Introduction

Patrick: [00:00:46] My guest this week is Brian Koppelman who I met because of a mutual love of books and reading. Brian is a writer, director, and producer. His movies include Rounders, Ocean's Thirteen, and Solitary Man. More recently he co-created the incredibly entertaining Showtime show Billions which allowed us to have some fun talking about the world of hedge funds and investing. We discuss creativity, the importance of storytelling, and why we are all so intrigued by billionaires. Brian's method for chasing curiosity is something everyone can learn and apply in their own lives. You're going to love this discussion. For show notes visit investorfieldguide.com/Koppelman. And now please enjoy this conversation with Brian Koppelman.

Meditation & Running

Patrick: [00:01:28] So, did you do TM right from the get-go when you got interested in meditating?

Brian: [00:01:33] Yeah, for me meditation has been an incredible gift. It has various benefits. You meditate so you know but for me, it had the effect of eliminating the physical symptoms of anxiety in a big way. And then when the anxiety chemicals stop firing it allows for better chemicals to fire in your brain so it has this benefit of, I think, some kind of increased creativity, deeper thought. And TM is simple. One of the things that held me back from meditation, when I was in college or whenever I took acting classes or any kind of theater classes, you would always do some kind of guided three-minute relaxation thing and for me that didn't work. It felt this kind of forced thing, or then when I'd have to do breathing, concentrate on your upper lip kind of stuff, but TM is so simple to do and the way in which I was taught it, it took all the pressure off and it became easy. So about 6 years ago, I think, I started and I meditate every day. I don't really miss a day. I could miss a day out of 2 or 3 months but I really don't. I bet I've missed five mornings of meditation in 6 years.

Patrick: [00:02:50] It's even very hard to describe what it's like if you haven't done it and gotten pretty deep into it. Are there other experiences or states that you could equate to the feeling either during or immediately after meditation?

Brian: [00:03:06] There are moments when you're running. I used to play a lot of sports and the idea of the zone. Those days when you're on a basketball court and you see it all super clearly and you're not really performing from a place of conscious thought. There's something similar in the way that it feels then and right after you have a game like that. There's a euphoria attached to that that I don't chase in meditation. In one of those times when you're working, in basketball in particular, you're working with these 5 guys and when that thing happens in a way that you have one of those games, you are afterward just completely at peace but also there's this euphoria. Jogging, though. I went through a period of doing a lot of jogging about 10 years ago or maybe 7 years ago, after reading Murakami's book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Ad I had started by doing Couch to 5K because I couldn't even-

Patrick: [00:04:16] Got to start somewhere.

Brian: [00:04:16] ... This is coming from a guy who played a lot of full-court basketball. Couch to 5K is this incremental thing where at the end you're doing 3 miles, 3.2 miles. And then I got to where I was running 3, 3.5 miles 3-4 times a week and I did fine and then I would do a long run, like a 5 mile run at the end of the week, and sometimes ... Running's a weird thing because sometimes it's blissful and sometimes it's hell.

Patrick: [00:04:39] Agony.

Brian: [00:04:39] And you just don't know, right? Do you run still?

Patrick: [00:04:41] I do often, yeah.

Brian: [00:04:42] Yeah. It's a bizarre thing. You're in the same physical shape you were in two days ago and sometimes it is ... You start running and you go like, "Why don't I do this all the time? Why isn't this ... " And it's like you're just gliding whether you're slow ... I'm a slow runner. Whether you're a slow runner or fast runner, you sometimes are just sort of like in this transcendent kind of space.

Patrick: [00:05:05] I think bliss is the right word. And oftentimes it happens in a couple minutes where you'll be in the agony part and then in the bliss part.

Brian: [00:05:13] Early morning runs, for me anyway, the first 5 minutes always suck.

Patrick: [00:05:16] Always agony, yeah.

Brian: [00:05:17] But after that you wait for that thing where you trip into that other state. That's really close to meditation. Don't you think that's close to meditation?

Patrick: [00:05:25] It's the example I give but often that's not till mile 6, 7, 8 something really long. It takes a long time to get there and Lynch has this great little phrase. He calls it a thick beauty which is like a pervasive weird kind of buzzy feeling. I'm not religious so no larger overtones here but just this kind of weird feeling of connection that's pervasive, that's not some high or low. It's something like right down the middle and it's thick. I like that description.

Brian: [00:05:56] That book is incredible, Catching the Big Fish. Reading that book was one of the big things that made me want to figure out how to meditate and why I picked TM.

Creative Process

Patrick: [00:06:06] Yeah, and from another writer too so it's an interesting bridge, a great bridge into some discussion on creativity. I think what's interesting for people listening is there's probably a lot more overlap between what we do than people might suspect because in investing, creativity is very important if you're trying to do better than others. And storytelling is important, I think, no matter what you do. So I was going to start with Billions but my wife and I watched Solitary Man last night and it was the first time that I saw it and so really actually want to start there because it was an extremely interesting and unique movie. I won't say it just yet but there's one little short line in there, I'm curious if you can guess it, that I could literally talk about for the whole podcast. But first, I'd be curious to hear how this movie came to be so maybe if you could just tell me a little bit about how the idea germinated, how you came to it, because it's such a unique character.

Brian: [00:06:57] Sure. Let me first say that your point about creativity, a cornerstone belief of mine is that all of us, yes, in the world of investments and in what I do, there is a primacy on creativity. But I actually think humans are happiest when they're accessing the most creative part of who they are. I don't think there's any job, almost any sort of mission, that you're not rewarded for using the part of yourself that thinks with nuanced dexterity and creativity. And so something I chase all the time is the techniques by which to free that part of myself and in others. Tony Robbins talks about how as long as human beings are making progress they feel good, they feel happy. And I think that twin with that is this idea of creativity and not feeling thwarted or not feeling like you are working by rote. So I do think that there is a big kinship in most sort of pursuits that taps into this idea of creativity.

But I actually think humans are happiest when they're accessing the most creative part of who they are. I don't think there's any job, almost any sort of mission, that you're not rewarded for using the part of yourself that thinks with nuanced dexterity and creativity.

Okay, Solitary Man. The origin story for that movie is that I'd seen ... There's an event that happens at the beginning of the film where a woman in her 30s is about to see her father, a man in his 60s, and she calls out, "Dad." And they're in a public place and he says, "Don't call me that in public because it'll make it harder to pick up women." And I saw that, and the woman in question was somebody I cared about a lot. As I'm a dad and that's the thing by which I define myself more than anything else, and seeing that and imagining the kind of monster or person that was acting like that much of a monster, that they could say that to their own daughter. Imagine denying your paternity in that way in public so that some rando woman would think you were still eligible and would think you were younger. It got me so angry that I went home and I wrote like 20 pages out of anger. And then a big huge chunk of the movie came to me including kind of the very end. There was a big part in the middle I couldn't solve for a really long time. And in that first burst of inspiration, a whole bunch of stuff I'd been thinking about, a very specific story, came to me. But there was this big hole or gap in it and it took me years. I hadn't written anything alone. Most of the work I do is with a partner, my partner, David Levien. He's my creative partner and has been since the first movie. But this story was so personal to me. I showed those 20 pages to Dave. I read them out loud to him and he said, "Yeah, that's a movie. We should make that movie but you have to write it because the voice, the tone, the feeling of it, you just have it." And it ended up taking me years to solve but I worked at it at any sort of free time that I had. And even when I was really blocked and having a very difficult time, I would come back to it and read it and think about it.

What happened was I wrote half of it and half of the script was written, and it's pretty much the movie, but the second half remained unwritten for like a year and a half in the middle which was torture for me. And then I had sent it to a friend of mine and he said a couple sentences to me. I sent him the 62 pages and he said, "What are you planning to do?" And I mentioned, "Well, this is why I'm stuck. I know this one thing should happen." And he said, "Here's why that shouldn't happen." And as soon as he said that, I had a eureka moment. I went, "Oh," and then I wrote the rest of it in 3 weeks.

Patrick: [00:11:01] Wow. Really neat. So let me tell you the line and a little bit of setup without giving too much of the movie away because everyone should watch it. Basically the guy is a guy in his 60s who's a philanderer, he's a womanizer-

Brian: [00:11:14] Played by Michael Douglas.

Patrick: [00:11:15] Yeah, played by Michael Douglas, the main character. And he's got a great character as an ex-wife who's played by Susan Sarandon and they're kind of sitting talking and they seem to be a peace with each other, a pretty decent relationship despite having been divorced. And she says something to him which is in a conversation, "I don't change things when they're still working. That's your move." And I love that line so much because for good and bad, it seems to me to sum up a lot of the creative process of business, something that we call the innovator's dilemma which is the second you're not growing or changing, you're dead. It's not a matter of if but when. Now in this case it's very bad because he keeps blowing up his life. But I don't want to get into some of the nuance because the character to me actually wasn't ... There was a lot of sympathy for me.

Brian: [00:12:11] Well, of course, because once I'm then really writing the guy, I can't write about people if I can't find something in them that I connect to or that I can empathize with or understand. So while I think the actions that that character takes are mostly repulsive, I understand the way he's talking to himself. I understand the story that he's telling himself. It doesn't excuse him or justify it. I wouldn't be friends with him in real life but I'm able to understand how he got there. You know, in a later scene they have, he talks about feeling invisible and so once I realized, once a man in his late 60s said that to me. "I used to walk down the street and people would, women would notice me and then at a certain point I just became invisible." And once I realized that this character had this fear of invisibility, it enabled me to understand more about why he was the way he was. That doesn't mean when I write about it I'm not going to create situations where we excuse the behavior. I think the movie doesn't excuse his behavior at all but it allows you to get inside what his motivations are. Speaking about the question of that line, as you were talking I was thinking of Roger Lowenstein's great book about Buffett and the way in which he depicts Buffett's ability to stand pat which is really difficult for most of us to do. The ability to keep your own counsel, to change when you believe it's time to change based on the information that you have. Equally valuable, the ability to not change despite what everybody else is saying based on your own interpretation of events and the circumstance.

Patrick: [00:14:02] It seems to me like the things, the creative output, that people like most have one foot in the familiar and one foot in the new. And that if you think about the creative process, at least in the limited amounts of that kind of creative bliss state that I've experienced in my life, there's always sort of a vulnerability in leaving behind the known.

Brian: [00:14:26] Well sure, Harold Bloom, the most famous lit critic ever, wrote this book called The Anxiety of Influence, and he's been sort of the cornerstone of Yale's English Department for a very long time, 50 years. And Bloom talks about strangeness, and how great work has a kind of strangeness to it. And that's what you're really talking about, something that doesn't feel like we've read it, seen it, heard it a million times. The causes of that kind of work are difficult to predict or to really enumerate. You know what I mean? There's a lot of preparation and, yes, risk-taking that goes into it. You do feel like sometimes you'll hear an album like, I've been listening to this album by Josh Ritter a lot lately, this album called Sermon on the Rocks. And the same thing with another album I love, Jason Isbell's album, Southeastern. And even if you didn't know the biographical stuff that led these people to making these albums, or this woman named Mitski who made an album called Puberty 2. You would, in hearing the records, you sense a vulnerability and openness, a willingness to strip aside a whole bunch of stuff that might've protected them before. And so I do think that that's a hallmark often of great art. On the other hand, there are great artists who work in a very formal way where what they were feeling doesn't matter at all, where their level of craft, intellect, and intention is so great that the work lands in a way that rips you apart even if you have no sense of whether they were affected by it at all. Most of the time that kind of work doesn't reach me in the same way but that's just a question of taste.

Patrick: [00:16:31] Is there anything that you do to create the conditions in yourself so that you're always kind of open to flowing that way?

Brian: [00:16:38] Yeah, I try not to be on guard. So yes, I try really hard. I have rituals because I was a blocked writer until I was 30 and the way in which I finally blasted past that was by finding and sticking to some kind of a routine. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron was enormous for me. In doing morning pages I freed myself from all this other stuff. I freed myself from the curse of perfectionism which was my problem, was wanting whatever I produced to be so great that it would make the reader or viewer just fall down and weep and have no more reason to live. If that's your standard you're never going to be able to do any work because you're never going to be able to produce work on that level.

And so, the morning pages, which Julia Cameron spells out in The Artist's Way, are three longhand pages you write every morning and it's something I recommend for every single person on earth because it happens as you start doing these pages. There are great rules. I'm not big on rules but there are great rules with this. One of which is you can't read back what you've written for five years. You can never show it to anybody. You cannot stop your pen moving. So what happens is you get in the habit of producing pages without censoring yourself at all, without stopping, without trying to judge. And for me it had the effect of tapping into my subconscious and starting this creative process. So I do that. I take a long walk in the morning almost every day, and I meditate. And the meditation piece came later but I do those things every day and those things put me in a state to take risks creatively, to do the thing that I want to do.

Patrick: [00:18:41] How did you find the book? Did someone give it to you?

Brian: [00:18:44] Yeah. It was great. Dave, who is my partner in all this stuff is my lifelong best friend also. We met at, I had just turned 16 and he was 14.5 and we've been like brothers ever since. He was writing and tending bar and I was working full-time and I had gotten to this point. I had given him Tony Robbins' book Awaken the Giant Within and I had read Tony's book. And Tony's book, and I did all those exercises, is one of the things that made me realize specifically, "Oh, I'm scared to be an artist. I want to be an artist. I have to be." Our first child, Amy and my first child was born. I wanted to be the kind of dad that would tell my kid to chase his dreams and that he could do anything. I have two kids now and I do, we tell them that. And I realized I wasn't and so Tony's book kind of throws the gauntlet down to you, "Well if you're not living the life you want, why not? And how can you?" And I remember going to David and giving him that book and he felt the same way about it. He loved it and started doing the stuff. And I went to him and I said, "Look, I'm at a point where I feel like I have to find a way to write and I'm so blocked up and I can't do it and I don't think of myself like this." And then he gave me The Artist's Way and I started doing it the next morning. And it's a crazy thing.

I remember on my 30th birthday being miserable. Amy threw me this incredible poker party. I was already into poker and she threw me this incredible poker party, all my friends. My son was sitting there on my lap at 9 months old until Amy took him home and left me with all my buddies. And I came home and I said, "I know I'm not who I'm supposed to be and I'm 30 years old and what's going to happen?" And I started doing The Artist's Way right after that. And 1 year later we had written and sold Rounders to Miramax and it was in pre-production and we'd sold 2 other movies to Hollywood and my life was entirely different. My 31st birthday I had 3movies in various stages of production. 2 of them at that time didn't get made but they were bought and we both quit our jobs and I was living full-time the life of a filmmaker and a writer.

Patrick: [00:20:59] I often ask people what transformative or formative books they've had in their lives and that book probably has maybe come up more than any other, probably because there's a very tangible thing you're going to go start doing right away.

Brian: [00:21:14] Have you done it?

Patrick: [00:21:15] Yeah. I'm not religious about it. I have similar morning routines to you with running for me and meditation and then I try to write in the morning but it's not just to dump my brain. I actually just start writing about whatever I'm researching or what have you. So I don't do it as formally and I'll come back to it for a couple weeks at a time and lose track of it but it is like this powerful reset button or something.

Brian: [00:21:43] It is. If you need it, it's an astonishing tool. I'm an atheist. You say you're not religious. I'm an atheist and the book has so much spiritual gobbledygook in it that it's really off-putting but she's really smart and she really came up with something that works. The Artist Pages and in the beginning The Artist Eight, those two things. But really the pages. I've given that book. I talk about it a lot. I talk about it on my podcast. I put it out there in the world a lot but I've handed that book to probably 30 or 40 people. Of those 30 or 40 people, let's say 10 of them have done it. 7 of them published books or got movies made out of it. It's amazing. If you really do it you will figure out by the end of it because the other benefit of it is, you don't lie to yourself in the morning pages so after the first couple months of it or month of it, you could just be writing kind of bullshit on the page.

But you know, what happens is you start noticing. Oh, every day I'm writing that I should be doing X or Y, or that I've slacked off on this or that I haven't gotten back in touch with that person. And it's a way to connect to your beating heart and thoughts that are just bubbling underneath the things that you're trying to avoid, the things that you need to do. And so for people who need it, I haven't found a more effective tool. And, for me, bundled with meditation it's just a really powerful way to start your day. It was really rewarding so I told Tim Ferriss about it and Tim talks about I did in Tools of Titans and on the podcast. And now Tim has given that just to millions and millions of people I feel really good about that. And I'd like Julia Cameron to maybe dedicate her next book to me.

But you know, what happens is you start noticing. Oh, every day I'm writing that I should be doing X or Y, or that I've slacked off on this or that I haven't gotten back in touch with that person. And it's a way to connect to your beating heart and thoughts that are just bubbling underneath the things that you're trying to avoid, the things that you need to do. And so for people who need it, I haven't found a more effective tool.

Patrick: [00:23:40] Give you a shout-out.

Brian: [00:23:41] Or give me a shout-out or something.

Curiosity that Led to Billions

Patrick: [00:23:43] You mentioned Rounders and I'll use that with Billions as kind of bridge into Billions where there's this phrase that Danny Meyer who runs a lot of my favorite restaurants here in New York and guess people know him for Shake Shack now, which has been his huge commercial success. But runs these incredible restaurants, is huge on hospitality, and has this phrase, "A, B, C, D," which stands for Always Be Collecting Dots, which is this idea of immersion in a subject area as a means to spark creative insight or create a story or what have you. Obviously, Rounders is just thick with that sort of immersion into the world of poker and gambling. Awesome movie. And Billions now is kind of like that too. It's this incredibly deep dive into a world that has this allure for people, billionaires and intrigue, and maybe the dark side of some of those things. So I'm curious in how you got interested in this area in the hedge fund investing world?

Brian: [00:24:44] Yeah, I would say one of the things I realized right from the beginning of doing any of this kind of work is that for me, if I go from a place of curiosity and fascination I have a chance to do something that has that strangeness that we were talking about. Something that feels like, of course this was supposed to be a thing but then why hasn't it been a thing before and also it's not presented in exactly the way, it's not a cookie-cutter. It's got an original spark. Dave and I, we work together on this stuff. So, with poker, the other things are we love insular worlds with language of their own. That's been from the beginning something that was important. Even Solitary Man, the character is a guy who used to own car dealerships and when you watch the movie you really believe the guy was a car dealer.

I went and I spent time with car dealers and learned how they talk to each other and what all their terms that they use mean and what they're like. But for a long time, we'd been really curious about hedge funders and fascinated by the ambition that drives them. The access that they have. The power that comes from both their resources and that level of access,. And United States attorneys because you can make the argument that billionaires are like nation-states more than they're like citizens. If you think about it, they have armadas, they have fleets of craft, they have soldiers with arms around them. Their feet never have to touch the ground and they move through the world unchecked, really. This is long before Donald Trump's emersion as a viable political candidate. This is just the way that we looked at billionaire hedge funders. And United States attorneys, people don't really understand the kind of discretion that federal prosecutors have but it's enormous. They really decide which cases to take and why and then they have the full power of the federal government to throw at the defendants. And so this idea of a king and a nation-state. We think of them as kings and so a king and a nation-state set against one another felt Shakespearean in its conception. And felt like we could swing for the fences, make a popular entertainment that had thematics that tied to stories that have been told for a long time because the themes are deeply about human nature and the limits of who we ought to be. How we ought to use our abilities in the world. And so we then, and I remember a year and a half ago I talked about this at press events about the show and I talked about Trump and Mark Cuban. And I'm sorry if your listeners are guys in finance or women in finance who like Trump but I'm very, very worried about the country and the world with him about to become president. He'll be president by the time this is up. Maybe there won't anymore be the facility by which people can listen to this. Maybe this is just for you because maybe he's shut off all podcasts.

Patrick: [00:28:23] I'll get it out before he shuts it down.

Brian: [00:28:25] But I talked about it like I'm friends with Mark Cuban. I really like Mark. And I too sort of celebrate Mark and his achievements but I was really interested in why billionaires are celebrated in our country. Why the most popular two reality stars were Mark and Trump, and what that means. What is it about people who've had that kind of financial success that over the last 10 years has superseded even athletes and rock stars and movie stars as a subject of fascination and love and idolization? And so Dave and I were both really interested in exploring that. Solitary Man explores too this idea of a certain kind of charisma standing in for a certain kind of quality of person and this conflating of the value of charisma with the value of a conscience. So those ideas were sort of circling for us, thematics. And then we decided to find a way to get access to a bunch of people in the hedge fund world and in the federal prosecutorial world. And we were able to. And Andrew Sorkin who's our partner in creating the show , after the pilot Dave and I made the show, the two of us, with our writing staff and our incredible crew and the actors, and Showtime. But in the beginning of this, when we were sitting with Andrew, he was able to connect us with a couple of hedge fund billionaires and we met a couple of them and then they would tell people we were all right and we wouldn't sell them out. We were able to meet more of them. I play poker a lot in the city and a lot of the people I play cards with play cards with some of these people, and we started hanging out. I went to college with a guy who's a substantially successful hedge funder.

And so we get to sit in some morning meetings and talk to them and certain people now say we can talk about it so we've become friendly with Jim Chanos who talks to us a lot about how and why hedge funders think the way they do. We spent some time with Marc Lasry who has been willing to do the same. Cuban has been this season a great advisor for us about the way he sees the world and the kind of access that people like him have. And so we then dive in and try to get all the real stuff that we can, and read a ton. We try to read everything that we can that seems relevant, non-fiction articles. We try to interview journalists too because neither of us are incredibly financially literate. I'm terrible at math. So I'll go talk to a journalist and say like, "Okay, how do you get to the bottom of this?" Or, "What do you think this really means?"

Patrick: [00:31:16] And then just build it out from there.

Brian: [00:31:187 Yeah, and we have tech advisors too, and people will call for various pieces of it so that it has authenticity.

Patrick: [00:31:23] It's incredibly fun to watch as somebody, and being friends obviously with maybe some of the same people, and know from the inside out and then to see if from the outside in. And it's pretty damn good. I love the scenes where they're sitting around talking about, of course, dramatized, but sitting around talking about investment ideas.

Brian: [00:31:43] Yeah, like those morning meetings at hedge funds. We've watched those go down. And even if the person doesn't speak exactly with the sort of-

Patrick: [00:31:52] Bravado.

Brian: [00:31:53] ... that Bobby Axelrod does. I've definitely seen people get dressed down the way that he dresses down people when they have an idea that isn't fully thought out. The whole notion of stocks as ideas is something that most people didn't know about until the show. Nobody knows that that's how you people all talk about it as ideas and little things like that, when we hear something like that, it gives you the whole ... For me when I hear that's the way they talk about ideas and names, that gives you a whole way to understand a thought process.

Patrick: [00:32:29] Yeah, even that term names. We don't call them names. It's so funny.

Brian: [00:32:32] That's what I'm saying. Yeah, only you people do.

Patrick: [00:32:33] Right, right. I might be reading too much into this but I'm curious if I've got a thread here that we could pull on. So, in Solitary Man, obviously, the character owns car dealerships but is massively successful, successful enough that he's gifted a library at a college and-

Brian: [00:32:48] Oh, yeah. He made a lot of money.

Patrick: [00:32:49] ... is a millionaire multiple times over.

Brian: [00:32:51] Yeah, he was a person who probably had made $100 million. He wasn't a billionaire. But he was extremely wealthy person.

Patrick: [00:32:59] And well known. And obviously Axe in Billions and a lot of the characters are extremely wealthy. But there's this moment in both where in Solitary Man he goes back and ultimately is actually working at the deli or the diner where he went to college and Axe has the pizza shop where he often returns and talks to the owner. It's sort of this grounding place and in both situations, I thought a lot about money and the so sure you become like a nation-state but there is a lot of negative. This is well documented psychologically but also just you meet people and you see it, that when you have so much money there is stress and maybe a lack of purity in your life because you're treated differently.

Brian: [00:33:43] You're talking about transactional relationships, right?

Patrick: [00:33:45] Very much so, yeah.

Brian: [00:33:46] That it becomes difficult. One of the billionaires talked about chits and how all they care about is chits and having chits so that the more access you have, the more valuable the few chits are where it's very difficult for you to achieve that thing. So you're trading chits on this incredibly high level. And yet, what a bummer to have to live that way in a certain way. What an incredible thing, right? But also when you don't know why somebody is talking to you. If you're the kind of person who cares about that then you might need to find relationships that are more clearly, pure is a very loaded word and I don't even want to use it but that are more genuine. Although I don't think it's unique to billionaires. I think, Patrick, how many kids do you have?

Patrick: [00:34:49] Two.

Brian: [00:34:50] So let's say you want to get them into a private school. Well, you'll meet somebody who knows someone who's on the board and maybe you and your wife will go out to dinner with them. Maybe you'll like them. I don't know, is that genuine. Would you have done that otherwise as you sort of press that advantage or as that person welcomes you in? That relationship may become a real relationship but the genesis of it was transactional in some way and I do think it's hard in the world. I think it's one of the hugely valuable things about both meditation, morning pages, running, walking, is the more we can get rid of the lies to ourselves, the more of a chance we have at peace. And so it's one thing to have that transactional relationship. It's another thing to fool yourself into thinking you don't. If you know that you do, you can then decide if you want to change it. You can then decide how you want to frame it for yourself or for that person. If you don't know then you wake up at some point feeling more alone than you even are. I see this in social media even from my own perch and I have to have an awareness of the various relationships. For me an amazing thing is I've been with my wife since I'm 25 years old. She's the greatest person I know and a wonderful writer and a great mom. I spend a tremendous amount of time with my kids and my partner at work is my lifelong best friend. These are incredibly grounding real things. And I have a couple of other very close, very long-time friends. And I say I've watched Mark go through the world and I'm not close friends with Mark but, like I say, we're pals. I've spent time with him in a couple situations where there are people and I've watched and I admire it so much the way in which he's aware of who he is and why people are talking to him. But he also has the ability to kind of see through it and look for the genuine moments and appreciate those which I think would be just so hard in the position he's in.

Reverence for Billionaires

Patrick: [00:37:12] Diving a little bit deeper into that, you said before that there's this interesting trend where almost more so than athletes now we revere billionaires and their success and Shark Tank is the equivalent of watching Jordan or something like that. And it seems obvious we're watching people who are orders of magnitude more talented or lucky or some combination thereof in things that we ourselves want to be good at. Everyone wants to have the skill to make a lot of money or be able to dunk a basketball or what have you and it's like a dopamine shortcut by watching these other people do it. We can kind of vicariously experience some of that. Obviously, you're struggling with this and exploring it and it's a part of Billions but if you had to guess, what is it that makes people so ... Why this switch, this reverence?

Brian: [00:38:05] When the show's done I'll have a better sense of it all. One of the things Dave and I try to do is I don't have the answers to why Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades and Wendy Rhoades are the way that they are. I keep trying to find it and so part of it you put them in situations that will reveal deeper parts of their character because this question of the kind of ambition that in particular hedge fund billionaires have is so fascinating to me still. I can't locate it. It's so hard to locate the bedrock cause of it. The particular thing that makes Dan Loeb have to go make the next billion, or John Paulson, or whoever you want to look at. Most of us think, "Man, if I made $100 million dollars, I'm out. I'm done." I have a buddy who's a PM somewhere, it doesn't matter where, and I'm sure he's made between $12 and $20 a year for a long time and that's a staggering amount of money. All of us listening except half of 1% of the people are like, "I'd be done. 3 years of that I'd be done. 1 year of it." It doesn't matter.

Patrick: [00:39:24] Be in Tahiti.

Brian: [00:39:25] Yeah, but for some reason, these people have to keep going. And it's not as simple as money is the way they keep score. It's not as simple as the banal ideas. Citizen Kane is still this, and it was the reason we used it in the show. I would say you talk about books a lot but there are old movies, they seem, especially in this age of everything moving so quickly, old movies seem like boring from the outside or like, "Ah, why would I watch some black and white three-hour thing?" Citizen Kane is the most amazing piece of art. Casablanca too is another one which, Casablanca for these times, let me just say. I'm saying this everywhere I can these days. Go watch Casablanca and think about the world right now. But Citizen Kane is one of the still best explorations of the cause of the kind of ambition that these people have. That said, the chase, for me, of trying to figure it out, trying to locate it, trying to see what would be satisfying to someone like Bobby Axelrod is what makes it something that I can keep writing. If I knew, I would have to stop writing it. That's why it's a TV series, not a movie. But I don't have the answers.

Patrick: [00:40:40] I've got this theory that obviously, that motivation could be good or bad. That it's an obsession based on interest and curiosity which is kind of what we were talking about earlier with creativity and that's good. I've got this. I think you probably agree. Everyone's got something like that. For most people it's not-

Brian: [00:40:56] What's yours?

Patrick: [00:40:57] Mine's reading and that has a million byproducts. The reason I'm sitting here is because I like to read. I read a book. It's by a hedge fund guy. I became friends with him. We were having a great conversation. We said, let's tape this and it's just grown from there. It's just a fun thing I do but almost-

Brian: [00:41:12] Which was that one, the first one?

Patrick: [00:41:13] The very first one, his name was Jeff Gramm. He wrote a book. Actually if you're looking for great source material, it's a book called Dear Chairman about the history of ... Dan Loeb's featured pretty prominently in it.

Brian: [00:41:23] Right, the letters?

Patrick: [00:41:24] Yeah, the activist letters to CEOs.

Brian: [00:41:26] Right, I'll read it.

Chasing Your Passion

Patrick: [00:41:27] It's a fantastic book. He's a great writer. So for me, everything always comes back to reading and research. I would just say research. I would include conversations in that research. Reading, source material, data. The way we invest is quantitative so working a lot with data but just research at its core, like I'm insatiable. And I think everyone's insatiable for something and that there is a life and a career, et cetera, that's incredibly fruitful and enjoyable when you chase it. But I think most people either aren't aware of that or haven't been given the break you got when you went from 30 to 31. I think sometimes it falls early and sometimes people never hit it and that's sad. One thing I would love to be able to do, and a lot of what you've said helps me with this goal, is make people realize that because I think the money thing and the athletic prowess, those are great achievements, obviously, but it doesn't need to be the small list of stuff.

Brian: [00:42:31] You know that feeling when you wake up in the morning and you are incredibly curious, obsessed, fascinated. It's the best feeling. It propels you forward and then you end up 12 hours later and you feel like that five-on-five basketball feeling the whole day. That's the other piece. It's so obvious to me that I don't even say it but when I'm creating it is, of course, that meditative state. When I hit those moments in the work so like running, when you open the computer and you start to write and you have to write pages because the actors are expecting it and the network's expecting it. In the beginning it can be a drag to write the first page or the first two lines. But then, if this is the thing that you're supposed to do and you've prepared yourself to know how to do it and you're writing about the thing that actually really interests you and you're really compelled by, you disappear into it.

It's not like people say the thing about the characters write themselves or whatever. That is total bullshit. You're still writing it but you do kind of, the conscious mind disappears and you enter this alpha state and you're able to ... Sometimes I'll write stuff and I'll get to the end of it, a scene, and characters will say something that I didn't really know that I understood or knew in the way that the character expressed it. It's a fusing of sort of like a synthesis of everything I know or have experienced or have thought about or have chased somehow shows up on the page. That's because of all the preparation work and showing up every day and getting in the routine. But it's also a sign to me that I'm doing the thing I'm supposed to do because the way it makes me feel at the end of it is spent in a great way.

It's a fusing of sort of like a synthesis of everything I know or have experienced or have thought about or have chased somehow shows up on the page. That's because of all the preparation work and showing up every day and getting in the routine. But it's also a sign to me that I'm doing the thing I'm supposed to do because the way it makes me feel at the end of it is spent in a great way.

Patrick: [00:44:23] I'll give one example of this because it happened recently, just as a reference point it's useful. We talk about billionaires and athletes all the time. I've had this weird experience where in the last year or so I've met 3 or 4 carpenters, master carpenters. And there is something about these people, maybe it's a small sample size, could just be random, but it seems to me that it's an incredible foursome that are incredibly creative and exist in this kind of bliss state when they're working more than anyone I know. And as a result, they have such interesting lives. No one knows famous carpenters. There are no famous carpenters but the point is-

Brian: [00:45:01] There's one really famous carpenter.

Patrick: [00:45:02] Well, one really famous carpenter. Yeah, one very famous one. But the second most famous carpenter in history-

Brian: [00:45:09] And we're talking about Adam Carolla, of course.

Patrick: [00:45:10] Of course,

Brian: [00:45:11] As a famous carpenter. Carolla, yes.

Patrick: [00:45:13] So the third most famous carpenter-

Brian: [00:45:15] Yes, third. Number, it's true we've got two really famous carpenters and then ...

Patrick: [00:45:18] No one knows number three but these guys clearly have a happiness that is unmatched by most people I've met and in some ways ... look I love the show. I can't wait for it to come out again but in some ways it would be great if there was some show that showed the bliss and the creativity and the productivity and the output of seemingly more mundane things like that.

Brian: [00:45:42] That's why you love books too because books can give you that. Someone can write about to depict a world, workers, people, in any area and you can get inside their heads and understand what it is that they're feeling and how they're processing and why.

Patrick: [00:46:00] The guy that does this for me more than anyone, more potently, is Werner Hertzog. There's a movie called Happy People about trappers, I think, in Russia somewhere, and it is just-

Brian: [00:46:13] It's great because he also depicts misery better than anybody, I would say.

Patrick: [00:46:16] Oh, sure. Sure. He understands both sides of the coin but man is he able to basically do what I just described so I guess it already exists. But it's pretty-

Brian: [00:46:25] Well, Herzog's incredible. And folks, if you haven't watched Grizzly Man, which is not about this at all, watch it because it's ... I don't want to say much about that movie. If you haven't seen it go see it, just get it, rent it.

Patrick: [00:46:36] Yeah. I second that.

Brian: [00:46:37] It's about a dude guy and a bear.

Storytelling

Patrick: [00:46:38] Yeah, that's all you need to know. I had come prepared to ask a lot about storytelling and you said earlier you're not much for rules but I'm curious. I'm a Joseph Campbell, any amateur storyteller, I'm sure Campbell is the first person you come across but there is something incredibly appealing about not the specifics and tactics but the simple sort of arc or circle of the story.

Brian: [00:47:04] I don't put Campbell in this category of gurus you should ignore. Campbell was a genius and those books are brilliant and I've read them and they're worth reading to understand why we tell stories to one another and how we tell them and what they mean. Incredible. What I'm really talking about is that people who hold themselves out as experts, especially in a creative field, are often just failed creatives and they're not really experts and so you should be careful about listening to them. And I think there are probably rules of storytelling. Rules is a bad word but there are probably cornerstones of how we tell stories. But you know them already. You know them if you want to be a storyteller because they're no different than when you're with your 3 friends and someone comes over and you want to tell them about the time you almost got caught and went to jail but got out of it because you charmed the cop and you knew his sister and then years later... That story that you know how to tell. It's those rules. Believe me, that story has a three-act structure, a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has an inciting incident in it. It has a climactic moment and it has a denouement. And so we understand how to tell stories, a huge part of who we are as human beings. And if you want to learn specifically how to tell screenwriting stories, read screenplays and then watch the movies made from those screenplays. Then go back and read the screenplay again and watch the movie again. And do that 25 times and then try to write one and then compare that to what was there.

There's not a shortcut. I don't believe there's a shortcut and I don't believe you should try to have a shortcut. All the stuff that I did from 0 to 30 is why when I made the ... Meaning I was obsessed with movies, movies, music, books, comedy. I was obsessed with those things. I would watch them over and over and over again. I would study it because I loved it. I would memorize movies because I loved movies. That's why I because learn how to write a movie. David had spent time reading tons and tons of scripts and absolutely did show me in the beginning the way to think about a screenplay but reading screenplays is what will give you that. Reading books is what will show you how to write a book. So that's why I don't get bound up in rules. I started my podcast, one of the reasons that I do the show, was to talk to people who had had really high and low moments and how they figured out how to keep moving forward. So huge achievers in the arts and in business and sports so it could be Mario Batali or Seth Myers or Salman Rushdie and you talk to these people, Aimee Mann. And nobody says to you, "Well then I remembered for the next time, yes I had a failure, but the next time I read a how to book and then I figured out what I was doing wrong." It's always just about going deeper inside. It's always about going deeper inside, being more true, being braver in the work.

And nobody says to you, "Well then I remembered for the next time, yes I had a failure, but the next time I read a how to book and then I figured out what I was doing wrong." It's always just about going deeper inside. It's always about going deeper inside, being more true, being braver in the work.

Patrick: [00:50:30] But back to Campbell, the reason he discovered what he did, the major discovery was the myths or stories across cultures, across time, are all the same in a fundamental level and that's because that's just the human journey. And we build up these stories based on our own experience whether it's hands-on or reading someone else's great experience. And that a common theme in the conversation today has been getting deep to something where curiosity is your north star.

Brian: [00:51:00] Oh, another documentary that does the thing you're talking about is that one Meru about those climbers.

Patrick: [00:51:04] Oh, awesome. Those guys are nuts. Such a good one.

Brian: [00:51:13] Yeah, that shows you people who just love what they do to an insane level.

Patrick: [00:51:17] Have you seen the one about Yvon Chouinard, the guy who founded Patagonia and his best friend who's the guy who founded North Face?

Brian: [00:51:24] No, what is it called?

Patrick: [00:51:25] It's called 180° South, I believe. Meru makes me think of it because this guy is just a troublemaker, a maniacal outdoorsman, and he basically just started creating products that he needed that didn't exist and that's how Patagonia came into existence.

Brian: [00:51:41] And it's a documentary?

Patrick: [00:51:42] It's a documentary.

Brian: [00:51:43] I haven't seen it. I will.

Patrick: [00:51:45] And then his book, which I've-

Brian: [00:51:46] I'm about as much of an outdoorsman as Woody Allen but I somehow love, I just love watching that stuff.

Patrick: [00:51:52] He wrote a book called Let My People Go Surfing about creating Patagonia and it's the best, along with Phil Knight's book on Nike, which is awesome too. Those are the two best books I've ever read about basically doing everything we've described today in the business setting, of just following that curiosity and as Warren Buffett would say, what would make you tap dance to work in the morning. Figure out what that is and then just drive hard.

Brian: [00:52:19] Oh, yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention along with Citizen Kane, and I know if 1% of people in your audience get this book and read it, it would be more than I expect because it is work but it's worth it. It's Theodore Dreiser's book, The Financier. David Mamet would say it's like the best book about American businessman ever written. It's a novel. Dreiser is one of the great American novelists and this book is set over 100 years ago and it's about the rise of this businessman. It also informed Billions in certain ways.

Patrick: [00:52:58] I've never heard of it.

Brian: [00:53:59] Really? You never heard of Dreiser?

Patrick: [00:53:00] No.

Brian: [00:53:01] Oh, he wrote a few books that you'll recommend to people. And he's one of the greatest novelists who really ever lived. Oh, you'll love it.

Most Memorable Day

Patrick: [00:53:10] So, final couple of questions, and these are the same two I ask of everybody. The first one is, if you had to think about or tell me about the individual most memorable day, individual day, of your career, what would it be?

Brian: [00:53:23] Of my career?

Patrick: [00:53:24] You can do life too.

Brian: [00:53:25] No, I like career because life it would be too hard. It's hard to top the first day on set of your first movie. It was such a crazy dream that Dave and I had that we could do this thing that then to be walking on set and there are all the trucks and the lights and all that stuff. It was pretty staggeringly great. So that would be one of them. And another one, a moment that just occurs to me is the first day we walked on the set of Ocean's Thirteen. It was the Warner Brothers lot and I remember when Ocean's Eleven came out. The great thing for me about having a podcast and having this conversation with an audience for a long time is you cannot hide from your podcast audience and I talk a lot on mine so people know me and know that I'm not somebody that envy and jealousy ... I have many unattractive features, I'm sure, but those are not two of them. I don't ever look at somebody else's success and think like, "Oh, I should've had that." But when Ocean's Eleven came out I remember going to movies with Amy and walking out in a terrible mood. And she was like, "What?" I said, "I just can't fucking believe they didn't call us to write that movie." I was like, "That's everything that we do and everything we know about," and Steven Soderbergh was like our favorite director. I really walked around in a funk for a few days after seeing that movie like, how did I miss that. It was so good and that script is incredible. Ted Griffin wrote that script, it's amazing. And those actors and Matt was in it who's our friend and made our career. So when we got the call to meet Soderbergh about Ocean's Thirteen and then got that job, and the first day we walked on set they were building the giant casino which was on the Warner Brothers lot. But I was walking across the Warner Brothers lot with Dave and then with Matt Damon was coming in the other direction having walked out of wardrobe and we saw each other. And I hadn't seen Matt in a little while and he was so significant to the beginning to my career, starring in my first movie, and I remember seeing Matt and us all hugging each other and then him walking us across to where Clooney and Brad were, and Ellen Barkin, and just feeling like, "Holy shit, I cannot believe my life has somehow led ... "

And I was 40 so it was 10 years later. And I remember thinking about this Tony Robbins thing and Awaken the Giant Within where he says "We overestimate what we can accomplish in 1 year but we wildly underestimate what we can accomplish in 10." And that's something I think about a lot and I've thought about a lot in my life and incorporated. And I thought about these 10 years that had led me to this place with these people where they're building this giant casino and making this huge movie and it would've seemed impossible to me 10 years earlier. So that day also stands out. Not quite probably the same as Rounders. I'll give you one more. Sorry, no, one more in a small little movie is Dave and I made this 30 for 30 documentary on Jimmy Connors-

Patrick: [00:56:53] So good. US Open. Jimmy, yeah.

Brian: [00:56:55] And I worked at the US Open ... Thanks ... And I worked at the US Open as a kid selling clothes. And I was around the Open a ton and I loved it and walking to the Open to go interview Jimmy Connors and Pat McEnroe and it was two days before the Open would start so it was the grounds of the Open and we were there and had the run of the place. And that came out of complete follow your passion. There's no money in 30 for 30. You do that only because you love it and you want to tell the story and so getting to tell that story was really like reliving this huge part of our childhood and that was also really special.

Patrick: [00:57:33] I love that. I love the Tony Robbins quote. I forget the exact quote but you can a lot more happens in 10 years-

Brian: [00:57:40] You overestimate what you can accomplish in a year and underestimate what you can accomplish in 10.

Patrick: [00:57:43] Yeah, that sums up life, I think, and this idea of compounding so in investing, Buffett's been successful through compounding any good investment plan which frankly should be boring, not exciting like picking names as we were joking about earlier. But little small percentage growth in short periods becomes enormous change and when you look back you just can't believe it. And it seems to be again to hit on the same theme one last time, the only way you stay committed to those little small percentage gains is if you love the process itself. You didn't want to be in that spot. You're just in that spot because of your love of the process.

Brian: [00:58:23] That's exactly right.

Kindest Act

Patrick: [00:58:24] That's the direction it goes. So, the last question which I ask everyone is kind of a similar look-back moment which is, other than giving you The Artist's Way, what is the kindest thing that anyone's done for you in your career?

Brian: [00:58:37] There are so many moments. Well, in the career, no. The kindest thing it is, is Dave saying, "Yeah, I'll write a script with you," because it led to everything else and it was generous. He was writing and had written a couple scripts on his own and was in this pursuit and here I was saying, "I think I can do this and I want to do it." Instead of just saying, "Okay, well here, you can do it, I'll show whatever." He was like, "All right, let's do this together." And there have been many, many other kindnesses, and so many in life, all from Amy and my father, but in life there have been many, and my Mom who is no longer here. But professionally it was Dave throwing in and saying like, "I believe in you and in this as we can do this thing together." That's led to this creative partnership that's going strong 20 years later.

Patrick: [00:59:40] Well, the good news is that this, for people listening, doesn't have to end here. I just recently started listening to your podcast and just to give a very tangible bridge, I would highly recommend people check out the one with Jim James. Who is a guy who is the lead singer, kind of creator behind a band called My Morning Jacket which, God, if you want to see a group of people in a flow state, go see them live. It'll be an experience of a lifetime. I've seen them a bunch of times and that interview, just to suggest one, in what is a very wide-ranging field of people and topics. It's a great, great podcast called The Moment. Obviously probably everyone listening watches Billions so I don't need to try to support that. You're preaching to the choir.

Brian: [01:00:30] love that you're doing this show. It's valuable. Thanks for doing it.

Patrick: [01:00:32] Thanks for being on the show with me. Thank you.

Brian: [01:00:34] Sure.

Created by @_Nick_Diller