The Exchanges

Q I totally agree. I love Billions. Huge fan, so. Thanks. One of the things that did strike me, I did a little bit of Googling before, um, is that you're a big fan of meditation. How did that get started?

A I am. I practice Transdental Meditation. I meditate twice a day for 20 minutes. Well, I've long tried to find ways to outsmart the part of my brain that wants me to give in to doubt and fear in all areas of my life, right? The part of my brain that makes it hard to sit down and do the work because it tells me that probably I'm not as good as I hope I'll be, and I'll never be able to capture the feeling I have on the page or when I shoot it. The part of my brain that Could keep me up at night with fears, particularly in a time like this. And so, a long time ago, when I was 30, I'm 53 now, a long time ago when I was 30, and I was in an acute stage of writer's block and really feeling like I, I wasn't going to be able to ever access the part of myself that was the most alive and do work that mattered to me, I found morning pages, as described by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way, and I, that worked not only as A solution to my writer's block, but kind of as a salve for many of these kind of issues. But over time, and that continued to work, and I do that every day. But over time, I found myself jousting more frequently with the physical manifestations of anxiety than I would have liked, and started searching. And the more books I read, The more people I spoke to, it seemed meditation was an answer. I'd always been worried about whether I'd be able to. I read David Lynch's book, Ca…

AI assessment note: “I read David Lynch's book, Catching the Big Fish, and he talks about”

Q Yeah, how does a writer's room even work? Like, I'm, pretend I'm a kid.

A No, we're, you know, David and I are the showrunners, so we, we run the writer's room. We have a group of, uh, seven other people in the room with us, and we all talk through this outline stuff of the episodes. So we work together And get the outline into what we think is pretty good shape. We then share that outline with our whole writers room team. They give us notes. We then incorporate the notes that make sense to us. Then we share it with Showtime. Then Showtime gives us their thoughts. They're incredible partners. They leave it to us to make all the decisions, but their outline, their questions are great because they haven't been in the writers room. So they don't know what we're planning. They know the arc of the season because we've told them that ahead of time, but they don't know what each episode is going to be. So they might get it and say, Oh, this is great. We don't understand what happens there when Axe talks to Taylor. Was Axe playing a game, or did he, you know, they'll ask questions that then allow us to refine what we're going to do. Then we don't turn the outline back in, but we take their questions. And bring those into when we draft the actual teleplay.

AI assessment note: “we all talk through this outline stuff of the episodes.”

Q How did you think about that? Did you think about that as like, you know, a certain percentage of movies are going to fail. This happened to be one, or did you walk away from that going like, oh, like I failed. I need to do something different. Like, how did you, how did you think about that situation?

A Every, no, that, that was a really brutal, I mean, that was a brutal blow. Part of that was that in the making of that, it was a very difficult, fraught filming process, or process if you'd prefer, and it, um, was, I knew the movie was going to be bad, and so I was waiting and waiting for it to be released, knowing it was terrible, and I did really get a call from a film agent basically saying, Your careers might be over. You might not be hireable unless you find a way to write yourself out of this, and so it was cataclysmic, man, and it required all those resources. I'd started meditating a couple years before that, which was incredibly helpful, but it was jarring. You know, I, I walked, I used to walk across Central Park to go to my office, and On a normal day, crossing the park would take 25 minutes, and I'd say in the shadow of that movie coming out, I was walking so slowly, it would take me like an hour and 20 minutes to get through the park because I was just so beat up and miserable. Um, but then you start to do things. I started my podcast in the shadow of that. I started making these vines that were called six-second screenwriting lessons where I was talking to people about giving themselves permission to do this creative work, and I was really, really talking to myself and trying to remind myself that I didn't need some authority figure to tell me I was hireable that …

AI assessment note: “no, that, that was a really brutal, I mean, that was a brutal blow.”

Q You mentioned sort of part of your routine, and is there anything else in that routine before I ask you what morning pages are?

A Uh, well, those are the Those are the main things. I take each part of that, the coffee I take seriously, the meditation, and the morning pages. And then I, um, pre-billions, every morning included a long walk, too, of a couple miles to my office, uh, in the making of the show, and then I would walk home at the end of the day. Once we started making the show, uh, it became much harder to do the walk in the morning, so I still do cardio exercise, but I have to figure out how to get it in every day. I can't necessarily add that in, or I just have to get up at, you know, three 45 every day, which I'm not quite able to do.

AI assessment note: “those are the main things. I take each part of that, the coffee I take seriously”

Q That's beautiful. Talk to me a little bit about the writing process. How do you go from idea to fully finished movie or show?

A I'll back up a little bit. I'd say anyone who really is interested in this stuff, The way you figure this question you're asking me out is by watching movies and then reading the screenplays or watching television shows and reading the teleplays. And with the internet, it's really easy to get access to those things. So I start, David and I, my partner is my lifelong best friend. We do all this stuff together. And we usually start with a world that fascinates us. And so you'll go, okay, well, this world of hedge fund operatives and United States attorneys, this seems like a big, fascinating, very specific world with insular language and customs that would be fun to dive into. And from there, we'll start to do research to see if it is a world that we find as fascinating as we think we find it. So which means reading a bunch of stuff, doing first person interviews with people, using whatever connections we have, you know, so if I know somebody who knows someone who works at a hedge fund to get to go visit the hedge fund or meet the US attorneys, spend a lot of time doing that, so that we feel like we can get our arms around what the world is. And then it's time to figure out who the characters are. So you have a lot of conversations about the kinds of people who are drawn to this world. You're doing a lot of journaling about this. You're doing a lot of thinking about what would br…

AI assessment note: “we usually start with a world that fascinates us. And from there, we'll start”

Q I want to hear more about living your dreams and sort of like you mentioned earlier, anxiety. Walk me through how you, how you convince yourself to live your dreams. Like, is there, is that just diving into the work or is there, is there more to it?

A Well, as I say, for me, It was an acute moment, right? It was an acute moment when I, I realized fatherhood's really important to me. I'm going to be bad at it. And that quickly I was able to shift. You know, I saw that there was a chance that by doing this work, I would free myself. And I'll say it happened so quickly. As soon as David and I started writing our first movie, we had no contacts. We, I had no thought that we could sell it or that we'd make a movie out of it, but the moment I was waking up earlier, going into a room, generating pages, I started walking straighter. I started, as I say, moving more lightly through the world, and I have found that whenever I talk about this, I get hundreds of letters from people who realize that they're in the same bind I was in, and that they hear this quiet voice, and they've been scared to let it out. And as to the root of where the fear comes from, I don't know, I think it's primal. But I do know that if you can somehow manifest it, You will feel better long before the world recognizes it. So living my dream, I don't translate that into when I got to make the movies. I really translate that into when I started to be able to identify myself as a writer, as a creative person. So that as long as I decided, I made a decision that as long as I wrote every day, I was a writer. I didn't need someone else to say it. I needed to do that w…

AI assessment note: “I made a decision that as long as I wrote every day, I was a writer.”

Q Is there a difference between somebody who started in movies and then writes TV shows and somebody who started in TV shows and then writes movies?

A I, there, there is in a few different ways. Um, One is that television writing is a career path, and that people can come up through writing rooms. You can get a job as a writer's room assistant if you're in a writing program in college, potentially, or a film program, film and TV program, and then if you're in a writer's room, you can kind of learn what that means to contribute ideas in a writer's room, and work your way up a system, and you can not count on that progression happening, but it's a progression that can happen, and it's a It is a career path. Being a movie writer, you really have to survive by your wits. There's nothing holding you in place. There's nothing, uh, there's sort of no safety harness. You're just floating out there trying to come up with the next good idea, trying to get hired, trying to sell the next spec script. I think it forces you to become, um, An original storyteller in a way that being a TV writer coming up through the system does not, and I think it gives, it gives you an edge when it comes to being in TV coming from this other world.

AI assessment note: “I, there, there is in a few different ways.”

Q Talk to me a little bit about your response to that. How do you think about that?

A Well, I, that's, a lot of that is, like, um, result thinking. Well, I, I think about it this way. One, you have to calculate less. You have to calculate less. If you, the more you try to game this stuff out, the more it becomes clear the odds are against you, and you can't win. But Most folks who've accomplished something great were kind of just unrelenting in their belief, forget their belief, unrelenting in their determination to do it. And momentum is an incredibly powerful tool, as is inertia, an incredibly powerful force, right? So I just think commit to doing something for a few days, And then commit to doing it the next day. And then suddenly you have this kind of momentum that thrusts you forward.

AI assessment note: “I think about it this way. One, you have to calculate less.”

Q Does the economics at all impact how the story gets played out? The economics of the show in any show?

A Well, sure, you have a budget. Um, so you, so if you're the showrunner of a TV series, your responsibility is to tell the story that you want to tell, Within the amount of, with using the resources that you're given. So the beginning of the season, our line producer really deals with the finances. We'll talk to Showtime. We'll talk to us. We'll together all figure out, well, this is the, what we think, you know, they'll say, well, this is what we feel like you guys should have this year. We'll talk it through, and then we'll make the show for that amount. I mean, that's part of the job, right? We're, we are in a business partnership with The finance here, and they give us a tremendous amount of creative freedom, and our responsibility is to make a show that really works for us and our audience, and that works for them financially, them being Showtime financially. Uh, we take that obligation really seriously to them, you know, because they're entrusting us with this. You know, we, that's a real thing.

AI assessment note: “Well, sure, you have a budget.”

Q What do you know as a professional storyteller about the cornerstones of a good story that we don't know, or we can't see?

A Well, I think you do know, actually. I think people get bound up when they have to, you know, if you have to go make a speech, if one has to make a speech and knows that they want to tell a story in that speech, they might get really nervous because suddenly they have to write, and some teacher told them that there was a form they had to adhere to, and that was unnatural for them. But if I put you in a coffee shop or a bar and And you had to sit down with somebody, and it was important for you to make them laugh, or for you to keep them engaged. And I said, Shane, tell them a story that you know people always react to. You would tell them that story, and that story would have An inciting incident, the moment that it comes alive , it would have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The middle of it would probably build to some sort of a climax. There would be some sort of a resolution, and that's all the same stuff that's happening when we're telling a story professionally. I guess we're probably better at recognizing, or more practice, not even better, at recognizing the stuff that gets in the way of that, But we all know how to do all of this stuff. It's all just about getting comfortable with it. It doesn't mean everybody has, I'm not being falsely, uh, humble. That doesn't mean everybody has the same, uh, utility with language that I have. That utility with language is hard one…

AI assessment note: “Well, I think you do know, actually.”

Q What keeps you going? Like, with all the success you've had, like, what keeps you motivated to wake up in the morning and just keep going after it?

A This work makes me, the work makes me feel, it does make me feel alive. You know, it's the same reason I do my podcast, The Moment, is I made the decision when I was 30 that I was going to follow my curiosity and the things that fascinated me, and as long as I'm doing that, I feel like a version of myself that I Want to spend time with. For me, I think that in anybody's career, you got to take care of your family. You have to make money. I'm not a Pollyanna-ish idealist in that way, but if you can find a way to do work that makes you feel fulfilled, it's really easy. A part of keeping at it becomes much easier. Listen, it's a hard business, my business. It requires a tremendous amount of commitment, a lot of time, But the rewards are outsized too, Shane, right? The rewards in terms of people telling me How much they dig the thing, you know, the, the sort of feedback I get, the financial rewards. I mean, all of it is outsized to, especially considering I just love doing it. So what keeps me going is, is all of it, man. I mean, it's much harder to ask somebody who's, uh, you know, riding the back of a garbage truck every day, uh, what keeps them going, which is of course, what keeps them going is the need to put food on the table and take care of their family and the sense of a job well done and all that other stuff. But someone who has the opportunity to do what I do, who wouldn…

AI assessment note: “This work makes me, the work makes me feel, it does make me feel alive.”

Q But you are that dream for a lot of people, right? Like you're financially successful, you're outwardly successful in terms of recognition and creating something people value. And then you get to a point where you could walk away and sail off into the sunset, but you keep going. And I love that.

A Well, I think it's really important to say that a long career in Hollywood has a lot of ups and downs. I mean, in in 2013, I thought I was drummed out of the business. David and I wrote a movie that completely bombed at the box office. It was a disaster on Rotten Tomatoes. We were involved in a high profile project that was going to be on HBO and it never happened. We got fired from it before it even begun. And we had a movie agent call us and basically tell us it's possible that our career was over. And it was out of that, that we started writing billions. And so I had those conversations with my wife in 2013. My wife, Amy Koppelman is a filmmaker too. And I remember having a conversation about whether we'd have to sell our apartment and downsize and How we were gonna look at our, we were not living extravagantly. We've never lived extravagantly, and I remember really feeling like this might come to a crashing halt, and then I remembered being 30, and I remembered the only way to gain control of this is to control the stuff that I can handle, which means showing up again and starting to write again, and so that was 2013, and by 2015, we were in production on the pilot of Billions, and Able to sort of shift into this other gear. And so I never take it for granted that it's going to continue. I'm responsible about the money. Amy and I are responsible about the financial part of …

AI assessment note: “I never take it for granted that it's going to continue.”

Q What have you learned, I would say, maybe in the last 20 years, sort of, about living a meaningful life?

A Well, it's something I think about a lot. Um, This is where you get into trouble talking about this stuff, but I, I think it's, it's because it's nothing novel, right? It's a life that involves doing work you think is meaningful, being good to as many people as you possibly can, contributing in whatever ways you can, uh, in a societal way, and I try to do all that stuff the best I can. I mean, for Amy and me, raising our kids was the single most meaningful thing by far. It's the thing that gave our lives meaning that and doing work that we cared about. I mean, that takes care of a huge, a huge part of it. Right. And then trying to be there for as many people as you can in whatever way you can. Again, that stuff is, it's basic. And I think in different phases of your life, you can do Different parts of it. You can do more of it.

AI assessment note: “raising our kids was the single most meaningful thing by far.”

Q Did that put a lot of strain on your relationship with Amy?

A No, that's the luckiest thing in my life is that like, uh, we married, we each married the right person for us. So no, we were in it together. We're really lucky in that way. I, we were too young to make a rational decision. Shane, like I was 25 and Amy was 22 when we, I mean, I guess I just turned 26 when we got married. Like, Oh no, I was 25, and then I turned 26, I guess, 20 days later, but we, we just happened to pick the right person, and we just fit, and we have, uh, incredibly honest, we, I'd say a lot of people's favorite episode of my podcast is the one that Amy was on, and it was when her movie I Smile Back was coming out, and we had a great combo about all this stuff, and I would say it's a real great peek into A functional marriage that has withstood whatever disappointments from the outside by sort of being together.

AI assessment note: “No, that's the luckiest thing in my life is that like, uh, we married”

Q Like, how do you take care of yourself to give you the strength and energy to take care of other people?

A Well, I think that goes back to like the stuff we talked about, like meditation and morning pages and exercise. I mean, these things which are hard to force yourself to do, they are, they sound like just received wisdom or something, but the thing is that They work. I guess the only other thing is like the way the Tibetans talk about it, you know, contemplate your death. That makes a lot of things very clear too, right? If you really try to understand the, the concept of death, it does help clarify a lot about the concept of life and how you should live. But it's mostly Simple things. I mean, oh, well, one thing for me is eating well. If I eat well, uh, eating and sleeping, those things are really important. Eating well and sleeping well, meaning, uh, not eating too much, like, you know, sugar and flour.

AI assessment note: “meditation and morning pages and exercise... eating well and sleeping well”

Q How did you overcome fear? You mentioned fear earlier. What were you scared of?

A Well, listen, we, we all have these existential fears, right? All these fears are some kind of a replacement for the idea that we're here for a short time. It's the human condition. But then these fears manifest in different ways, and People who want to do what I do, and who feel that somewhere in them, there's an artistic impulse, or even if you're somebody who works in an office, and you know that if you work from the most creative part of yourself, that means you're going to take risks. That means you might put an idea forth that hasn't been thought of in your firm before. You might get laughed at. Your idea might not, you might reveal to yourself when you finally manifest it, oh, Crap. This wasn't actually a good idea, and the fear of not being special, of not being good enough is, can be crippling to people, and the truth is, what I've discovered is that's all just stuff. It's what Steven Pressfield in his book, War of Art, calls resistance, but the, to me, As soon as I get past it and start doing the work, I remember that the result, the external result doesn't matter at all. I've been cured so many times of whatever's ailing me just by the doing of the work, by engaging with this question inside of me, by getting, listen, in these times, I'm never going to talk about a writer or an artist being brave, but there is something of an internal fortitude that when you find a w…

AI assessment note: “I've been cured so many times of whatever's ailing me just by the doing of the work”