The Rich Roll Podcast - Curiosity Is A Superpower: Legendary Film Producer Brian Grazer on Beginner’s Mind, Getting It Done, & Why Conversation Matters

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

There is nothing more powerful than a story well told. Woven into the very fabric of what makes us human, story fuels connection. It fosters empathy. And it holds the power to impact not just the individual but humanity at large. Few understand this better than Brian Grazer—a man devoted to the idea that when curiosity and conversation combine, great art is made. One of Hollywood’s most prolific film producers, Brian and his Imagine Entertainment partner Ron Howard are responsible for a litany of critically acclaimed, box-office hit films and television shows including Apollo 13, 8 Mile, Splash, Arrested Development, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, and many more. His productions have been honored with numerous awards including an astounding 10 Oscar wins, 50 Emmys, and 11 Golden Globes. Today we explore Brian's unique approach to storytelling, why he believes questions are more important than answers, and why curiosity has been the “superpower” that fueled his rise as one of Hollywood’s leading producers and visionaries. Curiosity is so central to Brian’s success in fact that he wrote a book about it entitled, A Curious Mind, which he has recently expanded upon in a newly released version. It was a thrill to sit down with a man that I deeply respect and admire. This conversation left me with a newfound appreciation of curiosity not only as an art form, but as a powerful driver of human happiness. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Seed.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL Indeed: Indeed.com/RICHROLL Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/RICHROLL On: On.com/RICHROLL Birch: BirchLiving.com/RICHROLL Inside Tracker: InsideTracker.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich

It's pretty hard to teach curiosity. I think you have to have a little bit of that engine within your genetic template. But if you can recognize it in yourself, you can then build upon it. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Grayson. One of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world. Responsible for some of Hollywood's most memorable movies. I need a map. Somebody.

Fabulous! Say again, please. Houston, we have a problem. How have you been able to consistently, you know, create mass media, box office successes, movies that are beloved, that kind of withstand the test of time? The beauty of storytelling in a cinematic and sonic form, it can really be therapeutic. If I can have movies take people on journeys or adventures

to get them to that state of mind, feeling that we're grounded by faith. It's not religion, it's just faith. You know, it's all those things just about one-on-one human connection. Super nice to meet you. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, of course. I'm thrilled to be on.

I've, of course, like many, followed your career for a very long time, been a fan of the work that you do. And I wanted to say right up front that I used to, many, many years ago, I would see you in Malibu, like down across Creek, like hanging out. It was when my kids were little and I was down there a lot,

like at the playground down there. And you would always be around, you were surfing and chatting with people. And I often thought to myself, like, I would really like to meet that guy. Like, he's such an interesting person. He's so successful in what he does. And he just seems to be,

like you have a compelling presence. And I never was able to muster up the gumption to just come up and talk to you. Here we are many, many years later. Thank you. Yeah, no, I'm psyched to do this. Yeah, I'm actually very approachable. I gather.

Yeah, because I love people. I mean, I love listening very approachable. I gather. Yeah. Because I love people. I mean, I love listening to their story. I should have my own podcast, but I just never did it. Well, you kind of have been, you just weren't recording. That's exactly right. For the last 50 years, you have been engaging people in these curiosity conversations, this practice that you developed as a very young person, where you were reaching

out to interesting people with no agenda other than to learn from them. And the podcast is really just a more structured, formal version of that. And I can't tell you, as I just told you a moment ago, I've been doing this for 11 years and it's almost impossible for me to calculate or put words to the extent to which it has not just expanded my life, but nourished it in ways that I couldn't, I can't imagine not having done it. Like it's been so nourishing and has changed me in ways.

People say, well, who is the most important? You know, what guests? It's the overall like macro experience of having done it and being engaged in the process of doing it. I feel exactly the same way. And as you pointed out, I've been doing it for, well, when I got out of college.

So I asked myself this rhetorical question of what did I learn at USC? You probably saw that. And I thought, not very much. And then I started to reflect on what did I learn and who did I learn that from? And then I tracked down the professor that really made a difference in my life. I mean, actually stuck out and developed an awkward conversation with him during the summer after I graduated.

And I thought, wow, I learned more from Dr. Milton Wolpin in that one hour than I did in an entire year in his class, which I actually rather enjoyed and I learned a lot. But this one, there's just this one hour was immeasurably better. And I thought, oh, I can do this my whole life. And like you, I don't know what it'd be like to not have this curiosity and to exercise that discipline because it's really fortifying. Because it's really fortifying.

And it gives anyone that does it with sincerity a competitive advantage in life and in their businesses. So you don't really have to compete. Like, I never really competed with other producers. I would admire some and maybe less on some others. But basically, I was never really, I was only competed on my own standard. And the standard would constantly be iterating and growing because I was always meeting these new people that had new and unique accomplishments. Your grandmother told you very early that you were a curious person. And despite your struggles in school, which you later realized was the result of dyslexia,

she instilled in you a recognition of kind of some level of just bred in curiosity that was baked into who you are. But obviously that stuck with you and you then make the choice to really cultivate that. So when you talk about curiosity, like what does that mean specifically? And yes, we can all practice it,

but people are kind of brought into the world with varying degrees of a natural inclination towards it. Yeah, I agree with you. It's pretty hard to teach curiosity. I think you have to have a little bit of that engine within your genetic template or in yourself. But if you can recognize it in yourself, even if it's modest, you can then build upon it just by like any kind of exercise. Instead of going to the gym, you're doing this other exercise. That exercise is doing a little bit of homework on who or what subject interests you and then doing a lot of work to find that person. And a lot of groveling. I found, you know, it was constantly, you know,

letter upon letter or email upon email. And a lot of, you know, sort of gritty stuff like begging. You know, you're kind of begging assistants to tell their boss, who's probably another assistant, why you should talk to Brian Grazer. Yeah. And that was, of course, in the early stage of my career. But you're still always doing it because you're taking people off their daily agenda. always doing it because you're taking people off their daily agenda. You know, for me to drive out here to Agora Hills, it takes me off my conventional agenda. But what I read about you was something,

I hadn't heard your podcast, but I read about it and I was really interested in meeting you. I didn't know that we knew each other or passed each other in Malibu, which I think is kind of interesting and funny. The approach or kind of philosophy that I've adopted and tried to hone in this podcast is to, and it speaks to kind of your philosophy of pursuing curiosity through these conversations, is to, I mean, first of all, there's obviously a value proposition in you coming here.

You have a book out and we're, you know, there's obviously a value proposition and you coming here, you have a book out and there's a symbiotic kind of relationship happening here and there's a formal structure to what we're doing and it's gonna be shared publicly. So maybe that filter is kind of the way in which we communicate. But at the same time, I always enter into these trying to be as prepared as possible,

but then to let go of that preparation and just be present with the person so that I can allow it to be whatever it wants to be and to not be motivated by any kind of agenda or attachment to a notion in my mind of what I want it to be. And I think beneath that is this belief that I have that the most important thing when I sit down to do this is to try to find a way to create emotional connection and trust that whatever the guest has to impart from an intellectual perspective or whatever might be helpful to the audience will come as a result of that. But if I front load it with trying to extract information

without being able to figure out how to connect with the person, that's backwards. And I get the sense that that's sort of the way that you approach all of these interactions that you have. It is. It's so interesting that you're such a great student of that. Because it took me a while. I was doing it, but I didn't know that's what I was doing. I would just be naturally drawn into somebody's soul, basically. And I would do research on architecture to meet Rem Koolhaas or to meet Dr. Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine, or even prepare for Princess Di, who I, you know, ended up sharing a bowl of ice cream with. Breaking protocol in the process.

Yeah, but you have to. Like, you know, yeah, you have to break protocol. In order to, ultimately, I think you have to be kind of unprotected, unedited when you talk to people. Yeah, a real person. A real person. Yeah, a real person. Which I suspect in, again, going back to what makes this town rather unique or maybe a little bit different than other places is that this town, and especially in the industry,

you know, in which you've been successful, is driven almost entirely on transactional friendships or transactional relationships. Yeah, well, it definitely is. You know, it's funny I was talking to someone the other day and that was a famous person

actor in show business and I've been in this the Hollywood world for what 35 years but I never feel like I've never felt like anyone screwed me ever, which is kind of unusual. You know, cause people, I don't know if what kind of language you use on the show, but

you can say whatever you want. Okay. So it's just, you know, there are people that go, that guy fucked me or I'm going to fuck that person. I don't have, I don't, I don't know if you have this ether, but I don't really have that revenge gene either. I don't, and I'm not better than all these things. I just don't have it. I don't, I can get angry about subjects and things and work and process and, and people's, if they're lazy, but I've never really felt like anyone like screwed me over or fucked me, you know? Probably anytime something didn't go exactly the way I wanted it to go, I reflect upon it and it was usually somewhere my fault, I think, you know, that I, you know, because you have to be pretty precise when you communicate in our business.

You can, I found that you can often, you can say the wrong thing, but you really have to be grounded with the right intention. And people have a sonar for that, for does this person have the right intention? Are they speaking from an authentic place or a truthful place? And people really know it, even if they don't know it, you know. They just go like, I don't know, I just didn't feel comfortable. Or again, sometimes it's beyond verbal. You just feel something. So I think you want to get yourself together. We all want to get ourselves together on that, like knowing our inner truth and trying to

always show that. And if you're well-read at the same time, then you're going to be either a good interviewer or a good interviewee or a good person to say hello, say hi to in the elevator and have that turn into something or waiting in the bathroom line at a restaurant. I mean, there's a certain level of self-confidence that's required or at least a understanding of who you are to be comfortable with who you are to bring that into the experience.

And, you know, this is a lot about what you talk about in the face-to-face book and now in the, also in the expanded version of A Curious Mind, this idea of, you know, being real, like in Hollywood, you're gonna go into a meeting, people are gonna be defensive already. What does this person want from me? You know, their job is to say no most of the time.

And how do you get a yes? Well, you get a yes through some kind of, deploying some kind of strategy. And there's nothing real about any of that, right? That's completely at cross purposes with being present and making eye contact and trying to really understand the person who's sitting across from you,

liberated from the results of whatever the conversation might yield. Yeah. I always, you know, because if you're talking about, if we're talking about Hollywood and getting yeses and what that's all about, We're talking about Hollywood and getting yeses and what that's all about. I always found that if my mission within a subject is a theme that is universal and undeniably universal. So, for example, I've produced Apollo 13. And that is about many things. It's about this journey into space.

It's about training, how hard you have to train to be an astronaut. But it's also about a brotherhood between these astronauts. They wouldn't have survived it. This brotherhood between them astronauts. They wouldn't have survived it. This brotherhood between them wasn't working, you know, the roles played by, you know, in Apollo 13. So first it was hard to pitch that story because the studio executive said, well, everybody knows they made it back safely. And I said, but it's about a brotherhood. And don't we all root for brotherhoods? Don't we all root for family? And so it sort of took the executive by surprise because

I didn't even want to argue the story or the ending. I just wanted to case build on the brotherhood. Because brotherhood is what, you know, one might argue that's what we're missing today in America. I mean, we have patriotism as a foundational endpoint that we all want to work towards, but a brotherhood will make that work better, meaning all of our collective appreciation for, you know, I sound so corny.

Sure. No, it's true. And if Tom Hanks is the face of that brotherhood, you know, who are you going to root for more than that guy? Right? So that's- Yeah. I don't know if you, that's exactly right. I wasn't even going to cast Tom Hanks. You know, there was all these other action stars. They said, go get this guy or go get that guy, or I don't want to say their names. They're all great actors. But I said to myself, I was all ready to pull the trigger on one of those action stars. And I asked myself like, but who does the world want to save the most? They want to save Tom Hanks the most. What is it about that guy that makes him so indelible in that way? What is his defining quality in your opinion?

I think people feel his goodness. I just think people feel his basic goodness. And he's, you know, as far as an actor, he's entertaining, but he doesn't need to steal the show so he can actually, you know, you can actually love him at the same time. There's some actors, like in the case of, say, Jack Nicholson, amazing star, or Michael Keaton, amazing star. But, you know, they play really,

they often can really excel at very extreme characters. Whereas Tom Hanks, that's not what he really does. He doesn't really excel in a really extreme character. I don't think he probably would have been a great Batman, you know, or a great Joker, but he is certainly great at Big, and he's certainly great at Forrest Gump, and he's certainly great at, you know, Captain Sully. He's great at saving the world. He's great. You root for him universally. He can put on the costume of the everyman and embody our best aspirations of who we can be, I think, right? Yeah. He has a different form of magic that he performs. When you are in the casting process, like, is there a system?

Like, how do you approach that to try to figure out, like, how does, how do you, I guess I would say, I would ask it this way. Like, how do you deploy your curiosity when you're trying to make those choices that are so instrumental in whether a movie is going to work or not. I ask questions that would lead to, leads me to understand whether that person has anything that's authentic about them. In other words, if somebody doesn't say anything, if they all speak in generic terms, I know I won't hire that person. No matter what their credits are, I just won't do it. If they don't have a point of view that I would call identify as intelligence. In other words, there are certain people

that just defy gravity because it's not their accomplishments, but it's their point of view, you know, in the way you communicate with them. It could be their point of view of politics. It could be their point of view about athletics. It could be their point of view about healthcare. But could be their point of view about athletics. It could be their point of view about healthcare, but they have a point, you know, but what they eat, what they do,

their daily process of life. If there's something unique in there, then I'm leaning in and I'm interested. Okay. So if anyone knows who Val Kilmer is, Val Kilmer played many different roles. He was great at, he was great in Heat. He played Jim Morrison in the movie about the doors for me. Iconic. Yeah, it was very iconic. But prior to that, I hired him in a movie called Real Genius. And I wasn't going to hire him at all because I didn't think his reading was particularly good. And he knew I wasn't going to hire him. So he waited for like four hours for me to leave at

the end of the day. So he's sitting on a couch and I'm on the 35th floor of a building in New York. That's where we were doing the casting. And he says, you mind I go down with you? And so before I could answer, he slips into the elevator. He puts a nickel between his fingers, his open hand, and he starts juggling it from finger to finger, flipping it from his index finger all the way to his baby finger, and then back to the thumb. And I thought, wow, that's a kind of magic unto itself. And I literally, by the time we hit the

lobby, I hired him. Wow. Just because he did that thing. Because that told you what? It told me that he can do something that's very unique that I couldn't personally do. He had the balls to wait. It might have been five hours, actually, to just get in the elevator with me and capture my attention, which he was very successful at doing it. So he was courageous. He was patient. He had internal grit. And I thought he was, at the end of the ride down,

I didn't know if he was funny or not, but I found him charismatic because he had the courage to do those things. the courage to do those things. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at

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you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to TheCircumstanceRecovery.com. Producing a movie is such a Herculean task. It's Sisyphean. You're pushing this boulder up a mountain.

It's constantly trying to roll back on top of you. It's a miracle any movie gets made. And when a movie is good, it's like, you know, I mean, the number of things that have to go right for a movie to be good, let alone great, is astonishing, I think, that most people don't quite understand. And this town is littered with people who call themselves, quote unquote, producers,

who might spend the better part of a decade trying to get one project made, and then it comes out, and maybe it's not so good or whatever. To have a career as legendary as yours, I mean, like 47 Oscar nominations at this point is just stunning. And so if you had to like, you know, deconstruct the formula for that success, like what is,

how have you been able to consistently, you know, create mass media box office successes, movies that are beloved, that kind of withstand the test of time? Like what is the secret sauce there that speaks to like your strengths that's kind of fueled your success and empowered this track record that you have? Well, from these curiosity conversations is yielded my knowledge or insight, not complete knowledge and insight, but enough insight that it provides me with new rich arenas to put characters.

So if I like brotherhoods, all of a sudden I start thinking about the selfless nature of firemen. I don't really know much about firemen at all, like almost nothing, you know, just other than, you know, when there's a fire, you call the firemen, you know, but I, but I ended up making this movie called Backdraft that was very beloved by firemen. You know, so I think by reaching out to people and learning about what they do for a living or bigger subjects or unique subjects allows me a curation system to not do something that everybody else is doing. So I try not to follow anybody ever. I don't follow trends. I don't read data research.

I never did. And I don't even prognosticate ever what's going to be successful. Oh, now in the box office, this is what's going to be successful. Or next year, everyone's going to want the Barbie movie. I don't know. I mean, in other words, it's having a curation system that is very broad, gives you the ability to understand what in the world, what subjects are interesting to you. And what's interesting to me just happens to turn out to be interesting to other people. You have to be in a place where you can trust that gut instinct and that intuition though, right? Which you've developed through being constantly curious

and always learning and meeting with all different kinds of people. But I would imagine that got lodged early because your first movie, Splash, everybody said, this is never gonna work. And everybody said, no, and blah, blah, blah. And you kind of like in a Sisyphean way, push that boulder up a mountain and it becomes this hit,

which then tells you, oh, like I can trust myself even when everybody's telling me this is a bad idea. Well, thank you for studying that or knowing that, but it's very nice. That's true. It made me feel like, wow, nobody does know. I can trust myself. I can entrust my internal truth. My basic essence

drove me towards that. Because ultimately, even though you might learn a subject, you do have to tap into your own needs or your own weaknesses often to find the character and what they want and what makes them survive. In that case, it was all about man's survival is through love. And it's hard to find real love. And so that was essentially just the basic truth of the movie. So you always have to have not, a producer's job is to be creatively and fiscally responsible.

So for me, the creative responsibility is to understand the heartbeat of what the movie is and never lose track. And that's why we could make Parenthood, for example, is to understand the heartbeat of what the movie is and never lose track. And that's why we could make Parenthood, for example, because it's about something that we really believed in. So the script would change form over and over again. Splash, the script changed form over and over.

I mean, in other words, people go, that's a terrible script, and I'd work on the script, and then I'd get different writers, and I'd just endlessly develop it, often just tweaking things a little bit or rebalancing the script, but never losing sight of what my ultimate goal mission is. So you have to have a goal mission and that's the flame that keeps something going for 10 years, then you finally get it made. Sure. And the goal mission project by project is creating something universal that speaks to us and our inner humanity that we can connect with emotionally and doing that through something very specific that's compelling enough to lure us into the movie theater, basically. Well, like 8 Mile, the movie 8 Mile.

I knew nothing about hip hop. This is with Eminem. I knew nothing about hip hop. 10 years before I even met Eminem, I had this curiosity conversation with Old Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan. I was in New York and I, you know, every week had to meet a new person. So I said, oh my God, I'm going to meet this guy, ODB, Old Dirty Bastard. I thought it was an insane name, you know, because at that time people didn't have, you know, want to have crazy names like that, that were kind of degrading at the same time.

In any event, so I meet ODB. I learn about the language of hip hop on the East Coast. And then I start to demystify what that language, why it was there, what it was, what it represented. It represented the inner voice of the street and what was going to become the language of the youth in America. And from ODB, I met with Public Enemy, with Chuck D, and then Slick Rick, then LL Cool J. And all of a sudden I start to think, wow, this is, hip hop is not a subculture. It is the, it's the culture. So then I start thinking that. Then I later thought, then I much later, I'm struggling

with this for 10 years. I had Spike Lee help me a little bit. I was going to do it as a series. Then as a movie with, I meet Eminem and I realized that within his story is overcoming shame. And I thought, wow, I could relate to that because I too had to overcome a lot of shame. We all have some shame. It's just sort of, did it stop you from something? And it stopped him from being able to look at an audience and, you know, rap the way he, and to show his talent. And so that was really what the movie was about. It's like overcoming your, you know, your injuries, your personal and real injuries, and getting to your talent, getting over those barriers so you can actually express your talent. your talent, getting over those barriers so you can actually express your talent.

Yeah, you reflect back on that movie and you think it's about his rise to superstardom, but it's really not about that at all. It's about him owning who he is, coming to terms with and having some peace about his background, his upbringing, and being self-actualized in that through his performance in that culminating scene

where he's just owning that truth, which is a universal thing. It's a very specific way of channeling into something that most people have to go through in their lives. And I think that's why it connected so deeply. But the story of your initial meeting with Eminem is pretty wild because he was very resistant to your wiles. Yeah, he was very resistant. I mean, I met with him in my office and it took a lot of effort to get him in there.

And he wasn't a superstar then. He was a rising star. And he just wouldn't look at me and he didn't really want to talk. And so I had to go to great lengths to get him to want to speak to me and communicate. So how did you build that trust? How did you overcome that wall that he was throwing out? Probably ultimately when I got out of being, when I, when I was, there was a moment where I was just super desperate when he was ready to leave. And by being that desperate, it might've, uh, represented something to him like, wow, this guy really cares, but I've never asked him and I don't know. Um,

but maybe sitting in my office just as I'm the movie producer and he's the rising star, I don't know, maybe the roles. So I stepped way out of my role and again, just before he had his hand on the door to leave. And I don't want to say what I said, but I just asked him like, please, you know, please stay. You can communicate with me. Yeah. You said animate. Yeah, I did.

Yeah. And I thought, I said, come on, you can animate or something like that. And I thought, oh, man, he looked at me like he was going to kill me. But then he came back and talked. So it was great. He's a gigantically talented, like gigantically. 100%. Yeah. This book, A Curious Mind, it came out in 2015 originally, right?

Then you wrote Face to Face, which is about the importance of personal contact. I think that came out in 2019. Yes. So why synthesize those two books and expand A Curious Mind and re-release it now? Okay. Because my publisher asked me to. Because I think people today are operating much more in the state of mind of curiosity. And if they're not, two things.

I think they are that curiosity, the word curiosity, which overcomes I don't know, the shame of I don't know. The word curiosity is much more in our lexicon since the book. The word curiosity is much more in our lexicon since the book. And I think that now we're entering a totally new chapter of what we have to be curious about, which is the state of the world politically, but more importantly, on our personal lives and survival, AI. So can we use AI one-on-one to better our lives? Or is it going in some ways to break down our life, either our livelihood or economics or replaces? So the more curious you are about that subject right now, or these subjects right now, the more successful you will be in your job and the more successful

you'll be as a human being. And I think the basic principles of a curious mind and fused together with face-to-face of art of human connection, which is really about just treating that face-to-face and eye contact as our human Wi-Fi. Because without that human Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, because without that human Wi-Fi, nobody would have ever trusted me or sat with me for an hour to talk to me. They would have talked to me for a few minutes. If I looked away or looked at my phone, they would have just, or if they felt I wasn't interested, or if my eye contact was not sincere, they would have left. Isaac Asimov, he did leave. That was the only one that did leave. But Edward Teller, I mean, I've met hundreds of Nobel laureates. They, I mean, just endless amount.

Those people would not have left. Princess Di wouldn't have broken protocol and shared a bowl of ice cream with me, you know, at the, at the premiere of Apollo 13. A lot has happened since 2019 and even more since 2015 when, when the first iteration of this book came out, the political landscape has shifted completely. We endured a pandemic, which just basically eliminated all of this face-to-face interpersonal interaction that you speak of. It changed the workplace. It changed how we think about how we interact with people. But, you know, Eminem is not giving you the green light to go forward on this movie if that meeting was conducted on a Zoom call. Like it's not happening, right?

It's not happening. So there is a certain kind of timeliness, like, yes, your publisher, you know, encourage you to do this, but, you know, frankly, and you say it outright in the book, like this is a very interesting moment that we find ourselves in,

where we have an untethered relationship with the importance of person, in-person interactions with other human beings that has been tarnished by what we just endured. It gives us an appreciation for how much we need it, but at the same time, we're still disengaged from it. People don't go into the office and we are doing more Zoom calls

than we were before the pandemic. That's just a fact. And that is fomenting this epidemic of loneliness. I had the Surgeon General on here and we went in deep on that. I heard that one actually. Yeah, so- That was amazing.

So, this is a very real thing. The antidote to which is being in communion with people, finding shared common ground, plying that curiosity as a vehicle or an engine for empathy. Because empathy is what we lack and empathy is what we need most right now in order to resolve the very serious problems

that are driving us apart from each other, threatening the fabric of democracy and our ability to really cohere as a society. Like these, yes, like engage people with curiosity, but what's behind that is something I think much more profound and fundamental that you're getting at with all of this. Well, thank you.

I would trust you by the way. I hope so. Well, you have a lot of human, you're well-read. I could tell you, by the way. I hope so. Well, you have a lot of, you're well-read. I could tell you actually read the books and you have so much humility. Well, I care about this and I'm a practitioner of these things that you talk about. And when podcasting during the pandemic all went to Zoom,

like I had to do a few of those and I just, I hated it because I need to be, I need, it know, I had to do a few of those and I just, I hated it because I need to be, I need, it's not just, yes, the eye contact. We're sharing an energy here. We are, definitely. And you can't, you can't put words to it. And you also can't place a value on that. That is at the center of everything. Like I have this phrase, like conversation matters because conversation is a vehicle into another person's experience that allows you to breed empathy and understanding and overcome the baked-in biases that we all have,

and it allows us to suspend our judgments and communicate more openly. And that's the only way that we can solve the problems that we face. True. It's a great reminder, actually, that we do when we're together, because I'm just thinking about that, we operate on an energy or vibration, whereas on a Zoom, you definitely don't have that. That's completely absent. And so your way that you would detect somebody's truth or the things that we were just talking about, those core values, they're not really, they live in that energy and they're not really living on the Zoom. The other thing about Zoom is because I spent a lot of time writing

and producing comedies. No one's particularly funny on Zoom. You know, there's not a lot of laughter on Zooms. Laughter is an important lubricant. It's really, you know, meaningful. And the writer's room was really one of the things that was under threat during the recent strike that just got resolved too, right? Like the magic occurs in the energy that's shared by a group of really talented, funny people. A hundred percent. And when they're just doing it on a Zoom call, yeah, maybe they can come up with a few jokes. It's not the same though. Yeah.

And it's not a problem that AI is gonna solve. No, it's not. I'm curious to see what'll happen. I mean, what is your inclination around that? Around AI? Yeah. In relation to which, okay. Well, there's many people in the world of tech, and I'm sure you know because you've interviewed them,

that believe that we're going to survive and succeed better with AI. But then, like, who will survive and succeed better? Will it be the common man or will it just, or will it be the elite man? You know, the, the, so I don't know the answer to that really. I, I use AI, I use open AI, I use a few other sources in testing the, a story. So if I have a story and then I want to state and I want to write about it differently or find a word that I might not have thought about in relation to the story. Well, I had to give a birthday speech for my wife the other day to my wife. And so I thought I'll write down all the virtues of my wife

and then turn that into a narrative. And then I thought, why wouldn't I just feed that into ChatGPT? So then I did. And of course I couldn't read that because not that I'm above it or something. I just don't think I could. I'm just not good at reading speeches. You know, some people are. I'm not, I sort of try,

I try to understand the base, you know, feel the basic principles of it and know that those truths live inside of me. And then like you pointed out earlier, just talk about it. You have a whole thing on public speaking, leading from the heart and like just being,

like how, you know, honesty and kind of being real is much more powerful than whatever words are coming out of your mouth. Yeah, because people buy that. They don't even buy your words. They're reading your energy. Yeah.

And if you can show them your soul, which is something AI doesn't have, you're in a better position to win them over than through the cogency of your argument, right? Yes. And so AI being this kind of soulless thing, it can be this tool. It can actually be an incredibly powerful instrument.

We use it for stuff here all the time. But, you know, it doesn't have a consciousness. And so I think it's important to be cognizant of its shortcomings because creativity is our gift, right? And I think you, and you talk about this also, like how technology in general, not just AI, but even going online is great if it's actually nourishing your curiosity and kind of empowering you to dig deeper and really go further.

But it can also work as kind of a impediment to your curiosity because you think your curiosity has been satisfied. So if you prompt chat GPT or you Google something and you think that's the end of the story, you're not really engaging in your curiosity and you're not gonna find that innovative, creative solution that nobody ever thought of before. So true.

Because it was my wife's 50th birthday, and we're having it at a Friends of Ours house with about 70 people. And, you know, I think I'm probably a good speak. I mean, I'm a good public speaker, but I get nervous every time. And so when so when I did the chat GPT and I kept, uh, you know, reiterate, you know, iterating upon it, um, that does tell you what to say. I mean, it, it, it re it's using your words, your prompts, uh, for the most part. But it doesn't give you like what I, I didn't look to that at all. And instead of talking about my love, I was able to communicate it in a way that I was showing you my love.

So showing her my love. And that's what worked. Like people cheered, you know, they all liked that because it was, you know, rudimentary, but it was from the soul. And people felt that I showed my love instead of, you know, from a distance, just talking about it. Right, right.

How has this new era of Hollywood where the streamers are front and center changed what you do? Because to me, it feels like on the one hand, there's never been more opportunity to tell stories because there's so many outlets, so many opportunities to get a project made or to have a story told, but it's become, our culture has become so diffuse.

There is no monoculture anymore and that's probably a good thing. But at the same time, shy of a big Marvel movie, it's close to impossible now to create something that has a resonant cultural impact beyond like whatever's happening this week. It's hard. Yeah.

Well, because there's so many deflections. There's from watching a movie, there's more live sports than ever. I mean, things like that. Well, there's just a lot going on. Oh, specifically to the point of streaming. It's harder to create a cultural moment with streaming, I think. Now, there are times that something really, like in documentary, the Michael Jordan documentary,

that was a streamer. Sure. That was really amazing. But I mean, you have to be A++ to be able to create a cultural moment with something that streams, in my opinion. Because there's not external tactile marketing. It's all digital marketing.

So you're not really feeling something, the marketing part, the framing of your piece. I mean, Oppenheimer, for example, or Barbie, those two are the biggest movies. There was outdoor advertising, they were in the elevator, it was on bus stops, there was all sorts of things. And you felt, you just felt there was a tactile kind of communication with you that helped frame seeing that movie. And that's why people, I think, like, you know, well, there's a Taylor Swift component or there's, you know, basketball or Superbowl, just being there is, makes a huge difference. And it lives those, the things that happen that are great happen in a more magnified way to the

culture, I think. But does it feel like they're fewer and far between now? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And does that change the nature of how you approach a project or you still just do it the way that you know how to do it? Well, fortunately for me, a lot of the streamers, you know, whether it's Apple or Amazon or Netflix,

you know, they're all kind of streamers now, or Disney. Fortunately, they all want Imagine movies of the 2000, which are like they go, just make the movies that you used to make, which are tour de force films, meaning it's like a beautiful mind. It was about John Nash played by Russell Crowe or Denzel Washington playing Frank Lucas, an American gangster. Or those movies of the 2000s, I have so many more, that are just driven by, for the most part, a single performance about a subject that leads you to, usually leads you to cry. You know, either because of the celebration of greatness or sadness along the way, and then greatness. I try to have every movie that we work on have hope,

even if it's hard. Yeah, or some form of redemption. Yes, redemption for sure. Why is storytelling important? Because it gets you, storytelling is important because it's, it should be entertaining, but it should nourish your soul in the same way that one of the great books of all time could do. But the beauty of storytelling in a cinematic and sonic form together, or that it reaches you on every level, you know, on a cell, on a cellular level. Like it really, it can really be therapeutic. You can learn so much about

yourself. I mean, I, I got into the, the, the movies that I make because I saw, you know, I didn't know, I didn't go to cinema school. I mean, I teach at the cinema school, but I didn't go there. But the movie that really, really made a difference for me that I felt elevated my state of consciousness and elevated me as a person was E.T. I saw E.T. as a person was E.T. I saw E.T. and the conventional, you know, you'd go to movies and you'd fight with lines and you'd fight with the, you know, the vendor and you want to get popcorn. Then you want to save your seat. You want to do all this stuff. It's a really, and people are honking and pushing. And I remember at the end of the movie E.T., nobody honked, nobody pushed. The vibe was entirely different. Everybody was elevated to a more peaceful, more thoughtful state of mind.

That was my experience. So I thought, if I can have movies do that, take people on journeys or adventures in a story to get them to that state of mind. Today, I want to make movies that lead us to the state of mind of feeling that there's faith, we're grounded by faith, and that we should be aware, attention to that. It's not religion. It's just faith. It's doing things, abiding by the golden rule.

It's all those things just about one-on-one human connection. Also this sense of possibility. Yeah. And that humans are fundamentally good. That seems to recur. I think that for are fundamentally good. That seems to, you know, recur. I think that for sure. Yeah. And wars often end by having people get together. Seldom does that backfire,

where you get together to help demystify one another to realize we're here surviving on the same planet for similar reasons? Does that turn into something bad? It usually turns into something good. What's the movie you have yet to make that you've always wanted to make that needs to get made? I'm going to make a modern've always wanted to make that needs to get made before you make a modern army movie right now oh you will you open the book with this whole experience of going to fort irwin i've done that i've done that trip where you take the black hawks to yeah yeah from burbank it's unbelievable um my friend jesse albert uh hosts these for certain individuals time to time

and yeah he uh you know asked me if I would come. And so I did, I didn't, I think you were there two days, right? I did a day with a bunch of people and did the whole thing where you, you go everywhere and you, you use all the stuff. Shoot guns, you go in tanks, you do the whole thing. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah, it was wild. And now I'm going to go to Fort Campbell, which is all the aviation, helicopters and everything. Because it's part of this movie.

The trick is, what is, like, the movie isn't like the army. The movie is, like, what is it that you identified through that experience of visiting Fort Irwin and meeting with that general that got you excited about the story that could potentially be told there? It's so much about we stick together. You live, I live, you die, I die. You know, it's really about humanity, basically. And that it's hard being in any of the services is difficult, but it also is rewarding. And it also, there's times that because you're sharing, you're so intimate with your brothers or brothers and sisters at this point that you have a lot of laughs too.

So it's a story about brotherhood. Yeah. Yeah. I only use four themes. Yeah. So the four themes are- Family. This is the big secret.

The secret to Imagine Entertainment's many decade run. Okay. So it's brotherhood, self-respect. Like people all want, they thrive for self-respect. They are driven towards self-respect like people all want they thrive for self they are driven towards self-respect and um so and and that's you know that's ultimately what uh eight miles about self-respect it was self-actualizing to get there but it's about it's about respect. So family, brotherhood, self-respect, and I had one other one, but oh, love. Yeah. The smallest one. Anyway. On the subject of these curiosity conversations, I think it's important. I mean, first of all, I'm curious as to why you think we as a culture like undervalue curiosity,

like why we even need to talk about it as something that we should cultivate because it's so obvious to me. And then second to that, like I think it's important to point out that throughout your life where you've been pursuing these conversations, I wanna disabuse people of the idea

that they were like directly tethered to some movie project. Like a lot of these movies came out of conversations that you had with people. But they weren't on them. Completely unrelated to the subject matter of that. It's like the, it's through osmosis, through just being engaged as a way of being, like being a curious person that has, you know, provided like a lens on the world and a way of

filtering experience that creates the possibility for these ideas around movies that you've created. So, first of all, I look at it like this. The reason I never did a podcast, because people did say, you ought to have a podcast, is I felt like the conversations I was doing shouldn't be commodified in any way. That they're really just, I was on this one-on-one curiosity path to learn. And I felt like many of the people that were sharing their story with me, like Carl Sagan and people like that, they might not have wanted to. There weren't podcasts at that time, really. And they weren't thought of as so favorably the early stages of them, as my recollection goes. And so basically, they weren't attached ever to a project. And I felt like if I approach a person and it's goal-directed, that means it's transactionally directed. I thought they would sense it was transactional. They wouldn't want to do it. I don't want to be transactional. I just want to have a conversation that them that they feel really good about this hour they

spent with me, and they'll feel like it was the best date they'd ever had. And so I love these conversations. And out of the hundreds, if not thousands of conversations I had, thousands of conversations I had, not one person individually turned into a subject. It was really just the insights I gleaned from the conversations or the little nuances that I got out of the conversation that actually became, that just became useful to me in some way or valuable to me. Right. And an example of that, I think, would be the relationship between the Chilean dissident and a beautiful mind. Yes. Which are seemingly completely unrelated and yet informed each other almost perfectly for you.

Yes. Well, because what happened is, and I'll tell this story quickly. I met a woman named Veronica DeNegre. I met her through Sting, who was an early curiosity conversation I had. So Sting, the musician, I thought this guy was actually like a school teacher and now he's the biggest rock star in the world. I mean, I don't understand how that transition works. And so I thought, I'm going to meet Sting. I meet Sting. You know, he might

have liked me a little bit. I mean, not tremendously, but enough that he invited me a year later to go to a barbecue. I went to the barbecue and this woman named Veronica DeNegre was there that he took on the amnesty tour with he and Bruce Springsteen. She was held in prison and was tortured in prison for about six months in Chile under the Pinochet regime. And of course you gravitate towards the harshest word, And of course, you gravitate towards the harshest word, torture. And you'll ask, like, what was it like to be tortured? But I thought, I did ask that for a second. And then I thought, I'm going to be more interesting than that. I'm going to say, how did you survive?

Because that at least leads to hope. And it's probably a question that people don't ordinarily ask. Like, what was the process of survival? And she said that her process of survival while she was unpredictably being tortured every day was that she created a parallel story in her mind. She has one narrative of what's actually going on in real time, this torture part. And then there's this other story that's not going on in real time. It's an alternate reality. And that narrative is only in her mind, like a story that she's telling herself to give her the sustenance, the ability to survive. So I thought

later, when I thought, much later, I thought, I want to make a movie that will help destigmatize mental disability. So that's very unrelated to Veronica Denegre and being tortured in Chile. It has nothing to do with that. But by doing these curiosity conversations, each human being that I met, whether it's Veronica Denegre or Carl Sagan, they served as being a dot on a greater constellation of dots that lived in my mind. And often that constellation of dots, although unrelated, found periodically would connect a dot. found periodically would connect a dot. So her ability to survive was creating a story that would help her survive.

What is this? And now I'm making a movie about a schizophrenic. What does a schizophrenic do? They live in alternate reality. So I thought, well, why don't I show what an alternate reality looks like in a schizophrenic's mind, and that will do several things to the movie of the John Nash story. One, it will make it horrifying. horrifying. It'll show an audience really what it looks like to be in somebody's mind that is mentally disabled, either bipolar or schizophrenic or any other mental disability. It shows what that other narrative looks like. That will help us as a viewer have compassion for that person instead of just driving past them when we see them on the street

screaming at a car or something or a street lamp. The other thing it did was it enabled me as a dramatist to make the movie instead of a, in fact, a straight drama, we made it a thriller. we made it a thriller. So a thriller actually elevates the chances of commercial popularity. Thrillers have more propulsion drive in the narrative. So therefore, audiences are going, oh my God, what's going to happen now? In a drama, it's slightly more melancholy. And so it changed the genre to a thriller, which helped to become hugely commercially successful. Right. The thriller genre acts as a Trojan horse to bring people in and show them a different perspective on mental health that helps like normalize the conversation around it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So very, very unrelated. And then weirdly, I was able to relate to Apollo 13 much better,

which was later, because that was about survival as well. And I thought, you know, what's it like? It made me think of the subject of survival. And the subject of survival for them is just like coping with the difficulty, putting a square peg into a round hole, all those things. And so the subject of survival became a subject for me that I was able to expand upon in many different movies, actually. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah.

I have to let you go, but the last thing I'll say is for somebody who's listening to this, who's thinking about curiosity a little bit differently than they were an hour ago, who's thinking, yeah, but I'm nervous to talk to people or, you know, I'm not Brian Grazer. I don't have fancy friends. Perhaps a few words to leave people with around how to approach engendering a little more curiosity in your life by engaging with the

people in your environment. Well, look, I did it for 20 years where I wasn't famous so anyone can do it you just all the people that you know of or know or know of in your universe why don't you just ask one of them to have a curiosity conversation with you and so it's the teacher across the street or the insurance salesman down the street, whoever it is. You often think of those jobs as being really maybe not interesting or banal. But if you actually have talked to somebody, you will find the magic within them. You'll find something that interests you. I mean, we were on break for a couple of minutes

and I was super curious about how you got into being a podcaster, which you did before that. And then you told me you're a lawyer. And I thought, wow, I would have never guessed that. So just the surprise of that was interesting. And then you did ultra marathon. What are they called? Ultra what?

Yeah, you got it. Ultras. Ultras. Yeah. You don't want to see. You're too humble to say. Ultra physical events. Yeah, that's it.

You got it. Double the size of a marathon. I mean, I can't even imagine a marathon, much less double the size. I love it. Thank you. Okay, thanks. See you. I appreciate it. All you. Okay, thanks. See you. I appreciate it.

All right. Cheers. Cheers. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

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