The Tim Ferriss Show - #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by Zapier, new sponsor, but not new to me as a service. We'll get to my personal story. But if you run your own business, think about all of the hours

Starting point is 00:00:36 and hours you spend moving information from one software program to another, or one window to another, one social media platform to another, copy and pasting, blah, blah, blah, all because those things don't easily work together. They're not connected. With Zapier, now they do automatically. My team and I have been using Zapier for years, which helps us with tons of stuff, such as, just to take one example, connecting Facebook ad campaigns to our email platform. And you could also, as I do, automate publishing things that you put on Instagram to other social media platforms, saving us hundreds of hours. My team has also raved about Zapier support. This is super important to me, which in their words, quote, is in a class of its own, end quote. And that is not paid placement.

Starting point is 00:01:26 We test all of these things and have used Zapier as full paying retail customers. That is not because we got any type of freebie. So there are tons of examples. Now, why are there tons of examples? There are tons of examples because Zapier supports more than 1,500 business applications, and the possibilities are virtually endless for automating processes, for getting shit done. And you may know if you read the 4-Hour Workweek that the third step is automation. In other words, not adding headcount to a messy process to fix problems, but automating as much as possible. You want to eliminate, then automate, and only then delegate. And Zapier is one of the best automating softwares,

Starting point is 00:02:17 if you can use the plural, one of the best pieces of automation software I've ever come across. It is the easiest way to automate a ton of your work. So check it out. If you want to try it out or just learn more, go to zapier.com slash Tim. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash Tim. Connect the apps you use the most and let Zapier take it from there. You can do a million things. I'll give you one more example. You could, for instance, instantly engage with leads for your business, send them to a CRM or spreadsheet, and then notify your team so they can act fast on every opportunity. And here's the really beautiful part and perhaps the gem to really highlight. It's easy to build an exact solution that you need in minutes without writing code or asking a developer for help. So as a non-technical person, you can piece these different programs together in a way that is customized for your needs and your business and what is important

Starting point is 00:03:13 to you so you can get the hell back to focusing on the stuff that you're good at. Okay, so that's it. Join more than four and a half million people who are saving an average of 40 hours per month by using Zapier now and for a limited time for my listeners. Try Zapier for free by going to our special link, zapier.com slash Tim. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash Tim for your free 14 day trial. I use this program all the time. My team uses this program all the time. Zapier.com slash Tim. Hey, just one thing, Tim. This is Michael from Zapier. It's pronounced Zapier, like happier.

Starting point is 00:03:56 So that's Zapier.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Super Fat Nut Butters. I've got two boxes of them actually sitting within 15 feet of me in a cabinet. These little beauties are great. I've been using them as quick mini breakfasts, that's one use, and as on-the-go fuel for a few months now. I was pretty slammed this afternoon. I had a Wi-Fi debacle and I was preparing to record a podcast, so I didn't have time to make something to eat or buy something to eat, but these saved my ass. That's a great use case. They're 200 to 300 calories each, depending on which ingredient cocktail you eat, because there are a bunch of different types. MCT, meaning medium chain triglycerides, protein, macadamia, caffeine,

Starting point is 00:04:39 et cetera. Three to five grams of net carbs per pouch. They're keto and paleo friendly, and they are really easy to transport. You can throw them in a backpack or a pocket. I love these things. The first time I tried super fat, however, before warned, I finished the entire box in maybe two or three days. So watch your portion control.

Starting point is 00:04:58 And pro tip, the way you eat them, you have to unscrew the top. You get about 90% out of it that way. And then you tear the pouch, tear it diagonally, not straight across, and that'll get you the last 10% or so. I suggest ordering the variety box. You can try that way all five SuperFat flavors in one box, and you'll get two pouches of each flavor that way. You can also get 15% off your order by going to superfat.com slash Tim. That's superfat.com slash Tim for 15% off. When you go to one more time, superfat.com slash Tim.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and attempt to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the habits, routines, and so on that make them tick, make them good at what they do. My guest this episode is none other than Edward Norton. You can find him on Twitter, at Edward Norton. He is one of the most celebrated actors of his generation and has starred in, produced, written,

Starting point is 00:06:07 or directed more than 30 films. He's been nominated for three Academy Awards for his performances. His most recent film, Motherless Brooklyn, which he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, will be released on November 1st. I've seen it, and I do not say this lightly, it is spectacular. It's based on one of

Starting point is 00:06:25 my favorite books and we dig into that and get into a lot related to creative process, creative struggle, and so on in this episode. People mostly know Edward for his acting, but he has a substantial parallel career as an entrepreneur, investor, and activist in both technology and environmental sustainability ventures. He has hit a lot of home runs. We don't cover that in depth in this episode, but we talk about it here and there. As one example, in 2010, Norton co-founded and was chairman of CrowdRise, a charitable crowdfunding platform which raised more than $500 million for US nonprofit organizations before being acquired by GoFundMe, the largest social fundraising platform in the world, for which Norton now

Starting point is 00:07:09 serves on the board. He also co-founded EDO, which applies advanced data science and machine learning to the analysis of audience engagement signals for the media and advertising industries. EDO's data and software are used by every major film studio in their media rotation planning, and virtually every major television network now includes EDO data alongside Nielsen data within their pricing metrics. He is the founding board member of the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, an award-winning Kenyan conservation and community development organization, and in 2010, he was appointed the first United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. Edward really seems to do it all.

Starting point is 00:07:52 And in this wide-ranging conversation, we explore how he does that, why he does that, why he feels able to change chapters in his life. We go deep into, as I mentioned, creative process, creative struggles, both inside and outside of film. If you'd like more Edward after this episode, you can listen to my 2016 interview with him, which is very, very different at tim.blog forward slash Edward and take my word for it. Go check out Motherless Brooklyn in theaters. If just for the music alone, it's absolutely outstanding. So with that said, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide ranging and for me, super fun conversation with Edward Norton. Edward, welcome back to the show.

Starting point is 00:08:34 Love being here. You know I love our conversations. Yeah, man. And we have a lot to talk about. And I want to start with going back in time to 1999. And this is an interview where I'm going to ask you questions, but I want to share some autobiographical sketch from my own life. So, 1999, my mom recommends a book to me. And my mom is, I would go so far as to say a book snob in the best way possible. She recommends me perhaps one book every two or three years. And in the span of two weeks, my brother, who is exactly the same, recommends the same book, which was Motherless Brooklyn. And it became a favorite book. I read it multiple times. And for ages, I thought to myself,

Starting point is 00:09:26 why hasn't a movie, a film adaptation of some type been made? And I want to know how you came across Motherless Brooklyn in, I believe, 99 or thereabouts, and what impact it had or why it grabbed your attention? Sure. So I was living in New York. I was a New York actor. I started working in films, but I would always split back home to New York. And I came up with a lot of people in theater and people who

Starting point is 00:10:10 were writers and people who are artists. And, um, there's kind of that, the thing I love about New York is the density of it. You're, it's not like a company town like LA or a one. And I think I was at a party in the village, and someone I knew who knew Jonathan Lethem, we were talking, and she said, you know Jonathan Lethem? And I said, sure, sure, yeah, He's that Brooklyn writer who, you know, did this and that. And, um, uh, she said, yeah, he's a friend of mine and he, you know, he's got this new book coming out about a Tourette's detective, uh, who has obsessive compulsive disorder also. And, and he's, um, trying to solve the murder of his boss in Brooklyn. And I literally was like, stop, you had me at Touretic. I was like, I literally said Touretic. I was in Touretic detective. I'm, I'm, I'm salivating. I'm, I'm, I have to read it. Um, and, uh, so I, I somehow got connected to Jonathan and I, I persuaded, I got the book in galley form.

Starting point is 00:11:27 It hadn't been published yet. And, you know, revealing our age, it was a Xerox. I got a Xerox with a clip binder on it. And for those on the podcast who are young, nerdy tech geeks who don't know what Xerox is. Before PDF, you actually had to print something on a paper, on a copier. And so I had a paper-bound Xeroxed copy of it, and I read it in one go. And it's funny because when I really think about why did it grab me so much, it's very similar to the experience I had reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time. Lionel, the character in Motherless Brooklyn, has many of the same emotional hooks that I think Holden Caulfield does. You, by the end of page one, you're on his side, you know, you're sort of, because he's narrating his own story to you, because from the

Starting point is 00:12:36 first sentence, he's telling you, this is how my head works. And you can hear the calm rational uh mind at the center of the story when he describes this chaotic uh condition that he has that that he has to spend his life navigating you jonathan lethem he pulls off the thing that we all try to do in books, in art, in music, which is the end of page one, you're emotionally bought in, you're hooked, you relate to this character, you feel for him, you have empathy, but you're laughing, you're sympathetic, you're impressed. It's just like he does, it's a zero to 60 emotional buy-in that's very, very rare. You know, you relate in the most reductive sense. And then from there, it becomes this study of the mind and how it works.

Starting point is 00:13:38 And the fact that his condition is extreme, that he has the physical twitches of Tourette's, the mental obsessive compulsive components of it, the vocalizations that he can't control that are both hilarious and painful and awkward and make life difficult for him. We don't all have Tourette's, but I think what Jonathan achieves is everybody sees themselves in it because we all are constantly in a conversation with our own minds. We all have a rational center that deals with our behavior and our noisy voices that tell us to do things we know we don't want to do. You know, we all relate to being essentially in an argument with ourself and with the impulses that we wish we could control better. So Tourette's becomes this sort of, and Lionel, they become a proxy for us, you know, and the and our, our,

Starting point is 00:14:46 the difficulty we have navigating ourselves. And that just nailed me. It just like, I was, I was completely, um, entranced by it. And honestly, as an actor, I just was greedy. I was like, I want that gig. I want, I want the part. No, I want to, because, not because it was like, oh, this is instantly showy. It was more, this is just hard. How would you do this? How do you, it presents all the media's challenges for an actor. It's paradoxical. It's actually physically demanding. You have to see the humanity of the character underneath it and it just was like this would be a field day i would really like to play the role okay so let me hop in for a second here because i really want to uh underscore a few things that you said that

Starting point is 00:15:39 struck me about the book and also about the film and if if i'm misquoting you here, I'm going to quote you quoting someone else. But in one of the interviews I read in prep for this, even though we know each other, I found you referencing a C.S. Lewis line from Shadowlands, we read to know we're not alone. And I think that, as you said, Lionel, on one hand, is such an unusual character, but on the other, is very usual in that he represents this schism that we sometimes feel about our outer and inner worlds, or perhaps even dueling inner worlds, right? And I'm not going to give any spoilers in this, but he even references parts of himself as Bailey, right? that's really marvelous where the his condition the part of his head that has the inhibition the lack of inhibition and the impulse control you know um problems and literally fights fights his his conscious self fights the attempts to restrain it, and calls him Bailey.

Starting point is 00:17:07 So it's such a schism that when he yells, sometimes the voice in his head yells at him and names him Bailey. You think about the ways we talk in our head. You think about the number of times that you've said quietly in your head, oh, you're such a fucking idiot. Think about the critical voice in your head aimed at yourself. It's literally right out of,

Starting point is 00:17:44 and you being a meditator the the noisy mind right it's like the noisy mind literally given given name given form given voice it's like it's not just that we can't stop our thoughts it's that we actually have a piece of our head that criticizes the actions that another part of our head is implementing. It's amazing. It's an amazing thing that we live with and that most people don't discuss as openly or actively as a phenomenon, you know? Yeah, it's also it meaning the film. I'll be honest. Initially, even though I know how skilled you are, I was very nervous to see the advanced screening

Starting point is 00:18:37 because this book is so dear to me. And it's on top of that, in some ways, a very hard film to pull off. And you not only pulled it off, and we'll certainly spend some time on creative process, which I want to get to in a second, but you made some decisions that I think strengthened the, not just the main characters, but the sort of humanity and the drama and the tension and everything that goes into the storyline itself. So to zoom in on the creative process, which I really know very little about, I don't know the backstory, but if we look at 1999, then we jump forward 10 years, 2009, 10 additional years, 2019, when we're recording this. When did this catch for you?

Starting point is 00:19:28 When did it actually start to happen? Because you, I just want to point out to people, wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this film. That's a lot of concentrated effort. So what did making this film look like? It went in phases. And in some total, there's no question it's the most work I've ever put into a film. It's one of the deepest dives and longest climbs, whatever metaphor you want to use. I've worked on this one longer and deeper than any creative piece I've worked on. The initial hook, as I said, was character. I was then busy for a while.

Starting point is 00:20:22 I had a lot of other projects that I knew were literally going to take me a couple of years before I had the bandwidth to really seriously contemplate it. But much like, you know, as a function of what we're discussing, the brain works on things. You're busy doing other things. But I was noodling on it. It was rattling around in my head. I would reread the book. I would think about the character. I, even when I wasn't actively trying to write it,

Starting point is 00:20:56 I even started to sort of like try to imagine the physicality of it. And how do you take something that's an interior monologue in a book and reduce it down and select pieces of it? And what are the best pieces of Lionel? And my brain was kind of cooking on that for years. But when I got around to saying to myself, all right, actually what happened was in about 2003, in 2002, sorry, I did a run of work. I did a big film.

Starting point is 00:21:23 I did Red Dragon with a bunch of great actors. And then I did Spike Lee's The 25th Hour. And then I did a play in New York for the rest of the year. I did Lanford Wilson's Burn This. was an amazing year it was a it was it was a very notably vital and satisfying year of creative work for me um I worked with amazing people I worked with heroes of mine like Spike Lee I did I did two films in a row with Phil Hoffman and and then we did plays next door to each other and we had come up together and that was really gratifying and I I uh I I kind of got to the end of that year and I felt something very rare for me which I sort of felt satiated I actually felt like um I'd spent the whole year working in a gear um that I'd wanted to work in for a long time. And I felt like I'd run a marathon very successfully. And it was sort of like, why run another five miles until it hurts? I feel good. What am I

Starting point is 00:22:36 going to do? Do I want to just keep going until something goes badly? And I kind of got this moment of clarity where I was like, I need to take a break. I really want to take a substantial break. And in 2003, I just, I stopped working entirely. And I focused on getting my pilot's license. And I, I did that for like six or seven months, just trained, did aviation training and got my pilot's license. And it was, it was great. It really cleared my head. It emptied it out. And I sort of got to the end of that. And I thought, I'm ready to work on Motherless Brooklyn. So I had this nice sort of clean slate kind of feeling. And when I sat down to look at it again, I realized there were some issues with turning it into a film because it's this very interior

Starting point is 00:23:23 monologue. The whole book is kind of this interior narration and it has a plot, but really it's like Lionel in his head. Edward, could I ask you to pause for one second? Yeah. You taking that break, and we're going to come right back to where you left off, but I would imagine that there were people who said, this is not the time to take a break. You're red hot. This is when you should commit to A, B, C, D, or E. Perhaps not, but there are many people who fantasize about taking such a

Starting point is 00:23:51 break, but never do. They can't shift out of sixth gear. Was that hard for you? It was a little bit. It was a little bit, but I've had good examples in my life. My dad is an incredibly accomplished person in multiple dimensions. He's a scholar and a Marine veteran and a lawyer. He was a corporate litigator. He was a U.S. attorney. He was, federal prosecutor for Maryland. He was an environmental litigator. He was an environmental organization builder. He's worked at a private equity firm. It's like he's really, he's had a remarkably rich tapestry in his career. There's a connectivity through all of it. There's an intellectual connectivity. There's a values, mission-driven kind of thread to everything he's done. But I've really watched my dad over the years very fearlessly pull the video game cartridge

Starting point is 00:24:55 out and put another one in. You remember when we were kids and you had your Atari cartridges? Oh, I remember, for sure. Like, am I going to play tanks or am I going to play like, um, you know, what was it? Combat. It was called combat, right? Or you, or are you going to play pong or whatever? Um, he, he, I've seen him have what I would call the pleasures of staying very feeling, uh, challenged, fresh, um, invigorated about what he was doing through phases of his adult life and and i kind of learned to view those changes as as not as risky but as like refreshing you know what i mean like i i saw, even as a kid, you absorb, you absorb when your parent is turned on by what they're doing, you know? And I, I, I literally

Starting point is 00:25:54 remember the new spring in his step, his enthusiasm, him being charged up. And it, I think as you get older and you have kids yourself, you forget almost how important it is, how much a child perceives about whether their parents are happy. You know what I mean? It sounds like the most obvious thing in the world. But I had an awareness that my dad's happiness was often pegged to making bold shifts in the way he was spending his time. And I, I felt like I'm one of the luckiest people in the world because I get to work, I get to do, you know, work or make a livelihood out of something that is play for me. It's, it's, and the last thing I wanted to do when I kind of meditated on it was, why do I want to turn this into a career? You know what I mean? Why would I turn this into something where it's exhausting me or it's, you know, what am I chasing? Like if I'm satiated or if I've just achieved like the things I wanted to, what a waste it would be if I make myself like a careerist copper top, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:27:19 Right. And what a waste if I don't seize while I'm 30 years old on the freedom to, you know, the freedom that comes with this gig, the freedom to like get a pilot's license. You know what I mean? And those were dreams I had too. I dreamed my whole life of getting my pilot's license. And I was like, I've got the money now. I've got the time. What's my reason for not doing it? I don't have one. So, um, it, and then we get back to the voices in the head because voices come in the head, voices of insecurity, voices of competitiveness, voices of aspiration, ambition, maybe more than aspiration, like ambition for ongoing plaudits, affirmation, applause, you know, like the hunger for, for achievement. They come in the head and not to mention that there's the voices from outside, but really the truth is like the ones that master you are the ones inside.

Starting point is 00:28:35 They're the ones that are saying like, you know, you're going to, you know, you need to get more of this or, and, and I think, um, it comes, it comes in, but piloting was really good for me. It was really good to not, um, take a break and, and just kind of like go on vacation or lounge around because I replaced the consumption in my work with like the consumption in learning, like in my brain piloting was like one of the hardest things I ever took on. You know, it was like, it made, it honestly made the work I'd been doing feel kind of like play, play acting,

Starting point is 00:29:18 which weirdly it is, it is, you know, like, it's like, Oh, making up stories and playing dress up for a living or like hurling myself into the sky by myself in a plane with you know ultimate consequences to screwing it up you know what i mean it's like it's like great creative risk and risk of botching

Starting point is 00:29:38 a landing are not are not actually equivalent and it's like a great perspective too you know what i mean um because i've always found i get some of my my best sort of for me like i get them i think we talked about this the first time i did your show i think we talked about like the things that are meditative that are not sitting with your legs crossed trying to clear your mind you know what i mean we did because we were sitting on a pier looking at surfers and we're talking about the role that's played in your life so you know piloting is a great meditation for me it absolutely eradicates everything but the present moment it's very, very difficult to be out of the present moment. And there's a function in it that's really interesting,

Starting point is 00:30:28 which is takeoff and landing in particular. I'm sure there's a metaphor in this somewhere. But taking off and landing are extremely, extremely focused things. Even for a modern airline pilot in a plane that basically flies itself, you are seriously on deck when you're taking off and landing that plane and i think that experience is so intense it's almost like this it almost does what sometimes it takes me 45 minutes of meditation to get anywhere near which is it obliterates atom atomizes distraction, right? Because you must deal with that moment in which there's very little margin for error if something goes wrong. And it sort of atomizes your distraction. Then you get yourself up into the sky and you're floating. And somehow that atomization sustains.

Starting point is 00:31:20 I don't find myself stressing once I'm on autopilot and I'm floating along. I look down at the landscape going by. I think about, it's real Daniel Kahneman, thinking fast, thinking slow. Once I'm up in the air and I'm kind of ahead of the plane, I get into a very slow, slow gear and a very meditative gear, just watching the landscape go by. Um, and it's wonderful. It's like really, really, really wonderful for me. And I think, um, uh, it's, I get that surfing, I get that scuba diving, but it's amazing how quickly piloting kind of straightens you out, straightens your head out. So you finish this incredibly productive sprint with acting. You take this sabbatical of sorts to focus on piloting, which sounds very therapeutic and holding you in the present tense for much of the practice, you come out with a clear mind and you take another look

Starting point is 00:32:36 at Marlowe's Brooklyn, and you're realizing there are some challenges. As you mentioned, one of them translating an internal dialogue and words on a page into something cinematic. What else were you pondering turning over in your head as you re-examined Marlowe's Brooklyn? Because it is not an easy book to turn into a film. No. Sometimes I think people don't even realize the degree to which the sound mix and the music are make or break. For a film, you can have a film that's cut. The same film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture with a bad sound mix will seem like a piece of shit. Like it really, it is astonishing how important that layer of varnish is on the whole thing. And you can't adapt a book into a film. A book is not a

Starting point is 00:33:30 film. It's just not. It functions in the mind of the reader in a totally different way because you are activating imagery in your head in a much, much more surreal way than when you're receiving the sensory, you know, being encompassed by visual and sound in a film. And you have to, you can't think about, I think faithful adaptations almost never work. If you're trying to literally transliterate the book into a verbatim as close to a verbatim thing it those are the worst film adaptations the very best ones i think are literally like they're like transposing a piano concerto for guitar you know you have to just completely change the the waveform of it and my favorites are ones where,

Starting point is 00:34:26 you know, like Out of Africa, which is a film by a truly great director, Sidney Pollack, with one of the great performances by an actress ever. And it really holds up. It really, really holds up when you watch it,

Starting point is 00:34:38 not only technically, but also thematically in terms of being a film about loss and the desire to hold on to things and possess them and coming to an acceptance of loss and impermanence. It's a really, really, really beautiful film. And it's based on, in theory, Isaac Dennison's memoirs, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass. There's none of the narrative plot that's in the film is embedded within the book.

Starting point is 00:35:07 Those are memoirs. The whole romance, the things, these are all suppositional. They springboarded from the essence of her sort of spiritual observations and meditations on impermanence, and they created a story from whole cloth. And that's why it's a great film. They understood what the essence was and they turned it into a narrative and cinematic experience that's totally its own thing. And Jonathan Lethem not only loves films and is very erudite, he really held, holds that belief that, that it's better to springboard and create something new unto itself. So when I said to him, like, look, I think you've got to deal with certain structural challenges in this.

Starting point is 00:35:54 And one of them is that Motherless Brooklyn has a slightly surreal tone in the sense that it's about guys in the modern world who feel like they're living in a pocket of Brooklyn that has never moved from 1957. And they speak and act almost like Raymond Chandler's gumshoe detectives. But if you slap that onto the screen and have guys in fedoras talking that way with Priuses floating by, you have immediately put yourself in an ironic mode, right? You're essentially saying, we're being tongue-in-cheek here. Nothing needs to be taken seriously. And if you go in that gear, then Lionel doesn't have to be taken seriously either. And his Tourette's is now a gag, not a complex person. It's a wink-wink kind of a gag because the rest of the thing is a wink-wink gag. And I didn't want to do Motherless Brooklyn like the Blues Brothers.

Starting point is 00:36:48 You know what I mean? I didn't, which is a great movie. That's just not what I thought it had within it. I wanted to play Lionel Strait, and I wanted him to be a rich, complex, sometimes poignant and affecting and, you know uh a human being whose loneliness is real whose isolation is real um alongside his humor and stuff and if you if we played it ironically that wasn't going to be there and so i said to jonathan like you know in the book people call him freak show would people really even do that in 1999? You know, what this feels like is maybe, maybe it, let's set it in the hard boiled world of the books you love, the films we love and, you know, and, You know, he wasn't, no, he really was. He wasn't like, for one second, he, I mean, think about that.

Starting point is 00:37:48 You write a book, people say they love it. And then someone comes along and says, hey, what if we were to like transform it, like literally set it in a different time and therefore have to come up with a different mystery plot? Because the book is about the yakuza and the japanese sea urchin trade and zendos and all these things that are highly contemporary even though there's an old school feeling to the noir sort of vernacular of it and without and he was like i love it you know he's like i love it like let's treat him like marlo and send lionel into another mystery and i and he like, I get it. I

Starting point is 00:38:25 think it's a cool idea. And I can't really overstate how rare it is for someone to be that broad-minded about their own piece of work. When did you have that conversation with him, roughly? Was that... Yeah, somewhere almost like five years after he published the book i got it so this would have been after you've revisited it after the piloting kind of 2004 2005 period yeah and somewhere honestly somewhere in flying around over southern california kind of do things i had this kind of clarity that like, that this, that the way around what was feeling like a tone problem was just simply to set

Starting point is 00:39:15 it in the fifties and that, and once that, once that thing sort of settled in me and I knew Jonathan was okay with it, then something really interesting happened, which is something else that I had been chewing on for a long time, totally unrelated to Motherless Brooklyn, was my fascination with what happened in New York in the mid-50s, this kind of really dark part of New York's social history that I was really, really interested in. And in one person in particular, this guy named Robert Moses. Robert Moses. And I had always thought to myself, how do you approach that? How do you approach the density of what was going on? And I had sometimes thought it's and i and i had sometimes

Starting point is 00:40:06 thought it's kind of like the way that chinatown is about stealing la being built on stolen water i always thought like what happened in new york under robert moses is sort of its own original sin it's dark history in the 20th century and but yeah it's too dense though it's all this urban planning stuff and blah blah and i had this moment where i suddenly went that's what lionel can be the conveyance into lionel can we can take jonathan's phenomenal detective and we can send him into in a movie which has to be bigger has to have bigger scope. We can send him into this. He can become the conveyance into this very dense and complex thing that I was also interested in. And suddenly I had this mashup, this idea of mashing up these two things. So Robert Moses, for people, we don't need to spend a ton of time on Robert Moses, but as I watched Motherless Brooklyn, I wondered, it had to be in a way, right? How could it not be

Starting point is 00:41:14 a Robert Moses incarnate in this film played by Alec Baldwin? And for those who might have some passing familiarity with the name, Robert Moses is the subject of a book called The Power Broker, also a very, very, a very good book by Robert Caro. And there's a whole chapter on him too in the Burns documentary called New York. There's a big section, which was, that was my first encounter with the story of Moses, was in the documentary in New York. But yeah, he was, and he was, he was titularly,

Starting point is 00:41:58 he was the parks commissioner, but secretly he was essentially Darth Vader of New York in the 20th century. He held an almost uncontested imperial power over New York city above any mayor, any governor. He, uh, he ran New York city like a, like an autocratic Caesar, um, and made almost all of the significant decisions about how New York evolved from being a 19th century city into being a modern city. The whole physical landscape of New York's transformation in that era was directed by him. Speaking of directing, as I mentioned earlier, you wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this film. Did you want to do from the outset, all of those things, or was that a by-product of challenges you ran into, or is there some other origin story? I'm just wondering how it came together.

Starting point is 00:42:56 no directing. I wanted to, like I said, um, it, I'm not really totally joking. I was kind of, it was a greedy actor impulse to grab a great role.

Starting point is 00:43:07 I really thought this is a really memorable character and it's a great challenge. It's everything I love to try to take on. And it was like, I just want to play this part. Then I did, I was turned on by the challenge of adapting it. And then I ran into that, went through this process that we've talked about. And when suddenly I kind of had this, what was for me, exciting idea about the mashup, and I had Jonathan's hall pass to be that sort of freewheeling in it, I'd spent a lot of time then researching and working on how to make kind of a literary mashup, not between books, but really just of motherless Brooklyn, but conveying it into sort of a literary version of this history. And once I was finished that, which took me a long time, like many, a number of years,

Starting point is 00:44:01 because I went through writer's block and I got hung up on the plotting and I got distracted by other projects. But when I finally got it done, it took a solid eight years, I would say for me to get to where I was happy with it. Then I reached a point where I was in my own mind going to shop it around to directors that I admired. But someone, you know, did something good for me. A studio executive that I was friends with actually sat me down in a bar in New York on 12th Street and was like, dude, you need to direct this. And I was sort of like, oh, but the part is really challenging. And he literally said to me, look, think about the movies that we came up on that mattered to us.

Starting point is 00:44:57 Do the right thing. Red's Warren Beatty's great film about American socialists. You know, Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven. He kept citing all these examples of sometimes an actor is really right for a role. It's really in their wheelhouse. And they've come up with a story, and they just do it. They take that big swing. And he kind of said to me, why wouldn't you do this? Why wouldn't you? This mashup is yours you don't want to sit over someone's shoulder you know and he just was like you can do this

Starting point is 00:45:33 and I kind of did have that moment where I went you know why yeah why wouldn't I I do love those films they have meant a lot to me like some. Some of them were defining films for me. And it was sort of like, he urged me across the line into getting excited about just owning it. mean to obsess on the timeline, but I'm so curious to get an idea of the timeline, since this is such a longitudinal project, right? I mean, it's, so when, when did you have that meeting with this executive who gave you the talking to related to directing the film, roughly? So, if I was... Because normally, I, sorry to jump in, but normally what happens to me, and I'm sure has happened to a lot of people, is they have this back burner set of projects. But by and large, in my case, I never come back to them. So, I'm fascinated by someone as busy as you are, and certainly not just

Starting point is 00:46:40 with film. You have many, many hats that you wear, much like your dad, in a sense, very multifaceted. How this remained a project. Roughly when did you have this conversation? I probably started, actually not probably, I started actively writing it the summer of 2003. And I wrote like 60 or 70 pages of what became like 150 page script and they were good like they were good they were the beginning of the movie as it is now and um and people really liked it like they were like this is really really cool like and then I got horribly blocked I got it wasn't like distractedness. I really, I had it framed out and I had the things, but I couldn't in my mind just sort of puzzle out a compelling way to get lost in the merc, but emerge

Starting point is 00:47:35 from it. You know what I mean? I do. Especially with this, if I could call it genre, right? The getting lost in the merc is important. Absolutely. Anybody who watches Chinatown and tells me the first time that they have any idea what's going on until about 20 minutes before the end of the movie is lying. You have no idea what's going on in that movie. Zero. In fact, I've tracked it. There's a very specific scene where he's in the car with Faye Dunaway, where he finally narrates his read of what he thinks is going on. And there's only about

Starting point is 00:48:11 20 minutes left in the movie. And by the way, he's wrong. He thinks that what's going on is all about the water. And of course, it's about incest, right? And that you know with these films that it's not about comprehension, that getting lost in deep convolution is actually part of the point, which is an important point, which is that it's hard to know what's taking place around you. It literally existentially noir at its best is about how difficult it is to see where the dangers are around you and where power is and who's got the power. You know, that's what they're thematically, I think, is their strength is they really do remind us there are things going on in the shadows that are, that are antagonistic to us. And that if we don't figure out what's going on, damage is going to get done, you know, but, but I, I, I wanted, I wanted the puzzle to make sense. Even, you know, you have to get lost, but you have to know

Starting point is 00:49:27 underneath it, what's really going on so that you can emerge from it or bring people out of it in a way that is, it all is satisfying and it does make sense in the end, you know, to some degree. And so I got hung up and then I did that terrible thing, which is I put it in the drawer, right? To your point, I put it in the drawer and I was like, I just need a break. And then literally, uh, I got sent a really weird,

Starting point is 00:49:54 cool script called down in the Valley. And I decided I'm going to do that. I'll do it quick. I was like, I'm going to do that one really quick. It's a little independent film. I'm going to do that one quick. And then I'm come right back to this.

Starting point is 00:50:04 And then, then I did The Illusionist. And then a film I had been working on for years to pull together came together, The Painted Veil. Naomi Watts got free and she wanted to do it. And suddenly it was like, I'm making a film for six months in Prague. And then I'm making a film for six months in China. and time just starts to roll by and your mind gets further and further from the thing you're working on and um it just one thing after another kept coming in and then that thing in the drawer that you haven't figured out becomes more and more and more of a block you know of lead it's just like it's not an active thing. And I think the same person who later helped me embrace that I should direct it at a certain point called me and was like, hey, there's other people who are interested in this. I think maybe, you know, should we let someone else take a crack at it?

Starting point is 00:50:58 And I don't even know if that was true. I have a feeling it might have just been sticking a fork in me but it worked like and and actually this friend of mine he was the studio executive who at that time was running new line um and he actually did something that i laugh at in retrospect which is he cited a specific director to me who i think he knew the idea of giving up my project to that person specifically was going to make my skin crawl. Like, and, and he, and he just, whether it was conscious or not, he, he hit me with exactly the right piece of information for my resolve to get very, very strong again. And I took it out and he did kind of put a deadline on me. He was like, look, we've been sitting on this thing a long time and this person wants to

Starting point is 00:51:55 do it. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And he was like, well, how about we just agree? How about we just agree? You'll get it done by Christmas, or we'll start having a real conversation about letting someone else take a crack at it. And it was great. I literally knuckled down, and I pulled it out. I looked at it. I talked to some other writers with some focus who I respect, puzzled it out, cracked it, and finished it really aggressively. Really, I wrote like I wrote my college thesis. I wrote the large bulk of the rest of it in like two or three weeks of like long, deep nights of just powering it through.

Starting point is 00:52:41 And then it was done. It's a very, very helpful friend, the anonymous executive. No, it's not anonymous. Toby Emmerich, he's the head of Warner Brothers now. Very, very clever. Maybe accidentally, but very helpful. Clever, helpful, but also like, you know, Hollywood and the business of movies is sort of like inside baseball. And honestly honestly i sometimes think it's probably very boring to most people but i i do think i do think it's it's always good to highlight when when there's exceptions to sort of the the reductive cliche about something and people in this day and age are constantly talking about how studios you you know, it's impossible to get original adult stuff made

Starting point is 00:53:25 and everything. But I did not, I've had this champion, Toby Emmerich has been this incredible stalwart champion of my project for over a decade, like a really long time, encouraging me, pushing me along, helping me actually like get through these mental block moments. And then when I actually got it done, starting to try to figure out with me how to get it made, and he didn't have the collateral to get it made. And then we went through this next period, which was like five years of really struggling to, to, you know, it was like the producorial struggle, the writer struggle was over, but the producorial struggle was at least five years of both of us hammering on it and trying every equation of casting and financing and everything to get it made.

Starting point is 00:54:14 And all thwarted throughout. We were constantly thwarted. Let's dig into thwart for a second here, because I would imagine that many people listening on some level are thinking, you're Edward frickin' Norton. Like, why on earth would you hit these roadblocks? What were the types of feedback or the pushback that you experienced? And I'm not saying that I doubt you had it. I just think it'd be helpful. And I'm curious to hear more about.

Starting point is 00:54:53 Honestly, I think no one can ever take for granted that someone should just hand you money to make a film. I never know. It doesn't matter if you've been nominated for 10 Academy Awards or... It doesn't matter. It's risky. It's risky. And when someone's coming at you with, I'm going to do a big scale 1950s period film about like a dense kind of the Chinatown like story about New York City and its urban development. Oh, and at the middle of it is a guy with Tourette syndrome, an obsessive compulsive disorder. It's sort of Rain Man meets Chinatown. People's eyes just start crossing. And you go, okay, not Chinatown, LA Confidential. That one was much more accessible. You know what it is? It's not Rain Man. He's got full-on autism.

Starting point is 00:55:40 It's Forrest Gump meets LA Confidential. You start going, it's not Rain Man meets Chinatown. That's too tough. It's Forrest Gump meets LA Confidential. You start going, it's not Rain Man meets Chinatown. That's too tough. It's Forrest Gump meets LA Confidential, the more accessible version of both things. But people's eyes are just like, you got your chocolate in my peanut butter, my peanut butter in your chocolate. They don't, they're like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, you know, it's really, you're, you're definitely like describing

Starting point is 00:56:05 something in the trade. It's like to say that it's execution dependent is a, is a, is an understatement. Mostly people are like, you know, please bring us the next one. You know what I mean? Like, um, it's, and, and when you're saying to people, will you give me tens of millions of dollars to make this, you can't walk around in a huff like, how can this be so tough? I understood why it was tough. I understood why it was tough. The upsides of not pursuing, let's call it a careerist, pursuing projects where my agenda was, will this be one of the biggest movies ever, is that you can make a lot of really excellent films that you're proud of and that people end up not only loving, but seeing as maybe almost like essential zeitgeisty movies like Fight Club or 25th Hour or American Street X but those none of those movies were financially successful so it's not like I was walking around like you know like like some actor on a run of gigantic hits who's considered like you know oh this guy's gonna open the movie at 20 million so we'll do

Starting point is 00:57:26 anything he wants to do you know what i mean it's just it's just not the same and and you can't unfortunately you you can't you can't collateralize um artistic credibility uh into any kind of a, you know, any, any number you just can't, you can, you can do it in some measure. And if I'd been willing to make, if I'd been able to make motherless Brooklyn, the way I wanted to for 15 million bucks of budget, I could, I could have done it the next day. You know what I mean? But I needed slightly more than that. And so it was tricky. It was just tricky. bound pile of paper that's been sitting in your desk, what does the first day of writing look like? I mean, do you just start spitting out anything that comes to mind in hopes that something good lands on the page? Or do you use a different strategy? I mean, I, as someone who's put stuff on the shelf, and I find writing very,

Starting point is 00:58:46 very difficult. And so if I let something sit for a long time, I might be able to go back and edit what I've done very quickly. But the thing that struck fear in my heart, that murky part that I couldn't quite find my way through, may have been turned into a mountain in the meantime, right? Like I've developed all these stories around why it was hard, how hard it was. What did the first day or the first few days of working on that look like and feel like for you? Well, the really interesting thing was

Starting point is 00:59:18 that when I read what I had written, I forgot some of what I had written and I liked it. Like I was reading it as if someone else had written it and it was making me laugh. You know, um, I was, I, I kind of had this reinvigoration of, of the pleasure of it, ironically, because procrastination does a really weird thing to your head. You know, when you, when you push something off, it starts to become monolithic. You know, I don't know what that is, but it becomes monolithic, and then it just intensifies your desire to avoid it. And it was fascinating to read it and kind of have the sensation of, like, this is so much fun.

Starting point is 01:00:05 Like, this is such fun language the characters so cool why the what was i why did i put the you know why did i give up on this and then in a funny way i went back to my cards because my issue wasn't a character issue it wasn't a language it was just a plotting issue and i looked at my cards cards you mean literally index cards for scenes totally yeah and i and i sat down on a huge rug and i mapped them all out and i kind of looked at the node that was like this was a problem and like i said i i had a couple conversations i brought some people in that i trust and i I was like, really, I'm hung up on this whole thing over this. I did kind of almost just some Rubik's cubing with some people. And it was like, I was like, oh, wait a second. I'm overthinking this. This gets easily solved by just doing X,

Starting point is 01:00:56 right? And then suddenly it was like, holy crap, like that really wasn't that big a deal at all. I just needed, you know, I needed a few people in a room brainstorming. And I did it with Brian Koppelman and David. Oh, nice. Yeah. Who were, you know, great pals, great writers. Yeah. Wrote rounders, produced the illusionist.

Starting point is 01:01:18 And it was kind of like, it was kind of like, you know, I ran them through it. They're, they're obviously terrific on this stuff. And really just, they, I let, they let me use them as a sounding board i threw ideas around i feel like i remember david levine saying at some point like i said something david goes i don't wait what's wrong with that he was like you just said it like what's wrong with it like what's wrong with that that's great you know and i was kind of like oh oh, is it that simple? And it was like they helped me crack my own blockage in a way. Such good guys.

Starting point is 01:01:56 Just to take a second for that. They're two really skilled and really, really just good human beings. Also co-creators, along Andrew Russ Sorkin of billions. Yeah. Yeah. That's their, their show. And they're,

Starting point is 01:02:09 they're great. Those guys, um, they, uh, they're like serious trade craft pros. You know, they really are like,

Starting point is 01:02:19 they, they, they're writers, um, in the old school mode, you know, they, and, and they were great, helped me. So, um, uh, they helped me punch through it. And, uh, then I went and like I said, I wrote the rest of it in kind of almost like a blitz. And, um, and, uh, it was great. You know, it's the funny thing.

Starting point is 01:02:46 I was actually thinking about, as we've been talking about this, sometimes I think guys don't acknowledge, men especially, maybe women experience this too. I don't know, but I certainly see it in a lot of my guy friends is it's so stupid to be competitive about some things. But in what we've been talking about, I can actually kind of recognize if I'm honest that two things happened. One is that when Toby at one point said to me, I'm going to, I'm going to give someone else a crack at this. It really was actually like the flaring of a very like, you know, um, low, a very low kind of primitive kind of competitive aggro sensation in me that galvanized me you know i kind of was

Starting point is 01:03:46 like you're not giving it to that guy no no way no way like this is mine and and and i'm gonna like give me a you know it was like it did kind of push me right and that's not necessarily like a quality that that that's a quality i would say in general that i try to de-emphasize or or cultivate out of myself like like competitive competitive competitive attitude within creative work it's really stupid and i think it can be really counterproductive i also think like around the culture of movies with award shows and all this shit there's so much absurd like like construct of competitiveness that is beyond inauthentic to anything to do with this kind of work you know what I mean it's like it's like it's even more inauthentic to creative work than it is in figure skating you know where it's like subjectively scoring a figure skating routine it's like the

Starting point is 01:04:51 idea that the idea that that the culture would um construct like a competitive matrix around any kind of a creative form with awards and all this stuff is really, like, sort of mortifying, you know, in some ways. And I think, but at the same time, like, it galvanized me. And it's funny because when we were talking about flying, there's an interesting kind of component of that too, which is say like, oh, well, your insecurities come in. I'm not working. And, you know, are people going to forget about me? Just stupid stuff comes in your head. But there's an interesting thing about doing something like getting good at flying or getting good at surfing, which is like, it drops through you into this kind of confidence. And there's a component of that that's competitive too, because in a weird way you go

Starting point is 01:05:50 in your head as a guy, I think some of you sort of go, yeah, but I can do this. Right. It's like having a black belt. It's sort of like, it's like you're listening to someone blather on about something and in the back of your head going, can you take off a plane and land it you know what i mean it's like i'm serious yeah i get it i get it i totally get it well you know again not the highest order of of motivation but it it when you say like a lot of people don't do that or a lot of people wouldn't take that break. Sometimes I think if what you're doing is you're sort of, I don't know, exercising your muscles or developing a musculature that you're proud of, right? If it's a, if it's like a component of yourself that you, it's almost like you have a secret,

Starting point is 01:06:40 you have some secret skill or you have a thing. It, it's interesting the way that it it it's interesting the way that it it's interesting the way that it um it dials down the volume on on insecurities in general you know what i mean i do yeah and it i mean it's really hinges it seems to me on the stories you tell yourself which create the lenses of your reality in the sense that they, they mold your perception of what you're doing. Yeah. And don't, don't you, I mean, have you've done so like when you famously, like with the, with the, you know, when you like weren't worked on kickboxing or any things, or when you do any ofboxing, you know what I mean? Right, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Starting point is 01:07:49 Or when you do any of the things you've done to sort of demonstrate that you can do things within me, whether other people see it or not, that gives me like a kind of a confidence. 100%, 100%, which is why I often recommend to people, even if they never have the opportunity, hopefully never have the opportunity to use kickboxing or Brazilian jiu-jitsu or some martial art outside of a practice environment, that they should train because the way they will carry themselves through the world, male, female, doesn't matter, age, doesn't matter, will be different. And there will be a certain quiet confidence that I think can be built and added to with many different skills that demonstrate an ability, demonstrate to yourself an ability to learn, be self-sufficient, survive, whatever it might be. So it makes perfect sense to me. And also the motivation that you're talking about or the motivations,

Starting point is 01:08:54 be they good or bad, somewhere in between, putting aside the value judgment, they are, meaning they exist. And in the examples that you've, a few of the examples you've given, you've been able to utilize them, right? And harness them ultimately to, as one experiment to one of beautiful or not beautiful. Like, how can you take whatever this motivation is, whatever this opportunity opportunity is and turn it into something beautiful it doesn't mean you you ignore morality or good or bad but but as a thought experiment looking at things through that lens so you're able to take what might be looked at as a base primitive urge this drive and transmute it into oddly oddly enough, I mean, at the end product, like something that looks very deeply at impulses and human nature. Yeah, true.

Starting point is 01:10:13 I also think, I don't know, there's frustration at not being able to achieve some goal is never pleasant, right? We don't associate it. It's just not a pleasant feeling because you sort of want what you want. And especially if you think you've got high-minded or only positive motivations, you're sort of like, it's frustrating not to get to do this. And with this project, I definitely, you know, there was a period where it was always hovering. It had a kind of an albatross-y kind of effect on me in the sense that it was, I wanted to do it and I felt I had a good vision for it and

Starting point is 01:11:07 that it could be unique. Um, and, and, and actually like be the kind of hypnotic movie experience that really reminds people, this is why we go to movies. You know what I mean? And I really had all that conviction, but then I was, I was like bending my life. It was like, it was like the shadow force. It was like a dark matter force in my life because it had this gravitational pull that would, it, it, it would affect my decisions. You know, I would sort of go, well, you know, I could take another year off or you're at a point, you know, where you don't have kids and you're in a great new relationship. And you say, oh, well, let's just take our surfboards and go. But it's like, oh, but this might, you know, I've got to keep pressing on this because it might happen this year. And it throws like those old models of the universe where the black hole is taking the time-space fabric

Starting point is 01:12:09 and bending it. That's how this was for me. It was like bending the space-time fabric of my life, even though it was not happening. And there's this point where you have to kind of keep reassessing. It's like, how long am I going to let this mirage, is this a mirage, or is it a thing that I just have to persevere? And how long am I going to chase the mirage you know and and when you were shopping i'm not sure if that's the right term but when you were uh engaging in the producerial is that the word uh challenges and pursuing that at that point

Starting point is 01:12:57 were you confident that you could get it made and that it was going to get made? Or was it more of a test run to see or a fishing trip to see what type of feedback you would get? How can I guess how, at that point, how convinced were you it would happen? Or how committed were you to sort of willing it to happen? I had many moments where I thought, this, this is not going to work out the way I want it to. I just don't have the go to another actor who I think would get this movie made instantly and I think would be really great. But that kind of broke my heart a little bit selfishly. I really felt connected to this character of Lionel and I could kind of see my way into that, but I just couldn't bite the bullet and make those phone calls. You know, I had a moment of, this all went on so long that, you know, Netflix became a big force

Starting point is 01:14:22 in the landscape of ways you could get this stuff done. And I could have walked over to those guys who I think are awesome and I think gotten this done in probably one conversation. And I didn't have – I wasn't negative on that. It was probably the thing I would have – but I had a. It was before they had really started making some commitments to putting things in the theater. Um, the way they did with Roma, the way they did, um, are doing with Noah Baumbach's terrific movie marriage story and others, you know, and I, and I, I, I didn't want to get hung up on sort of the like,

Starting point is 01:15:07 almost like the pretension of saying, I want to see this in the theater. But I did. I just, I wasn't quite willing at that point to surrender to the idea of making it only for a streaming presentation. You know, like they did with Roma. I've done it in a heartbeat, you know? Like, and I think it's, I'm not one of the ones

Starting point is 01:15:24 who's negative on, um, the way they're approaching this stuff. I think it's really, I think there's a lot of really, really, um, new and diverse voices are getting a platform to tell stories because of their model, you know? Um, so I, but it was a timing thing and I i felt very low about it at times yeah very very um not defeated but just very discouraged and thought that it might be one of those things i just i just had to sort of um sigh and make a big pivot on or let go of and then um a a you know a weird set of things

Starting point is 01:16:13 started becoming emergent to me post 2016 toby emmerich became head of warner and he said to me like look i'm not going to have this job and not make a couple movies I really want to make. And it's Warner Brothers, and we've got to make those movies. That's part of our tradition, and yours is one of the ones I want to get done. And I'm going to figure out the absolute best deal I can give you to get it done, and you're going to have to find some of the money or a lot of the money, but we're going to, I will create a way that we can get this done. Um, which is amazing.

Starting point is 01:16:51 That is amazing. No, no, no. His, his, there's a lot of people who have that job who don't have, who don't say now that I've got this job,

Starting point is 01:17:03 I'm not going to tighten up. You know what I mean? I'm not going to tighten up you know what I mean I'm not going to play to be here forever I'm just I'm gonna I'm gonna use the position to do some of the things that made me want to get into this in the first place and he did immediately he did with Bradley Cooper on Star is Born um and he did it with me you know he was like I'm he literally said like part of the tradition at Warner Brothers is we make, like, you know, auteur-driven stuff. And all Clint Eastwood's films were done there. And they made Ellie Confidential.

Starting point is 01:17:30 And, you know, and so that was a shift. And then also I got Bruce Willis stepped in and stepped up for the movie. And that made a difference and um i found i called in a lot of chips and figured out some very clever ways to pull together the co-financing alongside warner brothers that we needed and and suddenly started to tumble um i have to yeah go ahead go ahead yeah i have a follow-up question other thing was that was that post-2016, you've seen the film, and even though I had written it essentially the way it is by 2012, there was a lot about what changed after 2016 that suddenly,

Starting point is 01:18:17 you know, Toby was ringing me up and saying, man, a lot of what is embedded in this script is, is staggeringly on point right now in a way that it was not in 2014. And, and I think that maybe that was part of why when I was giving it to all these terrific actors and saying, I don't have any money for this. I have to have everybody like, you know,

Starting point is 01:18:43 defer fees and just work for love of the project. But it felt toothy to people. It felt like of its moment more than it had a few years before. And I think it exerted more of a gravitational pull on this incredible cast of actors. And that helped me get it made too. You have an incredibly star-studded cast you have in front of the camera you also have i did a fair amount of research prior to our conversation you also have a lot of talent behind the cameras and working on the film and other capacities who are

Starting point is 01:19:21 involved you talked about deferring fees or having actors willing to defer payment in some fashion you used i think the phrase creative co-financing or found creative ways to co-finance something along those lines feel free to not answer if if that's the best move but could you give even a hint as to what that means what because uh um you can never um you really can't hedge off the risk of an individual film um the only way you can do that is if like the way that steven soderbergh and um and channing tatum really brilliantly with magic mike realized like we can make this film for like under six million bucks and we can pre-sell the foreign um for more than the budget um and then we can own it you know what I mean so

Starting point is 01:20:14 like we can we can start shooting the film knowing that we're in the black on it and therefore literally finance it ourselves and own it that you can you can hedge off you can literally de-risk a film if you can make it for less than what you can pre-sell the foreign on that's the only way to to literally hedge off all risk on a single film right um which is why like most co-financing companies are the ones with big bank roles like legendary that can do big slate financing with the studio because you're you're essentially playing the portfolio right um and historically studio returns have delivered a return like a positive return right so if you're going to people and saying hey we put some money in my film

Starting point is 01:21:04 you can talk till you're blue in the face about why it's going to work. But the bottom line is the numbers don't lie. You're taking just a massive singular risk if you invest in one film, right? I did a deal with some of my co-financers around, basically, I had access to the secondary trading on a company, a technology company that I was an original investor in and strategic advisor to. And I had a fund, a little boutique fund that was doing secondary trading in that company. And I basically set up a situation where some of the investors in my film had been looking at acquiring that company through their private equity firm, and they couldn't. But I was able to essentially do a deal with where they could be um my lp is in by um by a stake uh through secondary a secondary deal in this company that they were very interested

Starting point is 01:22:17 in and we all felt that the we all felt that the the likely returns on that were such a sure thing that they considered it. I basically told them, I'll get you access to this deal if you'll finance my film too. And so I set up like a pair trade. I set up sort of like a pair trade on my film and a position in this company. This is also a great example of where swapping cartridges in the video game that is the timeline

Starting point is 01:22:55 of your multifaceted career paid off in a really tangible way, right? Because you've been exercising other interests and developing other capabilities and knowledge in a seemingly completely unrelated sector that then allowed you, in some ways, to get done a project in what many people view as your primary career over a period of 20 years to finally get it done. That's remarkable

Starting point is 01:23:25 no there's no there's no question that my kind of parallel life outside of my creative filmmaking life um this whole other dimension of my professional life that is, you know, just not a public facing component of my life. Um, 100% the, that, that ended up, um, unlocking the way to, to get this passion project done. There no no doubt about it yeah wow and i i think i can say um that no film no film has ever been financed off of the specific type of deal that we did for this one it was um and i and i don't and i will never it's not replicable either for me it it was a very very very unique situation um and i uh i um i wouldn't even want to go through the headache of trying to replicate what we did on this because i think it was a little bit like alex honnold i felt like i was i felt like i was going up a pitch without a rope and that if I didn't get each and every handhold perfect, it was going to be a complete and utter, you know, it was going to be a complete fail. Like, like it was sort of like, I was either going to get to the top or the whole thing was going to crash and burn completely.

Starting point is 01:25:16 There was no, there really was not, um, yeah, there really wasn't an in-between. It was like, it was like, and the bet paid off in every way. And, um, and the beautiful thing about it was actually in a funny way the the alliances i formed with people to get this done are are thick now you know that's like i really feel i really feel like a deep kind of alliance with the people who helped me achieve this long-held dream. And I've been able to reciprocate. There have been ripple effects to finally getting it done that were as meaningful as the thing itself, which is great. How cool.

Starting point is 01:26:00 The tour of duty that was put in to get it made is no joke. And you mentioned theatrical run and putting the film into theaters. And I could make an argument, and I texted you this right after I saw the film, that even if the projector ceased to work and one were only able to listen to the movie through a proper sound system, like some of the sound systems in theaters, that it would be worth much more than the cost of admission. Could you speak to the soundtrack and the music and anything that you think makes it noteworthy? Because I am not an audiophile. I'm not a musician. I, let's just call it, dozen films I've seen in theaters. Why is that? in many films is approached as what I would call an emotional accelerator or just an emotional enhancement of what is already

Starting point is 01:27:35 taking place within the text. So the moment is obviously dramatic and the music reflects that drama. It's violent and the music reflects the violence. It's sad and the music reflects the sadness, right? And sometimes you get what I would call a very reductive kind of mirroring effect. And what that does, I think, is it makes the music become a pad of embellishment underneath the other aspects of the film as opposed to like a unique a unique element in its own right that is almost taking on a primary role in communicating emotion or character or narrative or whatever, right?

Starting point is 01:28:25 And I think a lot of my favorite films have, I think, not even mine, everybody's favorite films usually have music that's more transcendent than that. And I don't mean transcendent. Literally, that transcends the text. It's not solely there as kind of a subtle embellishment. It's kind of more boldly used as its own primary piece of the experience, of the hypnosis that the film's working on you. And I, you know, jazz was going to be a part of this film because of the era.

Starting point is 01:29:08 It was also, to me, if there's a kind of music that's teretic, it's jazz in the era of pop. It's true. It's completely a teretic type of music, not just in its sort of explosive sort of, but because literally it's about taking melodic forms and twisting them round and round and round and doing variations on a melody, variations on a melody, variations on a melody.

Starting point is 01:29:39 And so I knew I wanted that a little bit. And once, and on the jazz component of it, I went initially to basically a genius, Wynton Marsalis, who helped me curate and think through some of the key music that was being played in a club in the film. But I also wanted to weave in, honestly, I don't know why I was so into mashups on this, mashups of sort of like, you know, a theoretic character with a old-fashioned noir. I wanted to mash up sort of jazz with Radiohead, in a way, the things I love. And I got Tom York to write a beautiful song for the film that we work into the film, not only in his performance of it, but also in a 50s-style Miles Davis-like arrangement of it. And again, it was one of those things that a lot of people kind of looked at me a little bit cross-eyed they were like this you can't you know it's going to be it's it's going

Starting point is 01:30:52 to feel weird to bring his voicing into a film in that era or to try to bring a modernist sensibility of of dissonance and electronic kind of components into a jazz score. But I didn't think that was true because I knew that Tom really has an appreciation of jazz, especially like Charles Mingus and other jazz artists who explored the kind of dissonance that I think Tom has explored in his own music on records like Kid A and Amnesiac and his own solo stuff. And I knew there was more synergy than people were recognizing on paper. And I thought, we can do something really interesting mashing these things up. And we did and i think this this trifecta of tom and winton marcellus and this incredible incredible young composer in london named daniel pemberton and everybody's

Starting point is 01:31:52 been reacting to it and i i agree with you that um i've been working on this for like a number of years and i am still not tired of listening to the music on the film. I have the soundtrack. Actually, the soundtrack just came out this past Friday. We released the soundtrack and the score last week on the streaming services. Smart. Very smart. You can listen to them

Starting point is 01:32:19 without having seen a frame of the film, and it is really, really beautiful stuff. Really beautiful stuff. Kudos for the dance scene as well. We don't have to give any spoilers, but what a fantastic, fantastic scene. People who watch it will know what I'm referring to. And I want to hop to a reference to, I dare call it a review, but I don't think review is quite the right word. So I've had Ken Burns on this podcast. He's one of the, for people who don't recognize the names,

Starting point is 01:32:55 or the name, one of the most legendary, if not the most legendary, well-respected documentarian of ever possibly in the United States. I mean, just a prolific, prodigious talent. And he wrote a piece... Yeah, I mean, I would say he bent the genre. I'd say he redefined the genre. I think there was never long-form... You could even argue that the whole the whole embrace of long-form storytelling that's now ubiquitous on net what we call binge tv watching started with the civil war you know what i mean ken's film the civil war was the most audacious long-form film in american history at that time. And, and he basically said,

Starting point is 01:33:48 he was one of the first people to say, people will not only sit for this, they will devour it. They want rich, nuanced, long stories about these seminal events in our history that are still defining who we are. And he reinvigorated, reshaped the entire form of not just documentary, but I literally think of filmed storytelling. He did. He has, and I'll probably get some of these numbers wrong, but since we're just doing a quick deep dive on Ken, there are film effects named after Ken Burns, mostly related to his treatment of still photographs,

Starting point is 01:34:31 embedded within and named after him in some of those popular software programs currently being used. And the Civil War, one must keep in mind, was on broadcast television. And it was somewhere between 14 and 20 hours of total content. And at the time, I want to say within a year or so, between 30 and 40 million people had watched the Civil War. I mean, and if you just let that sink in for a second,

Starting point is 01:35:01 considering that it's appointment viewing, I mean, it's absolutely incredible. So he writes this piece on Medium, which I only very recently read, and I'm going to read the last paragraph. I mean, it's absolutely worth reading, and I'll link to it in the show notes for people at tim.blog forward slash podcast, and you can find Edward, just search Norton or Edward Norton, and then we'll have a link to this. But the last paragraph is one that really strikes me. So, if a lonely orphan burdened by society's heartless response to his Tourette syndrome can rise above his daily struggles and battle against jaded masters of the universe types, then what excuse do the rest of us have for our own apathy? Motherless Brooklyn answers with a resounding

Starting point is 01:35:45 none! That's a hell of an ending to a hell of a piece about the film, about you, about society also. We could talk about that, but the question I'd love to hear your thoughts on eventually is, what would you hope this film to do what a what effect if any do you want it to have on people or uh the the sort of larger larger picture if any just i'm curious what what you'd like the impact to be on individuals who watch it or otherwise um well i think to stick with ken for i mean ken's ken's affirmation of the film was just like it was about as meaningful uh a compliment as i've ever gotten um on my own work it it's like he's he's he's one of the druids in in my you know in my matrix of people who have really mattered in filmmaking.

Starting point is 01:36:51 He's one of the giants. And he also, in particular, he has clearly got this unparalleled commitment to dissecting kind of the American character. You know, he, he, he really, he's committed his whole creative career to the, to trying to understand who we are through the past. And, and it's, I, I can't, you know, I, I can't overstate my admiration for the work he's done. So it's, it's to have him kind of actually take the time to write this piece that he wrote about the film was, you know, I had tears in my eyes when I read it the

Starting point is 01:37:31 first time. I'll just pause for a quick second. I'm sorry, because people may not realize just how effusive and direct his commentary is in this piece. I've never seen anything like it. So I'll just give one more quote, which is dot, dot, dot. So I'm not going to read the entire paragraph, but an instantly classic lead character in a career best performance by one of our finest actors, scene after scene of memorably smart and funny dialogue delivered by a brilliant ensemble cast, gripping action with a gorgeous jazz score that's the best I've heard in years. It's nothing less than a modern masterpiece. I mean, how did you, I know you just said it,

Starting point is 01:38:11 it could bring a tear to your eye, but how did you feel after 20 years of hoping to make this to read something like that from none other than the legendary Ken Burns? I mean, what happened? Were you dumbstruck? Were you? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:38:30 I mean, it's a funny thing. When you finish a thing, you go through these, you start to sort of amass data points on how is it actually landing, you know, and you show it to people you respect and you show it to some friends and you, you know, you, you,

Starting point is 01:38:55 I was starting to get a, a happy sense of slow, you know, confidence that it, that it was working as a film, that it, that it was doing what I wanted it to do. Um, and that people were with at least engaged with the character in some measure of the way that I, that I had been engaged with him. Right. I, I think my first, my very, my very very very very first thing that I

Starting point is 01:39:25 really was holding my breath on was in a way did I do Lionel justice you know did I do Lethams great character a basic honorable you know reinterpretation and that that seemed to me to be working uh and jonathan i was very very nervous showing the film to jonathan and when he was really exuberant about it that that set me into what i'd call um a kind of happy relief um and but i think that what ken what Ken gets at that's – gets at a deeper level of satisfaction is that he – it's more what you read in the beginning. At a certain point, you kind of – there's the hope that you can craft something in a way that works a kind of magic on people just as a piece of cinema, whatever. I think the things that have meant the most to me as an audience member were things that had a transparency to them where you could feel, you felt like it was really hitting the nerve of your own experience or even better,

Starting point is 01:40:46 the collective experience, you know? So for me, like do the Spike Lee's do the right thing had a, had a seismic impact on me. It was this guy writing and directing and starring in his own film about his own neighborhood. Um,

Starting point is 01:41:03 and it was wildly entertaining. It was visually original and dynamic. And then it, but then it was about America. It was, it was about the toughest, thorniest questions about like race and, and how we deal with each other and what's the correct response to the tensions that we feel about living all together and it was just so so rich sophisticated and most importantly it it put it so squarely in the audience's lap it didn't give a cheap homily at the end it didn't give a cheap redemptive reassurance in the end it it basically like insisted that you deal with with the question yourself you know and i think a lot of us it changed almost like the aspirational goal for what you're going for, what you can do with a movie. And on some level, the thing I've had the most ambition to do

Starting point is 01:42:14 is find things that in some way or another instigate that same kind of like um activation you know in we get so much stuff that's essentially engineered to make us passive like there's just so much in the culture that literally wants us to be a passive recipient of downloaded um cheap nutrition mostly i think um trying to put us in a mode where we're inclined to buy shit. You know what I mean? I think that, and I think the stuff that activates people, the stuff that really gets them engaged is rare. And it's really cool when you feel it, when you have that sensation that reminds you like that you can get actually provoked emotionally or provoked ethically or provoked in terms as a citizen, you know, it's, that's pretty cool.

Starting point is 01:43:16 And I think it doesn't mean that it's gotta be, um, you know, um, academic or intellectual or that, that it's going to be, be, I don't know what the right word is, a screed or a, it can be art. I mean, it's like Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan doesn't explain to you, he refused to explain to you what a lot of what he did was about. But you knew, you know, you knew, you know, people in his generation, they knew what he was writing about. but you knew, you know, you knew, you know, you people in his generation, they knew what he was writing about and they knew what he was getting at and he didn't have to say it. And it galvanized people, you know, it really galvanized people to, to participate, um, in, in their generations and, um, causes and all of it. And I think in some measure, that's the highest aspiration.

Starting point is 01:44:06 It's the, if you can get people to think about their own participation in the world around them, that's pretty fantastic. I think you nailed it, man. I sent you a message right after walking out of the theater. I saw it here in Austin at the Violet Crown. Really nice, small theater, fantastic sound, good luminosity, which is a whole separate conversation, but they project properly. And it really does, it brings up a lot and it communicates a lot without doing it in a heavy handed, two on the nose,, prescriptive way. And it, as you said, doesn't offer neat, pithy, unrealistic, simple solutions to complex situations. But in not doing that, in presenting the story and the characters and the universal struggles and challenges and desires

Starting point is 01:45:07 in a very artful, powerful way, I think does a much greater service. It's a fun watch, but it's also a meaningful watch. And that's really hard to do. Thanks. I mean, it's funny. There's the poet Rilke, I love his poetry and his work, but there's that famous collection of letters that he wrote to a young poet. There's a bit in it that I think about a lot where he kind of says 10 years is nothing to an artist. Gestation is everything. And it's kind of one of those things that you put over your desk when you're in college, you know, and you, because it just sounds, it sounds, it's sexy to think that you know what it means in a weird way.

Starting point is 01:45:58 Do you know what I mean? I totally do. You're sort of, it's the kind of you look, I latched onto when I was young because I, you know, you imagine yourself with that, the romantic struggle of it, but then the reality of it is it's not so pleasant sometimes on this affected what I wanted to say and my capacity to even understand what I wanted to say a lot. I think if I had been able to make this in 2003, a whole bunch of things wouldn't have happened. I think I would have at that time in my life sort of had more romance for the idea of like the cynicism that's in the genre right i think i might have embraced in an almost like showy way that i could be as dark and cynical as any noir movie before you know um at my age the phase of life I'm in with what I see going on in the country now, I really felt differently by the time I made this film. I did not want Faye Dunaway to end up with

Starting point is 01:47:15 a bullet in the eye and the detective saying, do as little as possible, because I think that is not what this country needs right now. And I am not super keen on things that are artistically rich, but ultimately really nihilistic. I don't think we need nihilism walking into classrooms with AR-15s and blowing kids away way, way, way too often to be casually putting a sexy stamp on the idea of nihilism. And I wouldn't have felt that strongly about that if I had made this 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago, you know, so it would have changed that what Ken wrote, what Ken wrote about this and, and the sort of propulsive, you know, message of it, or I wouldn't have been, I wouldn't have been the person, you know, trying to put that message across if I'd made this before. And, um, and I, and so I'm glad in a way, like I'm, I'm, I really am genuinely glad that it took a long time because I think I feel more, um, spiritually determined that, that it goes in the direction it goes in at the end, instead of, um, into what I'd call

Starting point is 01:48:38 like something that's sexy. It's funny. Cause Fight Club, some people will say Fight Club is nihilistic and a lot of people say that, but I never felt that about that movie. I always felt one of the things I liked about it was that Fincher, for all his crusty exterior, that's very much about what we're talking about. I think it's about a person who goes into a romance with a nihilistic thing but absolutely comes out of it you know like absolutely recognizes the destructive the destructive freight train that he's set in motion and moves to derail it and moves to grab hands with a woman and and say like no to that and and yes to linking up with another human being and and and making a connection. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:49:26 And I think the, the violence in that film is to, to reduce the film's message to the exploration of the nihilism is a pretty weak sauce read of it. In my view. I think the, I think the, the message of evolution and growth in it is there

Starting point is 01:49:47 um and i i kind of feel that way about this i i think that this making motherless brooklyn now um it's it's gotten more of what i'd want to say as a father even in it than then i then i would have been capable of earlier. I also couldn't have made this movie with the budget that I had and on the schedule that I had to make it. If I hadn't worked with Spike Lee and Wes Anderson and Alejandro Iñárritu, I wouldn't have had the chops to do it. Those guys made me realize how much you can within limitations. And I think marinating in their work with them

Starting point is 01:50:30 had a really, really big impact on my capacity to do this logistically. Well, I've said it before, I'll say it again. Kudos to you, man. It's a great film. And I wholeheartedly urge everyone to check it out and i do not take saying that lightly because i recognize one careless recommendation and people are like fuck that tim ferris so uh really really interesting in talking about personal self-transformation as an artistic benchmark we don't trust him ever again yeah exactly yeah yeah yep exactly right but i do feel comfortable recommending this it's great and uh see it in the theater uh that that's definitely a recommendation

Starting point is 01:51:18 it'll be great when it comes out on other platforms but it it's it's really one of those films you want to see in a proper environment. And we have been talking for a while. I know you're a busy man these days. And I think this is a good place to wrap up. But people can say hello on Twitter at Edward Norton, Instagram, Edward Norton official, Facebook official Edward Norton. I'll link to all these in the show notes. Everything we talked about, I'll link to in the show notes per usual at tim.blog forward slash podcast. But Edward, is there anything else you'd like to say? Any parting comments, suggestions, anything else that I'm missing? No, it was interesting to talk through this like that.

Starting point is 01:52:01 Because it's one of the things i dig about your show i think you as you know i and as everybody knows you hack the um you hack the process you know better than anybody and i think um i think that uh i've been talking about i've been talking about the thing itself in sort of reductive ways that are necessary when you become a cog in the marketing machinery around your own project. But I do think it's very interesting to actually think back through the process of a thing with actual consideration because the truth is like, it's amazing how much you tell yourself. You start to discount phases of it. You know what I mean? Like it's amazing how much the, maybe this is why, like, the mind also, like, eliminates the pain of a workout, you know what I mean?

Starting point is 01:52:48 It's like you, if you remembered pain viscerally, you might not ever do anything again, you know what I mean? But you, it's funny, isn't it, that the function of the head has a tendency to, I don't know, focus on the positive in some measure. Oh, for sure. Yeah, the selective remembrance. Yeah, the selective remembrance. And it starts to turn things into a story. And I must say, you know what I think I would say as a wrap-up on it is,

Starting point is 01:53:20 when I was thinking about doing this, I talked to Warren Beatty one time about Making Reds, which is his own incredible, you know, three-hour-long movie about American socialists. And it's one of the really great films of that whole decade about America and about the American character. And it's also emotional. It's about relationships and all these things. It's a masterwork um and he told me it was he told me that everyone told him that that he was going to flush all his chips on that bet and that um no one wanted to see a three-hour movie about socialists with documentary footage from people who actually lived through the era you know and and he he just

Starting point is 01:54:02 went and did it anyway and the thing is that when you grow up on the film, and then you see it got nominated for awards, and it's affirmed and everything, you sort of, you discount the fact that, in truth, for him, it was a very, very, very out-on-a-limb experience, and probably felt very half-baked a lot of the time. And I think it's good for people. It's good for people at any phase of life. Certainly, I think it's good for young people to hear people who get a thing done say, like, it doesn't feel good at many phases along the way. It feels entirely half-baked. You feel entirely behind the eight ball and discouraged. And this is an intrinsic part of, it's an intrinsic part of it. It isn't all fun. Even when you're like already, like you were

Starting point is 01:54:52 saying, you're like, well, but you've had success in this thing. This should be easier. It doesn't get easier. It's anything that's worth, thing that's got any actual merit in it is going to be hard. And the hard part isn't romantic. But it's hard. You know what I mean? It's romantic later. It's romantic later. When you selectively remember it. Yeah, it's romantic later. But it really doesn't feel good along the way. And I think sometimes it's nice to be reminded that it's been hard for other people when they were getting things done that you admired because it maybe gives you that extra

Starting point is 01:55:31 little bit of determination or patience to persevere a little more. Absolutely. And when in doubt, find a friend like Toby Emmerich to call you up and threaten to give it to somebody else. I think people, your tribe, the people you trust, like sounding boards, it's like nobody gets anything like this done alone. It's almost like when in the back of your book, you see an author, they thank things in its names. But when you look at it as a block and you realize what that really is, it's just that's like a tribe, you know what I mean, around an author. What's more solitary than writing a book, right?

Starting point is 01:56:17 But you look at the network that's around an author and it makes them feel compelled to say, I could not have gotten this done without these people. There's not many things that are truly done in solitude. Agreed. And a lot of things worth doing not in solitude also to have companions on the path. And I could not be happier for you. And it means a lot to have you back on. Hope we get a chance to hang again soon.

Starting point is 01:56:48 And thanks so much for the time. Thanks for another great conversation. For sure. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend?

Starting point is 01:57:11 And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Super Fat Nut Butters. I've got two boxes of them actually

Starting point is 01:58:01 sitting within 15 feet of me in a cabinet. These little beauties are great. I've been using them as quick mini breakfasts. That's one use. And as on-the-go fuel for a few months now. I was pretty slammed this afternoon. I had a Wi-Fi debacle and I was preparing to record a podcast. So I didn't have time to make something to eat or buy something to eat. But these saved my ass.

Starting point is 01:58:24 That's a great use case. They're 200 to 300 calories each, depending on which ingredient cocktail you eat, because there are a bunch of different types. MCT, meaning medium chain triglycerides, protein, macadamia, caffeine, et cetera. Three to five grams of net carbs per pouch. They're keto and paleo friendly, and they are really easy to transport. You can throw them in a backpack or a pocket. I love these things. The first time I tried super fat, however, before warrant, I finished the entire box in maybe two or three days. So watch your portion control and pro tip, the way you eat them, you have to unscrew the top and you get about 90% out of it that way. And then you tear

Starting point is 01:59:00 the pouch, tear it diagonally, not straight across, and that'll get you the last 10% or so. I suggest ordering the variety box. You can try that way all five SuperFat flavors in one box, and you'll get two pouches of each flavor that way. You can also get 15% off your order by going to superfat.com slash Tim. That's superfat.com slash Tim for 15% off. When you go to one more time, superfat.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Zapier, new sponsor, but not new to me as a service. We'll get to my personal story. But if you run your own business, think about all of the hours and hours you spend moving information from one software program to another, or one window to another, one social media platform to another, copy and pasting, blah, blah, blah, all because those things don't easily work together. They're not connected. With Zapier, now they do automatically.

Starting point is 02:00:01 My team and I have been using Zapier for years, which helps us with tons of stuff, such as just to take one example, connecting Facebook ad campaigns to our email platform. And you could also, as I do, automate publishing things that you put on Instagram to other social media platforms, saving us hundreds of hours. My team has also raved about Zapier support. This is super important to me, which in their words, quote, is in a class of its own, end quote. And that is not paid placement. We test all of these things and have used Zapier as full paying retail customers. That is not because we got any type of freebie. So there are tons of examples. Now, why are there tons of examples? There are tons of examples because Zapier supports more than

Starting point is 02:00:51 1500 business applications and the possibilities are virtually endless for automating processes, for getting shit done. And you may know if you read the four hour workweek, the third step is automation. In other words, not adding headcount to a messy process to fix problems, but automating as much as possible. You want to eliminate, then automate, and only then delegate. And Zapier is one of the best automating softwares, if you can use the plural, one of the best pieces of automation software I've ever come across.

Starting point is 02:01:26 It is the easiest way to automate a ton of your work. So check it out. If you want to try it out or just learn more, go to zapier.com slash Tim. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash Tim. Connect the apps you use the most and let Zapier take it from there. You can do a million things. I'll give one more example. You could, for instance, instantly engage with leads for your business, send them to a CRM or spreadsheet, and then notify your team so they can act fast on every opportunity. And here's the really beautiful part and perhaps the gem to really highlight. It's easy to build an exact solution that you need in minutes without writing code or asking a developer for help. So as a non-technical person, you can piece these different programs together in a way that is customized for your needs and your business and

Starting point is 02:02:20 what is important to you so you can get the hell back to focusing on the stuff that you're good at. Okay, so that's it. Join more than four and a half million people who are saving an average of 40 hours per month by using Zapier now and for a limited time for my listeners. Try Zapier for free by going to our special link, zapier.com slash Tim. That's Z-A-P-I-E-ier.com slash Tim that's Z A P I E R.com slash Tim for your free 14 day trial. I use this program all the time. My team uses this program all the time. zapier.com slash Tim. Hey, just one thing, Tim. This is Michael from Zapier. It's pronounced Zapier, like happier. So that's zapier.com slash Tim.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #393: Edward Norton — On Creative Process, Creative Struggle, and Motherless Brooklyn

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.