#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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Now it's seen. a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton. No Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. My guest today is Michael Schure. Sure sure. Depending on who you ask. On Twitter at KenTremendis, we're gonna 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 is also 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 Fay 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, 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 Line group.

The Lampoon is this very old institution at Harvard. It was founded in I think eighteen seventy six 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 of interesting things about it. One of them is that the alumni are numerous and very high achieving like it

William Randolph Hearst was in the lampoon. And so was John Updike and so was George Plimpton and a million comedy writers in the from like the eighties to the present, who have written for Letterman and the Simpsons and and SNL and all 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 were 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 Kenny wrote Animal House and And he was on the lampoon and

Jim Downey, who is a legendary comedy writer at Letterman I think he was Letterman's first write head writer and wrote m so many of your favorite S and L sketches throughout history. He was on the Harvard Lampoon. So when I applied to college That was like on my essay for Harvard was I I want to come here'cause I want to join the Lampoon. So when I got there, that was like goal number one for me was joining it. And you there's like an audition process. You have to write material and then

You get 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. Yeah 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 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. It was 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 and sort of given notes by the other artists on the staff. Then they voted on what their favorite artists were. And same with with writing. You wrote three pieces. uh comedy pieces of the subjects were up to you. You were winnowed down.

from the total number of people trying to get on to, you know, half that and then half again. And then they would bring, you know, 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 kinda test that theory'cause I was skeptical. So I submitted my pieces

The first time I tried out. I submitted anonymously, to the extent I could. I I only wrote my 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 I made it past the first cut and I show they have a 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 sip 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 like a Frat hazing week.

But you spend a week, like, getting 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 uh do you have any recollection With that. Paradox of choice.

situation where the topics are up to you. How you chose what you would right about. Are there any constraints? Like five hundred words or less, thousand words or less, is there were. I wish I remembered they put a page limit on'em, you know,'cause it's prose comedy. It's a kind of comedy writing that isn't done that much anymore. The closest analog that people might be familiar with is something like the Shouts and Murmurs page in the New Yorker. Like a lot of Lampoon people have gone on to write Shouts and Murmurs pieces for the New Yorker. Prose comedy used to be much more common. Magazines used to have the

humor, you know, PJ 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've been gifted a subscription as a freshman in college. By someone, probably my dad, who thought, You're a college man now. You ought to read an intellectual magazine. And then it lapsed and I started getting these like really angry letters that were like You know, like what's the deal? What how could you have betrayed us like this. So you legitimately were getting these in indignant letters from the New Yorkers. Yes. That's incredible. I was and and and they kept offering me

The free tote bag if you re up. And I I remember just continuously thinking, like, I don't want your damn tote bag, man. Like, leave me alone. So I wrote a piece that was like Five or six in a series of letters asking to re up like it just got increasingly antagonistic and aggressive. So it was that sort of thing and that would fit on one page. You know what I mean? Like that's five hundred words or six hundred words or something.

you know, 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 twenty page long. humorous short stories. These are like short little bursts. These are shouts and murmurs level bursts of of humor. I'm sure somewhere in a box, somewhere in my house is my original pieces that I submitted, but

At least for my memory, they're long gone. You know, I was I was just gonna say that that is one of the m great things about comedy as a discipline is that You know, stand ups will tell you that the reason they like being stand ups frequently is because There's a vote. You write a joke.

And you perform it and the audience votes immediately whether or not that jokes is funny, and it's not quite as immediate. in T V 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 would work and some wouldn't. And then it would end at ten, and the show goes live at eleven thirty.

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 in like months and months and months go by and then they sort of float out into the universe. comedy very frequently, especially comedy for performance, is just It's like a Roman Coliseum, you know, 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.

There's not a lot of 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 like no one's ever gonna 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. Yeah. Well about S now. For

A moment. I was gonna ask you about lessons learned at SNL, but there are a number of different ways I could frame the question. Another would be 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 paraphrasing here that you you think everyone or any comedy writer should s sort of do a tour of duty if possible. At S and L for a period of time. I'm sure a lot of more people would like to than can. But what what were some of the lessons learned for l 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. So From a creative standpoint.

The thing that S Nel teaches you is To not be precious with your own material. You generally have about four minutes to do whatever you're gonna do. With rare exceptions. You're talking about four minutes, and so you write a sketch. And it's five minutes and thirty eight 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 you know 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. Like it just trains you to say anything can be cut.

And If it improves what you're doing. than cut it. And I think that's a really hard lesson. for some people to learn, especially when depending on where those people 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 you did this alone. You figured it out, you crack the code, and how dare anybody tell me to cut this or cut that or how dare the 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 twenty five minutes too long. Like that I liked it. It was good, but man, why was that so long?

And the answer is almost always like they just didn't get tough enough on their own material. So SNL is just ruthless about that. S N L is like a Lauren Michaels has many aphorisms that he likes to dole out to you and As you sit at his feet and he he dispenses his wisdom and

But one of the things he has been saying for I think about fifty years is The show doesn't go on because it's ready. The show goes on because it's eleven thirty on Saturday night. And that 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 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 learn. Another thing it teaches you, and by the way, I should note If you meet and work with anyone who went

Through the S and L Gauntlet of Fire. Everybody has that same sort of attitude toward their own material. So When you're talking about an actor like Andy Sandberg. So my friend Dan Gorn I created Brooklyn I nine, Andy Sandberg.

We got Andy Sandberg to s to star in it. Andy Sandberg is a very 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 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. Cut this. It's a very rare star of a T V show. Who will say, Cut my material. You know, like that's not That's not the typical attitude for like 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 S and L Judge. Comedy and material. based on only like 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 Polar'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 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 like 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 gonna return to sort of the the end of your SNL tenure, but before we get there, I wanted to ask about I'm not gonna say the antithesis because I don't think that's totally accurate, but

Perhaps a contrast in styles, or at least uh someone who is not purely encapsulated by Brevity is the soul of wit. And that is David Foster Wallace. How how did

I mean it seems Like you have a longstanding fascination with David Foster Wallace. How did that start? Why is that the case?

Well, uh there's a v extremely long winded version of this story. I'll try to I'll try to make it only. This is like morning TV, so we can go as long as you want. Mm. So February of nineteen ninety six, 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 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. It really something about it just

altered my brain chemistry and changed the way that I thought about literature and writing and the world 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 Billy Bud or something, but I just kinda wanna 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, thinking about it in terms of like how it fit into the postmodernism canon. And Around

I can't remember now, maybe October of the following year. Wallace came he was on a tour and 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 Bradle Theater, which was in Cambridge. So I was president of the Lampoon at the time, and one of the things a Lampoon does is it gives out awards to people.

And it's always sort of a joke. The hasty pudding is the old famous eighteenth century social club at Harvard and they give out a man and woman of the year award. And it's always, you know, literally like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts or whatever. It's like the most famous people of the world and they all come. So the lampoon would do

A parody of that and they would say 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 we used to have the you know celebrity dinners from time to time, so Unilaterally, without even asking anyone else who worked at the organization.

I decided that David Foster Wallace was going to get an award from the Harper Thampoon. 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

I'm gonna level with you. Like we're making this up. We we we're just completely making this up, this award, but It's a really cool building and it's a fun group of people and he's gonna be in town and if he 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, uh this is Dave Wallace. Is this Mike Shore? And it was just Wallace calling me on the phone And he wanted to know since so like my heart 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, uh 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 A bunch of people on the stuff had read the book and really loved it. And we just hung out with him and he was great and we 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 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

Corresponders. 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

There 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 We corresponded for a while and I tried to get him to come to SNL. to see the show'cause 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 California and taught at Pomona and we sort of lost touch and I kept it. thinking in my head'cause 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.

correspondence I think I I've 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'cause that's impossible, and not an ongoing TV show,'cause that's also impossible, but some kind of limited series.

And this is years ago now. This is probably twelve years ago. At the time a thing that's very commonplace now, which is a sort of l like mayor of East Town was like this, like a sort of six or seven hour mini series. that has like a very high budget and and stuff like that. That didn't really exist back then.

But I tried to convince people that it would be r a really good book to adapt into something like that. I had optioned the rights to it. I had sort of gone to his estate and made my case as like 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 kinda didn't happen. among them that his the people who control his estate 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 wanna do anything that would ever make any of you feel uncomfortable or 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 two thousand I'm gonna say two thousand eight, nine, ten, somewhere around there.

Where I was like, I think I'm gonna spend the next four years of my life trying to adapt this enormous ridiculous book into a eight hour mini series. It would have been a very there's the sliding doors thing where like that could have been the way my professional career win. Mm-hmm Yeah. Have you ever thought

Or would you ever resurrect? That goal? To adapt in some fashion, infinite just. Have you read the book? I hesitate to ask. I haven't, I'm not gonna lie. I have not. I've read a bunch of his writing, mostly shorts shorter stuff. string theory and a lot of the shorter stories, but if it just I it was

Just too intimidated by the sheer magnitude. By the bulk of it. Just the bulk of it. Yeah. 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. Like 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 ninety six. He wrote it, you know, over the call it eight years prior And the book imagines a very near future.

It's almost a little black mirrory, if you've seen that show. Where he's imagining it takes place in So it came out in ninety six and it basically takes place from like two thousand to two thousand Eight or so. he's projecting forward and extrapolating into what he saw going on in society and and imagining The kind of slightly warped, slightly funhouse mirror version of what the world is gonna be like.

Now of course we're twenty 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

Cheap. 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 uh 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. Yep. That would be Yeah. That would be very, very tough. Not not impossible, but tough for the reasons that you mentioned, you know, as you're Describing The challenge I was I was thinking of motherless Brooklyn and what Edward Norton did with that and his

obviously his colleagues and everyone else did with that novel because they had some creative challenges With respect to how The characters although it it's set in a somewhat contemporary landscape within the novel speak like old timey gangsters. It's one another. Yeah. And so they 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 uh ignorance pool on this one. I'm I'm this is 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 choose the timing if you chose it. I don't know. I didn't really choose it. It kinda 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 gonna 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 S N L 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 S and L

Is a little bit of a I guess you call it like a golden handcuffs kind of a situation because Normally when you work on a T V 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.

S and L. 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 twenties to that show. I started when I I just turned twenty two. And I worked there until I was twenty nine. And I left in part because I realized

That if I didn't Achieve velocity. I might just stay there forever. And that's not the worst thing in the world. You only work like half the year'cause you have all these weeks off and Make a good living and I bought an apartment in Manhattan when I was twenty five.

It's kind of an amazing life. But I just had this sense that if I wanted to do more creatively I had to leave and so All of these things kinda lined up. My feeling like I had sort of gone as far as it was as I could go or that I wanted to go really

my then girlfriend now wife living three thousand miles away. the end of my twenties, like all of those things kind of coalesced. And I just decided okay, this is gonna 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. You're having like It it's really crazy making. Like you have six identical meetings a day. You go into a 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.

And you go in and you meet the uh senior vice president of comedy at Fox. And you chat amiably for fifty minutes, almost to the minute you did fifty 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 twentieth 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, Would you like a water or a diet Coke? and you chat amiably with this new person for fifty 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 their 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. Well, I'm I'm so and so. I created a 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 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. Then 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 from the British version to the American version. So I love the office. I the British office. It was my uh I I found it to be maybe the greatest comedy h 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. None the less, I took the meeting with Greg and He Instead of like Going to a place and having the going here in fifty 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. It 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? 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 fifty meetings, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, with fifty different people at 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 gonna offer me a job. But if he does I'm gonna take it because I think he's gonna Teach me how to write. I just get the sense that he's like a professor. And he knows how to do this. He he's 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 The 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.

Plot. and motivation and and character, all the stuff that you need. He taught a class, a pH d 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's world.

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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

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're 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 like the beginning of this journey. I believe I said something like I don't know if the show's gonna work. 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 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 a Hail Mary's chance of this actually succeeding.

that he was the quarterback who was gonna throw the ball. So It really was based on I don't know that I was a ri 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

She was approaching it from a completely different angle than I would have ever imagined anyone would approach it. And I was right. You did and and that's why it worked. What did you at that point recognizing that's and I'm gonna 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's everything. Because

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 develop as quickly as you can milk it for all it's worth and then it's a tissue that you you throw in the garbage. You you pluck it out of the box, you blow your nose and you throw 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 how 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. But long form TV writing is you're establishing characters and you're slow cooking them over hopefully In the office's case, two hundred episodes. These are not tissues anymore. These are like carefully

honed in crafted dollhouses with like miniature furniture in them that all need to be properly sanded and painted and like placed in these really specific ways. And you have to keep coming back to them and you you're building them. 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 idea of saying how do you pace out a character growth over multiple Episodes multiple seasons. How do you establish Interesting relationships and dynamics that you can go back to over and over again. 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, they'll come up with a bunch of funny jokes. What's important is why is he doing that? What is the like character trait?

That's led him to be the kind of person who thinks he has the ability to run a diversities 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 this guy named Roy, who he hates. How does that fit in? Like all of those All that grist for the mill. That was unknown to me. I 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 you know Letting the audience like throw to the musical guest so they can perform a song. Like that's just not that's not that's the old that's S N L this is not S N L this is an entirely new animal.

Follow up on the the Professor. I've read in uh I think it was an interview. Of sorts, Profile and Vanity Fair. This is from two thousand eight. 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. You can't be too fast, it can't be overnight, it's 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 a few weeks of class. Are there any other lessons? An 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 how much time you got kind of a deal'cause I could tell you 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 the that a professor of Newtonian physic would say would write F equals M A on the board and then everyone would scribble it down in their Notebooks or type, I guess. This is how it's showing you how old I am that I'm still imagining people taking notes with a 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 so that they're'cause comedy is all about thwarting expectation. And if people see something coming, then they'll They won't laugh. Being surprising. Escalation is another big one, right? If 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 there's a certain quality that executives like to refer to as likability.

which is a a kind of a reductive term, but it essentially means that if people if audiences 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 the 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 likeability, but it you might call it relatability. You might say the main characters on a show or that 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 the basic building blocks of life. Yeah. As far as teaching moments There as many aphorisms as Lorne Michaels had about

Comedy Greg has just as many. And There was a so he 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 s a secret Santa, 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 and he had gotten He had drawn Ryan. Ryan was the temp played by B. J. Novak. He had drawn Ryan in the

Secret Santa. Gift exchange, draw. And he had bought a video iPod. So even though it's a classic Michael Scott thing because there was a twenty five dollar limit or whatever, and he because his he was so desperate to be loved. Just bought this kid a four hundred dollar 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 Even Mitts and get something better. So When I wrote the episode, I did this thing where I

I was like, Okay, well the reality I've been a part of many Secret Santa's and many offices and I 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 gonna buy a grip for Creed. So I did it the way it would really be done. And

There was a 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 like to 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 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 that that's what she got. And Greg was like we 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 opened the gift and

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 would like a book like that. And what would be better is if there were something that were like overlapping in the overlapping area of the Venn diagram of what we already know about her

And what we can 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. You know that there's like there's like a baby 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 with like a like a fedora and like a toy saxophone. And Somehow, I don't know why, but somehow that was like that's perfect. Like that is exactly the kind of person we 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? 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 d I wish I remember too, someone pitched that. And immediately was like, Oh my God, that's per I don't know why, but that's perfect. So 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 with the was then added to the set. She put it up next to her. 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.

And it flowered. It just bloomed into this thing that was that lasted for for years and years and years. And so Greg's thing, and this is what that Vanity Fair article was 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. And it doesn't have to be A huge thing. It doesn't have to be like My dad was, you know, 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, 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 gonna ask you about The pitch for the good place, and how it was pitched 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, you know, if I could only take five things from my house as it were burning down, and you mentioned l 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. So it's not you can't hedge your bet. You can't say I'm gonna 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 Just 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. That would be maybe that's too much, David Foster Wallace. But I I think I would take that book. I also 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'cause 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 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. And he was a Red Sox fan, I'm a Red Sox fan, and in Christmas of two thousand three.

She inscribed a copy of one of his books to me with a long message about how he really thought two thousand four was gonna be the year The Red Sox had just gotten Keith Folk a relief pitcher and Kurt Schilling a starting pitcher. who were 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 like two thousand and four is the year they won the World Series for the first time in eighty six years. It would be awfully hard not to rescue that. piece of piece of literature from my house. So it The answer is when I play this game is usually five books. Oh

I'll tell you, there's one thing that isn't a book that I would save, which is After the good place ended, I got a call 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. And I was like, All right, what is it? And he was like, I don't want to tell you what it is, just 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.

Ha And it was so like the the cognitive dissonance I guess you would call it of receiving that object and opening it and reading it in his own hand. With 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 and it's it's incredibly meaningful to me and 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 is does it have a jagged edge? Is it from like a restaurant Place match. It's the back of a it's the back of a Denny's menu. Yeah.

Yeah, contrast that would make it even better. I I wish it were. I wish it were on the I wish he had done the maze on the front of the Denny's menu and then on the back it just j written off, dashed off a note to me. That would be amazing. How did your book collecting of first edition start. We're not gonna uh don't worry, I'm not gonna spend uh an hour here, although I could, but how how did how did that begin? Like what was what was the beginning of the collection where you're like, Oh

Oh, this is 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 kind of 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. They were used to be called rack packs, where there were like sort of three sections of cards. And I remember ripping them open. I remember holding the cards in my hand and flipping through them and like the tactile sensation of that is like incredibly drilled into my memory. And I became obsessed with them and I bought 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 C Ds came out, like the feeling of buying C Ds 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 like building a collection of something. So I was 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 i incredibly fussy about They can't be in direct sunlight and the humidity and the room has to be at the right level and they it's all this it's all this kind of 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 it dust off it or whatever. the feeling of that plastic in my hands, like and the sheen, the gl the sort of like shininess that it made the book. Look like I mean, it's literally no different than what l what libraries do, right? It's the library, it's that plastic that goes around the covers of library books. Again, something just kinda 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 Panin by Vladimir Nabokov, because I really love that book. But now I have to get all of his books. So like I need the flight. And the whole thing. I gotta 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 had to 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 all. Like I was still like any money I had for my for my student jobs, it was going right to like used in rare book stores and I was scouring in the early, early days of the internet, I was scouring eBay for

obscure copies of Don Delilo novels that someone might not know the value of and stuff. So it just it started from that. It just was like a thing that my uncle did who got me into it and it's continued. It's only burning brighter uh 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 if you're wondering.

Man, I would love to see your library sometime. That's uh I know I know this is just a first date, so I'm getting ahead of myself, but in any case. Uh we we are gonna 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. Like 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 can tremendous pop 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.

'Cause Ken is kind of a normal, boring, straightforward name. And then putting the word tremendous after it just made me laugh. 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 sort of really began to Spent their time. And

avatars and 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 like track me or know who I am. So I'm gonna just go do everything I do on here anonymously, and I chose Ken Tremendous as my sort of internet name.

So when I w I used to run a blog with a couple of my friends about 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 getting tremendous When Twitter started, I was like, I don't know what this is, but I don't want it 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

endlessly funny to me is that well, first of all, long ago stop trying to hide the fact that that's me. Like If you Google Kent Dremetis, my picture shows up. Like it's not like I'm trying to pretend to to be anonymous. But About two or three years I think into being on Twitter as Ken Tremendis 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, Do you know, I wrote back like on the DM m the 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, Okay, so I'm verified on Twitter as an imaginary fictional personality. It's kind of amazing. That is amazing. Yeah, I remember when uh It's a good name, right? It is. When we're when I was doing some some original Research.

Before we even booked this and uh found uh I found you as Ken Tremendous on Twitter and I was like, Is this possibly accurate? You just never know because on one hand it could be And you know, 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 have had concerns about security or privacy. Or B, they were like, Twitter, this is never gonna be anything, right? So then that's how you end up with like Angela Merkel's like hot fuzz four eighty seven or whatever. I'm making that up. That's not a real example, but yeah, and you're like, How the hell does that happen? So I had to ask about tremendous. Yeah.

It is a very weird aspect of my life, but it is very funny to like have an alternate personality. The backstory for Ken Dremendez for some reason is that he's A pension plan monitor. at a made up company called Fremulon Insurance. And um,

And Do I know that word for some reason? Why do I know Fremulon? Well F Fremulon is now my became my production company. Right. So now at the end Yeah, the end of all my shows, there's a graphic for an imaginary company called Fremulon. So it's a it's a whole there's a whole other metaverse thing going on where there's a there's a company called Fremulon and a guy named Ken Tremendez 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. 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

a wristwatch guy or a clothes guy or a car guy. Like I 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. Like I just

Because I don't care and I just think like it's a box that gets me from point A to point B and I don't care what it looks like. And and if they get dented, I don't care. The thought of like spending money on car upkeep is bananas to me. And and that I don't Hold it against people who do care. Honestly, like if that's your thing, that's your thing. Great, more power to you. But because I don't

I'd 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 pause or a 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 twenty five, what were the five things that mattered to me? How is that different from thirty-five or forty-five? It is weirdly a game I play a lot with myself. I've never really thought about why, but I would 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 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 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. Alas. 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 a more certainly a more effective way of achieving what I'm what I'm hoping it's achieving, which is like to give you some kind of pattern in your life or to sort of give you some kind of path you can follow of like here's where I came from, here's where I am now. Yeah.

Well let's let's talk about one place you were, which is I assume. Now I'm not gonna go play by play through the Entire chronology, of course,'cause I think that people can do plenty of their own Research on that.

The good place in the pitch. How did you 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 or

I am a huge fan of of the good place, wrote about it. 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. What was the pitch? When Parson recreation ended Brooklyn nine nine was still on the air. But Parson Rech 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 thirteen 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, like they're not gonna Make me do a pilot and then look at the pilot and then determine whether they're gonna 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. Two Myself and I kind of owe it to the

idea of being a creative force on television To try something insane. You know, like I I have been doing I had been doing something Essentially the same at that point for a decade, which was writing stories about

A group of people in a place on earth. The office was a group of people in an office in Scranton, Pennsylvania that Parks and Rack was a group of people who worked at a government office in Indiana and Brooklyn I 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 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 family show. I had never done a family show. And so I uh being a 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 m my family. Like I'm from I'm like a I'm a sort of m 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 it's in little tiny pieces. This idea had been kind of like bugging me.

And so I thought about that and I started it excited and I developed it in in my on my own time. And It just became very obvious that like that was the interesting idea. And

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'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 T V network on the idea of doing a show that's

Explicitly about moral philosophy. That's a tough sell. And so I question number one, what is moral philosophy? Yeah. Yeah. And how does it work on Tuesday at eight thirty 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 can goof balls 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. Like he put an enormous amount of work into that show. But My point is that I worked 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 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. I was 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 I promise I'll have answers for you. Like there's no aspect of this that I haven't thought about. I also told him that Ted Danson and Kristen Bell were at least in theory interested in being in the show, which helped a great deal,'cause once you have Ted Dancing and Kristen Bell in your show.

They don't care what it's about. Like it can be about anything. Like 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 gonna be like shoved into the margins.

It's not gonna be like a casual reference here and there. It's gonna be the guts of the show. It's gonna be in every episode of the show. One of the characters is a moral philosophy professor who is going to be like 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 gonna be uh entertaining and I think that moral philosophy In a way that no one maybe would think. off a at 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 begins with the character Cheaty standing at a blackboard with Philosophy one oh one written on it. And I was like

Oh boy. Like maybe I 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 gonna bore people to tears. That it was like I 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 kinda 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 from the

I'm so serious kind of Pedantic. Vocabulary that can just be so problematic and the language accompanies it, which is just imp impenetrable in some cases. And I really appreciated the 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? Well I think because

It's a subject that's That interested me Before I even really understood that it was a subject, like the 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 rubber necking, 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 catchunk 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. For eight hundred and thirty six dollars, 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 I just lost my mind and I said to the guy, I went and looked at his car and if you shin a flashlight on it You could see that there was a little sort of L shaped

Not even dent, like a lit like a mark, like a little t 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 eight hundred and thirty six dollars of damage. I know that that's what it costs to replace offender, but this is ridiculous and this is why car insurance rates are so high.

And uh how about this? I said I'll donate eight hundred and thirty six dollars to the Red Cross. And we call it event. And the guy was like, I kinda want my car repaired, man. And I was like, Well, that's my offer. Think it over. Tell me 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 and I told everyone the story and then they started getting angry. And being like, that's so obnoxious. Like, how can this guy do that? And then other people started going, I'll add a hundred bucks. Tell him it'll be nine hundred and thirty six dollars to the Red Cross. And then people started piling on another two hundred, another fifty, another twenty, whatever. So then I was like, Wait, there's something here, you know? So I I started like a blog, basically.

And I said, like, 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 five thousand dollars, then it went to ten thousand, then it went to twenty thousand. And it started circulating and I started getting press requests from like Good Morning America and NPR and these places. And my wife and I were like this is amazing. Like we're gonna save New Orleans all by ourselves. We're gonna do it, you know?

And then All of a sudden, like one night line, like 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. What 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. 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. Like they're so 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 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 s 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 had 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. I couldn't get over the idea that there was a right answer. That was my

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 gotta 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 gonna like suddenly Turn a page in a book. Read something and and be completely satisfied that everything is answerable. Like 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 But I would call a

Amateurish interest in the subject. It was a thing that I would like read an article about some ethical dilemma and be like, Oh, that'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 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 was 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 two thousand five and the show started in Two thousand fifteen. So it was at least ten years of kind of prep in uh in some way or 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 he used the word jerk, which was a great old timey. 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 picture of his license plate. I never like

Sent you know, they're they're basically docked them on the internet. 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 it had been left a mere like three or four days earlier when I had gone to see his car was Because all this happens 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, and I told him the whole story. I told him everything. I was like, I'm gonna come completely clean to you. I told him everything that had happened.

And I apologized profusely. Because I 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, like I

Hurricane Katrina is terrible. It doesn't have anything to do with your fact that your wife bummed into my Fender, right? So I basically said like I'm really sorry, this was not fair of me to do I had cut him a check and it was in the mail. I said like I 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 ignited this thing in me that was like I think what it made me realize importantly, and this really is what led to the book And the show. was the idea that like these things happen all the time. That is obviously a fairly extreme example, but

We're constantly milling around and bumping into people and having kind of interactions that where one person feels slighted or wronged in some way, somebody cuts in front of them accidentally. at the line at the grocery store or pulls into a parking spot when another person was about to pull into the parking spot or whatever the 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 gonna care about that or not? I could not care about it. I could just say like whatever. I f 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 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 Ten 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've had to be perfect subtitle the correct answer. to every moral question, which is uh Tanalizing, to say the least. How how did you decide to do a book, right? I mean, I think that most people think of you as a writer, but they would think of you as a TV guy. And

Books are Writing, certainly, one would hope. Uh, but they are a different animal. Why do a book? And I should just preface My

Preface. By saying I read I I read somewhere, I don't know, for for research for this conversation. a line of sorts that I just I just loved and so I'd 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 hell of a goal. So

Uh the mic is yours. Wherever you'd like to go. What I meant by that, and I was being a little facetious because I think that book sold like thirty eight million copies or something, so I don't wanna 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 is no way in hell I am ever going to engage with that subject. I am not gonna spend my free time, my

Precious free time. reading a book on astrophysics about black holes and singularities and event horizons and Uh in 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. Like that was what's really remarkable 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 fifty percent. So he's like, All right, there's only one mathematical formula that's equals M T squared. I promise that's the only math But it wasn't like 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 grown up. He talked to you like you were an adult with a brain. And I set out as my that as my goal because I feel After spending so much time wrestling with this stuff, again in a

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 gonna 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 Hobbs and Jeremy Bentham and David Hume and all of these people You would put them in the

Top millionth of one percent 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 opaque, and at times impenetrably.

And boringly. That no one wants to read them unless you're like a major unless you're a uh philosophy major in college. Like I remember thinking It's like someone wrote a recipe. For a chocolate chip cookie

That's both delicious and helps you lose weight and build muscle mass. But the recipe is six hundred 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.

It is like engaging. 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 legitimate question. Okay. Wow. Yeah, I have not. I haven't written anything.

Longer than A feature film script. Since nineteen ninety six. Well that I think that that tells that speaks to how Important you think it is, and I'm gonna 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, Fred. And and I think that you are but the point I was gonna make is that you know 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 is 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 I it strikes me that

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 T V writer if you are lucky enough to be on a show that lasts for a long time

You have spent Seven years, eight years A hundred and twenty five, a hundred and fifty 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 their sets of 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 c really close to you, a spouse or a child or a 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 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 y 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 T. go on live TV and have a debate. with a professional philosopher about who knows more. Like I think I would be in over my head To teach a class. Like 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 thinking about something, I then I then I think I agree with you,'cause I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and Well also making it

Digestible. Not just digest digestible and entertaining enough that people will actually ingest and think about what the hell you're trying to convey. I mean as as you mentioned. Yeah. It's like if you go to any campus bookstore and pick up the required text from like

Philosophy one oh one or two oh one or one oh two or whatever might be, I mean, good luck. I mean, if you want to get like a mil like a million people to read those books, like yeah. Best of luck, that's gonna be a really hard task. That's the reason I wanted to write it. It's that 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 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 is really hard. And it's the primary texts are not, I would say, strictly speaking, enjoyable to read. Like they're just not that fun. Pick up Critique of Pure Reason, flip through a couple pages and tell me how psyched you are. Polish it off in your free time on the beach. Like it's it's forget it. Like you'll never

The average person, even the ab way above average person who's more interested in philosophy than the average person. Is not gonna 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 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

The basics are the basics for a reason, in the sense that You know, Michael Jordan would still practice free throws. Right, at his peak. Right. Because there's certain foundational Elements. Right. They're sort of the the irreduci I shouldn't say irreducible, but these sort of foundational pieces that have incredible utility. And then you can get into like the intellectual masturbation.

stratospheric level where it's like, okay, you want to like hang out with Wittgenstein and talk about you know, logicians and like, you know, it depends on what is is isn't it? You know, and you're like, Oh come on, like we don't need seven hundred pages on that. Give me a f I need to go get some some fucking groceries and I need to decide. And I think this is an example you've given, you know, whether or not I do you know do I take the Grocery cart and put it back or leave it where it is. Like, okay. That's something I need to process today. A hundred percent. So let me ask. If you could have

Drinks or dinner? With any philosopher alive or dead. Just for Entertainment value.

'Cause is there anyone who who comes to mind? For entertainment value. No, no. You know, you know what, let me redact that. 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 like eliminate just for that reason. The name that comes to mind is Jeremy Bentham. who was an eighteenth 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. Utilitarianism essentially is do more good than bad. That's how you're a 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 brother.

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 stuff 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.

And his head it was like disgusting failure and it was 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 he was just a sort of oddball eccentric guy. Who seems like and and in his writing, some of which is

You know, impenetrable. in the way that a lot of eighteenth 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 like drink brandy with at some like 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 over your your chicken pieard 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 four hundred 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 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. Yeah. You know I wonder how problematic we will be in you know fifty a hundred years probably very but let me ask you then If you could have The

Call a friend or free 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 pretend you particularly identify with is finding tremendously helpful to you now in what in in whatever sense that 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 his

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. Qualities.

in a person personality traits, call them what you will. And that 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 a hill and try to take on an entire army by himself and just getting shot.

If you're not courageous enough, you'll abandon your you'll at the first sign of trouble you'll abandon your unit and fle 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 Feibles and weirdnesses. And the most sort of h 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 gonna screw up. He knows you're gonna screw up. You're gonna Be to magnanimous or not courageous enough or too generous or whatever And he sort of says, Like, that's okay. You're gonna 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? So I 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, we're life is hard, it's complicated, and it's weird and

We're all gonna make mistakes. The key isn't Whether you made a mistake, the key is what do you do now? Like if you've register 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 twenty four hundred 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 nineteenth century, early twentieth 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. Like 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. But 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 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 eighteen ninety six or whatever. For us the modern world is twenty twenty two. Things have already gotten so much more complicated than they were a hundred 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 gotta use all of them. We gotta 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. Is true. And so I feel like On my speed dial.

I've got Aristotle to just like rub my back and tell me everything's gonna be okay and then I Keep trying, man. Keep going. Like putting putting one of those silver marathon blankets around me when the world is too 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 uh I've a lot of reading to do. I've li I'm looking forward to my my first edition of How to Be Perfect, I think. I need a plastic a plastic jacket and uh an inscription. You gotta get your mylar, man. You gotta protect protect that dust jacket. That's where all the value is. You know, 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 just They've really just sat there, but Still What is the crown jewel of your collection? What's the what's the if you could only say five comic books, what are they?

Oh, you know, for me I'm not a comic book guy, so this is all this is all new to me. I I don't know anything about comics. What do we got? Yeah, these are not I mean keep in mind I was I was working as a bus boy on Long Island and buying what I could with Uh very meager fun. So I 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. Things that had some Made some indelible mark. on my childhood, which is the same reason I still have all of my Dungeons and Dragons. I have my modules, I have Fiendfolio,

Dungeon Dragons had a formative impact. On my Childhood And for those wondering, Grey Elf was my particular race. Dro elves or Drow, I'm not sure how you pronounce it. Were interesting to me.

Chaotic good also. preferred, but I'm getting into the weeds a bit. So let me uh I completely lost track of where I was, but that's nothing new. You know, 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 Your fla I mean that is part of your philosophy is deciding not to care. So it's sort of inevitable not to I feel like all

All roads lead back to David Foster Wallace, but the commencement speech about what is it, this is water or like I can't. Yeah. I'll 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 first 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 You're talking about Aristotle. And the marathon blanket and when when life gets 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 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, that set you up in some unexpected way for a success later, anything. Do any failures come to mind, however you might define that.

Uh I mean I've never failed once. So no. That's good because I was 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 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. Like they 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. Like that kind of failure is very common, very typical.

I don't think Th they have taught me as much as some I guess what you would call smaller scale failures. So Going back to S N L 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 you usually 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 h 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 forty five or fifty sketches over four hours. And just one after another, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then there's a meeting afterwards and Lauren and the head writers and the producers and the host all kind of pick here are the dozen sketches we're gonna do this week. So

There's a specific kind of failure. At S N L That is so painful. And visceral. That

I still and this is not an exaggeration I'm not saying this for a fact. 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 twenty eight in the rundown.

Lauren reads the title of the sketch. Here, this title here 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 sketch is is sort of sprung, the first joke comes up. And it dies. Like no one laughs even a tiny bit.

And what you know. Is that there's nine more pages. On that joke premise coming. And 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 a hundred and ten people

turning pages in a in a sheaf of stapled stapled paper. That's the only sound. It's just the like Oh 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. In my era it was

You know, Will Farrell and Molly Shannon and Tracy Morgan and Tina Faye 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 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 it and it works on the stage. It works in dress rehearsal, works in rehearsal, 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, in my at least for me. The sketch kinda gets like goes a little viral, you know, like uh you see it pop up on the internet and people are r remember it fondly. When that happens.

A thing you don't think is I've nailed this. Like I'm good, man. I know how to do this job. I'm a rock star. I've got this down, like because you know That your next Four and a half minutes of brutal silent

Paper shuffling failure. Is one week away. It's gonna happen next week. And so It just keeps you in this range of

reasonable reaction to the world. that is pretty narrow and that you don't get a big head, you don't your successes don't make you into a monster and your failures don't make you into a like a depressive A miserable person who complains and yells and screams and lashes out of people because

It just is a matter of 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 I love it. I love that failure. I love thinking about it and keeping it like close to my soul because I really think If you've experienced that failure.

You cannot become a monster. And that's why m not all, but The vast majority of people I know. Went through S and L 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?

Uh that Retelling. Just it makes my palms sweat just thinking about it. It sounds so bad. So bad. And what a gift also, right? To be It it is the greatest girl.

Just just I'm telling you that you cannot take yourself too seriously, right? 'Cause 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 you know, I saw the greatest comedians of our generation. Bom week after week after week. I saw Will Farrell take huge swings and bomb. I saw Tina Faye take huge swings and bomb. And granted, their successes were much more frequent than mine or really anyone.

Tina Fay's batting average on that show in the six years I was there was the highest of anyone's. And she probably hit four hundred, which is great for a baseball player. And incredible for an SNL sketchwriter, but for most people, if you failed at your job sixty percent 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? Like this is ridiculous. You're you're hanging out with your friends in an office and making jokes all day, like you can't ever get to a point where you get too worked up or too angry or too upset about things'cause 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 Question that leads to a dead end. So I will take the blame for that if 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. Let's all assume they speak. English.

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, you know? It's not like Apologizing isn't an ethical question'cause ethics has much more to do with whatever it is that you Did that make do you have to apologise, right? Whatever you did whatever you blew it. That was probably an ethical question. Or in many cases was.

So apologizing isn't really ethics, but I think it's sort of ethics adjacent. It's like I describe it as an exit 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. You never want to do it. You put it off, you procrastinate.

You have a conversation with the person you should apologize to when you just don't apologize to them. You're 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 like f you feel shame and your face flushes and you get hot and you start sweating and And it's just it's a hard thing to do. But I also think that it's really important. And I 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 ten years later, but in the moment. I really try to be a person who says oh no

I blew this and I 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 a hundred percent or even fifty percent at being that person, 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 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 of 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

That all Five 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 five billion people would apologize for whatever they were should apologize for, but I'll 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, you know, 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. And the next one says, You still haven't done it. Come on, man. You know you gotta do it. I'ma spoke to

A gazillion. Different. Yeah, 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 Mm-hmm. The good place also was involved in the book. What makes

Todd Special. Why? Tard. The first thing that makes me special is that We were working on the good place in season two.

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, gonna 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 very great a great book. It's very short. It's like maybe a hundred pages, easily readable.

And he talks about how Mortality Gives you sort of shape and definition to our lives because we know that everything And

And morality is what helps us make sense of those lives while we're living them. If you're immortal then none of this matters. Like if you're immortal Whatever. You you make a mistake, big deal. You'll you're gonna live for 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 had ever met, certainly within the realm of academia, but Also, maybe in life. Like he's just a lovely person. And I said,

Would you ever wanna come into our writers room and just talk to us about philosophy? And he was like, Sure. So he hopped 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. And he just became this kind of

It 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 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 Hieronome, who taught at U C L A. became our two go to advisors and When I had to write the book or I don't 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 he was the guy who made sure that when I talked about philosophers and what they said that I wasn't getting in Terribly wrong. And then would also explain to me a bunch of stuff I didn't understand. So

It was just a a happy coincidence that he happened to have written about the exact thing that we needed to know about at that moment. And then he just sort of joined the team and 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. Hieronome. As a philosophy professor, that is Pretty great, right? Incredible. So good. It's a wonderful name. Yeah, I know.

This has been a 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 I'm very excited about this. How to be perfect subtitle 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? I guess I would only say that Whether it's it's my book or

Another book. And there are plenty of them. that I think deal with this topic. well and 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 clases 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 then are really the foundational underpinnings of everything that I think is important for the

continuation of society. our 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 and I hope that whether it's from my book or from some other 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 ha 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 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 uh last question was a false summit. I apologize. Uh I'm gonna I I realize that I need to mention or ask you to mention something because I don't think you're gonna mention it without Some prompting.

What happens to the proceeds from this book? 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, the Any speaking honorarium.

That comes from the book. It's all being donated a hundred percent of it to charity, to one of five charities, 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 dot 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.

We're donating I'm donating every single dollar I ever make from this to charity. 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, you know, which is premature because I haven't read the book, but I 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 I really encourage people to check out the book. How to be perfect, the correct answer to every moral question. If it only delivers twenty percent, even twenty, twenty, twenty five percent, just think about what your life will be. Think about how better off you'll be. 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 T V shows that you re watch, like the Constant from Lost or The Fly from Breaking Bad, maybe another conversation. But I find it 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 I'm very, very optimistic about this. 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, goddammit. 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? 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 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.

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