The Tim Ferriss Show - #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect”

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Starting point is 00:04:49 living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Michael Schur, depending on who you ask, on Twitter, at Ken Tremendous. We're going to ask about that. Mike, Michael, created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy, The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the Peacock series, Rutherford Falls. He's also

Starting point is 00:05:26 an executive producer on HBO Max's Hacks and Netflix's Master of None. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy award-winning NBC hit The Office. His first TV writing job was at Saturday Night Live, where he spent seven seasons, including three as the producer of Weekend Update with Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon. His new book is How to Be Perfect, subtitle, The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Michael, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I'm very excited to be here. I thought we would start with something we chatted about just a little bit before pressing record, and that is the Harvard Lampoon. I have this fascination with the Harvard Lampoon,

Starting point is 00:06:08 and I would just love to perhaps offer you the mic to introduce the Harvard Lampoon to people and also describe how you entered the fray, how you actually became part of the Harvard Lampoon. The Lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in, I think, 1876. And it is this weird satirical comedy magazine that has just been kind of plugging along for now almost 150 years. And there's a couple interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving. William Randolph Hearst was in The Lampoon, and so was John Updike, and so was George Plimpton, and a million comedy writers from the 80s to the present who have written for Letterman and The Simpsons and SNL and all

Starting point is 00:07:02 these shows. Conan O'Brien was the president of the Harvard Lampoon twice, which is a very rare thing. So it's just this kind of weird little humor outlet that people who are obsessed with comedy kind of learn about at an early age. I learned about it from just noticing that it kept popping up when you would see certain movies that you thought were funny. Or like Doug Kenney wrote Animal House, and he was on The Lampoon. And Jim Downey, who was a legendary comedy writer at Letterman, I think he was Letterman's first head writer, and wrote so many of your favorite SNL sketches throughout history, he was on The Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college, that was on my essay for Harvard, was I want to come here because I want to join the Lampoon.

Starting point is 00:07:49 So when I got there, that was goal number one for me, was joining it. And there's an audition process. You have to write material. And then the pool of people gets winnowed down. And then they accept a few writers every semester. I have to imagine by the time you got there, certainly it was thought of almost as a feeder into these careers in comedy. And therefore, there had to be quite a wide funnel in terms of people interested in becoming part of the Lampoon. They can't accept everyone. What did

Starting point is 00:08:21 the audition process look like? What constituted the audition process? The Lampoon is a pure, to the extent that it could be, was a pure meritocracy. There were artists, writers, and there were business people who sold ads. And if you were trying to get on as a business person, it was like, did you sell enough ads? If you did, you got on. If you didn't, you didn't. If you were an artist, you drew a bunch of pieces, you were critiqued and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff, then they voted on who their favorite artists were. And same with writing,

Starting point is 00:08:54 you wrote three pieces, comedy pieces of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down from the total number of people trying to get on to half that and then half again. And then they would bring six to eight people to the election and then vote however many that they wanted, they would vote on. This was part of the sales pitch was that it was a meritocracy. So I decided to kind of test that theory because I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces the first time I tried out. I submitted anonymously to the extent I could. I only wrote my first and second initials. So they didn't know whether I was male or female. They didn't know really who I was at all. And I got admitted to, I made it past the first cut

Starting point is 00:09:36 and they have like a cocktail party for people who make it past the cuts. And I showed up and they were like, oh, you're that guy. Welcome. Congratulations. And I was like, wow, they really, it really was anonymous. Like they didn't know who I was. They didn't care. They just were like, are these things funny or are they not funny? So then you did that again. You said in three more pieces, you had got notes, there was another round of cuts and then there were elections and you just waited in your room for the full day, not having any idea what was going on. And then they would show up and say yes or no. And if the answer is yes, and then you got brought into this week-long semi, not really hazing, it's kind of a parody of a frat hazing week. But you spend a week getting

Starting point is 00:10:17 indoctrinated into the world of the lampoon, and then you're a member and everything is great. The writing pieces, and this is rewinding the clock, so I recognize that this is asking a lot, but do you have any recollection with that paradox of choice situation where the topics are up to you, how you chose what you would write about? Are there any constraints, like 500 words or less,

Starting point is 00:10:44 1,000 words or less? Is there? There were. I wish I remembered. They put a page limit on them because it's prose comedy. It's a kind of comedy writing that isn't done that much anymore.

Starting point is 00:10:54 The closest analog that people might be familiar with is something like the Shouts and Murmurs page in The New Yorker. A lot of Lampoon people have gone on to write Shouts and Murmurs pieces

Starting point is 00:11:02 for The New Yorker. Prose comedy used to be much more common. Magazines used to have humor. P.J. O'Rourke wrote humor for Rolling Stone, and people would write humorous pieces for the New Yorker or for any number of different magazines. It doesn't really exist anymore, like many things involving print media. But the only one I remember offhand is I wrote a piece speaking of the New Yorker. The premise was it was like a series of increasingly angry letters being written to you by the New Yorker because you hadn't re-upped your subscription yet. Because at the time, I'd been gifted a subscription as a freshman in college by someone, probably my dad, who thought,

Starting point is 00:11:42 you're a college man now. You ought to read an intellectual magazine. And then it lapsed, and I started getting these really angry letters that were like, what's the deal? How could you have betrayed us like this? So you legitimately were getting these indignant letters from the New Yorkers. Yes. That's incredible. I was, and they kept offering me the free tote bag if you re-upped. And I remember just continuously thinking like, I don't want your damn tote bag, man. Leave me alone. So I wrote a piece that was five or six in a series of letters asking you to re-up. It just got increasingly antagonistic

Starting point is 00:12:18 and aggressive. So it was that sort of thing. And that would fit on one page. You know what I mean? That's 500 words or 600 words or something. Brevity is the soul of wit. And so if your piece was too long, they would often hack it down and tell you to make it shorter and stuff. You're not talking about 20-page long, humorous short stories. These are short little bursts. These are shouts and murmurs level bursts of humor. I'm sure somewhere in a box, somewhere in my house is my original pieces that I submitted, but at least from my memory, they're long gone. You know, I was just going to say that that is one of the great things about comedy as a discipline

Starting point is 00:12:58 is that, you know, standups will tell you that the reason they like being standups frequently is because there's a vote. You write a joke and you perform it and the audience votes immediately whether or not that joke is funny. And it's not quite as immediate in TV or movies or some other forms of comedy, but there is a sense of you don't know whether you have gotten it right. And then you get a reaction from people that's visceral, that says you're on the right path or you're not, or you kind of are, but you could spruce it up a little bit. That's what made Saturday Night Live so great. We would do a dress rehearsal at eight on Saturdays and there would be a live audience and you'd run the sketch and then some jokes

Starting point is 00:13:40 would work and some wouldn't. And then it would end at 10. And the show goes live at 1130. This thing would occur to you, which is I could either leave it alone, do nothing, and get exactly probably the same reaction that I got the first time. Or I can try to fix this. I can cut this joke that didn't work. I can try to write a better punchline. There was an immediacy to it that was weirdly comforting because sometimes you make things and months and months and months go by and then they sort of float out into the universe.

Starting point is 00:14:10 Comedy, very frequently, especially comedy for performance, it's like a Roman Colosseum. A bunch of people gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down and then it's up to you to figure out what to do next. So I really like that about comedy in general. You can certainly write jokes that don't work, that you still believe in, and you can cling to them if you want to. But you also know no one's ever going to laugh at this. And if you're okay with that, that's fine. You can leave it in your movie or your show, but you at least have the information that you were looking for very quickly. Well, let's talk about SNL for a moment. I was going to ask you about lessons learned at SNL, but there are a number of different ways I could frame the question. Another would be,

Starting point is 00:14:53 how do you think you would be different had you not had the SNL experience as a comedy writer slash producer slash fill in the blank? I'm just curious because I think I have read somewhere, and I'm paraphr because I think I have read somewhere, and I'm paraphrasing here, that you think everyone or any comedy writer should do a tour of duty, if possible, at SNL for a period of time. I'm sure a lot more people would like to than can. But what were some of the lessons learned, for lack of a better way to phrase it? So many. I do believe that, by the way. I think that if everyone who worked in Hollywood had to work for one year at SNL, in general, things would be a lot better.

Starting point is 00:15:31 So from a creative standpoint, the thing that SNL teaches you is to not be precious with your own material. You generally have about four minutes to do whatever you're going to do. With rare exceptions, you're talking about four minutes. do whatever you're going to do. With rare exceptions, you're talking about four minutes. And so you write a sketch and it's five minutes and 38 seconds long. And you go in with a red pen and you just make giant X's under script, like cut this, cut this, cut this, this didn't work, change this. And after doing that every week for seven years, there's almost no joke or piece of writing that I could put into a script that I would think that cannot be cut. It just trains you to say anything can be cut. And if it improves what you're doing, then cut it. And I think that's a really hard lesson for some people to learn, especially when,

Starting point is 00:16:26 depending on where people come from, what their backgrounds are, if you grow up in a system, I mean creatively grow up in a system that doesn't train you not to be precious with your own material, and then you achieve any kind of success, you are almost always way too precious about your material because you have this sort of personal belief that you did this alone, you figured it out, you cracked the code, and how dare anybody tell me to cut this or cut that, or how dare these executives think that this is too long. And as a result, you can look around right now on your streaming service of choice, and you can find a lot of shows and movies where you think to yourself, that was about 25 minutes too long. I liked it. It was good, but man, why was that so long? And the answer is almost always like they just didn't

Starting point is 00:17:19 get tough enough on their own material. So SNL is just ruthless about that. SNL is like a, Lorne Michaels has many aphorisms that he likes to dole out to you as you sit at his feet and he dispenses his wisdom. But one of the things he has been saying for, I think, about 50 years is, the show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's 1130 on Saturday night. And that ethos is, it sort of permeates everything and it reinforces this idea that you work on it and work on it and work on it until it's done and then you're done. But the level of success you have with any individual sketch is a little bit up to whether or not, it's based on whether or not you are tough enough on your own material. So that's a great lesson. That's a really, really wonderful lesson for a writer of any kind to

Starting point is 00:18:09 learn. Another thing it teaches you, and by the way, I should note, if you meet and work with anyone who went through the SNL gauntlet of fire, everybody has that same sort of attitude toward their own material. So when you're talking about an actor like Andy Samberg, so my friend Dan Gorn had created Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Andy Samberg, we got Andy Samberg to star in it. Andy Samberg was a very well-known and beloved comedian and was pretty famous on his own right, thanks to his own work. And yet, when we would show him cuts of Brooklyn episodes in the early days, he would go like, I'm bad in this scene. Cut me out of this. Cut this. Cut my joke here. It doesn't work. Cut this.

Starting point is 00:18:52 Cut this. It's a very rare star of a TV show who will say, cut my material. That's not the typical attitude for number one on the call sheet, star of the show, guy on the poster. Usually those people are like, wait, I want more, I want more, put me in this more, put my face on TV more. People who went through SNL judge comedy and material based on only is this good? Is it funny? Does it work? Is it fast? Is it quick? Is it enjoyable? That's a wonderful trait in a producer slash actor. Amy Poehler's the same exact way. So everybody who goes through this system has this sense of like, it's not about me, it's about the end product. And if the end product is made better by removing me or removing scenes

Starting point is 00:19:39 I'm in or lines that I have or jokes that I have, then remove them. We all win if this thing is better. So there are other ways you can learn those lessons. SNL is just a particularly blunt, force, trauma way to do it. It's a very intense kind of like sledgehammer to the head over and over again that kind of drills this idea into you. So I'm going to return to the end of your SNL tenure. But before we get there, I wanted to ask about, I'm not going to say the antithesis because I don't think that's totally accurate, but perhaps a contrast in styles, or at least someone who is not purely encapsulated by brevity is the soul of wit, and that is David Foster Wallace. How did, I mean, it seems like you have a longstanding fascination with

Starting point is 00:20:34 David Foster Wallace. How did that start? Why is that the case? Well, there's an extremely long-winded version of this story i'll try to i'll try to make it only this isn't morning tv so we can go as long as you want so february of 1996 i am at the end of my junior year in college and infinite just comes out and my friend rebecca says to me hey have you heard about this book everybody really likes this book we should go buy it we went to the har Harvard bookstore and we both bought a copy of the book. I read the book. I started reading it that night and I didn't stop until I was done. Something about it just altered my brain chemistry and changed the way that I thought about literature and writing and the world.

Starting point is 00:21:21 It's one of those things. Everybody has a story like this about some piece of literature, right? It just did click. I heard an audible click in my brain as I was reading it. And I was looking for a senior thesis topic for my senior year. And I went to my advisor and I said, this book literally just came out this month. And I know that you want, what I'm supposed to do is pick like a D.H. Lawrence novel or a Henry James novel or some other, or Billy Budd or something, but I just kind of want to write about this. And to his credit, he was like, sure, go ahead. It's your thesis. You write about what you want. So I ended up writing, spending an entire year then writing about the book and thinking about it in terms of like how it fit into the post-modernism canon. And around, I can't remember

Starting point is 00:22:07 now, maybe October of the following year, Wallace came, he was on a tour, and he announced that he was coming, or maybe it was that spring, I think it was that spring, he announced a book tour and he was coming to the Brattle Theater, which was in Cambridge. So I was president of the Lampoon at the time. And one of the things the Lampoon does is it gives out awards to people. And it's always sort of a joke. The Hasty Pudding is the old, famous 18th century social club at Harvard, and they give out a Man and Woman of the Year award. And it's always literally like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts or whatever. It's like the most famous people in the world, and they all come. So the Lampoon would do a parody of that and they would say,

Starting point is 00:22:47 our man of the year is Randy Macho Man Savage. So and then we would have Randy Macho Man Savage come and give him a big fancy dinner and present him with a giant trophy and whatever. So we used to have the celebrity dinners from time to time. So unilaterally, without even asking anyone else who worked at the organization,

Starting point is 00:23:05 I decided that David Foster Wallace was going to get an award from the Harvard Lampoon, which I titled, I think, Novelist of the Millennium or something. And I'm just a college junior, and I called his agent and said, hey, I'm going to level with you. We're making this up. We're just completely making this up, this award. But it's a really cool building, and it a fun group of people and he's going to be in town. And if he wants to come, we would love to host him for a dinner. So I was working on my thesis about a week later. My phone rang and I picked it up and said, hello. And the person said, hey, this is Dave Wallace. Is this Mike Shore? And it was just Wallace calling me on the phone and he wanted to know. So like my heart

Starting point is 00:23:46 is pounding. Like I, it was very surreal. And he was like, look, I, he had gone to Amherst and he knew about, he knew what the Lampoon was. He was at Amherst in the early eighties. And he said, it sounds really fun to come there, but like, I'm very sort of like press shy. And you know, I don't, I don't want a whole big hullabaloo and i was like listen man we're just making this up like we just want to have you come hang out with us if you want to come hang out with us we don't have to do any kind of public ceremony or whatever just come and hang we'll show you the building i think you'll really dig it so he did his reading we brought him back to the castle and we just had a big dinner with him with the whole staff and by then

Starting point is 00:24:23 a bunch of people on the staff had read the book and really loved it and we just had a big dinner with him with the whole staff. And by then, a bunch of people on the staff had read the book and really loved it. And we just hung out with him and he was great. And we had an amazing conversation. I have a picture on my wall, I'm staring at it right now, of me lighting a cigarette for him, which is like, if my house is burning down and I have only time to grab five objects from my house, that's one of the ones I'm grabbing. So that began a correspondence between the two of us. He was an excellent corresponder. He wrote letters to hundreds and hundreds of people. Frequently, when you would get a letter from him, it was like a half of a piece of paper that he had just torn off from a, it was like a jagged edge. And he would just scribble a note and say like, checking in, seeing how you're doing or whatever. He was at Illinois State teaching English and

Starting point is 00:25:08 we corresponded for a while and I tried to get him to come to SNL to see the show because he was obsessed with television and I thought it would be really fun for him, but he was too shy and he never made it. He eventually moved to California and taught at Pomona and we sort of lost touch. And I kept it thinking in my head because I moved to California like taught at Pomona and we sort of lost touch. And I kept it thinking in my head because I moved to California, like, oh, I should reach out to him now that I'm out here. And I never did. And then tragically, his mental health problems caught up to him and he committed suicide. And it's one of the sort of great tragedies in my own personal life that I didn't more aggressively pursue. I mean, he had a million correspondents,

Starting point is 00:25:46 I think. When you read stories about him, you'll often read a lot of people have the story of like, I wrote him a letter out of nowhere and he wrote me back and we corresponded for five years. It was a thing he did. So I don't think I'm special in any way, but I really do regret not sort of trying to rekindle our little epistolary friendship when I moved out to California. So long story, only slightly longer. At some point, I had the thought that it would be really interesting writing challenge to adapt Infinite Jest into not a movie because that's impossible and not an ongoing TV show because that's also impossible, but some kind of limited series. And this is years ago now, this is probably 12 years ago. At the time, a thing that's very commonplace now, which is a sort of like Mayor of Easttown was

Starting point is 00:26:36 like this, like a sort of six or seven hour mini series that has like a very high budget and stuff like that. That didn't really exist back then. But I tried to convince people that it would be a really good book to adapt into something like that. I had optioned the rights to it. I had gone to his estate and made my case as a guy who could be trusted with this book, which is so important to people of my generation. And they had given me the rights to it. And I sort of tried to get people interested in it. And it was sort of taking off a little bit and it looked like it might happen. And then for a number of reasons, it just kind of didn't happen. Among them that

Starting point is 00:27:16 the people who control his estate became just kind of generally wary of Hollywood for a number of reasons and kind of didn't really want there to be a lot of adaptations of his material. And I was like, well, I don't want to do anything that would ever make any of you feel uncomfortable or make you feel ill at ease. So I just sort of backed away. I let the option lapse and that was sort of the end of my involvement. But there was a brief moment in time back in 2000, I'm going to say 2008, 9, 10, somewhere around there, where I was like, I think I'm going to spend the next four years of my life trying to adapt this enormous, ridiculous book into an

Starting point is 00:27:54 eight-hour miniseries. There's this sliding doors thing where that could have been the way my professional career went. Have you ever thought or would you ever resurrect that goal to adapt in some fashion, Infinite Jest? Have you read the book? I hesitate to ask. I haven't. I'm not going to lie. I have not. I've read a bunch of his writing, mostly shorter stuff, string theory, and a lot of the shorter stories. But Infinite Jest, I was just too intimidated by the sheer magnitude. By the bulk of it? Just the bulk of it, yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:32 I won't say that I would never consider it again, because if you ask me what my favorite book is, it's probably the answer. That's probably my favorite book I've ever read. There's a problem with adapting it now, which is that the book was, so it came out in 96. He wrote it over the, call it eight years prior. And the book imagines a very near future. It's almost a little black mirror-y, if you've seen that show, where he's imagining, it takes place in, so it came out in 96 and it basically takes place from like 2000 to 2008 or so. He's projecting forward and extrapolating into what he saw going on in society and imagining the kind of slightly warped, slightly funhouse mirror version of what the

Starting point is 00:29:18 world is going to be like. Now, of course, we're 20 years past the date when he was imagining it. And so in order to do it, and in order to honor the book properly, you would sort of have to do your own version of what he did, which is look at the world now and project forward from here. And you also would have to be as good at that as he was, which is saying something. Because among other things in that book, he basically predicted FaceTime and video messaging, literally what you and I are doing right now. There's a whole section in the book about that. The president of the United States is a celebrity who is obsessed with germs and is kind of a moron who doesn't really understand the way anything works, but it doesn't matter because he's really popular. He called his shots and a lot of them kind of came true. And you'd have to be as good a sort of fictional futurist as he was in order to do a good job. And I don't know that I am or that anybody is really. So I'll never say never, but it would be even tougher to do it now than it would have been then. That's a tough assignment. Yeah, that would be very, very tough. Not impossible, but tough for the reasons that you mentioned.

Starting point is 00:30:30 As you're describing the challenge, I was thinking of Motherless Brooklyn and what Edward Norton did with that, and obviously his colleagues and everyone else did with that novel, because they had some creative challenges with respect to how the characters, although it's set in a somewhat contemporary landscape within the novel, speak like old-timey gangsters to one another. And so they had to make a lot of changes with the film adaptation, which I thought worked really, really well. But I'm way deep in the ignorance pool on this one. This is way beyond my pay grade. So let me flee the landscape of David Foster Wallace and go back to the end of SNL. How did you choose what you would do after that? And how did you

Starting point is 00:31:20 choose the timing if you chose it? I don't know. I didn't really choose it. It kind of chose me because I was dating a woman who is now my wife, who had moved to LA years before and we had been long distance. And it had gotten to the point where it was sort of like, well, if this is going to work, either I have to move to LA or she had to move to New York. And it made a lot more sense for me to move to LA because that's where all the jobs were. So I had been at SNL for, at the time I'd made the choice, I'd been there for about five and a half years. And I had this realization, which was SNL is a little bit of a, I guess you call it like a golden handcuffs kind of a situation.

Starting point is 00:32:03 Because normally when you work on a TV show, even in the best of times, you're hyper aware of the fact that this is going to end. At some point, the show will end and you will need to find a new job. SNL, unique among television shows in the last five decades, never ends. It just goes on forever. So the situation is you're working in New York, you make a very good living, you have a really cool job that anyone that you meet when they find out what you do wants to talk to you and hang out with you. And it could never end. You could just kind of do it forever. And so I had this, I basically gave my 20s to that show. I started when I just turned 22 and I worked there until I was 29. And I left in part because I realized that if I didn't

Starting point is 00:32:53 achieve escape velocity, I might just stay there forever. And that's not the worst thing in the world. You only work like half the year because you have all these weeks off and make a good living. And I bought an apartment in Manhattan when I was 25. It's kind of an amazing life, but I just had this sense that that i wanted to go really my then girlfriend now wife living 3 000 miles away the end of my 20s like all of those things kind of coalesced and i just decided okay this is going to be my last year so halfway through that year i went to la for the first time professionally and started meeting executives and taking these general meetings, which are all identical.

Starting point is 00:33:48 You're having like, it's really crazy making, like you have six identical meetings a day. You go into a room and you're meeting with the vice president of comedy at Fox. And the assistant says, would you like anything to drink? Oh, water, Diet Coke? And you say, no, thank you.

Starting point is 00:34:05 And you go in and you meet the senior vice president of comedy at Fox. And you chat amiably for 50 minutes, almost to the minute, 50 minutes long. And then you leave and you get back in your car and you drive somewhere else and you go to another waiting room. And now you're meeting with the senior vice president of comedy at 20th Century Fox. And you're like, wait, these are different places? Yes, one of them is a network and one of them is a studio. And you go into a room and the person says,

Starting point is 00:34:30 would you like a water or a Diet Coke? And you chat amiably with this new person for 50 minutes. And it just keeps going and going and going. And so, and you write samples, you write, I wrote a Curb Your Enthusiasm spec script. I think that was it actually at the time. If those people like your samples, they'll send them to the people who have new shows coming on the air or the existing shows looking for writers. And you'll go on a hundred more meetings with those people.

Starting point is 00:34:54 Well, I'm so-and-so. I wrote this pilot called Welcome to Happy. And it's a sitcom about six people who are friends and they live in Chicago. And you watch their pilot and then they go, I really loved your script. And you say, thank you so much. Your pilot's so good. And then you chat amiably for exactly 50 minutes and then you get back in your car and you drive across town to some other person. And it's this kind of like endless just a treadmill of meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. So out of that giant morass of meetings, there were a couple people who really liked my sample and had an opening. A couple of them were new shows. One of them was an existing show, but the guy who was the most interested in me was Greg Daniels, who was adapting The Office

Starting point is 00:35:39 from the British version to the American version. So I loved The Office, the British Office. I found it to be maybe the greatest comedy that had ever been made. I thought it was a work of pure genius, and I thought that the idea of adapting it for America was incredibly stupid and foolhardy and would never work in a million years. Nonetheless, I took the meeting with Greg,

Starting point is 00:36:03 and he, instead of like going to a place and having to go in here in 50 minutes and then you leave, he and I talked for about two and a half hours. He was immediately much more kind of specific and also much more interested in going in depth about many more things than anybody else had been. He wanted to know all about how I wrote my script, why I did certain things within the script. He wanted to know about... My wife had written for another show called Coupling that was an adaptation of a British sitcom that hadn't worked. He asked me a million questions about it. Why did I think it didn't work? What was it about the adaptation that fell short?

Starting point is 00:36:47 At one point in the middle of the meeting, he said, I have a bad back. Would you mind if I lay down on the floor? I said, no, go ahead. And so he just lay down on the floor in front of me. And the whole thing was just after 50 identical meetings, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, with 50 different people in every level of Hollywood, that meeting was special and interesting and weird and captivating. And I left that meeting and I sent my agent an email and it said, I don't know if that guy's going to offer me a job, but if he does, I'm going to take it because I think he's

Starting point is 00:37:22 going to teach me how to write. I just get the sense that he's like a professor and he knows how to do this. He sees the matrix code behind stories and I think he could teach me how to write. So he offered me the job and I took it and that's exactly what happened. He taught me that absolutely in a collegiate professorial kind of a way, how to write stories, what makes them good, what makes them bad, what makes character work good or bad,

Starting point is 00:37:50 plot and motivation and character, all the stuff that you need. He taught a class. He taught a PhD level class and I soaked it all up and it's the greatest stroke of good fortune that's ever befallen me, I would say, is falling into Greg Daniels' world. That's why LinkedIn Jobs made it easier to find the people you want to talk to faster and for free. Create a free job post in minutes on LinkedIn Jobs to reach the world's largest professional

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Starting point is 00:39:12 I have so many questions about your time with Greg. It's hard for me to even pick a place to begin. The first thing that I'll ask, which is probably the easier question to answer, is when you sent that email to your agent, did you still think the show was not going to work, but you didn't care because you were going to get an education? Or did you come out convinced that it had a chance of working? In the email, which my agent still sends back to me every once in a while as a reminder of the beginning of this journey, I believe I said something like, I don't know if this show is going to work,

Starting point is 00:39:50 but if it doesn't work, it won't be because of that guy. The reason won't be that the guy in charge doesn't know what he's doing. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But there's no one that gives it a better chance of working than Greg Daniels. And I had that instinct after that one meeting. I just kind of knew from the way he was talking about it and approaching it that if there was a Hail Mary's chance of this actually succeeding, that he was the quarterback who was going to throw the ball. So it really was based on, I don't know that I was immediately like, oh wait, I was wrong. This is a great idea to adapt the office. I don't think I got that far, but I definitely felt like he was approaching it from a completely different angle than I would

Starting point is 00:40:39 have ever imagined anyone would approach it. And I was right. He did. And that's why it worked. What did you at that point, recognizing that's, and I'm going to use the wrong terminology, so I apologize, but that skit comedy is very different from what he was aiming to do. What did you feel that you were missing in terms of skill set or that you most wanted to learn from him? Oh, I was missing everything. The answer is everything. Because the deal is, so sketches are single ideas, single comedic premises executed as quickly as possible. And then you have one big joke at the end and you get out. That's all it is, right? It's an observation about the world or a comedic premise that you introduce to the audience,

Starting point is 00:41:27 develop as quickly as you can, milk it for all it's worth, and then it's a tissue. You throw it in the garbage. You pluck it out of the box, you blow your nose, and you throw it in the garbage, and it's over. And you don't have to worry about anything else. You don't have to worry about what happens to these characters tomorrow. Who cares? Tomorrow's Sunday, there's no show, right? So long form TV writing is a completely different animal. The thing that SNL can teach you potentially that is relevant is just how to be funny, like what's funny, what are funny ways of observing the world or things you've noticed about people or ways to write jokes, craft language, that sort of thing.

Starting point is 00:42:07 But long-form TV writing is you're establishing characters and you're slow-cooking them over hopefully, in The Office's case, 200 episodes. These are not tissues anymore. These are carefully honed and crafted dollhouses with miniature furniture in them that all need to be properly sanded and painted and placed in these really specific ways. And you have to keep coming back to them. And you're building this dollhouse slowly, piece by piece, brick by brick over the course of a decade when it works, right? So all of that stuff was new. All of the whole whole idea of saying how do you pace out a character

Starting point is 00:42:47 growth over multiple episodes multiple seasons how do you establish interesting relationships and dynamics that you can go back to over and over again what are the deep veins that you're when you're mining the ore like how how can you tap into the deepest possible vein so that there's the most material there? All of that stuff was brand new and completely unknown to me and, by the way, to most people who were on the writing staff. And so that was what he was teaching us. What he was teaching us was this is not about being funny. Jokes are easy. If you get a bunch of funny people in a room and you say, hey, this is a scene where Michael Scott is leading a diversity seminar and he doesn't have any idea how to run a diversity seminar, you get eight comedy writers in a room.

Starting point is 00:43:34 They'll come up with a bunch of funny jokes. What's important is why is he doing that? What is the character trait that's led him to be the kind of person who thinks he has the ability to run a diversity training seminar when he definitely doesn't? What are the circumstances under which he would try to pull this off in front of documentary cameras that are there documenting his every move? Why is he looking at the camera here? What's going on in Jim's life that he's in love with this receptionist named Pam and she won't, and she's engaged to

Starting point is 00:44:05 this guy named Roy who he hates. How does that fit in? Like all of those layers, all that grist for the mill, that was unknown to me. And it was what Greg was so good at sort of imparting was this is the stuff you have to care about now. It's not about making a funny joke and then getting out and letting the audience clap and then throw to the musical guest so they can perform a song. That's just not, that's the old, that's SNL. This is not SNL. This is an entirely new animal. All right. So I'm going to follow up on the professor. I've read in, I think it was an interview of sorts, Profile in Vanity Fair, this is from 2008, that one of the mission statements or the mission statement for the office could have been, let's make sure they're all changing, right? Speaking to that character development that you mentioned.

Starting point is 00:44:59 You can't be too fast, you can't be overnight. It has to not necessarily mirror reality, but it's one possible mission statement. And what I would be curious to know, and if there's a better way of phrasing this question, feel free to answer a different question, but let's just say that the professor were actually teaching a PhD class or a seminar. What do you think he would lay out in the first class or few weeks of class? Are there any other lessons? An alternate question would be, can you tell a story about a specific instance, teaching moment that you recall while being at the office? This is a real how much time you got kind of a deal.

Starting point is 00:45:42 I got as much time as you'd like. I'll answer both of the questions, which are different. The day one stuff, the PhD level class day one, in the same way that a professor of Newtonian physics would say, would write F equals MA on the board, and then everyone would scribble it down in their notebooks or type, I guess. This is showing you how old I am, that I'm still imagining people taking notes with a pen. I still scribble. There you go. So the F equals MA of sitcom writing, it's stuff like, okay, here's what matters in stories, right? What matters is characters' motivations for doing what they do, the plots having good twists and turns in them, because comedy is all about

Starting point is 00:46:33 thwarting expectation. And if people see something coming, then they won't laugh. Being surprising. Escalation is another big one, right? If you see a story where the same thing happens two scenes in a row, you get bored. So whatever happens in the second scene has to be bigger and more intense than what happened in the first one. There are certain things that I think you would establish as F equals MA type rules that you would then undermine. Like you would say, there's a certain quality that executives like to refer to as likability which is a kind of a reductive term but it essentially means that if people if audiences

Starting point is 00:47:10 don't in some way identify with characters they don't like those characters and that doesn't mean in the world we're in now and this has been true probably since roughly speaking the sopranos came on board and suddenly the main character of the biggest show on TV was a sociopathic mobster who killed people regularly. You wouldn't call it, strictly speaking, likability, but you might call it relatability. You might say the main characters on a show have to have some aspect of them that people can see in themselves or at least identify with or say, I have a cousin who's like that or something like that. Those are the amino acids, right? That's like the basic building blocks of life. Yeah. As far as teaching moments, as many aphorisms as Lorne Michaels had about comedy, Greg has just as many. And there was, so I'll give you one example. So I wrote an episode of The Office in the second season that was about, it was a Christmas episode. And it was an episode where they were doing a secret Santa,

Starting point is 00:48:11 so they'd each drawn a name and they had, you know, this person is buying a little gift for this person and this person is buying a little gift for this person or whatever. And the premise, which was really funny, was that Michael didn't like his gift. Michael's gift came from a character named Phyllis on the show, and she had knitted him some oven mitts. And he just didn't like them. He didn't think they were a big enough gift. And he had drawn Ryan. Ryan was the temp played by BJ Novak. He had drawn Ryan in the Secret Santa gift exchange draw, and he had bought Ryan a video iPod. So even though it's a classic Michael Scott thing because there was a $25 limit or whatever, and he, because he was so desperate

Starting point is 00:48:52 to be loved, just bought this kid a $400 video iPod. So he gave a video iPod to his person, and then he got for his gift a woven oven mitt and just lost his mind. And so he changed it from a Secret Santa to a Yankee swap, which is where you can swap your gift for any of the other gifts. It's another game, right? Because he wanted to unload the oven mitts and get something better. So when I wrote the episode, I did this thing where I was like, okay, well, the reality, I've been a part of many secret Santas in many offices and I know how you do it. You do a draw. So I put all the characters' names into a hat, and I did a real draw. I said like, okay, Oscar is drawing now, and I picked out, and it was Creed. Okay, Oscar's going to buy a

Starting point is 00:49:34 grift for Creed. So I did it the way it would really be done. And one of the characters had Angela. Angela was a character on the show who was very uptight and fairly religious. And she was very prim. She didn't curse. She didn't do anything that was sort of... She was just very, very uptight. And so I had in the script that someone bought for her a sort of vaguely Christian kind of self-help book. It was like seven habits for following in the light of God or something like that. It was just like a sort of one of those books that are perfectly lovely and helpful for people who are looking for some guidance in their lives and who are religious. And it didn't factor into the plot at all. It was just a detail of the script

Starting point is 00:50:22 that that's what she got. And Greg was like, no, we should come up with something else. And I was kind of confused. Cause I was like, it's not even a joke. We don't even make a joke about it. It's just literally like she opens the gift and,

Starting point is 00:50:34 and then that's what it is. But he was like, yeah, here's the thing though. We already know that Angela is religious and we already know that she is the kind of person who would buy a book like that or who would like a book like that. And what would be better is if there were something that were in the overlapping area of the Venn diagram of what we already know about her and what we can

Starting point is 00:50:56 learn about her that would broaden her character, that would make her into a more interesting person, dimensionalize her a little bit. And so what we came up with was that she loved those kind of photographs that people take where babies are dressed like adults. There's like a weird corner of the photography world where it's like a baby, but dressed like a jazz musician with like a fedora and like a toy saxophone. And somehow, I don't know why, but somehow that was like, that's perfect. That is exactly the kind of thing that she would like. How the hell does that come out of the ether? Did it just pop into someone's head? I mean, how did that, how did it land there?

Starting point is 00:51:44 I can tell you definitively that I did not pitch it because I believe I was completely unaware of this phenomenon. But so it's, that's why you have a room full of funny people because you just say, okay, here's the character, here's the subject matter, pitch on what she would like, pitch on some aspect of the culture. And some, I wish I remember too, someone pitched that and immediately was like, oh my God, that's perfect. I don't know why, but that's perfect. So we changed it to someone got her this poster of two babies dressed like jazz musicians. And again, it didn't factor into the episode in any meaningful way, but that poster was then added to the set. She put it up next to her.

Starting point is 00:52:29 Later in the season, we designed an entire episode over the fact that another person who sat near her hated it so much that there was like an HR complaint lodged against her. And it flowered. It just bloomed into this thing that lasted for years and years and years. And so Greg's thing, and this is what that Vanity Fair article is referencing, was at the end of every episode of the show, you should have at least a little bit more information about some of the characters than you did before the episode started.

Starting point is 00:52:55 And it doesn't have to be a huge thing. It doesn't have to be like, my dad was arrested as a serial murderer or something. It doesn't have to be some gigantic thing. It just has to be a little bit more than what you knew before. And as long as that's the case, the show continues to be more interesting and kind of grow and expand. That was a fantastic example. Thank you. That was great. I am going to ask you about the pitch for The Good Place and how it was pitched.

Starting point is 00:53:28 Before we get there, though, I want to come back to, I don't want to say a throwaway comment, but a passing comment that you made, which was, if I could only take five things from my house as it were burning down, and you mentioned the photograph of you lighting a cigarette for David Foster Wallace, What are some of the other things that would be on that short list and why? I play this game a lot with myself. Here are the rules of the game if you want to play it with me. The rules are your family and your pets are safe, so you don't have to worry. One of those objects doesn't have to be a human being or an animal, right? And you assume that nothing in the house is going to be salvageable after you remove these five objects.

Starting point is 00:54:13 So it's not, you can't hedge your bet. You can't say, I'm going to take these things and then hope that this other stuff survives. You're saying, this is it. The house is burning to the ground. You get five things, right? So I'm not actually sure. That photograph is probably top five, but I also have a copy of Infinite Jest that Wallace inscribed to me when I met him. That is probably, if I had to choose, that's probably the one I would take. I might take both of them. Maybe that's too much David Foster Wallace. But I think I would take that book. I'm a book collector. I collect first editions. So the rarest book I have is I have a first edition copy of Moby Dick that is in incredibly good shape. It's really, really a rare copy of that book because obviously back then no one really cared about paper quality or acidic paper or anything else. This copy happens to be extremely bright and crisp. I would probably save that just because I feel like that would be cruel to let that burn up in a fire. Most of the objects, in fact, the only real objects that I care about, I think, are probably books. So there's a writer named David Halberstam, who is a sports writer. He was a friend of my wife's family, me with a long message about how he really thought 2004

Starting point is 00:55:45 was going to be the year. The Red Sox had just gotten Keith Folk, a relief pitcher, and Curt Schilling, a starting pitcher, who they might put them over the top. And they just lost a heartbreaking playoff series to the Yankees. And he wrote this thing that was like, I really think this could be the year. And then it was. 2004 is the year they won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It would be awfully hard not to rescue that piece of literature from my agent that said, where are you? I need to send you something. And I was like, just send it to my house. And he was like, no, it has to be hand delivered.

Starting point is 00:56:33 And I was like, all right, what is it? And he was like, I don't want to tell you what it is. Just wait. So a messenger came to my office and handed me an envelope. And it was a handwritten note from President Barack Obama saying that he had watched The Good Place and really liked it. And it was so, like the cognitive dissonance, I guess you would call it, of receiving that object and opening it and reading it in his own hand was so, my hand started shaking because I thought, this is like, I shouldn't be holding, I should be wearing gloves or something in order to read this. But it's incredibly meaningful to

Starting point is 00:57:10 me. And I framed that letter. That letter is also on my wall underneath the picture of David Foster Wallace smoking a cigarette. Is it on White House letterhead or does it have a jagged edge? Is it from like a restaurant placemat? It's the back of a Denny's menu. Yeah. Contrast and styles. That would make it even better. I wish it were. I wish he had done the maze on the front of the Denny's menu and then on the back had just written off, dashed off a note to me. That would be amazing. How did your book collecting of first editions start? Don't worry, I'm not going to spend

Starting point is 00:57:51 an hour here, although I could. But how did that begin? What was the beginning of the collection where you're like, oh, this is now a thing for me? My uncle Steve, who now lives in Ireland, was a book collector. And he sort of introduced me to it when I was a teenager. And I've always been a collector of things. When I was a kid, my dad's former college roommate for my fifth birthday bought me a bunch of baseball cards. And to this day, I can recall the sense memory of opening the plastic around. It used to be called rack packs, where there were three sections of cards. And I remember ripping them open. I remember holding the cards in my hand and flipping through them. And the tactile sensation

Starting point is 00:58:37 of that is incredibly drilled into my memory. And I became obsessed with them. And I spent all my money on baseball cards and plastic sheets to put them in. And I organized memory. And I became obsessed with them. And I spent all my money on baseball cards and plastic sheets to put them in. And I organized them and I collected full sets. And later when CDs came out, the feeling of buying CDs and holding them and opening, it's almost fetishistic in the way that I think of those collections. I just loved it. I just loved that feeling of building a collection of something. So I'm clearly predisposed to this, but my uncle bought me a couple first editions of books that I liked. And when you collect books, you get incredibly fussy about they can't be in direct sunlight and the humidity in the room has to be at the right level. And it's all this kind of

Starting point is 00:59:24 ridiculous hobby stuff. But one of the things you do is you take the book cover off and you put it in this plastic sort of mylar stuff to keep it from getting spilled on or keep dust off it or whatever. The feeling of that plastic in my hands and the sheen, the sort of shininess that it made the book look like, I mean, it's literally no different than what libraries do, right? It's the library. It's that plastic that goes around the covers of library books. Again, something just kind of like lit up. It hit some pleasure center in my brain. And I started becoming a completist where I would say, okay, I have a first edition copy of

Starting point is 01:00:02 Panin by Vladimir Nabokov because I really loved that book. But now I have to get all of his books. You need the flight. The whole thing. I got to get all of them. And so there were certain authors that I just started collecting and I just wouldn't be truly happy until I had gotten first editions of all of their books. And for a while, I was doing this with no money. We did not have a lot of money growing up at all. And I took on, like most people in this country, I took on an enormous amount of student debt. And yet it didn't slow me down at

Starting point is 01:00:36 all. I was still like any money I had for my student jobs, it was going right to used and rare bookstores. And I was scouring in the early, early days of the internet, I was scouring eBay for obscure copies of Don DeLillo novels that someone might not know the value of and stuff. So it started from that. It just was a thing that my uncle did who got me into it. And it's continued. It's only burning brighter as I age and now actually make money so I can, it's dangerous. I have enough money to spend on these things now and it's not slowing down if you're wondering.

Starting point is 01:01:14 Man, I would love to see your library sometime. I know this is just a first date, so I'm getting ahead of myself. But in any case, we are going to get to the pitch for the good place, I promise. But you've mentioned a number of things that I have to pick up on, and you can make this as long or as short as you like. You mentioned sports writing. Can you please explain Ken Tremendous? The explanation is not super interesting. I was in college and I was walking home from somewhere and I'm obsessed with crazy names. Always have been. I loved Monty Python growing up. And one of the best things about Monty Python is that all of the characters in their sketches have bananas names. And I loved, loved, loved crazy names. So I think I was, again, this was like something got rewired in my brain at a fairly early age, but I was walking home and the name Ken Tremendous popped into my head as a funny name to use in something. I didn't know what. It was just like, that's a funny name. straightforward name, and then putting the word tremendous after it just made me laugh.

Starting point is 01:02:26 I went back to my dorm and I jotted the words Ken Tremendous down on a piece of paper. I thought maybe there was a short story or a comedy piece for The Lampoon or something where I would use that name. Later, when the internet really began to be the place where everybody spent their time. And avatars and handles, online handles, became a way for people to cloak themselves. I thought, well, this scares me. The internet scares me. It's dicey. I don't really want anyone to track me or know who I am.

Starting point is 01:02:59 So I'm going to just do everything I do on here anonymously. And I chose Ken Tremendous as my sort of internet name. So when I used to run a blog with a couple of my friends, there was a sports blog called Fire Joe Morgan that was us complaining about bad sports writing and bad announcing. On that blog, I was Ken Tremendous. When Twitter started, I was like, I don't know what this is, but I don't want it to be me. so I'll make it Ken Tremendous. And just everything I do online just became Ken Tremendous. And what's endlessly funny to me is that, first of all, long ago, I stopped trying to hide the fact that that's me. If you Google Ken Tremendous, my picture shows up. It's not like I'm trying to pretend to be anonymous. But about two or three years, I think, into being on Twitter as

Starting point is 01:03:47 Ken Tremendous, they sent me one of those notices. It's like, we'd like to verify you. And I was like, but it's a fake name. What do you mean verify me? Like, that's ridiculous. And I was like, you know, I wrote back like on the DM thing. I was like, you know that this isn't my real name. And they're like, yep, don't worry. We're verifying you. And I was like, you know that this isn't my real name. And they're like, yep, don't worry. We're verifying you. And I was like, okay. So I'm verified on Twitter as an imaginary fictional personality.

Starting point is 01:04:13 It's kind of amazing. That is amazing. Ken Tremendous. Yeah, I remember when... It's a good name, right? It is. When I was doing some original research before we even booked this and I found you as Ken Tremendous on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:04:30 I was like, is this possibly accurate? You just never know because on one hand, it could be. And I love these stories. I know a number of people are pretty well known, but they have these ridiculous handles because they, in the beginning, A, might've had concerns about security or privacy, or B, they were like, Twitter, this is never going to be anything, right? So then that's how you end up with like Angela Merkel's like hot fuzz 487 or whatever. I'm making that up. That's not a real example,

Starting point is 01:04:59 but yeah. And you're like, how the hell does that happen? So I had to ask about Kent Tremendous. It is a very weird aspect of my life, but it is very funny to have an alternate personality. The backstory for Kent Tremendous, for some reason, is that he's a pension plan monitor at a made-up company called Fremulon Insurance. Wait a second. Do I know that word for some reason? Why do I know Fremulon? Well, Fremulon is now my, became my production company. That's right.

Starting point is 01:05:30 At the end of all my shows, there's a graphic for an imaginary company called Fremulon. It's a whole, there's a whole other metaverse thing going on where there's a company called Fremulon and a guy named Ken Tremendous working at it. Oh, this is fantastic. It's so good. You mentioned the five things in the house you take with you. You're like, this is a game I play quite often with myself.

Starting point is 01:05:54 Is that an exaggeration or is that true? And if it's true, why is that a game that you play with yourself so often? It is true. And I think it's because I'm not a particularly materialistic guy. I'm not bragging about that. I'm just sort of stating a fact. I don't have a lot of things that I care about. Like, I'm not like a wristwatch guy or a clothes guy or a car guy. I just, for whatever reason, I've never, I literally never wash my car. Never. Unless it's so dirty, I can't see through the windshield and it feels like a potential death trap. Because I don't care

Starting point is 01:06:34 and I just think it's a box that gets me from point A to point B and I don't care what it looks like. And if they get dented, I don't care. The thought of spending money on car upkeep is bananas to me. And I don't hold it against people who do care, honestly. If that's your thing, that's your thing. Great, more power to you. But because I have a lot of objects I care about, when an object enters my life that I do care about, it gives me a sort of moment's pause or an opportunity to kind of reflect on what I have that matters and what that means about me at a different age. When I was 25, what were the five things that mattered to me? How is that different from 35 or 45? It is weirdly a game I play a lot with myself. I've never really thought about why, but I would

Starting point is 01:07:24 guess that it's like a way for me to kind of check in on my life to see like what's in my surroundings that has value to me or that matters to me and why does it have value to me or matter to me at that moment, you know? Yeah, I do. Sounds like I need to play this five things game more frequently with myself. I wish I had done it and recorded it though over time. That would actually really provide a lens. Yeah. Like if you could go back, if you could go back and say like, here's my list every year, and that would be a more, certainly a more effective way of achieving what I'm hoping it's achieving, which is like to give you some kind of pattern in your life or to

Starting point is 01:08:04 sort of give you some kind of pattern in your life or to give you some kind of path you can follow of like, here's where I came from, here's where I am now. Well, let's talk about one place you were, which is, I assume. Now, I'm not going to go play by play through the entire chronology, of course, because I think that people can do plenty of their own research on that. But the good place in the pitch, how did you pitch that? I mean, did you basically have carte blanche to do whatever you wanted and therefore you didn't really have to pitch? Or how did it come to be? And for those people who do not subscribe to my newsletter, I am a huge fan of The Good Place, wrote about it

Starting point is 01:08:42 in my newsletter, Five Bullet Friday, which went out to a few million people long, long, long ago. And it was a real Trojan horse for me because it was recommended to me as a funny show. And that was it. And that's how I got started. Then I was like, wait a second here. This is a Trojan horse for all sorts of stuff that I would not expect. Immanuel Kant didn't see that coming. So what was the pitch?

Starting point is 01:09:08 When Parks and Recreation ended, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was still on the air, but Parks and Rec ended and the people running NBC sort of said to me, like, we'd like you to do a new show and you can kind of do whatever you want. It was one of those deals and we will guarantee 13 episode season. Now, even today, the business has changed so much that that's far more commonplace today than it was at the time. At the time, that was a very exciting kind of, oh my God, they're not going to make me do a pilot and then look at the pilot and then determine whether they're going to put it on the air and then order a small number of them and maybe cancel it after five if the ratings aren't good. All of the sort of pitfalls of a new show were at least temporarily removed. So when they made that offer, which was very kind of them, I had a thought which was like, man, I kind of owe it to myself and I kind of owe it to the idea of that point for a decade, which was writing

Starting point is 01:10:26 stories about a group of people in a place on earth. The office was a group of people in an office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Parks and Rec was a group of people who worked at a government office in Indiana. And Brooklyn Nine-Nine was a group of people who were police officers and detectives in New York City. And it was like, those shows were so fun and great, but they were within the same general umbrella. And I sort of thought like, man, I could do it again. I could come up with a group of people who were working on the International Space Station or a group of people who work at an ice cream parlor in Belize, but it feels like I've been given this opportunity and I ought to take a kind of crazy swing. So they really wanted a

Starting point is 01:11:12 family show. I had never done a family show. And so I, uh, being a good rule following soldier, I put a lot of thought into like, what would it look like for me to do a family show? And the truth is, there's not that much that's very interesting about my family. I'm a sort of middle-class white guy who grew up in like a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut. And there's a lot that's been said about people like me on television and my family on television. And so I had this idea, I had the nascent idea for The Good Place rattling around in my head and had for a couple of years, like it's in little tiny pieces. This idea had been kind of like bugging me. And so I thought about that and I

Starting point is 01:12:00 started it excited and I developed it on my on my own time and it just became very obvious that like that was the interesting idea and of the many many rules of creation or of writing that have been taught to me over the years by a number of very smart people the best and most trustworthy is write what's interesting don Don't fake it. If you have to fake it, if you have to try to tell people that your idea is interesting, then you're dead, right? So like this, it just seemed like the best idea I had and the most interesting. And then that presented a number of challenges. Like for example, how do you sell a TV network on the idea of doing a show that's explicitly about moral philosophy. That's a

Starting point is 01:12:45 tough sell. And so I- Right, right. Question number one, what is moral philosophy? Yeah, yeah. And how does it work on Tuesday at 8.30 on NBC? So I did a couple things to try to make it palatable to my bosses. One of them was I worked way harder and for way longer developing the idea than I think I would have normally if I were writing a show about six goofballs in an office somewhere in Pennsylvania. Although, pause for a second to say that Greg worked for an entire year on developing the office before he ever met with me or any of the other writers. He put an enormous amount of work into that show. But my point is that I worked

Starting point is 01:13:32 harder on figuring out what the story was for the entire season because they'd given me an entire season to work with than I would have normally. I had the entire season mapped out before I pitched it. The second thing I did is I talked to Ted Danson and Kristen Bell, who I wanted to play the main parts, and they had expressed interest in playing those parts. So when I went in to pitch the show, I said, here's the show, and I laid it out for them. I told them what the pilot would be. I told them what the themes would be. I told them what the general arc of the entire first season would be. And I said to them, I've been working on this for a long time. If you have a lot of questions, answer them. I promise

Starting point is 01:14:13 I'll have answers for you. There's no aspect of this that I haven't thought about. I also told them that Ted Danson and Kristen Bell were at least in theory interested in being in the show, which helped a great deal. Because once you have Ted Danson and Kristen Bell in your show, they don't care what it's about. It can be about anything. Those are two big stars, right? And the last thing I did, and I think the most important thing I did, was I said, listen, this is a show about what it means to be a good person. And the engine for this, the mechanism, is the study of moral philosophy. And that's not going to be shoved into the margins. It's not going to be a casual reference here and there. It's going to be the guts of the show. It's going to be in every episode of the

Starting point is 01:14:57 show. One of the characters is a moral philosophy professor who is going to be teaching people stuff. And I know that that might seem like a risky idea, but I promise you it will not feel like homework. It's going to be funny, and it's going to be entertaining. And I think that moral philosophy, in a way that no one maybe would think at first glance, is actually a very funny discipline to me. It's like the thought experiments are really funny and the people who invented these theories are really weird and funny. So I said, I promise it won't feel like homework. Now that being said, the third episode literally

Starting point is 01:15:34 begins with the character Chidi standing at a blackboard with philosophy 101 written on it. I was like, oh boy, maybe I spoke too soon. But that was how I not only convinced them to let me do it, but also tried to reassure them that I wasn't going to bore people to tears. That I was like, I know this is a show about moral philosophy, but I also fundamentally understand that it's a half-hour sitcom on a major network that needs to have jokes and funny stories and plots that are entertaining. And I kind of just asked them to trust me and they did. And it was really cool of them that they let me kind of take this wild idea and run with it. You are very good at taking these thought exercises, right? Or these problems that philosophers are attempting to tackle and divorcing them from the I'm-so-serious

Starting point is 01:16:30 kind of pedantic vocabulary that can just be so problematic and the language that usually accompanies it, which is just impenetrable in some cases. And I really appreciated the trolley problem episode. Sure. Which people should check out. You mentioned that the idea or some semblance of the show was kind of percolating in some fashion for some time. Why was that?

Starting point is 01:17:01 Well, I think because it's a subject that interested me before I even really understood that it was a subject. The concept of making ethical choices or trying to make better ethical choices than the ones you made or coming into contact with ethical dilemmas and then wrestling with them, that was something that I always found really interesting. There was an event that happened in my life where my wife bumped into a guy going about one mile an hour in traffic. And there was a cop there. They were both rubbernecking, or at least my wife was rubbernecking at another accident that had happened next to them. And so there was already a cop there. So we saw that there had been this little kachunk, and he came over, and he looked everything over, and he says, I don't see any damage here. And my wife and this guy exchanged numbers and went on their way. And then we got a bill in the mail

Starting point is 01:17:53 for $836, I think, because the guy said his fender needed to be replaced. And I kind of lost my mind a little bit because, again, I'm a dude who doesn't care about cars. And I found this to be ridiculous and overly fastidious and sort of car culture just annoyed me. Also, it was literally the day of Hurricane Katrina almost destroying New Orleans. And I had friends who lived in New Orleans and I love New Orleans. My wife and I had gone there on a vacation fairly recently before that had happened. And it was just one of these moments where I just kind of, I just lost my mind. And I said to the guy, I went and looked at his car. And if you shined

Starting point is 01:18:35 a flashlight on it, you could see that there was a little sort of L shaped, not even dent, like a little, like a mark, like a little tiny indentation. I think that my wife's license plate holder had just kind of pressed into his fender a tiny bit, and you could barely make it out. And I said, you know what? This is not $836 of damage. I know that that's what it costs to replace a fender, but this is ridiculous, and this is why car insurance rates are so high. And how about this? I said, I'll donate $836 to the Red Cross. And we call it even. And the guy was like, I kind of want my car repaired, man. And I was like, well, that's my offer. Think it over. Tell me what you want me to do. And so I went back to work. I was at the office. I went back to work.

Starting point is 01:19:21 And I told everyone the story. And then they started getting angry and being like, that's so obnoxious. How can this guy do that? And then other people started going, I'll add a hundred bucks. Tell them it'll be $936 to the Red Cross. And then people started piling on another 200, another 50, another 20, whatever. So then I was like, wait, there's something here. So I started a blog basically. And I said, how much money will you donate to the Red Cross for the Katrina Relief Fund if this dude decides not to fix the bumper on his car? And it exploded. And it went to $5,000, then it went to $10,000, then it went to $20,000. And it started circulating. And I started getting press requests from Good morning America and NPR in these places. And my wife and I were like, this is amazing. Like we're going to save new Orleans all by ourselves. We're going to do it, you know? And then all of a sudden, like one night on like

Starting point is 01:20:15 the second night or the third night, we were talking about everything that was going on. And we suddenly both got like sick to our stomachs and we're like, we feel bad and we don't know why. There's something wrong with this. This is bad. Oh my God, this is bad. But we didn't know why. And I was like, I need someone to tell me why what I'm doing is bad, because I'm pretty sure it's bad. So I went on the internet and I looked up a bunch of philosophers who taught ethics. And I called them on the phone and was like, will you talk to me? I'm just this guy. Here's what happened.

Starting point is 01:20:52 Will you talk to me about what I'm doing? And they all said yes, because it turns out, as I write about in the book, philosophers love talking about philosophy. They're so excited to talk about philosophy at any hour of any day. So they sort of, in different ways, walked me through a bunch of arguments as to why what I was doing was bad. And by the way, some of them didn't think it was bad. Some of them thought, look, there's Aristotle writes about shame and the importance of shame. And if you feel no shame, you have no sense of disgrace. What you're doing is essentially shaming this guy into what you see as a better

Starting point is 01:21:25 value system than the one he currently has. And I was like, okay, but also shaming people doesn't sound like a great way to spend your time. And they're like, well, no, it's not great to shame people like this and whatever. And so I just ended up having a dozen conversations about this. I talked about it to every, I was so annoying. I've never been more annoying in my life because this is all I could talk about. We went to a wedding, my wife and I went to a wedding and we sat next to this guy I'd gone to college with who I knew was very smart. And I was like, hey, give me your take on this. And I told him the story and he was like, I'm outraged. And I was like, I know, right? And he was like, no, I'm outraged on his behalf. You're being an asshole. And I was like, oh no. And so I just couldn't stop.

Starting point is 01:22:07 I couldn't get over the idea that there was a right answer. That was both my main mistake and the beginnings of this, what's now a lifelong interest in the subject is, I was like, well, there's got to be a right answer. And what I eventually realized is, no, there's no right answer. There's a bunch of theories that will say, here's why what you're doing is a little bad or a little good or more good than bad or whatever. But there's no one, you're not going to like suddenly turn a page in a book, read something and be completely satisfied that everything is answerable. This is a complicated, weird, confusing situation. So the effect that this had on me was to kind of coalesce years and years and years of what I's interesting. I'm interested in this. Or something would happen in my friend group or with my family, and I would sort of, something would flitter

Starting point is 01:23:09 around in my brain, and I would think, this is a subject I'm interested in, but it was very, very casual. And then that incident with this minor car accident and the way that I pursued trying to get to the bottom of what was right or wrong about it, something clicked into gear. And then it became a thing that I thought about all the time and that I really cared about and was sort of at the center of my life. And so that's all the backstory for how the show came about. But it really is, I can trace the show to that event. And that event was in 2005 and the show started in 2015. So it was at least 10 years of kind of prep in some way or

Starting point is 01:23:48 shape or form to get me ready to write the show. It's a very important question. What did you do in the end of the day with respect to the bumper? I talked to a lot of professors and professional types. And the last guy I talked to said, listen, I don't even really think this is a philosophical question. I think what I would say is you're kind of being a jerk to this guy and you shouldn't be a jerk to people. Those are the exact words. He used the word jerk, which was a great old-timey word. Did you call this guy out by name or did you leave him anonymous? No. As I write about in the book, I made a couple good decisions amongst many bad ones. And among the good ones I made were I never named him, I never showed a

Starting point is 01:24:32 picture of his license plate, I never sent... You didn't dox him on the internet. But yeah, before doxing was a thing, I didn't dox him. So that conversation with that particular professor made me think, this guy has no idea any of this is going on. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. And so I called him up. The way it had been left a mere three or four days earlier when I had gone to see his car was, because all this happened so quickly. So three or four days earlier, it was like, here's my offer. I'll donate this money to the Red Cross. And he was like, let me think it over. And we just sort of made vague plans to talk again soon. So like three or four days later, I think, I called him and was like, hey, buddy, let me explain what has happened.

Starting point is 01:25:21 And I told him the whole story. I told him everything. I was like, I'm going to come completely clean to you. I told him everything that had happened. And I apologized profusely because what I really realized is that the thing I was engaging in that made it so unfair was what most people today would call whataboutism. He was saying, hey, your wife bumped into my car and I need to replace the fender. And I was saying, yeah, but what about Hurricane Katrina? And it's like, all right, yeah, Hurricane Katrina is terrible. It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that your wife bumped into my fender, right? So I basically said, I'm really sorry.

Starting point is 01:26:00 This was not fair of me to do. I had cut him a check and it was in the mail. I said, their check is in the mail. And he said, okay, thank you. And maybe I'll make a donation. Maybe I'll give part of it to the Red Cross. And I was like, great, I hope you do, but you're under no obligation to do that. Nice doing business with you. And that was the last time we ever spoke. And so it was just a really fascinating, weird little moment that kind of, for whatever reason feels slighted or wronged in some way. when another person was about to pull into the parking spot or whatever. These little mundane interactions that we have with other people have, I realized, significant ethical dilemmas to them very frequently. And our choice becomes, am I going to care about that or not? I could not care about it. I could just say, whatever. You could forget about it the moment it happens, move on with your life, never think about it again. But I felt like because I went through that, I couldn't shake the idea both that

Starting point is 01:27:32 there are ethical components to almost everything that happens and that we are better off when we pay attention to them and really try to untangle them and wrestle with them. And so that was really the 10 years before the show was pitched and written was really the beginning of this journey for me was coming to the realization that ethics matters, that I think that it's important that ethics matters and that you try to get to the bottom of these things when they pop up. So how to be perfect. So we have how to be perfect, subtitle, the correct answer to every moral question,

Starting point is 01:28:05 which is tantalizing, to say the least. How did you decide to do a book, right? I mean, I think that most people would think of you as a writer, but they would think of you as a TV guy. And books are writing, certainly, and one would hope, but they are a different animal. Why do a book? And I should just preface my preface by saying I read somewhere, I don't know, for research for this conversation, a line of sorts that I just loved. And so I'd love to hear you expand on it, which is, you would love the book to do for moral philosophy, what a brief history of time did for astrophysics. I think something along those lines, which is a hell of a goal. So, the mic is yours, wherever you'd like to go.

Starting point is 01:28:55 What I meant by that, and I was being a little facetious because I think that book sold like 38 million copies or something. So, I don't want to, it was tongue in cheek. But what I meant by it and continue to believe is that that book, which I read when I was, I think in high school, took this subject that most people would say, there's no way in hell I am ever going to engage with that subject. I am not going to spend my free time, my precious free time, reading a book on astrophysics about black holes and singularities and event horizons. No way. No way. I won't understand it, and it's pointless, right? And yet, he had a way of making all of that stuff both entertaining and also fascinating without being condescending. That was what's really remarkable

Starting point is 01:29:46 about that book is that he does not condescend to you. He says at the beginning of the book that he's not going to include any mathematical formulas because his editor told him that every mathematical formula he included in the book will reduce his audience by 50%. So he's like, there's only one mathematical formula. It's E equals MC squared. I promise that's the only math. But it wasn't in a condescending way. He was just saying like, look, I get it. This is weird and hard, but I think it's fascinating. I've devoted my life to thinking about it and I feel like you can get something out of this. And then he talked to you like you were a grownup. He talked to you like you were an adult with a brain. And I set out that as my goal because I feel after spending so much time

Starting point is 01:30:29 wrestling with this stuff, again, in an amateurish way, I'm not a professional, I'm not an academic, I don't have a PhD, I didn't really even study this stuff in college. I just read a lot of it, talked about it a lot with a lot of people. I think that it's the kind of subject, like astrophysics, that people would think, no way, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to understand it. It's pointless to even try. And when I was reading it, I had this thought that I couldn't escape. And the thought was, these are the smartest people who ever lived. Generally speaking, they're among the smartest people who ever lived. Aristotle and Kant and Locke and Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham and David Hume and all of these people, you would put

Starting point is 01:31:11 them in the top millionth of 1% of all of humanity who have ever lived in terms of just brain power. And they spent their lives, or at least parts of their lives, trying to figure out how we could be better people. That was their goal. What is right? What is wrong? What's good? What's bad? How do we improve ourselves? How do we make the process of being alive on earth as maximally good as they can be? And yet they wrote their books so densely and opaquely and at times impenetrably and boringly that no one wants to read them unless you're a philosophy major in college. out a recipe for a chocolate chip cookie that's both delicious and helps you lose weight and build muscle mass. But the recipe is 600 pages long and it's written in German and no one's ever reading it. And if you could just kind of, if you could somehow take what they wrote, synthesize it and talk about it conversationally with people in a way that isn't condescending, but it is engaging,

Starting point is 01:32:27 that that might be of use to people. People might enjoy that. And so the reason I wrote the book was that feeling mixed with a feeling, a personal feeling of when the show ended, simply that I wasn't quite done talking about this stuff yet. I just felt like I wanted to talk about it a little more. And the show was over, and it's like, I wouldn't know what to do. So I sort of said like, well, what if I write a book that sort of summarizes all of the stuff that I feel like I learned as I wrote the show? And that's where we ended up. Have you done any long form, really long form writing between thesis about David Foster Wallace and the book? No, legit question. Okay. Wow. Yeah, I have not. I haven't written anything longer than

Starting point is 01:33:17 a feature film script since 1996. Well, I think that speaks to how important you think it is. And I'm going to push back just a little bit in a sense, and that is you are not a professional philosopher. And I don't say what I'm about to say to insult any philosophers. I've had some on the podcast, but there is no bar exam for philosophers, right? And I think that you are. But the point I was going to make is that there's a quote that I wrote down, which I think you've invoked at points from David Foster Wallace, novels are about what it means to be a fucking human being. And I think moral philosophy, in a sense, also could be described along those lines. And you seem to me to be a student of humans, human nature, relatability, character, character development. So it strikes me that

Starting point is 01:34:16 you seem very qualified, actually, to write such a book. It's kind of you to say, and to a degree, I think you're right in the sense that I think that anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about the human condition and whose job is to actively observe it, interpret it, discuss it, write about it, engage with it, which is what the job of being a TV writer really is. Being a TV writer, if you are lucky enough to be on a show that lasts for a long time, you have spent seven years, eight years, 125, 150 individual episodes with the same characters. And you have done that thing that Greg taught me to do, which is slowly expand their personality profiles and their worlds and their sets of

Starting point is 01:35:06 motivations. And you've tracked them over big life events of sometimes getting married or having children or changing jobs or whatever. And it does, I think, first of all, you're drawing from real lives of real people you know or real feelings that you and other people you know have had, or you're imbuing the characters with those feelings but you also at the end of the line you really have this sense of like i kind of get that character i know that character really well now i've studied that character i'm fluent in that character in a way that you're rarely fluent with other people other than those really close to you, a spouse or a child or a parent or a sister or a brother. So I believe that you're right when you say that if you've spent that amount of time doing that, where that's your job, the observation of the human condition and the sort of interpretation

Starting point is 01:35:59 of the human condition, imbuing characters on TV with those traits and those observations and that kind of stuff, and you have a secondary interest, even a casual one, in a humanistic discipline like philosophy or could be anything. It could be music or academia or whatever, that you're not necessarily a professional, but you at least are qualified, I think. You're qualified to talk about the subject in some long-form way. Now, that doesn't mean that I want to go on live TV and have a debate with a professional philosopher about who knows more. I think I would be in over my head to teach a class. I don't think I'm qualified to teach a class. But to the extent that you're talking about just qualification based on just time spent

Starting point is 01:36:53 thinking about something, then I think I agree with you because I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and mulling it all over. Well, also making it digestible, not just digestible, digestible and entertaining enough that people will actually ingest and think about what the hell you're trying to convey. I mean, as you mentioned. That's the key. Yeah. It's like if you go to any campus bookstore and pick up the required texts from like Philosophy 101 or 201 or 102 or whatever it might be, I mean, good luck. I mean,

Starting point is 01:37:28 if you want to get a million people to read those books, yeah, best of luck. That's going to be a really hard task. That's the reason I wanted to write it. It's the exact thing that you're pointing out, which is I think there's a tremendous amount to be gained from engaging with the basic ideas that a lot of these philosophers put out there. And not the real deep, intense, you know, philosophy, grad school level philosophy stuff, just the basics, like the very, very basic theories are really valuable and can be really helpful. But in many cases, even engaging with the basic ideas is really hard. And it's the primary texts are not, I would say, strictly speaking, enjoyable to read. They're just not that fun. Pick up Critique of Pure Reason, flip through a couple pages, and tell me how psyched you are to polish it off in your free time on the beach. Forget it. The average person, even the way above average person who's more interested in philosophy than the average person is not going to read Critique of Pure Reason on a chaise lounge by the pool on his or her summer vacation. So that's exactly the impetus really to write the

Starting point is 01:38:46 book was like, if I can just relay the nuts and bolts of this stuff as I understand them, and as some of my professional philosopher friends have helped me understand them, I think there's real potential value for people in terms of how it can improve their lives. And I think the basics are the basics for a reason in the sense that Michael Jordan would still practice free throws at his peak because there are certain foundational elements. They're sort of the irreducible, I shouldn't say irreducible, but these sort of foundational pieces that have incredible utility. And then you can get into the intellectual masturbation stratospheric level where it's like, okay, you want to hang out with Wittgenstein and talk about

Starting point is 01:39:30 logicians and it depends on what is, is, isn't it? And you're like, oh, come on. We don't need 700 pages on that. I need to go get some fucking groceries and I need to decide. I think this is an example you've given, whether or not do I take the grocery cart and put it back or leave it where it is? Okay, that's something I need to process today. Yes, 100%. So let me ask, if you could have drinks or dinner with any philosopher alive or dead, just for entertainment value, because is there anyone who comes to mind? For entertainment value?

Starting point is 01:40:08 Not entertainment. No, no. Let me redact that. It doesn't have to be for entertainment value. I'll leave it broader than that. Just drinks or dinner. You can choose one or two. Okay. A lot of philosophers' lives are sort of unknown. No one knows what Aristotle was like as a guy. So some of them I have to eliminate just for that reason. The name that comes to mind is Jeremy Bentham, who was an 18th century English philosopher who is essentially the guy who invented what's called utilitarianism, which was very much in favor for a while, then completely fell out of favor and recently has come back into favor in academic circles.

Starting point is 01:40:52 Utilitarianism essentially is do more good than bad. That's how you're an ethical person. If the things you do create more good or happiness or pleasure than they do pain or suffering or unhappiness. The reason I would want to have drinks with him, though, is because he was also a true weirdo, like a truly weird guy who, when he died, he told his friend that he wanted his body to essentially be preserved and his head to be specifically preserved and his skeleton to be preserved. And he wanted to be put on display at this university in London. He didn't found this university, but he was a sort of spiritual founder of it. So we said,

Starting point is 01:41:32 basically stuff me like a scarecrow and preserve my head and put me on display so that as students for the next hundred thousand years, walk into this university, I will greet them as they walk in so they tried to preserve his head and it didn't work in his head it was like disgusting failure and it's miserable so they they created a wax head and they put it on his skeleton and they dressed him in one of his old suits and he's still there you can go see him in his like wax head and skeleton and his suit are still at this university and And he was just a sort of oddball,

Starting point is 01:42:05 eccentric guy who seems like, and in his writing, some of which is impenetrable in the way that a lot of 18th century writing now seems impenetrable, but some of it is really fun to read. And he wrote little fun poems sometimes, little jaunty rhyming poems about his philosophy. And he was a goofball. He was a weird guy. And I feel like he would be very fun to drink brandy with at some dark wood paneled club in England somewhere. I mean, there's a lot of philosophers that it sounds like it would be fun to eat or drink with, but some of them, I'll bet Nietzsche would be fun to have a meal with, but also he kind of accidentally helped create the Nazis. And so it would be hard not to bring that up over your chicken

Starting point is 01:42:51 paillard or whatever you're eating. A lot of the philosophers in the book and a lot of philosophers in general, like a lot of people from the last 400 years are now problematic for a number of different ways. And I don't know of offhand, I'm sure that Bentham, Bentham also argued for a lot of things that not a lot of people argued for back then. He was a, I would say a proto-feminist and a big sort of equal rights guy. He was an animal rights advocate. He seems on balance from what I know of him, which again is not super deep, but he seems on balance to be less potentially problematic than a lot of the people that you might choose for this dinner you're imagining.

Starting point is 01:43:29 Yeah. I wonder how problematic we will be in 50, 100 years, probably very. But let me ask you then, if you could have the call a friend or Siri feature for two philosophers, another way to approach this question would be if you could pick one or two to just rely upon instructionally. And this is individual to you, but are there two who you particularly identify with as finding tremendously helpful to you in whatever sense that translates. Aristotle's the first one that comes to mind because Aristotle's whole thing, Aristotle created what is now called virtue ethics. And he didn't try to write a rule book, right? He didn't say, do this, don't do that. This is okay, this is not okay. What he says is there's a number of things,

Starting point is 01:44:28 qualities in a person, personality traits, call them what you will, and that matter. And those things are courage and generosity and magnanimity and things like that. And his goal was find the exact right amount of all those qualities. He called them virtues. And he said, if you can nail that sort of like dead solid midpoint of all of these qualities, that's what a good person is, right? So it's important that you be courageous. But if you're too courageous, you will be rash. His example is a soldier storming over a hill and trying to take on an entire army by himself and just getting shot. If you're not courageous enough, at the first sign of trouble, you'll abandon your unit and flee in the other direction, and then that's not good either. So the key is be courageous enough to do your job, but not so courageous that you act rashly. So that process, I find the most forgiving of human foibles and weirdnesses and the most sort of humanistic of all the theories. I find it to be the most inviting. It's the most forgiving, I think, of the mistakes that we are bound to make as people because you're going to screw up. He knows you're going to screw up. You're going to be too magnanimous or not courageous enough or too generous or whatever. And he sort of says like, that's okay. You're going to blow it. Just check in, do an accounting of what you've done and then adjust and keep aiming towards that dead solid middle perfect spot. Right? find him to be the most friendly, I guess is a word for it, right? He's like the friendliest philosopher because Kant basically says, if you screw up, you're dead to me. Like, I won't even look at you if you make a mistake, right? He's just very, very sticklery and Aristotle isn't like that. He's sort of like, hey, life is hard, it's complicated, and it's weird, and we're all

Starting point is 01:46:20 going to make mistakes. The key isn't whether you made a mistake. The key is what do you do now? If you've registered that you've been too much of this or not enough of that, next time aim, get a little better. And that is just very lovely to me. I find that philosophy to be the most inviting. So he is definitely one of the two I have on speed dial if I can. He also, by the way, granted he lived 2,400 years ago, but he thought slavery was totally fine. He has a lot of Aristotle writing that's like a defense of slavery. And you're like, oh, come on, dude. Come on. Don't blow this for me. I was so into you. And now you're talking about how great it is to have slaves. But the other one would be William James. So William James, much more recent, lived in the late 19th century,

Starting point is 01:47:06 early 20th century. His theory is called pragmatism. I also find pragmatism incredibly inviting. He didn't really invent it, but he kind of developed it. And pragmatism basically says, the only thing that matters is what's true, right? If something is true, then we can rely on it and we can use it. And pragmatism will use any means necessary to get at a fact, a truth, something that we can rely on and hold in our hands and know that it's real. So he doesn't say you have to be a utilitarian or you have to be a religious dogmatist or you have to be a Kantian. He doesn't care what method you use as long as you get to some kind of truth or fact and then base your decision on that truth or fact. And that, there's something just very lovely. I describe it in the book as the jambalaya of philosophy, right? It's like,

Starting point is 01:47:57 throw everything into the pot, everything we've got, use whatever we can. He doesn't care what theory you use or how you arrive at the truth, as long as what you're arriving at is the truth. And so I really like that approach because in a modern world, I mean, for him, the modern world was 1896 or whatever. For us, the modern world is 2022. Things have already gotten so much more complicated than they were 100 years ago. But he was sort of looking around at an increasingly complex world and saying, we don't have time to only use one theory here. We got to use all of them. We got to use everything we have. Every tool in our tool belt we should be able to use at any moment in order to arrive at something that we can agree upon

Starting point is 01:48:42 is true. And so I feel like on my speed dial, I've got Aristotle to just rub my back and tell me everything's going to be okay. And then I keep trying, man, keep going, putting one of those silver marathon blankets around me when the world is too wearying. And then I've got William James to be the guy who's like, all right, let's walk through what we know. Let's get to some kind of fundamental truth that we can rely on. And I feel like those two guys would work well in concert with each other. I have a lot of reading to do. I'm looking forward to my first edition of How to Be Perfect, I think. I need a plastic jacket and an inscription. You got to get your Mylar, man. You got to protect that dust jacket. That's where all the value is.

Starting point is 01:49:30 I do know Mylar because I still have every comic book I collected as a kid, which is several thousand comic books, all Mylar bagged and backed. Not that I've done much with them. They've really just sat there, but still. What is the crown jewel of your collection? If you could only save five comic books, what are they? I'm not a comic book guy, so this is all new to me. I don't know anything about comics. What do we got?

Starting point is 01:49:57 Yeah, these are not... I mean, keep in mind, I was working as a busboy on Long Island and buying what I could with very meager funds. So I don't have any particularly valuable comics, I don't think. I would probably save the comics that introduced me to specific characters and specific artists. So a lot of Jim Lee, basically resurrecting the X-Men. I would save McFarlane. I would probably grab some Punisher War Journal. Long story.

Starting point is 01:50:36 Things that had some, made some indelible mark on my childhood, which is the same reason I still have all of my Dungeons & Dragons. I have my modules. I have Fiendfolio. Dungeons & Dragons had a formative impact on my childhood. And for those wondering, Grey Elf was my particular race, preferred race. Drow Elves or Drow, I'm not sure how you pronounce it, were interesting to me. Chaotic good also

Starting point is 01:51:09 preferred, but I'm getting into the weeds a bit. So let me, I completely lost track of where I was, but that's nothing new. We're not really deviating from philosophy because philosophy is everywhere, even if you don't recognize it. And if you decide not to care about philosophy, well, that's part of your philosophy is deciding not to care. So it's sort of inevitable, not to, I feel like all roads lead back to David Foster Wallace, but the commencement speech about, what is it? This is water? Or I can't recall. This is water, yeah. Yeah. Just so people aren't lost on the reference. I think he begins with this joke slash parable of two young fish swimming along and they pass an older fish and the older fish says, how's the water boys? Something like that. And the younger fish continue on, and then they go, what the hell is water? So, excellent commencement speech. Actually ties into a lot of what we're talking about. But when we look at your bio, because you're talking about

Starting point is 01:52:17 Aristotle and the marathon blanket, and when life gets tougher, when you're feeling particularly weary, when we look at your bio that I read in the introduction, I mean, it just seems like step up to the plate, home run, home run, home run, just batting a thousand, right? That's maybe the impression because that's what bios are intended to do. They don't list the mistakes and the failures. Do you have any favorite failures by which I mean a mistake, a failure, whether it was viewed that way by you or by other people that you learned a lot from that was particularly valuable,

Starting point is 01:52:54 that set you up in some unexpected way for success later, anything. Do any failures come to mind, however you might define that? I mean, I've never failed once. So no. That's good because I was kind of trapping you. The how to be perfect title. A book with such a title cannot be written by a charlatan. Please continue. Yeah. So my failures that are valuable are sort of smaller scale than you, I think, would think. There have certainly been projects I've developed, pilots I've made, show ideas I've had that never went anywhere. You go along the process, you're making them, you write the script, they say, no, thank you. You make the pilot, they look at the pilot, they say, no, we're not making this.

Starting point is 01:53:40 That kind of failure is very common, very typical. I don't think that they have taught me as much as some, I guess what you would call smaller scale failures. So going back to SNL for a second. So here's how SNL works. On the Monday and Tuesday of every week, you sit around your office and you goof around and you write sketches. And the way it usually goes is you stay up Tuesday night until like nine in the morning. You stay up all night and you write all night. And then on Wednesday, there's a read-through. The host comes in and Lauren comes in and the cast sits around a giant table and the crew piles into this room. They read through 45 or 50 sketches over four hours and just one after another, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Starting point is 01:54:26 And then there's a meeting afterwards and Lauren and the head writers and producers and the host all kind of pick, here are the dozen sketches we're going to do this week. So there's a specific kind of failure at SNL that is so painful and visceral that I still, and this is not an exaggeration, I'm not saying this for effect, I still have occasional nightmares about this particular failure, okay? The particular failure is, it's the third hour of the read-through. Your sketch is number 28 in the rundown. Lauren reads the title of the sketch, this time okay next sketch is uh you know caveman olympics by mike shore and the people start reading the sketch and then whatever the joke of the sketches is sort of sprung the first joke comes up and it dies like no one laughs even

Starting point is 01:55:20 a tiny bit and what you know is that there's nine more pages on that joke premise coming. And the first one didn't work, and all you have is nine more pages of it. And what happens next is the sketch is dutifully read by the cast and the host, and the only sound in the room is the sound of like 110 people turning pages in a sheaf of stapled paper. That's the only sound. It's just the like, over and over again. And if you've ever wondered whether flop sweat is real, I actively flop sweat, flop sweated so many times in those moments where I was like, I want to die. I want to get up and run out of the room screaming because this is so painful. It's all of these funny people.

Starting point is 01:56:18 In my era, it was Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon and Tracy Morgan and Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon and the funniest people in the world and all of your peers, all of the writers who were also the funniest people in the world, and you cannot make one of them laugh for one-tenth of one second. And as painful as that is, and I experienced it so many times, As painful as that is, what happens is if you can survive it, you get to the other side of it and nothing bothers you. There's literally no kind of institutional failure that can faze you anymore. I mean, that doesn't mean you don't get upset when things don't work out. Of course you do. It doesn't mean you don't get sad or depressed or need someone to talk to or rely on,

Starting point is 01:57:05 or you don't need Aristotle to wrap a metallic blanket around your shoulders when things don't go your way. Of course you do. But in the creative world, that pain, that failure, that weekly sometimes failure just absolutely thickened my skin to such a wonderful degree that I just realized like, this doesn't matter. This is sketch comedy. This is all goofing around. This is silliness. It's not life or death. It's not the stakes of this are not the end of the world. The stakes of this are like, did your sketch work this week? And that really evens you out a little bit because then the flip side of that coin is you write a sketch and it kills and it gets solid laughs all the way through. And then it gets produced and you mount

Starting point is 01:57:52 it and it works on the stage. It works in dress rehearsal, it works in rehearsal, it works in dress rehearsal. It goes on the live show. It works on the live show. You made the people in the studio laugh. Maybe even in a rare case, at least for me, the sketch kind of goes a little viral. You see it pop up on the internet and people remember it fondly. When that happens, a thing you don't think is, I've nailed this. I'm good, man. I know how to do this job. I'm a rock star. I've got this down. Because you know that your next four and a half minutes of brutal, silent, paper-shuffling failure is one week away. It's going to happen next week. And so it just keeps you in this range of reasonable reaction

Starting point is 01:58:42 to the world that is pretty narrow and that you don't get a big head. Your successes don't make you into a monster and your failures don't make you into a depressive, a miserable person who complains and yells and screams and lashes out at people because it's a matter of course in your life. And I really think that kind of failure, especially at a young age for me, was so valuable. And I love it. I love that failure. I love thinking about it and keeping it close to my soul. Because I really think if you've experienced that failure, you cannot become a monster. And that's why not all, but the vast majority of people I know who went through SNL are really nice people. They're just nice and good and kind and they have a level head. And I think it's because we just got all beaten up and we ate that failure. We shoved that failure down our throats over and over and over again. And it just taught us that you can't ever let yourself think too much of yourself because you just have that institutional memory of failure you know oh that retelling just it makes my palms

Starting point is 01:59:56 sweat just thinking about it yeah sounds me too bad so bad and what a gift also, right? To be over and over again. Just taught that you cannot take yourself too seriously, right? Because God, the consequences of that will be just so severe. Yeah. It's not just that you can't take yourself too seriously. It's that you are not God's gift to the world. And I saw the greatest comedians of our generation bomb week after week after week. I saw Will Ferrell take huge swings and bomb. I saw Tina Fey take huge swings and bomb. And granted, their successes were much more frequent

Starting point is 02:00:37 than mine or really anyone. Tina Fey's batting average on that show in the six years I was there was the highest of anyone's. And she probably hit 400, which is great for a baseball player and incredible for an SNL sketch writer. But for most people, if you failed at your job 60% of the time, you would be crushed. But because of the nature of the job and because it's constantly reminding you, this is an absurd way to make a living, right? This is ridiculous. You're hanging out with your friends in an office and making jokes all day. You can't

Starting point is 02:01:10 ever get to a point where you get too worked up or too angry or too upset about things because it's absurd. And you learn to take the successes with a grain of salt and the failures with a grain of salt. And I really believe that that failure, for me at least, was a tremendous gift. And I'm so, so grateful for it. I'm glad I asked that question. Not that I'm taking credit for the answer. I can't take credit for the answer. But let me just ask a few more questions. I could go for hours, but let me ask a question that is very often a question that leads to a dead end. So I will take the blame for that if that's the case. But here goes nothing. So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, non-commercial, to get a message out to billions of people,

Starting point is 02:01:59 let's all assume they speak English. It doesn't have to be a quote. It could be a question. It could be an image. It could be anything at all. Is there anything that comes to mind that you might put on such a billboard? This is what I think I would say. And this goes back to a thing I wrote about in the book. The last chapter of the book is about apologizing. And what I say in the book is, this isn't really ethics. Apologizing isn't an ethical question because ethics has much more to do with whatever it is that you did that made you have to apologize. Whatever you blew it, that was probably an ethical question, or in many cases was. Apologizing isn't really ethics, but I think it's ethics adjacent. I describe it as an exit

Starting point is 02:02:43 interview after you've made an ethical decision that blew up in your face. Now here's your exit interview. Why did you do it? What have you learned? Try to heal the wound a little bit of whatever the action was that caused this little problem. And what's interesting about apologizing, I think, is that everyone is bad at it. And I will absolutely include myself in this. No one wants to do it. Everybody flinches and holds back when you know you should apologize to someone for something.

Starting point is 02:03:12 You never want to do it. You put it off. You procrastinate. You have a conversation with the person you should apologize to and you just don't apologize to them. You're like, God damn it. Why can't I just apologize to this person?

Starting point is 02:03:23 It's a really hard thing for people to do because it's icky. It's like, God damn it, why can't I just apologize to this person? It's a really hard thing for people to do because it's icky. It's like you feel shame and your face flushes and you get hot and you start sweating. And it's a hard thing to do. But I also think that it's really important. And it's a thing that in my life, I've worked on really, really hard to get better at it, to become a person who recognizes when I've made mistakes and apologizes for them, not eight months later or 10 years later, but in the moment, I really try to be a person who says, oh no, I blew this and I made a mistake and I should immediately apologize and try to heal this little wound. I don't think I'm succeeding at least 100% or even 50% at being that person,

Starting point is 02:04:13 but I think I'm better than I used to be. And it's not easy. And I'm very, very understanding of people who have a hard time doing it. There's another version of a bad apology that we see all the time in the public sphere, which is when people say, I'm sorry if you were offended or something like that, which is not, that's not an apology, man. That's not an apology. That's you saying I did nothing wrong and you're stupid enough to think that I did something wrong. So I'm sorry you're so stupid. That's what that is. So there's a lot of bad apologies. There's a lot of procrastinating. There's a lot of delayed apologies. This is all a long-winded way of saying that I think if I could put up this imaginary billboard or push notification or whatever, I think I would just say, the message would be, say you're sorry. And I would trust

Starting point is 02:05:01 that all 5 billion people who read it would think like, how did you know that I have someone I should apologize to? Because we all do. Everybody's got something to apologize for to someone. And I don't think that all 5 billion people would apologize for whatever they should apologize for. bet that some people, if they got a message from the netherworld that said, hey, say you're sorry, they would go, yeah, you're right. I should call Jim and apologize for that thing that I did to him last week or whatever. That would be maybe the greatest chance of mass success on a utilitarian scale that I could probably achieve. I'm now imagining in my mind, driving down the highway, and there's actually a sequence of billboards. And the first one says, say you're sorry. And then the next one says, I know it sucks, but it's important. Yeah, right. And the next one says, you still haven't done it. Come on, man. You know you got to do it. Todd May. So you spoke to a gazillion different, you spoke to slash harassed slash pulled into conversation many different philosophers, many different professors. Professor Todd May of Clemson ended up, as I understand it, being an advisor of sorts to The Good Place. Also was involved in the book. What makes Todd special? Why Todd? The first thing that makes him special is that we were working on The Good Place in season two.

Starting point is 02:06:38 And season two, spoiler alert, stop listening for a second if you haven't seen the show yet. Season two involves a Michael, Ted Danson's character, is a immortal being from the afterlife who is trying to learn essentially human philosophy, right? And we had this moment where we were like, well, how in the world is an immortal alien, whatever he is, going to give a crap about human philosophy, right? He's eternal. He's an eternal being. Why would he care about whether you correctly interacted with a human being in some small moment? So we went looking. We were like, I wonder if anyone's ever written about the morality of immortality. What happens if you're immortal? Does morality matter? And turns out someone did write about that. It's Todd May, and he wrote a book called Death, where it's a great book. It's very short. It's like maybe 100 pages, easily readable. And he talks about how mortality gives sort of shape and definition to our lives because we know that everything ends. And morality is what

Starting point is 02:07:45 helps us make sense of those lives while we're living them. If you're immortal, then none of this matters. If you're immortal, whatever, you make a mistake, big deal. You're going to live for an infinite number of years. The memory of your crummy mistake will fade over time and it won't matter anymore, right? So he happened to have written this book that was about the exact thing that we needed to learn about at that time. So I read the book and then I was like, God, this is a great book. This guy could really help us. I reached out to him. I had a Zoom meeting with him to talk about the book. And I found him to be the most lovely, congenial, intelligent, friendly, conversational person I'd ever met, certainly within the realm of academia, but also maybe in life.

Starting point is 02:08:31 He's just a lovely person. And I said, would you ever want to come into our writer's room and just talk to us about philosophy? And he was like, sure. So he popped into our room. We did a Zoom meeting with him. He came to LA once, and he came in and talked to us about a bunch of stuff that we didn't understand.

Starting point is 02:08:48 And he just became this kind of, he was like an emergency break in case of emergency. Like we would, if we had a question about philosophy, we would smash the glass, pick up a red phone. It would be connected directly to Todd May. And we would say, please explain existentialism. And he would explain it to us. And we would say, thank you. And we would hang up and go back to writing the script. And so he just became that guy. He and a woman named Pamela Hieronymy, who taught at UCLA,

Starting point is 02:09:12 became our two go-to advisors. And when I had to write the book, or I wanted to write the book at the end of the show, I had just had such a lovely time working with him that I said, I think I need someone who really knows his or her stuff to sort of sit next to me and look over my shoulder and make sure I don't really blow it. That's the role he played. He was the guy who made sure that when I talked about philosophers and what they said that I wasn't getting it terribly wrong, and then would also explain to me a bunch of stuff I didn't understand. So it was just a happy coincidence that he happened to have written about the exact thing that we needed to know about

Starting point is 02:09:49 at that moment. And then he just sort of joined the team and helped us out for the rest of the time the show was on the air. Just so I make sure I'm getting this right, the other name you mentioned is Pamela Hieronymy. So that would be professor. Hieronymy. Hieronymy as a philosophy professor. That is pretty great,onymy as a philosophy professor. That is pretty great, right? Incredible. So good. It's a wonderful name.

Starting point is 02:10:10 Yeah, I know. That's really outstanding. This has been a lovely and much longer than expected conversation. And I really appreciate you being so generous and patient with my never ending stream of questions. The book, I'm very excited about this, How to Be Perfect, subtitled The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur, S-C-H-U-R, aka Ken Tremendous on Twitter and elsewhere. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments, complaints, requests to the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up?

Starting point is 02:10:53 I guess I would only say that whether it's my book or another book, and there are plenty of them that I think deal with this topic well and conversationally, I would urge you all to do a bit of your own educational reading on the subject of ethics. I think that ethics is, I would so much rather that my kids take classes in ethics in high school than advanced math or biochemistry. And nothing against those subjects, but I think that the two subjects that are woefully undertaught in this country and that are really the foundational underpinnings of everything that I think is important for the continuation of society are ethics and civics. I think understanding the way governments work and understanding the way that ethics work and the way that we treat each other are vitally important.

Starting point is 02:11:50 And I hope that whether it's from my book or from some other survey or some other set of articles or anything, I really believe that people could greatly benefit from just the basic understanding of what these people said about ethics, how they work, the different theories that are out there, applying them to your own lives. I know that I have gotten a tremendous amount of happiness and satisfaction from just even when I do the wrong thing, which is frequent, I take a tremendous amount of pleasure from wrestling with the questions and from at least having some kind of scaffolding or structure that I can go to and think about and use to examine the problems that I face in my life. So I just recommend ethics as a life

Starting point is 02:12:40 improvement strategy. I think they're really interesting and really valuable. And I encourage everyone to just poke around, even if it's literally reading a Wikipedia page or something, it really can, I think, be of great benefit to just about everyone on earth. Here, here, I fully agree with that. And I'm going to, so that last question was a false summit, I apologize. I'm gonna, I realize that I need to mention

Starting point is 02:13:07 or ask you to mention something because I don't think you're going to mention it without some prompting. What happens to the proceeds from this book? And when I wanted to write this book, I had two thoughts back to back. One of them was, that sounds really hard and really fun. And I think the fact that it sounds really hard and fun means I ought to do it. And the second thought was it would be really weird to personally profit from a book about ethics and being a better person. So I am donating every single cent that I make from the book, from anything involved in the book, from foreign sales of the book, the advance, the royalties, any speaking honorarium that comes from the book, it's all being donated, 100% of it to charity, to one of five charities,

Starting point is 02:13:53 potentially more down the line if Todd and I, Todd isn't on this too. I forced Todd to take a small payment for his professional time, but he is also joining me in donating the majority of what he makes as well. So the first payment went to the IRC, which is a wonderful charity that you can find at rescue.org that helps people in need all over the world. We're donating one-fifth of it to the Rainforest Trust, which buys and preserves rainforest land. We've got other charities lined up in the worlds of social justice and legal justice. And World Central Kitchen was the second one I think we donated to. So anyway, I'm donating every single dollar I ever make from this to charities.

Starting point is 02:14:35 So that's another good reason to buy it is you know that you're also contributing to some good cause somewhere in the world. I love everything about this, which is premature because I haven't read the book, but I plan on it. But I have really enjoyed this conversation and I really appreciate you taking so much time. I know you have many options for what you may do with your time. And this has just been great. I really encourage people to check out the book, How to Be Perfect, the correct answer to every moral question. If it only delivers 20%, even 20, 20, 25%, just think about how much your life will improve. Think about how better off you'll be.

Starting point is 02:15:14 That's right. And for everybody listening, we will have links to everything, including the book and anything else that we've mentioned. We didn't even get to the specific episodes of TV shows that you rewatch, like The Constant from Lost or The Fly from Breaking Bad, maybe another conversation. But I find you to be very fascinating, very engaging, and a very good teacher just from this conversation, which makes me very optimistic about this book, which is also reflected in the writing from The Good Place and elsewhere. So I'm very, very optimistic about this.

Starting point is 02:15:49 And for those people listening, you can find all the links and resources at the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast as per usual. And until next time, just say you're sorry. God damn it. Just get around to it. And thank you for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

Starting point is 02:16:19 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off

Starting point is 02:17:03 for the weekend, Something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up

Starting point is 02:17:28 on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike. And I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it. Or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low-carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough. And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again,

Starting point is 02:18:08 spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass no-sugar margarita. But for special occasions, obviously, you're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. things clicked and bam, company was born. So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring,

Starting point is 02:18:55 all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to be by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their master chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Element came up with a very special offer for you, my dear listeners. For a limited time, you can claim a free Element sample pack. You only cover the cost of shipping.

Starting point is 02:19:33 For U.S. customers, this means you can receive an eight-count sample pack for just $5. Simply go to drinkelement.com slash Tim. That's drinkelement.com slash Tim to claim your free eight count sample pack. One more time. That's drink l m n t dot com slash Tim for this exclusive offer. Drink element dot com slash Tim. Check it out. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix sleep. Sleep is super important to me in the last few years. I've come to conclude it is the end all be all that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses,

Starting point is 02:20:17 you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side and like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one

Starting point is 02:20:54 best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. These are not cheap pillows either. So getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. So check it out one more time. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect”

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect”

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