0:00:03 Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ Podcast. I’m Sonal.
0:00:07 Today, we have one of our book launch episodes with Safi Bakal, author of “Loone Shots.”
0:00:14 The subtitle is, “Had a Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.”
0:00:20 So joining me to co-host this episode is A6NZ General Partner for Bio, V.J. Punday,
0:00:23 who also happened to be a Miller Fellow with the author back in their grad school days.
0:00:27 Speaking of, Safi has an academic background in theoretical physics,
0:00:33 co-founded a biotech startup developing new drugs for cancer, and then led its IPO and served as its
0:00:37 CEO for over a decade. So he has a really interesting vantage point that unites perspectives from
0:00:43 academia, startups, and big company innovation. By the way, you can find other episodes touching
0:00:47 on some of these themes from different angles, including with former Stanford president John
0:00:52 Hennessey on the transition of ideas from academia to startups, and with CEO of Novartis,
0:00:58 Vashrini Vasan, on R&D and innovation inside Big Pharma, as well as an episode on what disruption
0:01:03 theory is and isn’t by searching for those on our website. But in this interview, we cover
0:01:09 what is a loonshot versus a moonshot, and how do or don’t those connect to the concept of disruption.
0:01:13 And given that those are some buzzy buzzwords, after briefly defining them and considering
0:01:18 how companies can innovate regardless of what we call it, we then go into some deep scientific
0:01:24 concepts and analogies to share a very different framework than in typical management literature
0:01:30 with practical advice for teams and companies of all sizes to nurture new ideas and initiatives.
0:01:36 And we even dismantle some common dogma around culture, product, and market along the way.
0:01:42 But first, Safi begins briefly with an analogy to historical empires and why new ideas didn’t take
0:01:50 off there. For thousands and thousands of years, truth was established by the divine ruler or the
0:01:58 tribal leader. And in the 17th century, plus or minus a few years in Western Europe, this kind of
0:02:06 new idea spread. But instead of asking what was true and false, there was a universal truth that
0:02:13 anybody could figure out through measurement and experiment. And that idea, now called the
0:02:18 scientific method, changed the world more than any other idea. It essentially democratized truth.
0:02:22 If you got rid of all the previous books, you destroyed them, they should all be able to come
0:02:29 back to the extent that they were right. And in some sense, you asked me what a loonshot is,
0:02:34 this idea that there are natural laws in the universe and we can access them through
0:02:39 measurement and experiment. We take that for granted today.
0:02:40 It was really controversial at the time.
0:02:48 Not only was it controversial, it was subversive, it was threatening. It didn’t just suddenly appear,
0:02:53 it was a 2000 year story of it, that same idea appearing and being quashed and appearing and
0:02:59 being quashed and appearing, you know, for hundreds if not thousands of years. So why did that idea
0:03:05 appear there? And in fact, so much of the stuff that we take for granted and fed into that
0:03:11 revolution came from China, Islam and India, the astronomy, the medicine, the mathematics,
0:03:16 which came from algebra and India. Many of the technologies, paper and printing had been
0:03:23 used in China and developed in China and not for 50 years or 100 years, but for a thousand years.
0:03:28 China did a paper printing compass, currencies, scholar elites,
0:03:34 agricultural mining that was unheard of, that was not seen in Europe until many centuries later.
0:03:40 So why Western Europe? What was, and I just kept getting stuck on this question, especially
0:03:46 when you grow up in, you know, a Western culture, you’re told, well, basically there was the Greeks
0:03:50 and nothing. Oh, no, you’re so right. I had the same upbringing. I completely relate to that.
0:03:54 That was like how I’d grown up. It was basically 30 second history of science,
0:03:58 Greeks, nothing new and done. History started and were modern. And maybe Einstein.
0:04:04 But the more I started to think about it and the more I realized like there’s something in the
0:04:11 question of why did these big empires did so well for so long, but why do they have trouble
0:04:17 innovating? And I realized there was a close parallel to my industry. So I was in the drug
0:04:23 discovery industry. So the parallel, China, India and the Islamic empires were a lot like
0:04:28 the Merck, Pfizer, Novartis of today. Fascinating. They were global, everywhere, dominant,
0:04:33 they’re phenomenal at franchises. So in India, you’ve had the Taj Mahal. You know, in China,
0:04:38 they built the Great Wall and just incredible, the grand canals. They had a series, sequels.
0:04:44 But the little tiny ideas got quashed. And where did the incredibly innovative revolutionary new
0:04:49 drugs come from? From them teaming market of hundreds and hundreds of small biotechs like the
0:04:53 one that I was at. Essentially, what you’re pointing to is that if you think about how we
0:04:57 parallel that now, biotechs are just great examples of startups in general, you know,
0:05:00 and that startups are maybe the ultimate loon shot, right? Especially the reason why often you
0:05:05 have to do in a startup is that if you try to do it in the big established empire, you know,
0:05:09 that you’d be either going against what the empire does, or it’d be heretical, it’d be crazy.
0:05:15 Right. So a moon shot is a big, exciting goal, like you’re in cancer, eliminating poverty. But
0:05:22 it’s a destination. To go to the moon. Yeah. Like in 1961, when President Kennedy said, let’s put a
0:05:29 man on the moon, that was the original moon shot. But if you rewind the tape, 40 years earlier,
0:05:35 there was a guy named Robert Goddard who explained how he might get there with jet propulsion and
0:05:41 liquid fuel rockets. Kennedy, when he announced his moon shot, was widely applauded. Goddard,
0:05:46 when he explained that crazy idea, might get there was ridiculed. In fact, there was an editorial
0:05:51 in the Times when he was talking about his idea that said, well, obviously this guy who, you know,
0:05:55 has this quote unquote chair in physics at Clark University or wherever, you know, he doesn’t
0:06:01 understand the basic principles of physics that we teach in high school every day. About 49 years
0:06:08 after the Times printed that, the day after the successful Apollo 11 launch to the moon,
0:06:14 the Times printed a retraction and said, apparently rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics
0:06:18 and quote, the Times regrets the error. Such a victory lap. But that doesn’t happen all the time.
0:06:22 The fundamental question for anyone listening to this episode who kind of has a lot of
0:06:28 understanding of the history of innovations is how do you go from being a Goddard to a Kennedy?
0:06:32 There’s a fine balance somewhere in between them. You don’t want to be the person completely
0:06:36 ridiculed. You don’t also want to get there so late that it’s already an accepted idea to succeed.
0:06:41 So when do you know a moon shot becomes a moon shot? Kennedy’s was a moon shot because it worked
0:06:46 too, right? I mean, if NASA was not able to get to the moon, it would have been a moon shot,
0:06:50 presumably, right? On this idea of moon shots, I do want to talk briefly about Google X,
0:06:54 which is in some ways given both a good name and a bad rap to the concept of moon shots in
0:06:58 multiple levels. One, because they talk about what they do as moon shots. Two, because they
0:07:04 actually have a project called loon, which has been mixedly received. And so that’s another context.
0:07:08 But three, I think what is really interesting here is when you think about a moon shot as
0:07:13 this destination, as you’ve described it, a desire to go somewhere. I think a lot of people
0:07:19 have a hard time in organizations in terms of teasing apart. What is a shot that’s worth further
0:07:23 nurturing, regardless of the destination, whether it fails or not? Because I agree,
0:07:27 there’s no shortage of ideas. But it’s precisely because there’s no shortage of ideas that I want
0:07:33 to know when can we pick which ones to invest in, because there’s still limited resources.
0:07:37 Yeah, you’re right. A moon shot is a destination, and we get there by nurturing loon shots,
0:07:40 which are these crazy ideas. And your question is, how do you prioritize?
0:07:43 Exactly. How do you winnow those ideas as well?
0:07:49 I think you want to find the ones that challenge your belief system, because those are the ones
0:07:57 that are most dangerous to you and your business. So the reason you nurture loon shots is when
0:08:03 there’s some new crazy idea that appears that’s going to kill one of your business lines, or take
0:08:08 away your customers, or even open a completely new business line, where would you rather find
0:08:13 out about it? By reading about it in the press release from one of your large customers who’s
0:08:18 going to move all their business away, or would you rather find out about it from one of your
0:08:23 people who presents you one morning with this crazy idea that you were sure was not true.
0:08:29 And all of a sudden, he or she shows you this great proof of concept that there’s some traction
0:08:33 to it. I love that you said proof of concept and traction, actually. I’m so glad you said that,
0:08:38 because when Astro Teller, who heads up GoogleX, wrote an op-ed for me at Wired, he made the argument
0:08:43 that it’s identifying a big problem, articulating a solution that can actually solve the problem
0:08:47 if it existed, even if it does not already exist, which is to your point that it is dangerous and
0:08:52 not out there, but more precisely, when you mention the proof of concept, that there is an
0:08:56 indicator right now that this thing can become a reality. And that, I think, is like the key.
0:09:01 So I spent a while talking about this with Astro, who actually I knew well before GoogleX. And one
0:09:06 of the things that Astro pointed out, which we both agree on, is that using the word moonshot,
0:09:11 unless you really know what you’re doing, and they obviously really know what they’re doing at X,
0:09:18 can be very misleading. And it comes back to why there are a few phrases in the English language
0:09:23 that give me more gas pain than the phrase disruptive innovation. Here’s the problem.
0:09:29 When people talk about disruption, they’re talking about a market. And if you look across history,
0:09:35 if you look across the ideas that change a field of science or a field of business,
0:09:42 or even world history, none of the champions knew anything about where their idea would end up.
0:09:48 I’ll give you an example, the transistor. It was developed at Bell Labs, although it was based on
0:09:52 a lot of federal research, but it was developed at Bell Labs, why they were looking for better
0:09:58 switches. By every definition, it was an incremental innovation, not a quote disruptive.
0:10:02 Once they figured it out, they didn’t know what they could do. It wasn’t usable in the phone
0:10:07 system initially, because it was too expensive and too unreliable. So after a bunch of years of
0:10:10 trying to figure out what they could do with this damn thing, they came up with hearing aids.
0:10:17 So do you think the scientists working on semiconductor junctions in 1946 and 1947
0:10:23 told their bosses, we’re working on disrupting the hearing aid market? The word disruptive
0:10:28 innovation makes sense in hindsight, if you’re a history professor. Right. But not for predicting
0:10:32 and knowing the future. Right. So the reason using the word disruptive innovation or moonshot,
0:10:36 unless you know what you’re doing, can be very misleading, is that it causes you to overlook
0:10:42 the small things that end up having a tremendous difference, because they challenge accepted
0:10:46 belief, but you thought maybe it’ll just be for hearing aids. In fact, it’s not so much an accident,
0:10:53 but it’s this emergent kind of building block that’s created that has so much like second,
0:10:58 third order effects. We had Brian Arthur on this podcast, and he’s like the father of complexity
0:11:02 theory and economics. And one of it’s, he’s the one who’s sort of studied when network effects tip,
0:11:07 when these systems sort of, it’s a very sudden, and they’re always like small, tiny tips. There’s
0:11:13 never some big specific iPhone moment that is a, you know, discrete thing. It’s actually this
0:11:17 continuum of things. What you want to do is you want to fund a portfolio of moonshots,
0:11:23 irrespective of market. Nothing kills a great idea faster, and has been more of a disaster to
0:11:29 innovation, certainly in my industry and drug discovery, than the idea of market projections.
0:11:34 Forget the market protections. Does it challenge accepted beliefs? If so, let’s go try it.
0:11:38 That’s what it’s all about. Well, then let me push some more then, because
0:11:42 then I want to really understand then what distinguishes a good moonshot from a really
0:11:47 bad one. Because when you are a company, you have limited resources. When you’re an entrepreneur,
0:11:52 you have limited time and energy to devote into what product you’re going to build.
0:11:54 And you want to nurture them, but which ones do you nurture?
0:11:57 Exactly. How do you think about that here? I mean, this is your job.
0:12:00 Yeah. So first off, you know, it’s interesting from the point of view of venture capital that
0:12:04 we’re looking for things that have that huge disruptive potential. That’s very much our business.
0:12:10 And it’s usually the things that Ben has, I think it’s been, or Chris Dixon, talk about how often
0:12:13 really great companies look like bad companies. Yeah, they both talk about it and they’re actually
0:12:19 quoting Peter Thiel. Okay. So for example, like, you know, going on the web and meeting strangers
0:12:23 to ride in cars with you, these things at one time seem like crazy. And now it’s a good idea only,
0:12:29 because in part what made it seem like a bad idea was also what opened the door for a team to come
0:12:34 in and have that opportunity. So, you know, for what we’re looking for, especially on the biocide,
0:12:38 I’m looking for things where they’re right at that cusp between where the science has largely
0:12:43 been done, where we’re not investing in science projects, and that it’s about to scale into engineering.
0:12:47 And the small crazy ideas that changed the course of science, business, or history,
0:12:54 they always stumble. I had this story about Jim Black, Mr. James Black, who was a Nobel laureate,
0:12:59 very famous, actually chemist, pharmacologist, originally was advising us. I was saying, God,
0:13:04 he asked me why I was looking kind of down. You know, we were working on this really promising
0:13:07 drug program in the lab, and it just didn’t, you know, we just had these bad results. And he’s
0:13:12 like leaned over, you know, padded me on the knee, and this is like 10 o’clock, a couple whiskies in,
0:13:19 and he’s like, Oh, Sophie, I can’t do a Scottish. Oh, Sophie, it’s not a good drug unless it’s
0:13:23 been killed three times. That’s fabulous. And so I’ve always thought of that as the three deaths
0:13:28 of the luncheon. And that’s actually a little different than some of the philosophy here,
0:13:34 especially in Silicon Valley of, you know, fail fast and pivot. Because in many cases,
0:13:39 the really good ideas that completely transform industries, they fail the first few times.
0:13:43 And it’s a false fail. And it’s a false fail. What do you mean by a false fail? I mean,
0:13:47 I think about in the context of false positives, false negatives. False fail is it’s a failure
0:13:53 that’s due to a flaw in the experiment, rather than a fundamental flaw of the idea. I mean,
0:13:57 just as a simple example, Peter Thiel and Ken Howrie, who I remember Ken Howrie was telling
0:14:02 me this story, you know, a couple years ago, that when they were first looking at Facebook,
0:14:08 everybody was passing on social networks because it was like the 15th or 16th or whatever social
0:14:13 network. And right around that time, Friendster was just sort of going down the toilet. And I
0:14:17 remember what Ken and Peter did was they got access to the, they were like, really, is it
0:14:24 the case? Maybe that’s the case. But why don’t we just probe and get a little more background.
0:14:29 And they asked where they knew the CTO and the team behind that they knew that the website was
0:14:33 having a lot of problems. So they got the user retention data. And they looked at it and they
0:14:38 were like, holy shit, you know, people are staying on this freaking website, even though
0:14:42 it’s crashing, they’re staying on it for hours. And they’re like, wait a minute,
0:14:46 maybe it’s not a bad business model. Maybe actually, it’s a really good business model
0:14:49 and people are leaving because the website sucks. That’s a false fail.
0:14:54 And when the lesson is to false fail within an org, if the false fail takes down your org,
0:14:58 then the other startups that come after you get to benefit from your failure.
0:15:02 But if you can sort of understand the false field internally, that’s your best bet to
0:15:06 keep on moving, right? And I think that these false failures, there really wasn’t a failure.
0:15:09 It was if failures of execution is not a failure at the loonshot.
0:15:11 And I’m curious to get your take on this, Hafi, because you’ve lived this,
0:15:15 is that for a lot of drug design projects, when they get canceled,
0:15:19 Pharma never has the time or the interest. Sometimes it seems to go back and understand why.
0:15:24 I remember the head of R&D of a very large, one of the top few Pharma one time, we were having
0:15:30 dinner, we were discussing doing a large partnership together. And we were talking about
0:15:34 killing projects and your people say, oh, you got to have balls to kill a project. And he said,
0:15:38 killing a project is the easiest thing in the world. It never comes back.
0:15:43 And that’s one of the reasons it’s so difficult to innovate inside, let’s say in my field,
0:15:46 in our field, inside a large drug discovery or research organization,
0:15:50 is because it’s so hard to keep a project going.
0:15:52 That’s fascinating, because I would have argued, I would have thought it’s actually
0:15:57 much harder to kill something than to actually keep something going that shouldn’t be killed.
0:15:59 Now, it’s the easiest thing in the world to kill a project.
0:16:04 It’s much harder when, because of the three deaths of the luncheon, because really good ideas
0:16:08 often seem really stupid in the beginning, as soon as they hit that first stumble,
0:16:12 it’s much harder to justify to your colleagues.
0:16:14 That’s true in a big company. Do you think it’s true in a small company? In a small company,
0:16:19 if this is your thing, killing something is actually the dreaded pivot, right?
0:16:22 And so maybe in a small company, is it less likely that people want to kill it?
0:16:27 Well, this comes down to the incentives. The underlying theme of this book is let’s look at
0:16:34 structure rather than culture. I became a first-time CEO. I think I was 32 or three.
0:16:37 And probably like a lot of first-time CEOs and entrepreneurs,
0:16:42 I read everything I could find about management, how to be a better leader,
0:16:47 how to build a great company, how to empower my employees and get great returns from my
0:16:52 stakeholders and achieve our big mission. And almost everything I read about was about
0:16:59 building a great culture. And as a physicist, that felt kind of squishy to me. And there’s also
0:17:04 that sort of after the fact, let’s say somebody wins a lottery and you say, “Well, that’s
0:17:09 fantastic. What color socks was he wearing? Let’s all go wear.” I did want to see if there was a
0:17:16 little more of a scientific underpinning. Let’s do the behavioral economics, but of groups.
0:17:19 And as soon as you arrange people into groups, what are these sort of hidden incentives? That’s
0:17:24 the kind of thing that I didn’t think about for 10 years and kind of none of the traditional
0:17:28 management literature has really looked at. So it’s interesting you bring up behavioral
0:17:33 economics because prospect theory itself was a very dangerous idea to the establishment at the
0:17:38 time. And yes, there’s a lot of debates right now in the literature about how robust those findings
0:17:43 are so many years later. But that aside, it was a very important contribution. I’m curious for
0:17:49 how that connects into your worldview. Sure. In fact, that’s kind of one of the most fun things
0:17:54 for me because what Kahneman and Firsky did was they found a new Venn diagram intersection of
0:18:00 psychology and economics. And this is a new Venn diagram intersection of physics and economics.
0:18:06 Oh, interesting. I love that. So you simply look at the incentives for individuals whenever you
0:18:12 organize into a group. It’s only relevant inside a group. And then you borrow an idea from physics,
0:18:17 which is a phase transition. How does this phase transition idea come into play? I mean,
0:18:21 you’re a physicist by training. So I get that there’s a physics aspect to this. But how does
0:18:26 this play in the innovation organizational context? Every phase transition in nature is a result of
0:18:32 two competing forces, a tug of war. And the phase transition is as you adjust the balance,
0:18:39 you change certain parameters of design or the environment, you adjust the balance between
0:18:44 those two forces and boom, at some point, they cross and the system snaps. I’ll give you an
0:18:48 example with water. There’s a glass of water right here, which your audience can’t quite see.
0:18:52 I’ll take a photo. But you can imagine. When I stick my finger in the glass of water,
0:18:59 I can swish it around, right? Except as I gradually lower the temperature, all of a sudden,
0:19:04 at a critical temperature, boom, the behavior completely changes.
0:19:12 So when it freezes. Exactly. Why? How did those molecules know to go from sloshing around and
0:19:17 being fluid to being completely rigid? It’s the same molecules. And it’s the exact same molecules.
0:19:23 There’s no CEO molecule with a bullhorn. And that’s sort of the other counterintuitive thing
0:19:28 about this is it doesn’t matter what the CEO does. Okay, it’s not about the culture. Yeah,
0:19:34 it’s about understanding those two forces and what are the balance. So here’s the two forces
0:19:40 in a glass of water. There’s one force, entropy, which wants to makes water molecules run around
0:19:46 and be free. Right. The creative force, one could argue. If one wants to do that, entropy is actually
0:19:53 a hard physical quantity. And it is the case that molecules have two competing forces, one of which
0:19:58 is entropy, which wants to make them run around and be free. And the other is binding energy.
0:20:04 It wants to lock every molecule of water, exactly 2.8 angstroms from its neighbor.
0:20:10 When the temperature is high, entropy wins. Now, as you gradually lower the temperature,
0:20:16 the entropy force gets weaker and weaker and weaker. And the binding energy gets more and more
0:20:22 important. And then what happens? Boom. At 32 Fahrenheit, those two things cross. Below 32,
0:20:28 it becomes totally rigid. So it has nothing to do with the CEO molecule yelling, be rigid, be fluid.
0:20:32 Let’s adopt a fluid culture and all slush around. The CEO can set the temperature.
0:20:37 That’s exactly right. Control parameter is the equivalent of temperature. It controls the
0:20:42 behavior of the system. It turns out when you work out the mathematics of this, of the incentives,
0:20:47 the two forces, there are four control parameters inside organizations, elements of organizational
0:20:53 design. And not the CEO, the executive team, the board has control over, just like you have control
0:20:58 over a glass of water. In classic innovation parlance, it is sort of disruptive versus non-disruptive
0:21:03 core versus non-core, these two forces. However you describe them, the point is that organizations
0:21:08 clearly have these two competing forces. So back to not being, you know, the cultural stuff that
0:21:14 management literature gives us, what structurally needs to happen to make organizations know how
0:21:21 to navigate these two forces? Okay. So when you bring a group of people together and you organize
0:21:27 them and you set a mission and you tie a reward system, incentives tied to that mission, all of
0:21:35 a sudden you create two forces. And here’s what they are. The first one is stake in outcome.
0:21:43 Think of that as equity. So let’s say to stick with our industry, you have a small biotech company
0:21:46 and you’re developing a new cancer drug. Your stake in outcome is your stake in that drug
0:21:52 success. Does it work or not? Now when you’re a small, your stake in outcome is enormous. If the
0:21:58 drug works, everybody’s a hero and a millionaire. If the drug fails, everybody’s unemployed.
0:22:02 Right. What’s the second force? It’s perks of rank.
0:22:08 Interesting. So you can think of this almost as equity in cash or equity in base salary.
0:22:14 When you’re a tiny small company, stakes in outcome are so much bigger than perks of rank.
0:22:21 Now let’s flip it. Let’s say you, Sonal, are a manager at Pfizer. So now let’s look at your
0:22:26 incentives. What’s the stake in outcome? Well, if you make a good drug, let’s say it sells
0:22:31 500 million a year, that’s a pretty good drug. Plus you’re going to be fighting for the next seven
0:22:35 or 10 years. Everybody wants your budget and there’s going to be the three deaths with the
0:22:38 loon shot. You’re going to have to try to defend it. So your stake in outcome is pretty tiny.
0:22:44 What’s the perks of rank? Well, if there’s a committee meeting and you sit around the table
0:22:48 and keep, you know, trashing these loon shots and doing it in a very thoughtful wise, and maybe
0:22:54 you’re very funny and kind of witty, and they’re like, well, this young person, she’s got a great
0:22:59 head. She’s aligned with our vision. Right. What might you get? Promoted. Exactly. And then what
0:23:04 happens when you’re promoted? 30% bump in salary. And not much change in stake in equity, actually.
0:23:11 Exactly. So we just went from small, a small company, stake in outcome was much bigger.
0:23:17 Perks of ranks were irrelevant. To large, where stakes in outcome is very small and perks of
0:23:21 rank. So that’s very much equivalent to the water. These are the dynamic two forces that you’re
0:23:26 describing. Right. And instead of temperature, it’s size. So somewhere between small and large,
0:23:31 as you grow and you grow and you grow, all of a sudden the balance of incentives suddenly shift.
0:23:38 And the same person, the same sonal, would go from pounding the table. This is the most awesome idea
0:23:42 to kind of making fun of it at committee meetings. You know, I think this makes a ton of sense. And
0:23:46 we see it in big companies. And I think the challenge then is, you know, as your company is
0:23:51 growing, what can you do about it? So let me ask you a question. When it snows overnight,
0:23:56 what do you sprinkle on your sidewalk? Salt. Why? Because it blocks the snow from
0:23:59 hardening and freezing over. Exactly. And the reason it does that is because adding salt to
0:24:05 water lowers the freezing temperature. This is a control parameter. It is another. So
0:24:09 the really interesting thing about complex systems, which is what we’re talking about,
0:24:13 whether it’s a glass of water or humans understanding incentives when you bring people
0:24:18 together in a group, is that they have more than one control parameter. There are four other control
0:24:24 parameters. And to what Vijay was saying earlier, that’s what a manager or a leader or an executive
0:24:29 team or a board can control. You may not control size. You may need 100 people. You may need 500
0:24:34 people. You may need 10,000 people. And that, you can’t control, but you can add a little salt.
0:24:37 It’s interesting to think about how far the analogy goes and where it breaks down. So I think one of
0:24:42 the most powerful things about it is the fact that you can take the same person from one face to the
0:24:46 other. I agree. Just like with the molecule. Yeah. So that part is really interesting. And also,
0:24:51 just what you’re talking about, you can imagine doping and putting in certain types into given
0:24:55 phases to change their behavior. And I think we’ve seen that in various groups, right? You can put a
0:24:59 certain type of person to a team. And so some people will change with phases. Some people are
0:25:04 just intrinsically different. I thought where you were going with this was doping in semiconductors,
0:25:07 which actually gave us the transistor. Well, you know, but that doping either one,
0:25:10 you’re talking about alloys or semiconductors is the same concept, right? Actually, it’s exactly
0:25:15 right. If you take an insulator like silicon and you dope it a little bit and then you get a metal
0:25:20 and it’s a phase transition. That’s what Phil Anderson won his Nobel Prize for, is the localization
0:25:26 transition, the metal insulator transition. But to get to your question, yes, this is a phase
0:25:32 transition. That’s kind of the theme of the book. CEOs at the end of the day, they’re sort of lamenting,
0:25:36 oh, no one cares. Well, that’s because they don’t own half the equity of the company like you do.
0:25:41 But when you were a small startup, of course, everybody, their incentives were aligned.
0:25:45 And of course they rushed out because they were going to be unemployed if the loonshot failed.
0:25:49 I find it’s a very hopeful idea, quite honestly, because you’re saying that you can,
0:25:53 you essentially can be a big company that can figure out how to innovate. You can be a small
0:25:57 company that doesn’t innovate, that actually sometimes goes into the frozen zone without
0:26:02 figuring out how to keep the entropy moving and the creativity and the excitement moving,
0:26:08 and that you can more precisely be both at the same time. And you can file up or down various
0:26:13 parameters to make that happen. So I find that’s a very hopeful message. A question I have, and
0:26:18 when you think about the history of innovation, kind of going back full circle to what makes
0:26:23 something a loonshot versus a moonshot. And yes, I heard you, a moonshot’s a destination,
0:26:30 a loonshot could be a false fail along the way. I still want to understand how you know when a
0:26:37 field, an area becomes more ready to be optimized a certain way.
0:26:42 This reminds me a lot of just the general topic of how a biology right now is shifting from
0:26:47 science to engineering. And there’s lots of different trends and reasons why. We talk about
0:26:51 these two different groups, the sort of creative types, the inventors, the artists versus the
0:26:56 the soldiers, the people who get things done. We’re seeing that shift in biology as one can
0:27:01 finally engineer biology in many ways. So in that field then, when you move from say artistry to
0:27:06 soldierry, for lack of a better phrase, the way I’ve heard you describe this is like the bespoke
0:27:11 to the machine automator. How do you in this particular example know? Yeah, I mean, that’s the
0:27:16 billion dollar or trillion dollar question, right? Yeah, literally. And so, you know, what it comes
0:27:21 down to when, at least for me, what I’m looking for is both in Safi’s language that there is a
0:27:27 destination that we see where you would land, and that at each step of the way that there is a way
0:27:31 to do it through engineering like execution, there’s all these different places where bio plays
0:27:38 a role, either with consumer or with healthcare or other industries. And in each one, it’s just not
0:27:42 enough that there’s a technology in our product that there really is probably market fit. And
0:27:46 that’s always unavoidable. And probably market fit is one of the hardest things for anyone to
0:27:52 sort of just theorize, you know, because you can very easily be wrong, or you can be wrong,
0:27:56 could be three years too early. It’s not wrong, it’s when. It’s when. And so, some of that also,
0:28:01 you have to have the intuition that it’s now, you can have theses for why it’s now. In the end,
0:28:06 the market will tell you whether you’re right. Like the classic example, Xerox was a great example
0:28:10 of a disruptor in earlier days with just the copying machine. People are like, “Well, I don’t
0:28:14 need copies. What do I want copies for?” You know, it just wasn’t part of the workflow. You wouldn’t
0:28:18 think to use a machine that doesn’t exist. And that only after people start to understand, “Oh,
0:28:24 actually, it was really useful to have this,” did you create a market. And so, in a sense that
0:28:30 device had product market fit before the market was there. And so, I think, I agree with Sophie in
0:28:34 the sense that just because the market isn’t there now, isn’t a reason to kill it. But obviously,
0:28:38 there has to become a market. Otherwise, there’s no one to buy it.
0:28:42 I would then argue just to reconcile these different views. It basically is how you,
0:28:46 the word market, just might be over-indexed. Because what we’re really talking about is a
0:28:51 pull, a draw, a need. But some might even say a want. Because sometimes you don’t need something.
0:28:55 You might just want something but not know that you want it in the classic Jobsian sense.
0:29:01 Right. In the sense of some, I mean, I can bring it to very nuts and bolts. Someone’s got to pay
0:29:04 for it. And this is one of the mistakes I see over and over again with startup founders is that
0:29:10 when they’re small, it feels like they’re all artists. They do a great job of building an org.
0:29:14 And then suddenly, the org is not what they’re comfortable with or familiar with because they
0:29:18 have built an army. And they actually never want to join the army. Right. They don’t want to be navy,
0:29:22 actually, in that context, right? So, when you think of artists versus soldiers, this idea that
0:29:26 there’s the creatives and the builders and the people have to fight the war on the ground,
0:29:30 another way to think about it is Jobs’ famous quote about pirates versus navy. I mean,
0:29:33 there’s so many different variations of this over time in innovation history.
0:29:37 I think our companies have both too. But hopefully, there’s something for the soldiers to start
0:29:41 working on, you know, to go to war on, even though, you know, you constantly have to continue to
0:29:46 innovate. So you need both. But so when I think about how I’m going to find them, I want to find
0:29:50 things that are just at that transition. If it’s only artists, it’s not going to work. But once
0:29:54 they’re there, we have to think about which ones have the opportunity to become the moonshots
0:29:58 eventually. And which ones also, frankly, that can continue to innovate. And so one of the things
0:30:02 I thought was interesting about the book was that phase transition interplay between the two and
0:30:07 how it’s not a bad thing to have that phase transition. And that was maybe one of the more
0:30:10 surprising things. There are two things that I find very hopeful. I know a lot of people have
0:30:17 found very helpful. One is, and they’re both a little bit against the grain of what you often hear.
0:30:20 I love things that are against the grain. More against the grain, the better.
0:30:25 Especially what I hear from my tech friends in Silicon Valley. So one is don’t hire people from
0:30:31 big companies or big people from big companies are a terrible fit. And I thought that as well.
0:30:34 We’re doing the great stuff because we’re the risk takers. We’re the innovators and all those big
0:30:40 corporate guys, they’re risk averse and that’s why you shouldn’t hire. And then as you grow up,
0:30:43 you start doing these partnerships with large farmers. So you’re spending a lot of time with
0:30:48 these people and you get to know them well. And then these people are just like us. If they’re
0:30:53 advisor and they have no stake in outcome and a ton of stake in getting promoted, what do you think
0:30:57 they’re going to do? They’re going to work on being promoted. And if they’re at a 50-person
0:31:03 startup and being promoted or titled is totally irrelevant, but whether the project works or not,
0:31:06 means whether they’re unemployed or not, what are they going to do? They’re going to pound
0:31:11 the table and save the thing if it stumbles. So it’s about the subtle influence of incentives.
0:31:16 And when you really peel back the layers on that, you tease out all these things that you can do
0:31:21 to balance the incentives better for what you’re trying to achieve. So that’s one hopeful thing.
0:31:25 It’s not really about there, these two kinds of people. You should never hire a big corporation.
0:31:28 It’s the same person in different environments. Exactly. It’s the molecule that lands on the
0:31:34 block of ice versus the molecule that drops in a glass of water. So okay, now you say these
0:31:40 organizations have these phase transitions when they grow, they go from being totally fluid and
0:31:46 embracing wild new ideas to being quite rigid. So what do we do if we are a 500,
0:31:52 a thousand, or 10,000-person company? And so the point is that innovating well is a phase of
0:31:58 organization, just like being solid or liquid is a phase of matter. It’s a property of the whole
0:32:02 that doesn’t depend so much on the details of the parts. That’s what it means in
0:32:06 science or physics of an emergent behavior. And actually, it’s just sort of straightforward
0:32:12 mathematics. And the book that innovating well and a focus on politics or not is a phase of human
0:32:15 organization. I love that you actually have an equation that you outlined in the appendix,
0:32:20 which is awesome. We’ve never seen that in a management book. That took a lot of convincing
0:32:25 with the publisher. That’s another story. It got relegated. To the appendix. We’re way back there.
0:32:33 But anyways, if it’s a phase of organization, there are operationally excellent, high execution,
0:32:39 or you are innovating well. Larger companies today or startups that have grown need to do both.
0:32:43 Yeah. Mark talks about how startups are on the sort of five-year cycle theory. And I think of
0:32:48 this a little bit like growing versus sustaining organizations that even startups, by definition,
0:32:53 after a certain amount of time, have this inevitable gravity that begins to hit because
0:32:56 there are other startups coming out there sort of doing things faster.
0:33:01 Part of it is that also these environments keep on changing as we were talking about. And so
0:33:05 as the environment changes, the question is how we can sort of push back on the environment. And
0:33:09 maybe to abuse the analogy in physics with phase transitions, you can have hysteresis.
0:33:15 Which is… You can push the environment past where something… So there’s a really fun thing
0:33:20 to do. And so kids, you could do this at home. For the beer, put in the freezer. You take it out.
0:33:25 And it looks like water. But it’s already below the freezing temperature. And you just knock it.
0:33:29 And it’ll suddenly, it’ll freeze right in front of you. I’ve never done that. I’ve never got kids out of it.
0:33:34 The knocking kind of catalyzes this. And so this is a historic effect that it really should have been
0:33:39 a solid. But that it was lingering in the old phase for a little bit. What’s the point of that?
0:33:43 So the point is, you may think you have innovation in your org. And you may think that you have the
0:33:49 environment. But it is just a message of the past. And in an instant, you can lose it.
0:33:54 Just like the beer can shift. And so you need to really understand what your environment is.
0:33:59 And as a CEO, as a leader of something, you have to understand your org. You have to look to see,
0:34:04 do you have this phase segregation? Do you have two healthy phases there? The pirates in the navy,
0:34:08 the artists and the soldiers. And then what do you need to do to sort of affect the balance?
0:34:12 And it can be the hysteretic argument is that it can be misleading sometimes, too.
0:34:18 I love that beer example. So it is absolutely true that matter can’t be in two phases at the same time.
0:34:25 You can’t be solid and liquid at the same time. So if complex systems can never be in two phases
0:34:32 at the same time, you can’t be solid and liquid. You can’t be water and ice. How can you do both?
0:34:36 There’s one exception to the rule that you can’t be in two phases at the same time.
0:34:44 And that’s right on the edge of a phase transition. Life at 32 Fahrenheit. What happens is,
0:34:51 matter separates. You get blocks of ice and pools of liquid. So you get phase separation
0:34:56 and they coexist at the same time. The second thing that happens is you get something called
0:35:00 dynamic equilibrium, which the molecules go back and forth and back and forth. Little molecules
0:35:05 swimming in the pool of liquid hits on the block of ice and freezes. A molecule on the surface of
0:35:10 the ice starts shaking loose and then goes into the pool. And it’s back. It’s a continuous cycle.
0:35:14 I mean, if you think about the word dynamic equilibrium itself as a seeming contradiction,
0:35:17 but it’s not in this context because it’s dynamic and in equilibrium at the same time.
0:35:24 Exactly. It’s a balance cycle of exchanging back and forth with neither side dominating the other.
0:35:30 And that’s what happened during World War II. Vannevar Bush came in, told FDR, he said,
0:35:35 “We’re going to lose this war.” At a 10 minute meeting in the summer of 1940, he said, “We are
0:35:40 far behind the technologies that are going to be crucial to winning this war.”
0:35:46 The culture of the military, not only is it resistant to new technologies like any
0:35:50 military culture, but it should be. It is the right culture for their job.
0:35:53 In this case, they’re literally soldiers.
0:35:58 They’re literally soldiers. And he said, “I want you to give me a group of people,
0:36:03 give me the authority to mobilize the nation’s scientists for war and we’ll develop the radical
0:36:08 new technologies and I’ll report just to you.” So he created phase separation within the federal
0:36:13 government. And to this day, that really is the origin of the national research infrastructure
0:36:20 of the United States. The National Science Foundation, the NIH, DARPA, came out of Vannevar
0:36:27 Bush’s idea during the Second World War. But he made sure where most, where this fails so often,
0:36:32 so many years, so many times across companies. I mean, Xerox Park is a great example of that
0:36:37 because it was overly siloed. They missed the second part, which is the dynamic equilibrium.
0:36:39 Constantly moving back and forth.
0:36:44 So here’s the message for entrepreneurs or leaders or managers, which is also a little
0:36:51 different than what you get typically in Silicon Valley and is different than the model of a great
0:36:57 manager, a great leader. And that is, there is this myth that the great manager, the great
0:37:03 leader of a technology company is this product, product, product person and they build their…
0:37:07 Oh, you’re really fighting some major dogma right now. This is going to be blasphemous.
0:37:08 I want to hear it.
0:37:13 They build the company, this great company on the back of their inventions.
0:37:21 So the companies across history that have done that have failed spectacularly. They may survive
0:37:27 for a while when there’s a Moses on the mountain with a staff anointing the next Holy Loonshot.
0:37:32 They may survive for a while, that’s the hysteresis effect,
0:37:36 but eventually they’ll turn. That’s exactly what happened with Polaroid when Edwin Land,
0:37:42 who certainly deserved Nobel Prizes for some of his breakthroughs, stood on top of that mountain
0:37:46 and anointed the next Holy Loonshot and that was the end of Polaroid.
0:37:51 So the difference, the ones who have really succeeded, let’s say Vannevar Bush,
0:37:55 a theater veil at AT&T, the ones who really succeeded didn’t have that mindset.
0:38:01 Vannevar Bush was a brilliant inventor. He invented the first analog computer. He anticipated
0:38:04 much of the personal computer industry and certainly the internet and…
0:38:06 He wrote that memex memo, right? I remember reading it.
0:38:11 The famous essay published in the Atlantic, which inspired Doug Engelbart and a lot of
0:38:16 that traces back to Vannevar Bush, but as he likes to say, “I made no original contribution
0:38:21 to the war. None of my inventions ever amounted to anything.” What he did, rather than lead as a
0:38:28 Moses, he led as a gardener and he saw his job as maintaining life at 32 Fahrenheit.
0:38:32 Setting up the structure, the scaffolding that allowed that dynamic equilibrium,
0:38:38 that living at the edge. He maintained the balance between his group and the military.
0:38:44 And so if there’s a lesson there, it’s not about your ideas. Your job is to maintain life at 32
0:38:51 Fahrenheit. Your job is to maintain the exchange of… Because where innovation fails is not in the
0:38:56 supply of new idea. It’s in the transfer of those new ideas to the field. It’s actually like Xerox,
0:39:01 exact same thing. They were giving these computers to people selling typewriters and what were they
0:39:04 being commissioned on? Typewriters. Exactly. It was a very sales-driven organization.
0:39:10 It was a subtle influence of incentives. Bush recognized that the dynamic equilibrium,
0:39:16 it’s not just transfer one way from the scientist or the artist or the creative engineers to the
0:39:21 salespeople or the soldiers in the field, but the other way. Because most ideas suck when they first
0:39:27 come out of the lab. There’s a huge jump from a technology to a product, like a really beautiful
0:39:30 product. And then even if you have a really beautiful product, you still have to create a
0:39:35 market and sell to sell it. I was outside of my Stanford office after I’ve been at ACSNZ for a
0:39:40 while. And a founder at Stanford came by and he’s like, “You present this whole new tech.” And he’s
0:39:44 like, “Oh my god.” And I was like, “Well, this is really interesting, but I’m not sure you could
0:39:48 build a company.” And he’s like, “You know, the physics was so hard, building a company will
0:39:54 be easy.” But actually, the tech is not enough. And this goes back to Steve Jobs’ story is learn
0:39:59 to love your artists and soldiers equally. So when Steve Jobs started his first time at Apple,
0:40:06 he was exactly like that. I only love the artist. And people who know the history know this quite
0:40:12 well. It was a disaster. So the Lisa that he tried to run was a flop, the Apple 3 that when it was
0:40:16 a flop. And when he developed the Macintosh, although it was a phenomenal ad that goes down in the
0:40:22 history of advertising, it was a disaster as a product. The sales completely plummeted. He
0:40:28 loved his artist and he ridiculed the soldiers. And it caused enormous dysfunction and it almost
0:40:34 made Apple go bankrupt. And then he did this same thing at Next. When his next computer company,
0:40:38 it was product, product, product, it’s all about the product, da, da, da, da, da. And that was,
0:40:42 that product flopped. And then he bought this little company, this Lucas Film Group, because
0:40:46 they had a computer. And he thought this is an even bigger, faster computer, the Pixar Image
0:40:52 Computer called PIC. And that product flopped. But eventually over 10 years, when he came back
0:40:58 to Apple the second time, he had Johnny Eve, that was his artist, and he had Tim Cook. Tim Cook was
0:41:02 known as the Attila the Hun of Inventory before. And the myth around him, oh, is all his ideas,
0:41:07 and he championed the product. That’s not really what happened. In fact, when he did that, it was
0:41:13 a disaster. And only by evolving and learning to love his artists and shoulders equally,
0:41:19 that’s when things really took off. And that’s why Vannevar Bush succeeded. And so many scientists
0:41:24 before him failed, because soldiers love soldiers. Artists love artists. He not only worked well
0:41:29 with the military, he loved them and respected them. And that’s why he was able to bridge the
0:41:33 two. Yeah. I would argue just to Vijay’s point too, though, that this is why there’s such a
0:41:39 resurgence in modern tech management literature and startups in particular, around the important
0:41:43 role of product managers and product management. Because traditionally, there was so much discussion
0:41:49 around engineering and sales and design, all being sort of separated and siloed. But now,
0:41:52 through this, and it’s not a new role, it’s been around for ages. But in a sense, that product
0:41:58 manager role is to connect the engineers to set the temperature. Exactly. There’s sort of like
0:42:02 this person who maintains a dynamic equilibrium between orgs, they move and travel. I actually
0:42:07 think it’s actually one of the most important schools of thought for the future of the firm
0:42:11 in the startup to company environment, which is the evolving role of product management in this.
0:42:16 Because that is the concrete instantiation of exactly what you’re describing, Safi.
0:42:20 There’s all these different threads going on here. Bush and his famous memo right after World War
0:42:26 II define what basic research is. And in Safi’s concept of dynamic equilibrium,
0:42:32 by, I think, inadvertently talking about the separation between science and engineering,
0:42:35 he kind of pulled engineering away from scientists. Oh, that’s fascinating.
0:42:40 Yeah. And that now there was these two different disciplines and science is done by scientists
0:42:45 and engineering is done by engineers. And that actually took a little bit about that
0:42:50 equilibrium that was there our way. And so what we’re seeing now is something different where
0:42:54 scientists are doing translational work, which is another name for engineering.
0:42:59 And in biology in particular, the shift from science to engineering is becoming very powerful.
0:43:03 And one of the things I think is always a topic very germane, I think, to our listeners and to me
0:43:09 is one of the more things that we can do that to practically learn from this. Because I think the
0:43:14 analysis is very compelling. But if you’re a CEO right now, what can you do? I mean, what are the
0:43:19 knobs? And so in the book, you talk about one of the classic things being the magic number.
0:43:24 Basically, a number of people at which beyond that, it’s hard to, you have to start to create
0:43:29 an org and a hierarchical structure too often. And the magic number is canonically 150, but
0:43:35 often I see the magic number being 30 when it’s not built right. And so how can you push it
0:43:38 such that you can try to maintain what we loved about the start from the beginning?
0:43:43 Right. So this idea of a magic number, like the Dunbar number comes from the idea that the number
0:43:48 of neurons in your brain is fixed. So sometimes, as you know, in science or in physics, you might
0:43:53 have a good observation, but the wrong theory. So if you just look at the hidden influence of
0:43:59 incentives out pops a size, but it’s not a fixed number. I have a little fun with it because I
0:44:05 show how if you plug in certain things, it can be 150, but it can be as low as 30 or as high as
0:44:11 5000, because it depends on these four parameters. So when you adjust these four parameters,
0:44:14 you make those numbers bigger. What are the four parameters again? I don’t actually think we listed
0:44:21 them. There’s equity fraction. For example, to what extent is a person being incentivized by
0:44:26 base salary, in which case there’ll be a ton more focus on politics versus to what extent are they
0:44:32 being rewarded on their project? Right. Another parameter is you might call it return on politics.
0:44:41 To what extent is the system’s design so that individuals can lobby their managers for promotion
0:44:46 and that has an impact? Obviously, the more impact lobbying has, the more political and the more
0:44:52 careers matter, but some companies, actually Google does this, McKinsey does this and others,
0:44:56 they take the promotion decisions completely away from the manager. So that’s
0:45:02 another example. Right. And then the third? The third one is project skill fit. So if you’re very
0:45:07 if you’re very good and working more on your project, moves the project, if you’re a coffee
0:45:12 machine designer, you’re good at coffee machine design, then you’re likely to spend more time on
0:45:16 your coffee machine. I love that idea. It’s like founder market fit. It’s like writer topic fit.
0:45:19 It’s this idea that you really match the skills and passion of the person
0:45:23 so well with the thing they’re working on. This is project skill fit. Now, if somebody puts you
0:45:28 on coffee machine design and you’re like me, not a very good designer with very little aesthetic
0:45:33 sense, then it doesn’t matter if you spend an extra hour or 10 hours or 100 hours on your project,
0:45:37 it’s going to be still the same lousy coffee machine. You might as well spend your time on
0:45:43 politics and lobbying. So project skill fit is another parameter. And the fourth parameter?
0:45:49 Management span. So there’s a lot of literature on management span, but they kind of miss the
0:45:55 point. There isn’t a right management span. There’s the right span for your goal. So for example,
0:46:00 if you are building planes, you don’t want to assemble 10 planes and see which eight fall
0:46:06 out of the sky. You don’t want a very innovative risk taking. Right. You don’t want to be doing
0:46:09 that with like autonomous cars, for instance. Right. So there you actually want to narrow
0:46:14 a span because that encourages quality control and redundancy checking because you don’t want
0:46:19 those eight planes. On the other hand, if you want to do a ton of experiments and have groups
0:46:24 work together well, you actually want a very wide span. So there’s no right answer for a company.
0:46:28 And that’s what like all these things that average across the company make no sense at all. Right.
0:46:33 If the group that’s assembling planes, you want one kind of system, one kind of metric,
0:46:38 you want narrow spans, you want high quality controls, the group that’s creating crazy new
0:46:42 technologies for those planes, you want those spans as wide as possible with very different
0:46:50 metrics. So there’s a handful of these parameters and those are what you adjust to tune for the
0:46:55 goals that you want to achieve. Yeah. So many of the world’s problems that can be addressed through
0:46:59 bioengineering, healthcare comes off naturally into many different sub parts about healthcare,
0:47:02 but just the world around us is created by biology, whether we’re talking about
0:47:08 the food we eat, the air we breathe, just about everything. And so that is a huge opportunity
0:47:12 for companies to come in and become huge companies because of the potential of the problems they
0:47:17 can address. And it’s just fascinating to think about how the dynamics of human nature comes into
0:47:22 play here and that there really are these knobs that a CEO can turn. And now I think the question is,
0:47:26 can you really read your organization right and understand what the temperature is?
0:47:30 Finding the thermometer or the equivalent starts to become, I think, really critical.
0:47:33 And if you can find that and know where these knobs are, I think you could
0:47:37 have a huge impact on your work. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you for joining the A6NC podcast.
0:47:40 Thank you so much. Thanks. It was a lot of fun to be here.

0:00:06 Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ Podcast. I’m Sonal. Today we have a unique sort of
0:00:11 crossover episode with writer/director/producer Brian Koppelman, who, with his partner David
0:00:16 Levine, also wrote some of the most popular and still-discuss movies like Ocean’s 13
0:00:21 and Rounders, which we’ll also touch on in this episode. But currently, Brian is a co-showrunner
0:00:26 with David on Billions, which airs on Showtime and the newest season actually drops this weekend.
0:00:30 The reason I’m calling this a sort of crossover episode is that Brian also interviewed Mark
0:00:36 Andreessen for his podcast, The Moment, which you can listen to on iTunes and elsewhere
0:00:38 if you want to hear more of their thoughts on the difference between hallucination and
0:00:44 vision, putting your art or products and yourself out into the world, and more. We also put
0:00:49 the written Q&A version of that conversation up if you want to read it on A6NZ.com. But
0:00:52 there are two separate conversations, so you don’t have to have listened to either to
0:00:57 follow both. Today’s discussion begins with Mark interviewing Brian, and I jump in in
0:01:01 between here and there as well, starting with the business of creativity and the creativity
0:01:07 of business, then going into how to speak to power, speak to one’s team, speak to co-partners,
0:01:11 as well as managing the emotions and ego around all that. And finally, ending on some specific
0:01:16 moments about Billions The Show in the last 10 minutes, where I’ll signal a light spoiler
0:01:21 alert warning beforehand. We’re here to talk about the business and making of film and
0:01:27 TV, and startups, and tech, and the parallels, and whatnot. Take it from the top, Mark.
0:01:31 Fantastic. So, Brian, thank you for doing this. So, I’ve always been fascinated. I’m deeply
0:01:37 fascinated by the process of creative expression and success, for sure, in technology. And
0:01:40 we think of what we do up here as fundamentally trying to find the most creative entrepreneurs
0:01:44 and trying to help them build enormous, both creative and professional and business success
0:01:49 around what they do. And it strikes me for a long time that there are a lot of similarities
0:01:54 between how the valley works and tech works and how entertainment works, film, television,
0:01:56 other forms of entertainment works. There’s some big similarities. There’s also some
0:02:00 big differences, which hopefully we’ll talk about. You know, Gallagher’s obviously been
0:02:04 super successful across both film and television for a long time, and even before that in music.
0:02:08 But I’m going to focus on film and television. Let’s start with this. What was the first
0:02:12 project that you, and I think it was you and your partner, David, first project that you
0:02:17 view that you and David were responsible for creating, selling, and making?
0:02:22 It was Rounders, for which we wrote the screenplay. And today, there are people online arguing
0:02:28 about that movie, which is incredibly satisfying, because as you know, when you make these bets,
0:02:34 it takes a long time to know if you were right very often. And Rounders was rejected. It was
0:02:39 incredibly difficult. The movie wasn’t a big box office hit. But 21 years later, people
0:02:44 are in ferocious online arguments about the most microscopic moments in the film, which
0:02:48 I, back then, of course, I would have said two things. I would have said we were trying
0:02:52 to make a movie like, and write a movie that would have the effect on people that movies
0:02:56 like Diner had on us, which is that we would watch them over and over again and quote them.
0:03:01 And so the fact that that happened is really rewarding, and it was kind of in our minds.
0:03:06 But when we set out to do that, we knew that there was only a needle in a haystack chance
0:03:11 of success. The doing it, we knew right from the beginning, and I think this is something
0:03:15 that has been really important to our ability to continue to do this work, David and me
0:03:22 for this long is from the beginning, it was only about us getting in a room or going separately
0:03:29 in our individual rooms before we would come back together and doing the work itself, trusting
0:03:34 that if we found a way to do the work itself well enough, some rewards would come. Some
0:03:40 have been really delayed rewards and some have been much quicker. We never seem to
0:03:42 know which it’s going to be.
0:03:45 So let’s start with for people who haven’t seen rounders, maybe thumbnail description
0:03:51 of rounders. Rounders is a movie set in the poker underground of New York and Matt Damon
0:03:54 and Edward Norton, John Malkovich are the stars of the movie, and John Turturro. And
0:04:00 it’s about a character who’s faced with a life decision, which is, is he going to pursue
0:04:05 his passion, this thing that he believes he’s great at, even though he’s had setbacks. And
0:04:09 in fact, these setbacks have threatened his stable life. And so he’s at a point where he
0:04:15 has to choose the stable, traditional road or the road that his heart is telling him
0:04:19 to pursue. And that’s the central question. And the movie has a lot of sort of heightened
0:04:24 dramatic, you know, you want to choose a heightened dramatic construct in which to hide the theme.
0:04:26 Because the last thing you want to do, if you want to talk about the themes, you know,
0:04:32 be, as you had Kowski and just write essays, if you were going to tell it in a fictional
0:04:36 construct, make that construct compelling. So only later people wonder and feel what
0:04:37 the themes are.
0:04:42 So when you say the, do the work, like what was, what was the do the work part of rounders
0:04:43 for you and David?
0:04:50 First, it was about researching. So I walked into a poker club one night, heard the way
0:04:55 the people spoke, saw what it looked like, and immediately recognized, nobody’s made
0:05:01 a movie about this. I can’t believe this exists. This should be a movie. I called Dave. He
0:05:04 said, that’s great. Who are the people in the world that we’re going to write about?
0:05:07 Who are the characters? Who are we going to care about?
0:05:13 So we started going to this poker club most every night, taking notes surreptitiously.
0:05:17 And then at a certain point when we felt we had enough of those notes, we started really
0:05:22 figuring out what the character’s question would be, who the character would be, what
0:05:27 the important relationships would be in his life. And then we had to, so then we started
0:05:31 outlining it, and then we had to just decide, okay, starting tomorrow, we’re going to meet
0:05:35 every morning. One mistake I see people make when they decide they have to do some kind
0:05:39 of artistic work is they think it means they have to grab that identity so hard that it’s
0:05:45 to shut out the rest of their identity. But what I found was you don’t have to do that.
0:05:48 I didn’t want to put all the pressure on myself of quitting my job and saying, I need a beret
0:05:49 and an easel, and I’m an artist.
0:05:51 So what was your job at the time?
0:05:55 I was working as an executive in the music business. David was bartending. And so what
0:05:58 we did was when he would come off bartending, he would sleep a couple hours, and I would
0:06:03 get up extra early, and we would meet in a storage locker underneath my apartment that
0:06:07 had a slop sink in it because it was an institutional little room, had barely room for both of us
0:06:13 to sit. I sat on the floor a lot of the time. And we met every day for two hours in the
0:06:14 morning to write the script.
0:06:16 And this was purely on spec?
0:06:21 Completely on spec. In fact, this is I think a piece of this puzzle that I never told before,
0:06:28 which is that when we had the idea, David met a young producer and told them the idea
0:06:33 and the producer offered us $5,000 and said, for five grand, I’ll be your partner. I’ll
0:06:36 give you five grand, but then we’re going to share and if we sell it, we’re going to
0:06:40 share in the writer’s fee and I’m going to be your partner on the thing. And we were
0:06:45 tempted because it represented, hey, wait, someone’s paying me to write. We’re professionals
0:06:49 then, right? But we asked some advice of a woman named Rachel Horowitz who was at Fine
0:06:53 Line. She happens to be the sister of Adam Horowitz, the Beastie Boys.
0:06:54 That’s awesome.
0:06:57 Rachel was a great executive and I knew somebody who knew her and we met and met with her and
0:07:01 we said, what should we do? Someone’s willing to pay us $5,000 and she said, I don’t need
0:07:05 to hear the idea, but if someone’s willing to pay you guys who have no credits, $5,000
0:07:09 now, write the thing and you’ll have a much better chance of success. And we’ve taken
0:07:15 that lesson to heart still to this day to write unencumbered. We like to go in a room
0:07:25 and let our idea come to fruition fully. Let ourselves, let us work out all of the complicated
0:07:28 parts of it without outside interference.
0:07:31 So let me ask you a lot of professional, one of the adages I think professional writers
0:07:34 is never write for free. If you write for free, you’re a sucker.
0:07:36 Well, that was like Samuel Johnson said that, right?
0:07:38 Okay. Yeah. You’re a sucker. You’re being taken advantage of, right? Never, never, you
0:07:41 know, a doctor wouldn’t, doctor wouldn’t do surgery for free. A pilot wouldn’t fly
0:07:44 a plane for free. Writers shouldn’t write for free. But, and I know you’re not writing
0:07:48 for free per se, but like, there is an element to this of like how, like, it feels like a
0:07:51 lot of your peers need the deal before they’ll write.
0:07:56 Well, it depends where you, where you put EV, right? Okay. Expect, you know, right, right?
0:08:03 Where do you put the EV? By the way, I look at the way I view the need for personal expression.
0:08:06 I don’t, I actually completely disagree with that quote. I don’t understand what the quote
0:08:09 is talking about. Don’t be taken advantage of. And it’s also kind of making fun of the
0:08:11 artistic impulse. It’s saying, are you a professional or not?
0:08:16 Yeah. But I would assert you can be a professional. You can treat, you can act like a professional
0:08:20 before you’re paid as a professional. It depends how you’re going to approach it. It depends
0:08:24 what your expectations are. But our expected value, even though it might have been foolhardy
0:08:29 to think so, was that there would be something on the other side of it. And I’ll say this,
0:08:34 the expected value of not doing the work is zero. Like, there’s no, there’s no question
0:08:37 about the EV of just thinking I’d like to write and not write it.
0:08:41 Well, if you had shown up in, if you, if you guys had just gone and tried to pitch, try
0:08:45 to get an agent at stage of your careers, would you have been able to do the project?
0:08:49 No, probably not other than we got someone who would have paid us five grand, but, but,
0:08:53 but then later we did make the mistake of pitching at various times. And I mean, occasionally
0:08:59 a pitch becomes, has become a movie for us. But for whatever reason, we’ve found that
0:09:04 our strongest work is done in private. And then we take it out and show the world. And
0:09:10 that’s the, for us, the, for us, we find that when you, when you pitch an idea, as you know,
0:09:16 when someone comes to pitch you, you’re entering into dialogue about this endeavor. And inevitably
0:09:19 what we found is a smart person would say something in the room, cause let’s assume
0:09:24 for a moment that the people across the desk are an idiots. Someone says something smart.
0:09:27 You can’t help but have them in your head when you’re then going to do the work. And
0:09:30 that might be a smart thing, but it really might not be the right thing. Because maybe
0:09:36 I’ve only explained this, this feeling that, that, that I have about what this thing could
0:09:42 be. Maybe I’ve explained it in a way the best I could at that moment, but left to my own,
0:09:45 it would take all sorts of different terms. But, but I have that, that phrase that the
0:09:50 person uttered to me. And I have to keep returning to that for some reason, because I’ve already
0:09:52 let them inside this process.
0:09:56 I have a question about this though, because, you know, when we go back to this idea of
0:10:00 you had the confidence to do this in private and then put it out into the world. And even
0:10:04 with the rounders, there was sort of a long staying power that came about with that. It
0:10:06 wasn’t like an instant box office hit in one.
0:10:07 That’s right.
0:10:12 How do you, what’s a timeframe that you sort of a gauge the success and B how do you sort
0:10:18 of balance this sort of impetus from executives and other people in your life who care, who
0:10:24 are producing and paying for these products with sort of keeping the creative process intact
0:10:26 without over rotating on the data.
0:10:31 So let me back up to answer that question. I have to tell you where I was before we wrote
0:10:37 the first thing. And where I was was in a pretty decent state of misery. Because although
0:10:43 I had a job that was well-paying and on the surface scene creative, and although I had,
0:10:49 I was lucky enough, even having Amy, and then our first child did not, was not a salve for
0:10:53 the way I was feeling, which was like, I wasn’t doing this thing that I knew I had to pursue.
0:10:59 I wasn’t doing the work. I was blocked. And I have this notion that when you’re a blocked
0:11:05 person, when you allow this creative impulse to be kept down, it dies. And like any other
0:11:10 kind of death, there’s toxicity that’s attached to that. And as in the toxicity I knew would
0:11:16 leech out and would actually make, you know, leech onto the people that I loved because
0:11:20 I would become a bitter person. And I wanted to be the kind of person who would come home
0:11:25 and tell my kids that they should chase their dreams with rigor. You know, people often
0:11:30 just think of it as a relic of the 60s. And it’s like, Hey, pursue your dreams, do your
0:11:34 thing. But it’s like, well, wait, if you have a dream, if you have a dream, work with incredible
0:11:38 rigor and discipline to pursue it. And so I finally got to the place where I knew, and
0:11:42 it wasn’t about, can I have a movie in the movie theaters? What it was about was, can
0:11:46 I find a way to have the courage to do the work that I’m worried I’ll fail at the work
0:11:50 that I think is going to be meaningful. And so I decided to follow my curiosity and my
0:11:56 obsessions. And it’s not merely pay following your passion. What it is, is figuring out
0:12:00 if I’m obsessed, I’m incredibly curious if I can get to the root of that. And I can
0:12:05 somehow create something out of it that is worthy. First of all, in the doing, I will
0:12:11 change and become better. To answer your question about success, the moment that I was in there
0:12:17 for two hours a day, I was charged the rest of the day. So the job that it seemed mundane
0:12:21 and bitter and sort of annoying to me was much easier to get through because I’d spent
0:12:27 two hours already firing on all cylinders. And so that in the beginning, and of course
0:12:31 along a career, you can hold onto those things and you can let them go because we’re all
0:12:38 human, which means that we’re all pray to, we can all fall, fall prey to being judged
0:12:42 by a standard that isn’t our own. And we have to find a way to remind ourselves that
0:12:46 our own standard is the standard that matters. So of course, I’m not going to say that the
0:12:49 whole time I’ve been doing this, I only cared about what I felt like when I was doing the
0:12:53 work. I will say that each time I have reframed and refocused to remember that what matters
0:12:57 is what I feel like when I’m doing the work. It immediately makes me feel better. And then
0:13:01 I immediately don’t care about the rest of that stuff. Easier to say, of course, you
0:13:05 might think easier to say because we’ve had this success, but I know I can point to a
0:13:09 movie like “Solitary Man,” which was a commercial failure. I mean, it made its money back, but
0:13:13 it was not a big commercial success. But I know it’s the best movie we ever made. It
0:13:18 got these incredible reviews. So I wasn’t crazy. That’s how I know this question. I’m
0:13:22 really interested in this delusion versus genius or delusion versus capability. But
0:13:25 I wouldn’t change anything of the four-year struggle to write that movie, and then we
0:13:30 directed the movie because as an artist, if you get to express the thing you want to
0:13:37 express, and then you get to make it, you’ve kind of won. The odds against are so great.
0:13:41 Even the odds against completing something, right? Even the odds against actually showing
0:13:44 up, “I want to be a writer is way different than I am a writer. I want to be an artist
0:13:48 is way different than I am an artist.” And we decide when you get to give yourself those
0:13:55 designations. But I was so sad, so miserable, that it immediately changed upon doing the
0:13:59 work. And so I have had to force myself to have that be the standard.
0:14:03 To go back to the state. So do you ever suffer from writer’s block?
0:14:04 No, because I have rituals.
0:14:05 Like morning pages?
0:14:06 Can you describe that?
0:14:11 Yeah, I meditate every morning, and I do morning pages every morning. So morning pages, like
0:14:16 out of Julie Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way,” I do three longhand pages, a real brain
0:14:23 dump, where I just let the pen move for three pages no matter what. And it has this incredible
0:14:27 effect on me. It’s self-hypnosis. It’s a brain dump so that you’re putting all the
0:14:32 dross just gets out there on the page. Also, it has the effect of, “I can’t be blocked.
0:14:37 I’ve already written three pages.” So you’re in a state of flow. You’re in a state of movement.
0:14:42 That is the tool I used to become unblocked when I was 30. And when I was that unhappy
0:14:46 and I said I had to try to write something, I had given Dave, “Awake and the Giant,”
0:14:50 within, and Dave gave me “The Artist’s Way.” And the combination of those things made me
0:14:56 realize I had to figure out what it was that I really wanted to do and be. And then “The
0:15:00 Artist’s Way” gave me this tool to try to actualize it. And as soon as I started doing
0:15:03 those pages, I was like, “Oh, I can do this. I can write. I can actually make good on it.”
0:15:05 And I’ve done it for 23 years.
0:15:06 Do you keep the pages?
0:15:10 No, you burn. My kids have instructions to burn upon my day.
0:15:11 Upon your day.
0:15:14 So I was going to say, you know, decades or centuries later, these get published as
0:15:15 the notebooks.
0:15:19 Yeah, they can’t. I’ve read Camus’ notebooks and Somerset Mom’s notebooks. And I’m happy
0:15:22 that they exist, but that probably wasn’t their intention.
0:15:25 So when you guys sold “Rounders” or got the gun, whatever you want to say, the trigger
0:15:30 got pulled. So what did you guys have when you walked into the room to do that at that
0:15:31 point?
0:15:35 Well, so we finished the screenplay. It was first rejected. It was my favorite story.
0:15:40 But I tell in detail on my blog, which is not a very active blog, at BrianCobbleman.com.
0:15:45 But we were rejected by every single agency in Hollywood. One said it was overwritten,
0:15:48 another said it was underwritten. I still don’t know what either of those terms mean.
0:15:52 And I wrote down everything they all said. And this was an incredible Hollywood lesson
0:15:56 because, you know, in the beginning, every rejection feels so personal. Every rejection
0:15:59 also feels so final, right, in the beginning.
0:16:05 I wrote down what everyone said and then we sold the thing. And that Monday, so we sold
0:16:13 the thing over a weekend on a Monday and by Tuesday, every single agency that had passed
0:16:18 called us to try to sign us. And I read them all their comments. I had it on a yellow legal
0:16:22 pad and I just read them. I said, “Well, but you said that the thing was overwritten.”
0:16:23 I did. I read it to them all.
0:16:25 And it wasn’t that the movie had gotten made and they liked it. It wasn’t that the movie
0:16:27 was a commercial success. It was simply that you sold it.
0:16:32 The thing had intrinsically changed in the work itself. And they all, nobody owned it.
0:16:36 Not one of them said, “You know what? I guess I’m…” They all said, “I didn’t read it.
0:16:40 It was my reader. It was my assistant. I meant to read it. I read the wrong script that was
0:16:45 about poker and I thought it was your script.” It was incredible. But it immediately framed
0:16:49 the question for me, for the rest of my career about who knows what.
0:16:55 So then it’s bought by Miramax, which is something I guess they used to say with pride. And David
0:16:58 and I were just the writers. We weren’t the producers on the movie. We weren’t the directors
0:17:03 of the movie. And this has to do with continuing to work with Rigger. There was a moment where
0:17:07 they were going to hire a director who we thought would fire us off the movie and we
0:17:12 thought would do a bad job. We met him. We didn’t like him. And so even though it wasn’t
0:17:19 in our billet, we decided we’d better find a director who they would hire but who would
0:17:24 be someone we felt we could work with. And it was really overstepping our position.
0:17:32 And I think part of it is, and this gets into us, part of it was that each of us were raised
0:17:37 in environments where we saw people take these kinds of risks. And my dad was an entrepreneur
0:17:42 and I saw a lot of the time the way that he would just overstep his position to achieve
0:17:49 a result. And so we found out through some sources who directors were that the movie company,
0:17:52 who they were interested in making movies with, we triangulated that with people we
0:17:57 could get to. And we found out that our agency represented John Dahl, who was really high
0:18:02 on our list. And we said to our agents at the time, “Listen, we’re going to stay in
0:18:06 California until you can get us a meeting with John Dahl.” And they were like, “Well,
0:18:09 how are we going to do that?” We said, “Well, send him this script, the letter that we
0:18:13 write, and we’ll just wait around.” And they had all just competed to sign us, right?
0:18:20 So this was the very beginning of this relationship with the agent. And in a way, he had to prove
0:18:24 himself to us. We were able to leverage the newness of the situation, even though often
0:18:29 people in that situation think that they work for the agents. The agents do a really good
0:18:34 job of making people feel lucky to have them. But we were aware of the actual leverage in
0:18:39 the situation. He got the script to John. John read it. Luckily for us, he really liked
0:18:42 it. He came over and met us at our hotel. We all shook hands on it. We knew he was an
0:18:48 honorable person. We then got to have this incredibly, incredible moment, which now when
0:18:52 I think back in it, I can’t even believe happened, which is we then called the producers and
0:18:55 the studio and we said, “John Dahl’s going to direct ‘Rounders’.” And they all went,
0:18:58 “Well, that makes no sense. He’s supposed to direct this other movie for us. How could
0:19:00 you do that? You overstepped.” And we all said, “Well, do you want John Dahl to direct
0:19:04 the movie?” And they all went, “Yeah.” And what was really great about that is then
0:19:08 that allowed us to be on set every day. Because when you’re the one who brought the director
0:19:14 in and you have this relationship, plus John has no ego and he knew we understood the world
0:19:20 of poker. Also, this incredibly lucky thing was we were the same age as Matt and Edward.
0:19:24 And so there was a relationship that developed right away, which was we were going to take
0:19:28 these guys and show them the world of underground poker. We were going to be experts about this.
0:19:31 John Dahl gave us our limits. He was like, “You have to really think carefully about
0:19:35 your set of actors. You can’t contradict me. We’re going to work together, but there’s
0:19:39 a chain of command.” And with that, he gave us complete freedom. Within that, he was like,
0:19:43 “Now, help me make the movie.” But none of it would have happened if we would have
0:19:47 pitched a movie. We would have been powerless. We had ownership because we’d written the
0:19:49 whole thing and we’d proven we were experts.
0:19:51 Can I ask you a quick question on this notion of ownership?
0:19:52 Yeah.
0:19:56 David Levine and you guys are both the showrunners for Billions. I’m dying to know how, because
0:20:05 when a studio buys your show, someone is producing billions, it is your show as showrunner.
0:20:08 What if there’s a conflict and you guys have a huge falling out and I’m thinking of the
0:20:13 case of the Sherman Paladinos and Gilmore Girls and they had to exit before the last
0:20:17 season and it totally changed the last season of the show and then they came back to remake
0:20:21 the thing? Is there this thing where you’re owning this thing that other people are now
0:20:24 sharing in and then you have to give up your baby? How does the ownership thing work?
0:20:32 I’ll tell you, it’s so analogous to the way a founder and will work with the investors,
0:20:38 the VC, the board. It’s up to you to manage that relationship. It’s up to you to set
0:20:47 the terms. This does get into questions of privilege. As two white men growing up with
0:20:53 David’s grandfather and my father were pretty successful, we learned at a young age how
0:20:57 to talk to powerful people. Most people don’t get in education and talk to powerful people.
0:20:58 You’re so right about that.
0:21:02 When people ask about advantages, yes, getting college paid for was a huge advantage, meaning
0:21:07 that I knew I could take certain risks that other people couldn’t because I didn’t have
0:21:12 a massive debt. But much more important or certainly equally important was from a young
0:21:16 age, my dad would like put me in situations where I would have to deal with powerful people
0:21:21 and I would have to find a way to get the result I wanted. He would let me be in a recording
0:21:26 studio when he was making records and sometimes ask my opinion in a room full of incredibly
0:21:30 scary powerful people. He would let me be in meetings and he would leave and I would
0:21:31 conduct stuff.
0:21:32 You really set you up for that.
0:21:39 From a young age, how to interact? How do you talk to power actually? Give us the advice
0:21:40 for our listeners.
0:21:44 The main thing is don’t treat them as the most of the time. Don’t treat them with a
0:21:49 sense of awe and that their station makes them better than you. But also don’t try to condescend
0:21:53 to them as though you’re the smartest person in the world. And you know the biggest thing?
0:21:55 Make them laugh once in a while.
0:21:56 That’s actually great.
0:21:59 I mean, right? Walk into a room, make them laugh, make them feel like you have the answers
0:22:03 to their problems and that you’re comfortable in your own skin. I mean so much of what I’m
0:22:09 talking about is an ingrained sense of comfort in your own skin is being able to just continue
0:22:13 to grow. You must always continue to grow, continue to better yourself, but find a way
0:22:19 to sit there in the room relaxed and understand that you’re not sitting there with the all-knowing,
0:22:25 all-powerful Oracle or Oz, which is to say to answer your question. It’s our job to make
0:22:32 the show, to make the actors comfortable, to make the crew feel empowered, to make
0:22:36 sure the show is written, edited and shot, right? It’s also our job to make the show
0:22:42 on budget, to communicate with the show time if there’s going to be, “Hey, guess what?
0:22:44 This next week it’s going to look like we’re over, but here’s how we’re going to solve
0:22:49 that the week after.” Also to make them feel heard when they’re talking about the show.
0:22:50 You’re so right.
0:22:54 If they’re giving notes, make them feel heard, make them know that you actually are listening.
0:22:57 Again, it’s really important that we only take the notes that’ll make the show better
0:23:01 and that we do that in a way that makes them feel good about the process.
0:23:04 That’s fantastic advice. That’s so great. I feel like that can apply to any business.
0:23:05 It does. I think that applies across the board.
0:23:07 You know how I coach people how to do that?
0:23:08 How do you?
0:23:09 Yeah.
0:23:10 From Larry Sanders.
0:23:11 From Artie.
0:23:12 So tell us.
0:23:13 I don’t know where you’re from.
0:23:16 We both love Larry Sanders, like my third favorite show of all time.
0:23:22 So people haven’t seen it. You must watch it immediately. So Artie, the producer, played
0:23:26 by the legendary Riptorn, Artie, the producer.
0:23:30 So typically we see this with young people out in here, which is like, you give somebody,
0:23:33 in your world, it’s called a note. In our world, it’s like feedback or here’s an idea.
0:23:37 You give somebody an idea and they immediately get their backup. Well, they do one of two
0:23:40 things. They either take it way too seriously and they try to do everything you tell them
0:23:44 or they get their backup and they get offended, “How dare you question my vision?” kind of
0:23:47 stuff and then that sets up a weird dynamic where you feel like you can’t talk to them.
0:23:52 Both of those are bad. One way you basically hijack their creative vision, usually a bad
0:23:55 effect. The other way is you end up with a bad, a hostile relationship.
0:23:59 And so, Artie’s whole approach to dealing with the network executives in Larry Sanders
0:24:03 is a show inside a show, basically. It’s a show about a show. His way of dealing with
0:24:07 the suits from the network was basically that they’d say, “Well, I don’t know. I think
0:24:10 the curtain that the talk show has read, we really think it should be purple.” And Artie
0:24:13 would literally say, “That is a really interesting idea. I am really going to think hard about
0:24:17 that one.” And he would read it on his legal panel. He goes, “Okay, okay. What else do
0:24:21 you have?” And then, of course, the show, the suit leaves the room, he rips up the
0:24:22 baby. And the suits are on their way out, and they’re like, “That was the best meeting
0:24:23 ever.” Yeah.
0:24:25 Is this a feeling of feeling that you’ve been hurt?
0:24:30 And so, that’s like, what I’m telling people is like, “That’s the baseline.” If you can
0:24:34 just do that, you’re better than most. And then to your point, if on top of that, you
0:24:36 can actually consider and actually absorb some of the feedback.
0:24:40 And sometimes, listen, nobody’s perfect. So, there are times I’m working 17 hours a day,
0:24:45 and somebody gives me a note I really disagree with, and I might say, you know, as you might,
0:24:50 I might, once in a while, say, “Listen, I tend to say kind of like, ‘Fuck off. That’s
0:24:51 a stupid idea ever heard.’”
0:24:54 I sometimes say that’s a stupid idea, but here’s the thing. If you have the right kind
0:24:58 of relationship with the people with whom you work, you can say that, because they know
0:25:03 that’s not your default position, and they understand, because you’re in dialogue with
0:25:07 them, but not operating from a place, no one’s operating from a place of fear, hurt, or misunderstanding.
0:25:11 And by the way, if you say that’s the stupidest fucking note I ever heard, call them the next
0:25:14 day and say, “Let me tell you what was going on yesterday. Here’s the way I’m going to
0:25:19 think about addressing it, or read this and tell me if you still think so.” It’s a constant,
0:25:24 you constantly have to remember, if you’re in our position, that you’re grateful to be
0:25:29 in this situation, but that you’re not an indentured, you’re not so grateful that you’re
0:25:32 going to prostrate yourself and ruin the thing in the process.
0:25:33 Of course.
0:25:34 And if you remember that, you’re in okay shape.
0:25:37 The part that I always struggle with here, and I wonder if a lot of people struggle with
0:25:41 this, is that I always had this belief that competency is a thing that will always get
0:25:45 you ahead. The result will speak for itself. How do you sort of play back the results to
0:25:50 tell the story that you want? Because oftentimes, the rounder’s example, this is the conversation
0:25:54 that’s happening around the movie, because people have ways of defining those things.
0:25:58 I think that’s a really big challenge. How do you sort of define it so that you can make
0:26:04 sure that the narrative you untold your way is that part of the point? I mean, in terms
0:26:05 of how people perceive your way?
0:26:11 Well, when you’re a showrunner of a going concern, you’re going to get to prove it out
0:26:16 or not prove it out, because you’re making the show. And I will say, certainly in the
0:26:22 relationship we have with Showtime, all their notes are suggestions. And so, Dave and I
0:26:25 are getting to prove it out every episode. I will say we did, so okay, there are a few
0:26:30 other things. It’s not bad thing to learn the mistakes people have made ahead of you.
0:26:35 It’s not bad to do research and know, well, what is the third round in this situation,
0:26:39 right? So if the third round in the situation is don’t go more than 3% over budget on a
0:26:46 given episode without having conversations, that that is the third round, then don’t be
0:26:50 a jerk. You’re in an incredibly lucky situation to find a way to do what you have to do. But
0:26:57 there are many other non-budgetary examples. So here’s how a pilot works. When I lay this
0:27:02 example out, there will be parallels to your world. So a pilot gets green lit. They give
0:27:08 you this amount of money to go make the pilot. And they’ve already approved the script.
0:27:13 You cast the show together. So that’s another one of these things where you’re trying to
0:27:18 find a way to express your opinions. Make sure you have the cast you want. While understanding
0:27:21 we’re in the real world, you’re not going to cast a complete unknown to play the lead
0:27:25 unless you have a bunch of other ways to say, well, that’s okay because in these three spots
0:27:32 we have people who aren’t. But then once that stuff’s done, guys go off, make your show,
0:27:36 right? Because once it starts going and before it’s edited, there is no feedback they can
0:27:41 really give you. You’re making the show. You’re making the show. You go in the editing room
0:27:46 after you have all this material. You know the show is going to fit in an hour long slot.
0:27:52 But most people, when they cut their pilot because they don’t actually have the real
0:27:59 limitation of an hour, will turn in a 67 minute pilot because they’re, every idea they had,
0:28:03 everything they want to be there. Now, David and I, because by the time billions have come
0:28:07 around, we’ve been doing this for a long time. And what happens when you give the 67 minute
0:28:13 thing is you’re inviting a bunch of people to tell you how to get the thing to 57 or
0:28:19 58 minutes. And suddenly they’re giving you their opinion on it. Also, by you not having
0:28:26 to have rigorously with discipline make those decisions, you’ve inevitably left in a bunch
0:28:32 of stuff that you shouldn’t have. So David and I decided and no matter what, we’re turning
0:28:37 something in that’s 57 or 58 minutes, maybe 56 if we could do it. We’re going to take
0:28:43 all of those questions off the table before showing it to the people who put up the money.
0:28:49 And I’ll tell you, we gave them this cut and we’re realistic people. So we knew all the
0:28:52 flaws and the things we would want to reshoot before it would go in the air. But you know,
0:28:55 they’re going to make it as some of the audience doesn’t know. When you shoot a pilot, there’s
0:28:58 no guarantee you’re going to have a series. They’ve invested a bunch of money, showtimes
0:29:01 known for if they make a drama pilot. It’s very likely they’re going to put it on the
0:29:07 air, but you don’t know. And so we turn over this pilot. And the first thing they said
0:29:12 to us when they called us was, you guys have already done all the stuff that normally takes
0:29:16 a month for us to work through with showrunners, which is you’ve gotten the thing into show
0:29:24 shape. And so that’s because we looked ahead at how best practice practices. And by the
0:29:28 way, it’s hard, right? It’s actually when you’re in the, then you’re in the situation.
0:29:32 You understand why everybody turns in at 67 minutes because you don’t have to, it’s much
0:29:38 easier to not have to make those decisions. Right? It’s much easier to hand the confidence
0:29:42 actually quite frankly, it’s easier to offload those decisions to the X, to someone else,
0:29:44 the people who are paying for it. Instead we said, you know, we’re going to make these
0:29:49 choices and we’re going to show them that this is the vision we have for the show. And
0:29:53 our structure, I think I’ve put the pilot script online at my, I think I put it online
0:29:57 at the blog. And if you go look at it, I put rounders up there too, which people have really
0:30:01 been reading a lot lately. But if you look at it structurally, it’s quite different than
0:30:05 the pilot that got on the air. Different scene starts it. And because when we got in the
0:30:10 editing room, we decided, well, now we have the opportunity to make the show be the best
0:30:15 version of itself. We were able to gain objectivity, even though it was all of our hearts in there.
0:30:17 It’s only in the edit that you get that arc totally.
0:30:19 And then there’s one message you’re delivering is like, here’s an incredible product. The
0:30:22 meta message I think you’re delivering is you guys are professionals.
0:30:26 And they said that to us. They specifically explicitly said, we know your showrunners who
0:30:31 can make the show. That was what gave. So this goes to your question of the relationship.
0:30:36 How do you establish a relationship with them that makes them your professional? We can
0:30:43 trust. And by the way, as you know, all you want is a founder show, a founder CEO who can
0:30:47 not make it your job to run the company and just take the best of your ideas. And you
0:30:50 want them to discard the worst of your ideas. Go knock it out of the park. Right. Go do
0:30:55 your thing. By the way, that’s hard. Those are hard one lessons over a career. Yeah. You
0:30:59 know what I mean? Those aren’t. We were 20 years in by the time. I think we sold rounders
0:31:06 in 1997 and we made the pilot of this in 2015. So that’s a long period of time over which
0:31:10 we figured this stuff out. So for people who aren’t aware, there’s a very interesting kind
0:31:14 of split and how movies are made and how TV shows are made at least these days, which
0:31:18 is movies are made. Generally, the writer writes the script, turns it over and then
0:31:21 other people run with it and other people being the presumably the producers and then
0:31:24 particularly the director, the director, the director ends up actually running the project
0:31:28 in a lot of ways, right? Maybe with a line producer or something. For TV shows, especially,
0:31:32 it seems like in the last couple of decades, you have this concept of showrunner and the
0:31:38 writers are often or usually at this point, the showrunners. And I’m just, I’m picturing
0:31:42 I don’t know, Louis B. Mayer or, you know, Jack Warner or somebody, you know, being
0:31:46 told that the writers should run the project and probably screaming and being very upset
0:31:49 like that would be impossible. And so two-part question, what was the left turn in the industry
0:31:53 that caused the writers to get in a position where they could be the showrunners? And then,
0:31:57 and then what did you guys do as writers to make sure that you specifically were able
0:31:58 to do that?
0:32:04 So there’s this, there’s this great book called Difficult Men by Brett Martin that’s about
0:32:12 five showrunners, David Simon, David Chase, Vince Gilligan, Sean Ryan and one other that
0:32:13 I’m not remembering right now.
0:32:19 And this is Breaking Bad, The Shields, The Wires, The Prannos and The Wire and, but he
0:32:22 goes into the history of it and Hill Street Blues is when this first, because they were
0:32:27 making this kind of serialized show and Stephen Boczko started having meetings with the directors.
0:32:30 When the director would come in, he would start having meetings saying, let me give,
0:32:35 set the tone. He was executive, nobody named him showrunner, but he decided that he was
0:32:42 going to, had to because of the nature of that show, exert upon the situation a kind
0:32:47 of tone, a control of the voice and, and tone because most shows have been more like law
0:32:51 and order was like the apotheosis of the other way around, which is each, each episode is
0:32:52 independent.
0:32:53 Yes.
0:32:54 Right.
0:32:59 But before Hill Street Blues, Hill Street Blues was one of the first shows that sort of combined
0:33:03 these elements for a cop show, I think, for sure. But, but the answer to your question
0:33:09 is about David and me and about anyone who wants to be a showrunner, which I’m happy
0:33:12 that showrunners officially in the dictionary now, like two years ago, it became.
0:33:13 I’m so glad.
0:33:14 I love that word.
0:33:19 It’s a real job title. Now, like, what do you do for a living showrunner? It’s learning
0:33:23 to be a producer. We have 150 people who work with us, but we’re who we’re in charge of.
0:33:28 And so it is quite different. But, but, but, you know, as you know, David and I directed
0:33:32 movies and we produced movies. So for us, it was a quite a natural thing because we’d
0:33:37 already, you know, at Rounders was as good an experience as you could have as a writer.
0:33:42 And there were still areas in which we didn’t have enough control over the voice. And what
0:33:47 we also knew was we’re probably never going to get that exact situation again. So we’d
0:33:50 better learn how to do these other parts of it. We’d better learn how to gain control
0:33:55 of the, you know, mechanisms of production means production means production.
0:34:01 That’s exactly right. And so we realized that we had to do that. But again, that goes goes
0:34:09 back to this question of a lot often a writer is takes solace while they’re whining about
0:34:14 not having control. They take solace and not having control because if you don’t have control,
0:34:17 you don’t take the blame somebody else as well. So if you’re comfortable, if you can
0:34:21 find a way to be comfortable with failure, which is a writer you have to or comfortable
0:34:25 in your mistakes, then you can be comfortable in wanting to be the final voice on what the
0:34:32 product is going to be. And we very early on decided, I’ll say this, when we work with
0:34:38 Steven Soderbergh, we are so glad to have his voice. If he’s directing them, man, what
0:34:43 a thrill to work with a genius, right? And what a thrill to have Soderbergh make us
0:34:44 better to this day.
0:34:45 This is OSHA 13.
0:34:48 Yeah, but also the girlfriend experience. And then he produced Solterman. I mean, if
0:34:53 Steven called tomorrow and said that he wanted us to just be screenwriters on a movie, he
0:34:57 was directing, we would jump at it because he’s going to make our stuff better. So but
0:35:02 if you’re comfortable in, if you’re comfortable taking the blame, if you’re comfortable in
0:35:08 a position of control, it makes you incredibly comfortable to then seed that control or to
0:35:14 share with somebody else. And so you can pick your spots then and decide. And also because
0:35:21 we’re able to make our own stuff, it’s the being in a situation where we are not the
0:35:26 final voice doesn’t make us chafe against it. I have plenty of that over here. So I don’t
0:35:28 have to chafe against it over here.
0:35:30 I’m happy to play this role in this situation.
0:35:31 Fantastic. I love it.
0:35:34 This is why we’re good producing other people’s movies. When it’s someone else’s vision, we’re
0:35:38 great at just helping them achieve their vision. Like Neil Berger, who’s an incredibly, incredibly
0:35:42 successful director, director of the pilot of Billions. We produced his first three movies.
0:35:47 And it’s like, Hey, Neil, we’re here to advise counsel, help. It’s your movie. Go run with
0:35:52 it. We’re comfortable in any of those different modes creatively. But I think the reason for
0:35:57 that is that we got comfortable early on with just doing the work and failing.
0:36:00 That’s right. We’ve been talking a lot about kind of managing ups, hierarchically, so
0:36:04 to speak. Now, turning it the other direction, like managing down in the writer’s room, you’ve
0:36:08 got like a lot of writers working with you. So how do you now navigate debates with all
0:36:12 those writers in the writer’s room? Like essentially you’re the show runners. And how do you make
0:36:14 it collaborative yet not a democracy at the same time?
0:36:17 Well, it isn’t a democracy.
0:36:21 So different show runners approach the question of the writer’s room differently. And some
0:36:27 who’ve come up through a writer’s room, rely on it in a very deep way, describe a writer’s
0:36:28 room.
0:36:33 A writer’s room is you get, let’s say six people in the room plus a show runner. There’s
0:36:37 a white board on the, and you start at the beginning of the season and it’s like, where
0:36:41 are we and how do we fill that in? And then each, but then it’s really hard to describe
0:36:45 a writer’s room mark because writer’s rooms become extensions of the way the show runners
0:36:48 see the world and the way they see the world of their shows.
0:36:52 So in theory, it’s a team of people writing the show together in some form.
0:36:57 In some form, meaning maybe everybody will write an episode. Almost all shows, the show
0:37:01 runner does the final pass on all the episodes, no matter whose name is going on.
0:37:01 Yeah, like the top edit.
0:37:08 On our show, though, David and I end up writing most of the show. And we have a great room
0:37:14 of men and women who help us really break the story arc of the season. And that is an
0:37:21 invaluable process. Tons of stuff comes out of the room about how the big arc of the season
0:37:25 should occur, about the twists and turns, about where characters, and that’s a months-long
0:37:31 process of talking. We haven’t yet found, and then when it comes to writing the scripts,
0:37:38 David and I, and then we have a writer named Adam Perlman, who’s now a co-executive producer.
0:37:43 He’s a number two person. And Adam writes a good amount of the show, too. But the truth
0:37:48 is, it is mostly us writing it. And I’m not saying that’s the way it should be on every
0:37:51 show. The voice of our show, the way that our show is, whether you like our show or
0:37:56 not, our show is canted in a certain way. It has a very clear voice that somehow the
0:37:57 two of us can do.
0:38:03 Instead, if someone on the team starts a script, their name goes on, and ours does
0:38:04 not.
0:38:07 So you’ve got a young hotshot writer, and they have an opportunity to write on a show.
0:38:10 This may be not as, let’s say, critical respect or whatever, but maybe it’s like they know
0:38:15 that they’ll actually get to write scripts. And what’s your pitch to them of why they
0:38:17 should come work for you, given that it’s a more constrained environment?
0:38:21 I’m not sure. Well, Adam was somebody who had a lot of job offers when he came on our
0:38:25 show in the second season. He started on the second season. He came into the room as just
0:38:31 a producer level, which is kind of a low-level position in terms of the hierarchy. He wasn’t
0:38:36 helping to be a showrunner, but he came in the room. He had incredibly good ideas. He
0:38:42 then wrote his first script that he wrote was very strong, strong enough that when someone’s
0:38:46 script came in that was not that strong, and David and I had to work on three other things.
0:38:49 We called him in and we said, “Hey, take a shot at rewriting this. Here are the things
0:38:50 that matter.”
0:38:55 We made extensive notes. Adam, go try to rewrite it. He rewrote that script. We then sat with
0:38:58 him and talked about how we were going to now rewrite it, but he did a really good job.
0:39:03 We kept being able to go to him, and by the next season, season three, he was running
0:39:07 the room when we weren’t there. We bumped him up to co-executive producer really quickly
0:39:14 and said, “Look, you’re our creative partner now. Help us do this.” If you’re really great,
0:39:18 if you’re great in the way that our show requires, someone may kill it on another show and just
0:39:23 not kill it on ours, the other thing is they get to be on set, watch how a show is made,
0:39:24 and be a part of it.
0:39:27 I’ll say one thing though to answer, another thing to ask your question, which is some
0:39:30 people have come into the writer’s room, talented, and I’ve found out they came into the writer’s
0:39:35 room because they like my podcast, but I’ve had to say to them, I’m this incredibly nurturing
0:39:39 and encouraging voice on the podcast, and I want you to know I am that for you and your
0:39:44 life, and I’ll help you get your next job, but you’re going to turn in a script and you’re
0:39:46 not going to get the voice on the podcast.
0:39:47 Oh my God, totally relate to this.
0:39:52 You’re going to get somebody saying to you, “Here’s what doesn’t work.” You have to know
0:39:55 that this is now you’re entering, this is, we’re in the major leagues here, we have
0:39:58 no choice because we’re playing the Red Sox tomorrow.
0:40:04 So we have to be ready to get in there and play the Red Sox.
0:40:06 So that’s, that has happened twice.
0:40:10 So one more question about Rounders, which goes to the kind of current state of the industry.
0:40:15 So Rounders was made in 1997, so that was the heyday of kind of the high status independent
0:40:19 movie, like medium budget, but like super high status.
0:40:20 Yeah, 14-5 we made that for, yeah.
0:40:23 Okay, yeah. And then, and then as you said, like it, you know, it had the thing, it wasn’t
0:40:27 a huge commercially hit out, but then it had this long, long life, you know, kind of plays
0:40:30 out through now and probably long into the future.
0:40:33 If that movie had not gotten made, and if a movie like that had not got made, just if
0:40:37 nobody had made kind of the definitive book or movie, and you and David entered the industry
0:40:43 today at age 25 or 30, whatever it is, and decided to make that movie, that project today,
0:40:44 what would be different about the process?
0:40:47 People constantly ask me how to break in to the business.
0:40:51 And my answer is, I have no idea, I did it 23 years ago.
0:40:52 I can’t help you.
0:40:55 I wish I could help tell you how to break in.
0:40:57 The conditions on the ground are entirely different.
0:41:01 The last thing I want to be is some general back in thing, ignoring what the sergeant says.
0:41:03 Like I have no idea.
0:41:07 I do know that what I know is that, well, I think it would resemble a movie that I love
0:41:10 and that launched many careers, which is Margin Call.
0:41:15 But whereas Rounders was a 14-5, I think Margin Call was made for a million too, and scraped
0:41:18 together by a commercial director, and they had limited sets.
0:41:20 Now, because Margin Call has a lot of similarities to Rounders.
0:41:24 It’s set in an insular world with a language of its own.
0:41:26 It doesn’t spell anything out for you.
0:41:27 You have to be willing to–
0:41:28 You have to be willing to roll with it.
0:41:29 We should describe it.
0:41:33 It’s kind of the definitive movie of the September 2008 financial meltdown.
0:41:36 It kind of takes place overnight, effectively in Lehman Brothers.
0:41:37 Yes.
0:41:38 A fictionalized version of Lehman Brothers.
0:41:41 And it’s actually a very chilling– people in finance look at it and say–
0:41:42 Goldman.
0:41:43 Well, it’s Goldman, right?
0:41:44 Because they survive.
0:41:50 Because it’s set at Goldman, and it’s about the willingness of gold– and they never
0:41:51 say it’s Goldman.
0:41:55 It’s about the willingness of– it’s about a decision that Goldman Sachs made to get
0:41:57 rid of their toxic assets.
0:42:02 But I think that movie is really analogous to Rounders because it is doing a bunch of
0:42:05 the stuff that we did.
0:42:10 You have to just catch on to the lingo, and you have to understand what the stakes are.
0:42:15 But he had to– look, they made that movie for a 10th of what we made Rounders for.
0:42:16 They had Kevin Spacey.
0:42:17 They had Jeremy Irons.
0:42:18 Jack Herquinto was in it.
0:42:19 And he was starting to become famous.
0:42:20 That’s right.
0:42:21 So they had Top End.
0:42:22 They put the Top End people.
0:42:23 But it was still– they had to make it for like a million and a half bucks.
0:42:24 A million and two, maybe.
0:42:25 OK.
0:42:30 It’s much harder to make those mid– those sort of mid-budget 14 to 25 or $30 million
0:42:31 movies.
0:42:32 The Netflix does it, right?
0:42:33 Right.
0:42:38 You can do it at Netflix now, which is probably where it would happen.
0:42:40 But– or you would try to tell the story in a novelistic way on television.
0:42:41 Well, that was a great question.
0:42:46 So would you pitch today– young David and young Brian show up– would you pitch Rounders
0:42:48 for television or for a film?
0:42:49 No.
0:42:51 You would pitch the world in the underground card rooms for television.
0:42:52 OK.
0:42:53 Because I think a lot of that– that’s where this stuff lives.
0:42:57 And that would have been, I think, a fascinating thing to see also.
0:42:59 David and I grew up watching movies.
0:43:05 We loved television, but our shared language, our lingua franca, was movies.
0:43:08 We were quoting movies at each other from when we were little kids.
0:43:10 We would watch movies 20 times.
0:43:16 We watched Stripes Together at least 20 times and Diner and many more movies where they
0:43:20 became the way we communicated.
0:43:23 And so it made sense to us to go make movies.
0:43:30 Since then, things like The Sopranos, West Wing, Larry Sanders, Mad Men showed up and
0:43:31 showed us the way.
0:43:35 They lit the way for us to think about television.
0:43:36 That’s actually huge.
0:43:37 We always talk about this.
0:43:39 Mark and I television is so much better than movies.
0:43:40 It’s unbelievable.
0:43:42 Well, I think it’s actually– it’s the best shows there are novels.
0:43:43 What?
0:43:44 I think we all think about it.
0:43:45 Or a series of novels.
0:43:46 I call it visual literature.
0:43:47 A movie is still more like a play.
0:43:48 It’s visual literature.
0:43:49 These shows are like thousand-page novels.
0:43:50 We definitely think about it.
0:43:52 We definitely think about it that way.
0:43:56 We’re trying to tell novelistic stories, deepening characters in challenging situations.
0:43:57 I call it visual literature.
0:43:58 It’s exactly what it is.
0:43:59 I love that term.
0:44:03 When you came up in the music industry, I watched– I was involved in the internet.
0:44:07 I wasn’t involved in Napster, but I knew the guys really well.
0:44:11 We both watched from various professional perches, kind of the music industry confront
0:44:14 digital distribution and basically just like implode.
0:44:15 Yeah, get run over.
0:44:16 I didn’t confront it.
0:44:18 Unfortunately, they didn’t confront it.
0:44:22 They just stood there and got– they were like, they just got run over.
0:44:23 Kablooey, right?
0:44:24 I mean, like France.
0:44:25 Like France.
0:44:26 In the deuce, man.
0:44:31 You know, they were like, should we pick up our guns and their rifles?
0:44:32 No.
0:44:33 Let’s just lay down.
0:44:36 That’s a comment brought to you entirely.
0:44:37 No, Mark.
0:44:38 You signed up.
0:44:39 You laughed.
0:44:42 You completely laughed.
0:44:45 So I fully– I’ll just confess, I fully expected the same thing was going to happen to TV.
0:44:49 Like, you know, Napster for music, BitTorrent for TV, it’s just like it’s just obvious.
0:44:50 Same thing’s going to happen to TV.
0:44:51 It’s just going to get run over.
0:44:54 And then the most like amazing thing in the world happened, which is the exact opposite
0:44:55 thing happened.
0:44:58 The exact opposite happened, which is like this– like the creative explosion of all
0:44:59 time.
0:45:00 Yes.
0:45:03 Like the– and you’ve probably seen, you know, John Landgraf, who runs FX, has always
0:45:04 talked about it.
0:45:05 He’s a brilliant man.
0:45:06 Brilliant man.
0:45:08 You’re a great programmer, but, you know, he talks about the content bubble, the TV
0:45:09 bubble.
0:45:12 And it’s like, I don’t know, every year now, it’s like 500 original scripted dramas are
0:45:13 getting made.
0:45:15 I think it’s 560 or something insane.
0:45:16 Yeah.
0:45:18 And so, and he’s been calling this a bubble the whole time, but like it keeps expanding.
0:45:21 And I mean, then we all get to, you know, you get to make it, but like we get to watch
0:45:22 it.
0:45:24 You know, I really like routinely see shows now where I’m just like, you know, 20 years
0:45:26 ago, this would have been the best show in the entire history of town.
0:45:30 The fact that “Mindhunter and the Crown” came out like in the same year on Netflix is amazing
0:45:31 to me.
0:45:32 Those would have been the best show of an era.
0:45:33 Ever.
0:45:34 Ever.
0:45:35 Ever.
0:45:36 Like the crown is as good as you can make something.
0:45:37 And like–
0:45:38 I keep trying to make Mark watch it.
0:45:39 He hasn’t–
0:45:40 I can give you the language by which to watch it.
0:45:41 So I’m totally not interested in monarchy.
0:45:42 I hate it.
0:45:43 And nothing about that is interesting to me.
0:45:45 The show is just the most beautifully written and shot.
0:45:46 I agree with you.
0:45:47 And acted show that there is.
0:45:48 He doesn’t believe me.
0:45:49 So here’s my question.
0:45:51 Let’s assume it is the medium of our time.
0:45:53 And let’s assume it kind of keeps expanding so that this all makes sense.
0:45:57 But the amazing thing is, it seems like the more shows get made, it seems like the average
0:45:59 quality level is rising.
0:46:01 And you would expect, I think, the opposite.
0:46:03 You’d expect the average quality level to fall because you’d expect to run out of talent
0:46:04 at some point.
0:46:05 I agree.
0:46:07 And so where is all this talent coming from?
0:46:08 I have no idea.
0:46:09 Okay.
0:46:12 So were there just all these geniuses out there who just never had the opportunity to
0:46:13 do it and now they do?
0:46:16 Or is there something happening in the industry where people are being trained in a different
0:46:17 way?
0:46:18 It’s just the love of television.
0:46:19 So it perpetuates itself.
0:46:23 And we might be in a golden age where artists are apprenticing in some way for other artists
0:46:26 and learning and figuring it out.
0:46:30 You know, I have the luxury not to think about the 560 shows or to appreciate what Landgraf
0:46:34 says and know he’s a brilliant guy without having to be cowed by that or feel anyway
0:46:37 about it because I just want to, I still go back to the same thing.
0:46:40 I just want to get in the room and get the feeling I get when I’m making the thing.
0:46:44 I want to be walking on the set and see Damien and Paul and Maggie in Asia and be able to
0:46:45 work with them.
0:46:53 And we’ve just found a way to make decisions still based on our curiosity and our obsession.
0:46:57 So if we’re interested in the US Open in 1991 and Jimmy Connors, we’ll go make a documentary
0:47:01 about it because we’ll really enjoy the process of making it and we have faith that there
0:47:02 will be people who will want to see it.
0:47:05 I was thinking my answer to Mark’s question, I’m trying to make him watch this movie Gully
0:47:06 Boy.
0:47:07 I haven’t seen it.
0:47:11 It’s a Bollywood movie that’s produced by Nas, but to me the point is that technology
0:47:14 has democratized the access to watching all this visual literature.
0:47:15 I don’t understand.
0:47:20 Ben is not able to make him watch something produced by Nas that makes no sense to me.
0:47:23 Ben and I have the kind of partnership where we’re able to compliment.
0:47:26 Actually, I wanted to ask you, that was the other question I wanted to ask you.
0:47:29 So you have been partners now with David for how long?
0:47:30 Over 20 years.
0:47:31 It’s an equal partnership.
0:47:32 It has always been from the beginning.
0:47:33 Okay, equal partnership.
0:47:34 Fully 50/50.
0:47:35 Beautiful.
0:47:38 So how do you, if somebody comes to you and says like, I want to have a partnership
0:47:39 like that.
0:47:40 I want to have a career where I have a partner like that.
0:47:41 How do you do that?
0:47:43 Well, do you remember when the four of us first, do you remember when the four of us
0:47:44 first met?
0:47:47 How funny it seemed to the bus when we, you, Ben and David, we were sitting there and
0:47:54 it was just like, this is a rare thing to have two sets of people who just, in the same
0:47:58 way it makes sense when someone sees you and Ben and talks to you for five minutes.
0:48:02 When someone sees David and me and they talk to us for five minutes, the whole thing just
0:48:03 kind of makes sense.
0:48:08 In the ways that we can finish each other’s sentences, but also are different in some significant
0:48:09 ways.
0:48:14 When someone else heard us talking, we’re maybe very similar, but the two of us understand
0:48:16 the ways in which we’re complementary to each other.
0:48:22 The key is to really regard the other person as incredibly smart, to really always know
0:48:26 that their motive is to make the work better.
0:48:32 So much of the stuff sounds like platitudes, but like trying your hardest to get your emotions
0:48:34 out of these decisions and being rational.
0:48:38 I think the key to having a good partnership is not about looking for the partner, it’s
0:48:42 about how can you make yourself be the best version of yourself in a way that complements
0:48:48 this other person that who you respect and whose work you admire.
0:48:50 And so that’s all hard work in life, right?
0:48:57 It’s the same thing in a marriage or any kind of a kind of a partnership, but it’s about
0:49:02 all of us, even the most rational, smartest among us, have emotional reactions sometimes.
0:49:06 And the question is, okay, it’s not to not have an emotional reaction, but it’s to not
0:49:09 let the emotional reaction dictate your response.
0:49:17 So if that means you know that you’re the worst of you, instantly reacts with anger,
0:49:22 then find a way to say, hey, I don’t want to react with anger, I’m going to go take
0:49:24 a run and then I’m going to come back.
0:49:27 And this is stuff you figure out over a long period of time.
0:49:31 But the more you know that the success or failure of a partnership is based entirely
0:49:35 on how you comport yourself, the better off that you’ll be.
0:49:36 It’s not the other guy’s fault.
0:49:37 It’s not the other guy’s fault.
0:49:38 Don’t you think of it that way?
0:49:40 I am curious what Mark’s take on this.
0:49:42 What is your take on that?
0:49:46 No, so the way I describe it, by the way, this comes up a lot in our business, Ben and
0:49:50 I have this kind of partnership, lucky for me, but also there’s a lot of founder and
0:49:51 then CEO.
0:49:54 Like sometimes we have founder CEOs, which is like your showrunner model, but sometimes
0:49:57 we have a founder and then there’s a CEO who’s brought in or promoted inside the company
0:50:00 and then they have to be part, you know, if you want the magic of the founder and the
0:50:02 company will well run, they need to have that kind of partnership.
0:50:05 And so when I always tell them, I kind of try to put a point on it and it’s kind of
0:50:10 say it has to be more important to each of you that it has to be more important than
0:50:16 each of you that the other one has to be more important that the other one gets to make
0:50:19 the decision than that you get to prove yourself right.
0:50:21 And you have to both have that attitude.
0:50:24 Like if one of you has that attitude, then you just, that person’s just going to run
0:50:25 over the other ones.
0:50:27 If you both have the attitude where your reflexive view is, you know what?
0:50:28 This is a debate.
0:50:29 It’s an argument.
0:50:30 It’s 50/50.
0:50:31 It’s a toss up, which a lot of these things are.
0:50:33 We’re going to do it your way.
0:50:36 If both people have that as their default point of view, then you can navigate through
0:50:37 these things.
0:50:40 And then you get in the positive version of the deadlock, which is like, no, let’s do
0:50:41 it your way.
0:50:42 Okay.
0:50:43 Now we have a healthy conversation.
0:50:48 Sometimes there’ll be emails back and forth about a thing in an editing where one of us
0:50:52 will have an idea and the other one will say, my instinct was to go the other way with
0:50:53 it.
0:50:54 But you know what?
0:50:55 Let’s, let’s, let’s do it that way.
0:50:57 And it’s not even a, it has to not be a move.
0:51:01 I think you have to actually be like, there was a thing yesterday.
0:51:06 I, where I, I saw something and I had a, um, a notion about it and David sent me back.
0:51:08 Um, well, there are a few different things that are good.
0:51:13 So normally when we’re doing edits on, when we’re comment, making notes on a cut in order
0:51:17 to do edits, our two assistants, we share two assists.
0:51:18 Not like one’s his assistant and one’s mine.
0:51:23 We have two assistants who help the two of us normally there on the conversation so that
0:51:27 they can then collate the notes and give them to the editor before we go talk to the editor.
0:51:31 But if there’s something that suddenly is going to, we see really differently, we just
0:51:33 immediately take it to a private communication, right?
0:51:37 We take the, we take the audience out of it.
0:51:38 We never talked about this, but we just do it.
0:51:41 We take the audience out of it because let’s not perform, not performing and we’re also
0:51:43 not worried about being judged.
0:51:46 But so yesterday was one of those things where we just saw one little tiny moment slightly
0:51:47 differently.
0:51:48 I wrote this thing like, I think we should do this.
0:51:51 And then Dave wrote me separately and said, you know, I don’t, I don’t see the scene that
0:51:52 way.
0:51:53 Here’s what I think is going on.
0:51:56 And I still saw the scene the way that I saw it, but I just immediately went, no, he’s
0:51:57 right.
0:51:58 Yeah.
0:51:59 Let’s just do that.
0:52:00 It makes total sense.
0:52:03 Like let’s go through the next bunch of iterations of the, of the cut with it in like that.
0:52:06 And the, in the hope that I’m just going to come around to seeing it that way.
0:52:09 Or let’s show it to some, some other people this way and let’s see what, what comes out
0:52:10 of it.
0:52:12 It would have been very easy.
0:52:14 And I see a lot of people fall into the trap of trying to argue.
0:52:17 Well, I look for as many, by the way I think about it is I look for as many chances as
0:52:19 I can to let him make the decision, right?
0:52:21 And then, and then to your point, like if I real feel as a consequence of that, I build
0:52:22 up so much trust.
0:52:23 That’s right.
0:52:28 If I still strong about something, that’s a really great point.
0:52:32 This is important to attach to that, which is because all the time Dave is willing to
0:52:34 say to me, let’s do that.
0:52:37 When he wrote me and said like, Hey, I think this is different than you think it is.
0:52:41 It was just so easy to go, well, yeah, of course, dude, go, let’s do that thing.
0:52:44 Because we’re always looking to let it be the way I want it.
0:52:45 As I am.
0:52:50 So I would say I’m certain none of that is a tactic or a strategy with Dave and me.
0:52:54 It just so happens to be the way that the two of us interact.
0:52:57 A quick question on this, though, just from like an advice point of view, because you
0:53:03 talk about this, how do you manage your own personal psychology around anger and creative
0:53:08 impulse and ego kind of in the, in this process, even beyond the partnership?
0:53:09 Well meditation helps.
0:53:14 It’s so, I mean, I know, as I said before, some of this stuff sounds so reductive and
0:53:18 so much like platitudes, but you know, I love that Tim Ferriss has said out of the whatever
0:53:23 a thousand people that he’s interviewed, who he views as highly successful creatives, like
0:53:27 92% of them meditate.
0:53:28 And I don’t think that’s just buy-in.
0:53:30 I don’t think it’s just that everyone’s decided to buy-in.
0:53:31 So I’m in the 8%.
0:53:32 Yeah, I know.
0:53:33 I’m like, Mr. Anti-Meditation.
0:53:34 I’m not into anti-meditation.
0:53:35 Anti-meditation.
0:53:37 Well, I’ve never, I’ve never, I’m not philosophically anti-meditation.
0:53:38 I’m personally anti-meditation.
0:53:43 I cannot imagine sitting still with my own thoughts for longer than about 30 seconds.
0:53:44 I couldn’t either.
0:53:45 Right.
0:53:46 So this is my question.
0:53:50 Talk to me as a practical person who’s interested in performance and not particularly interested
0:53:51 in introspection.
0:53:52 Like, how would I?
0:53:53 Well, I do the simplest kind.
0:53:55 I do Transcendental Meditation.
0:53:58 So it’s the easiest one because it’s just quietly saying a mantra to yourself for 20
0:53:59 minutes, right?
0:54:00 Yeah, define Transcendental Meditation.
0:54:01 Well, that’s what it is.
0:54:07 Transcendental Meditation is you, because I had ADHD person, I can’t sit still.
0:54:12 I have to check all that stuff, except I really do this twice a day, 20 minutes.
0:54:15 And what I found, and it’s just personal.
0:54:20 But what I found was it like reduced the physical manifestations of anxiety by a lot.
0:54:24 And when you get, for me, when I get anxiety out of the equation, I just think more clearly
0:54:25 and more creatively.
0:54:29 So it’s, and it’s not, I’ll say the other thing is people build it up too much, right?
0:54:31 It’s not some magic pill.
0:54:37 It doesn’t like immediately make you, you’re not suddenly becombed, but it just kind of
0:54:43 takes like a little bit of the tumult out.
0:54:48 And a lot of forms of meditation require you to force out the thoughts as you said, or
0:54:52 require you to be introspective, or require you to focus on your breathing.
0:54:56 Transcendental Meditation, all you’re doing is sort of allowing this mantra to be said
0:54:57 over and over.
0:54:58 And if thoughts come in, that’s fine.
0:55:02 You just kind of let the thoughts come in, and then you kind of return to this mantra.
0:55:04 And I’ll say the results for me.
0:55:09 So I was hugely skeptical, but I was at a point where I was feeling like I needed something.
0:55:13 I had too much agitation.
0:55:17 And so in reading about, I read David Lynch’s book, Catching the Big Fish, and a couple
0:55:18 of other books.
0:55:19 And it made me interested enough.
0:55:22 And I went and sat down with Bob Roth, who runs the Lynch Foundation, and I said, look,
0:55:24 I think you’re probably a cult.
0:55:28 I think that I’m an atheist.
0:55:32 You know, I know these are like Sanskrit words that have some holiness to them.
0:55:34 So none of that stuff works for me.
0:55:37 So talk to me about why I should even be sitting here.
0:55:40 And you know, Bob was like, well, why don’t you read this book and why don’t you read
0:55:42 this study and why don’t you look at these EEGs?
0:55:47 And let’s talk about what this tool does in terms of affecting the loops in your brain
0:55:48 and your brainwaves.
0:55:54 And in through that conversation, I was like, well, okay, let me, you know, I’ll learn.
0:56:02 And within, I’ll say like within two months, I noticed in my family noticed that I was
0:56:04 just in a much better place.
0:56:09 And again, it doesn’t mean I’m never a dick.
0:56:10 Like we’re all a dick sometimes.
0:56:14 It doesn’t mean I’m never short with anyone or that I’m never worried.
0:56:15 Of course I am.
0:56:16 I’m a human being.
0:56:19 But it means that I can manage it in a much better way.
0:56:25 And if the only thing I got out of it was I was sitting and meditating and when you’re
0:56:33 not trying to think of ideas, but like I’ve solved many tricky story problems.
0:56:37 I’ve come out of a meditation and just kind of had the answer show up.
0:56:41 Now that that could just be a function of like, I turned everything off and I, I consciously
0:56:43 wasn’t thinking about it.
0:56:45 And so I allowed this.
0:56:46 That’s great.
0:56:47 Perfect.
0:56:54 How, whatever it is, it’s not surprising to me that so many of us who are high achievers
0:57:01 aggressive in going after what we want, willing to take risks, that finding some tool that
0:57:05 gives you some enforced break from that.
0:57:09 It’s not surprising to me that that then when you then come out of that, you’re kind of
0:57:10 firing again.
0:57:14 That’s what makes sense to me.
0:57:15 Sir, who’s Bob?
0:57:16 Sir, who’s Bob?
0:57:17 Bob Roth runs David Lynch Foundation.
0:57:20 David Lynch Foundation is like at the center of transcendental meditation.
0:57:21 Lynch had the side.
0:57:22 David, the real David Lynch.
0:57:23 The director, David Lynch.
0:57:24 David Lynch is the biggest.
0:57:28 David Lynch is the reason transcendental meditation is popular in America.
0:57:32 Lynch credits TM with making him the artist that he is.
0:57:35 David Lynch just for Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet.
0:57:36 Oh yeah, all that stuff.
0:57:39 He started doing like 40 years ago or 50 years ago and he wanted to start a thing that would
0:57:42 give it to kids and post-traumatic stress people.
0:57:47 So he started this foundation and the guy who runs it and who’s like sort of the kind
0:57:49 of the head of TM in America is this guy Bob Roth.
0:57:53 The best part of that story, by the way, though, is that you were literally arguing, to Mark’s
0:57:56 point about this tent, because Mark essentially set it up as a tension between performance
0:58:00 and introspection and you’re essentially arguing that introspection leads to better performance.
0:58:03 Well, I know I would argue that it’s not introspection.
0:58:06 My journaling is definitely, a certain kind of introspection serves me, but meditation
0:58:13 is like the calming of the thoughts or the stilling of it, or it’s just a respite in
0:58:14 a way.
0:58:19 It’s a respite from the perpetual thinking machine thing.
0:58:23 I think the idea is that you have these thoughts, these pattern thoughts, and there are some
0:58:26 thoughts that you know you have, but then there are these like patterns of thoughts
0:58:32 that you have that are probably a little bit disruptive, but they’re loop.
0:58:36 And when you start to say this mantra, you’re interrupting, right, suddenly that’s what
0:58:40 the sound is and the other thing just dissipates and you get calm.
0:58:45 I’m not trying to think about my life when I’m meditating, I’m just trying to take a
0:58:46 break.
0:58:47 Yeah.
0:58:48 Okay.
0:58:50 Let’s spend the last few minutes just talking about billions specifically.
0:58:54 As friends, we’re about to go into some light spoiler alerts, particularly from the last
0:58:55 and early seasons.
0:58:58 So if you haven’t seen them already, you’ve been warned.
0:59:02 I have to ask this question because you know that scene from as good as it gets where there’s
0:59:05 a female character that goes to Jack Nicholson and you just say, “How?”
0:59:08 I just, I sacrifice take away honor and what’s the exact line.
0:59:10 Well, actually I was thinking of another thing.
0:59:11 I have not seen this movie.
0:59:12 Oh, you haven’t.
0:59:13 You guys have to describe.
0:59:14 You guys have to describe.
0:59:16 I thought you were going to say the one where I think of a man and then I take away reason
0:59:17 and…
0:59:18 Yes.
0:59:19 Well, that was his response to her.
0:59:21 What I have is, “How do you write women so fucking well?”
0:59:22 Well, that’s his answer.
0:59:23 Yes.
0:59:27 I disagree wildly disagree with his answer, which is good to hear.
0:59:34 But the best characters on billions are quite honestly the female and transgender characters
0:59:40 of Maggie Sif, who plays Wendy Rhodes and Asia Kate Dillon, who plays Taylor.
0:59:43 I mean, I want to ask you, how do you do this incredible character development for these
0:59:44 female characters?
0:59:48 You know, the hardest questions to answer are the, “How do you do the thing?”
0:59:53 Because that is, that’s the part that’s not…
0:59:55 There is no intellectual answer to that question.
1:00:01 That’s the part of it that either makes you someone who does this or doesn’t do it.
1:00:05 The most fun part for me is when I’m sitting on my couch, actually writing the scenes,
1:00:06 right?
1:00:14 I have music blasting, able to put the computer, the laptop actually on my lap, and I’m able
1:00:16 to sort of fly.
1:00:19 And that’s the part that isn’t intellectual at all.
1:00:22 It’s the result of all the intellectual work you’ve ever done.
1:00:23 It’s the result of your curiosity.
1:00:27 It’s the result of everything you’ve read, of everything that you’ve watched, of everything
1:00:29 that you’ve been a part of.
1:00:34 And then you want to just allow it to happen.
1:00:38 And so we honor these characters.
1:00:44 And Wendy Rhodes, when we invented that character and then wrote it, we certainly know who
1:00:49 that person is very well, but you have to make these fictional characters feel incredibly
1:00:54 real to you and you want to write them smarter than you are.
1:00:57 And that’s the only thing I can say is we want every character in Billions to be smarter
1:00:58 than we are.
1:01:03 So a quick question about Taylor as a character because Billions, the next season is now dropping.
1:01:11 You ended the last season with a tension between the head of Axe Capital and his protege, Taylor,
1:01:13 including their own firm.
1:01:18 And I so relate to Taylor’s character, like you won’t believe, there’s a sense of like
1:01:19 unbounded ambition.
1:01:20 Are you trying to tell Mark something right now?
1:01:22 No, no, no, no, not in that sense.
1:01:23 This happened before.
1:01:28 There’s this unbounded ambition with Taylor and Axe initially nurtures it and then essentially
1:01:29 squashes it.
1:01:34 I’m dying to know, like, Taylor’s a really interesting archetype actually, both that
1:01:39 Taylor’s transgender and that you have this essential universal archetype in every organization.
1:01:41 Tell me how you think about Taylor as a character.
1:01:47 Well, Taylor’s just the most highly competent person and is a brilliant person.
1:01:54 And if this is a long novelistic piece, we’re still sort of at the middle, the beginning
1:01:56 of the middle of the story.
1:01:59 And so that kind of person has to be tempted, right?
1:02:00 Has to be tested.
1:02:06 If you don’t test the morality of those kind of characters, how do you know whether they’re
1:02:07 really moral or not?
1:02:09 They don’t get lost for a little while.
1:02:10 How do they become found?
1:02:13 And so that’s where we find Taylor in this season.
1:02:14 I don’t want to spoil anything.
1:02:15 Okay.
1:02:16 I have another quick one.
1:02:17 I’m just dying to ask.
1:02:18 And we’ll lightly round these and then we’ll wrap up.
1:02:21 I want to ask you about some of the music choices you make and one specific one.
1:02:27 Last season, one of the most compelling raw music choices you made is in a scene for those
1:02:28 who haven’t caught up all the way.
1:02:33 I’ll just give a little teaser where Axe essentially is let out of a situation where
1:02:36 he was in trouble and he’s coming back to his pad and it’s literally, you guys portray
1:02:40 it visually as a completely raw bachelor pad.
1:02:42 And the song was “Street Punk.”
1:02:43 Vince Staples, yeah.
1:02:44 Oh my God.
1:02:46 I fucking love that moment.
1:02:50 It so stripped him bare down to just, he’s a street punk.
1:02:52 Tell me about that decision and that choice.
1:02:57 I mean, David and I choose all the music for the show together and we’re both music fanatics
1:03:03 and trade music all the time and so, and we put music in the scripts.
1:03:07 So when we’re writing that script, we’re going back and forth about what it should be.
1:03:08 Is it hip hop?
1:03:10 If it is, who is it and why?
1:03:13 We had Vince Staples on the list since the end of the first season, I think, when his
1:03:15 first record came out.
1:03:18 “North, North” is what I thought we would use from the beginning.
1:03:24 But that moment, you know, that moment people really understand what happens when Axe gets
1:03:25 in that hot tub.
1:03:27 And again, that was in the script.
1:03:30 That was what our goal was and then we had to work incredibly hard with our brilliant
1:03:40 editor who figured out how to make that sequence work the way we’d had it in our heads.
1:03:45 Marnie Mayer, who edited that episode, really worked incredibly hard to build that sequence
1:03:49 so that it matched and then exceeded what we had written.
1:03:51 And Marnie’s been with the show from the very beginning.
1:03:54 She and an editor named Naomi Garrity have been with the show from the start and are
1:03:58 really and truly our creative partners there, the guardians of the tone of the show with
1:03:59 us.
1:04:00 That’s great.
1:04:01 That was the last one.
1:04:02 And then we can wrap up.
1:04:04 So in season one, does this count as a spoiler alert?
1:04:05 Because it’s so early in the season.
1:04:06 I’ll just give it a high level.
1:04:07 We’ll decide.
1:04:08 Okay.
1:04:12 There’s a scene where you essentially set up Axe.
1:04:15 The entire audience thinks that he’s going to cheat on his wife.
1:04:19 And I spent that entire episode on the edge of my seat worried that he was going to cheat
1:04:20 on his wife.
1:04:21 This is an acceptable spoiler.
1:04:22 This is a spoiler.
1:04:23 This is totally a spoiler.
1:04:24 But it’s an acceptable one.
1:04:25 100%.
1:04:26 I don’t know how you can conceivably think of this.
1:04:27 It’s season one.
1:04:28 Okay, fine, guys.
1:04:29 But just a quick thing on that.
1:04:30 That was obviously deliberate.
1:04:32 Tell me about the decision making behind that.
1:04:37 So what I was saying, the thing about sitting on the couch writing and how that is this
1:04:41 incredibly free process, then you have to rewrite.
1:04:43 And then you have to think about how it fits into the whole.
1:04:48 So the whole gag is to write with total freedom and then rewrite with total clarity.
1:04:54 And so when we’re thinking about whether a character will behave in way A or way B,
1:04:55 we’re thinking about what they would do in the moment.
1:04:57 And then we’re thinking about the ramifications of that.
1:05:03 So if the character did decision A, well, what does that then say about that character
1:05:05 as we go through the rest of the series?
1:05:09 Which will leave us in a place where there’s more optionality.
1:05:13 And it’s clear in that case, which one would leave us with more optionality.
1:05:14 That’s great.
1:05:15 Okay.
1:05:16 Oh, can I say one thing though?
1:05:18 One of the great things about something like this is that someone like Mark can do the work
1:05:21 he does and then I can do the work that I do.
1:05:26 And if there’s some sort of a mutual sort of fascination with the work, you get to connect
1:05:27 with people on that.
1:05:31 And that is one of the sort of unintended joys of the work that I get to do.
1:05:36 And so that’s why I was happy to fly out here and do this podcast because we’ve gotten to
1:05:39 know each other over the last few years and it’s been a real pleasure.
1:05:40 Thanks for having me here.
1:05:41 Thank you, Brian.
1:05:43 Thank you so much for joining the A6NZ podcast, Brian, and for coming out here.
1:05:44 We really appreciate it.
1:05:46 And Billions in the next season is now out.
1:05:47 March 17th.
1:05:48 Thanks, Brian.
1:05:49 So happy to be here.
1:05:50 Thanks, guys.
1:05:51 Thank you.
1:05:53 And by the way, people may not know, I actually play on the show.
1:05:57 I actually play wigs under a rubber mask.
1:05:59 And so that’s why you never see me in a cameo.
1:06:00 I thought we weren’t supposed to have sex.
1:06:01 I’m sorry, everybody.
1:06:02 Speaking of spoilers.
1:06:03 Oh, my God.
1:06:04 This is one of my favorite characters.
1:06:04 Well, thank you.
1:06:12 [BLANK_AUDIO]