the hard part is, like, every day writing freely, writing without censoring yourself, and then being disciplined enough to rewrite it and to look at it again and again and again and be ruthless in making it better. So just like standards, you know, lowering your standards enough to actually put words on the page and then making sure you ratchet those standards back up before you decide a thing is finished. And so, you know, just beating the s**t out of myself and Dave doing it to himself and Andrew too and us all together making sure that this thing was as good as we could make it at the time. And I'll tell you, editing's the same thing. You constantly look and say, am I telling the story in the way that's absolutely the best without, you know, any sympathy or empathy for, who I was when I was writing it and hoping that it would be great. You know, it's this line that I thought was really hilarious when I wrote it really having an effect. And if it's not, yank it out. Killing the babies. Gotta do it, man. Hemingway's, you know, Hemingway's right. I mean, that was a great moment. And, Megan's solitary man, Ethan and Joel Cohen were were, you know, probably my favorite of all time, kind enough to come to the editing room. And, they watched a cut of the movie, solitary man. And, Ethan pointed to a moment in a scene, and he said that scene should end right there. Everything after that is nonsense and hurts you. Later, you have to go from that moment. You have to make this big cut to a thing that happened 5 minutes later. And I'll tell you the thing he wanted us to cut was absolutely one of the first things I wrote and was central to why I wanted to tell the story. It was a rap that Michael Douglas gave that that when I wrote that rap was one of the ways I knew I had the character in mind. And, like, I just couldn't imagine cutting it. And I said, oh, but Ethan and he was like, listen, man. That was probably the ladder that got you to the roof. And the roof is the project. But once you get to the roof, you gotta kick the ladder away. But you know what? And then I did. Dave and I looked at each other, and Dave said, what do you wanna do? I said, what do you think? And Dave's like, well, that was Ethan Cohn. So I think we should probably try it. And we, Dave's smart like that. And so we did kick the ladder away, and then we screened it that night for people. And it changed the entire way they watch the movie. Like, Ethan was he saw that in that moment, you even though Ben's a very hard character to hang with, that was the moment that you really lost you really lost your contact with Ben. You you hated him. And by cutting it, we gave the power to another character in the scene and changed the meaning of it, and it made the movie work. I know it's the difference between the movie getting on those lists and not getting on those lists was that 5 minutes getting cut out of the movie. So, you know, yes. So somehow I had a you know, Dave and I have relationships with people that got those guys to come, then we took the ego blow of, like, listening to them. I I was with the director recently, and I said, like, we wanna have filmmakers come. You should have filmmakers come watch this movie. And he didn't want to because he was scared of it. I wanna show stuff to the best filmmakers all the time. I wanted my stuff to be ripped apart once I've done the part that requires me to have the courage, right, originally to write Risking Failure. Then I just wanna be able to get the best eyes on it, and I wanna then figure out what to listen to and what not to based not on ego or my prior conception, but based on the reality on the ground right now. That's another thing that takes, like, discipline and and hard hard hard work and and, but the rewards of doing that are are great. Right. The rewards are great because and, again, all of this is a metaphor for what all of your creative process is a metaphor for doing what we all should be doing, which is striving for autonomy in our decisions, striving for competence, and figuring out all the different ways we can get competence. And, you know, in general, striving for well-being, doing what we what we want to do. Yes. You said last time I stopped us after 45 minutes. I'll stop I have to stop us now. Alright. Well because I have to go back to We'll get back together when Billions comes out. Listen, dude, this has been a fun day because you did my podcast, and even though it aired 2 days ago, I'm doing yours. This is really fun. The moment with my podcast. So you can find me the podcast is called The Moment, with Brian Koppelman. I am at Brian Koppelman on Twitter. You can email me anything except screenplay ideas or screenplays or TV ideas. If you send me any of that stuff, I'll I'll burn it, and I will actually print the email out in order to burn it. I'll never read it. But anything else, you can email me the moment b k atgmail.com. I read every email, and I reply to everyone eventually even though it takes me too long to sometimes. James, such a fan of yours and of your show, and, I hope I didn't ramble too much. No, Brian. Ditto. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thanks for coming to the James Altucher show. We'll do it again. For more from James, check out the James Altucher show on the Stansbury radio network at stansburyradio.com, and get yourself on the free insider's list today. The nation's favorite car buying site, Dundeele Motors, is home to the largest range of new and premium used cars from all of Ireland's trusted car dealerships. That's why you'll find Brady's Mercedes Benz on Dundee. 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