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nineteen eighty seven. An American university student is helping to organize a protest rally at school and is told to visit a little coffeehouse called Cappuccino. He does, and as the crowd falls silent in wait, and as yet undiscovered protest songwriter named Tracy Chapman takes the stage.
That student was.
Brian Koppleman, who would go on to executive produce Chapman's first album, Yes, the one with Fast Car on it. But being an exec even in the music business, wasn't Brian's dream. He wanted to be a writer, and so with his best friend and co writer David Levine, Brian holdaway in the basement to write his first screenplay, Rounders, and has since written, produced, and directed a number of critically acclaimed films. He's now one of the showrunners of the hit TV show Billions.
Brian's also obsessed with how creatives do their work.
He hosts The Moment, a podcast about what makes creative people tick and how they turn their inspiration into art. But what about the working life of Brian The creator of so many shows and movies that millions of people all over the world have loved. We dig into what makes Brian tick at work, covering everything from his morning page's richel to his writing routines to becoming a producer
and a showrunner. My name is doctor Amantha Imber. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Invent Him, And this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work. Brian has held a number of job titles in the movie and TV business.
At any one time, he's been.
A showrunner, a screenwriter, a director, and a producer. But it started with writing, writing in a basement with nobody but his co writer, working on a movie called Rounders. So what did that very first screenwriting process look like?
It was so hard one because I was a blocked writer for so long. And what that really means is I wasn't being a writer and something in me was quite dissatisfied with myself, really, And so I will tell you that when I finally broke through and found a way to produce work, it meant so much to me. You know, I'll just back up and tell you, you know, I was thirty years old, twenty nine thirty. I was, you know, moving along in a career that was going well,
but something inside me felt like it was dying. And this really came to a head when Amy and I had our first child, and I wanted to be the kind of person who would tell his kid to chase their dreams. And somewhere in me I knew I wasn't. And it wasn't a commercial dream, it wasn't a market center dream. It was about creating something. It was about taking the risk to be some kind of an artist. And I had this thought that if you allow a
creative death is like any other kind of death. And if I allowed that creative spark to die, it would become toxic and it would ooze onto the people I loved, and it would become I might become bitter. I might become exactly the kind of person I didn't want to be. And that's sort of what drove me to do this. And so to answer question, when I was finally doing the work, Amy cleared out a storage space underneath our apartment,
a basement in New York City. The storage space was a tiny little at a slop sync in it basically room for one chair at a half a desk, and I would sit on the floor. My partner, Dave, who I do all this stuff you just named with, he would type in that first one mostly, and in two hours every morning we met and we wrote that script. And those two hours I felt so alive during those two hours of the day that it actually allowed me
to be much better the rest of the day. Those two hours, and they were hard, right, learning to really be a writer and really write a screenplay and sort of approached that with an incredible rigor. It was really challenging, but I felt so much like I was becoming the person I wanted to be that when I would leave there and then have to go to my job and go to meetings, I was so much better because I
was able to engage. Almost like you'd gone to the gym, and once you put in a really rigorous and ritualistic kind of a workout routine, it kind of like sets you up for the rest of the day, And that set me up for the rest of the day.
I'm wondering, how much do you remember about what happened in those two hours every day, Like, how would you start, how would those first five minutes work.
One thing we did that turned out to be lucky. I think that I would say it was a smart thing to do, but really we were feeling our way through it. So I don't know how much of it
was that we were smart about it. But we outlined the script, and what that looked like was before we got in that room, we were meeting, and maybe we'd meet at a diner when I got off work or something like that, or in a morning before I went to work, when Dave got off bartending shift, and we would kind of talk through what this story might be. And you know, I had walked into a poker club late one night and played cards and realized that was this.
Dave and I've been talking a writing movie, and that's probably where we set it around. But we would really talk about, you know what, how do we want to tell this story about the New York poker underground. Who were the characters. So we did a lot of work ahead of time on thinking about who these characters were, what they wanted, and what kind of obstacles would be in their way. And so we did that work for a long while and then the first day we went
and began turning that outline into a screenplay. We had weren't meeting that very first day. We didn't meet in the storage space that Amy cleaned out that first day. It was Columbus Day, which is a holiday in America, and we so my office was closed that day, so we met in my office and that day we had a yellow legal pad and we were the only people in the It was big office, and we were the
only people there that in the whole place. And we spent that day probably three hours, and we wrote the first eight nine ten pages of Rounders, fairly close to what it ended up being. And so then when we would go into the room, we were adding on to that, and we would try to write a scene or two scenes a day. We would talk through We had an outline, so we knew, well, this scene's supposed to sort of be like this, and then we would talk to each other about what the spark in the scene might be,
what the conflict in the scene might be. I might tell Dave some story about something that happened in a poker room I was at once. He would maybe tell me about an argument he witnessed, and then we would set to writing. And on the first one he typed most of the time would I would sit on that thing, but most mostly then I would stand when we were actually writing, I would be standing up kind of behind them, leaning forward, and we would just kind of talk out
the scenes to each other. And I'd say we did that for four months and then had the script, and then I would and then the other part of it is at night. You know, we would take it home on floppy disks. Back then, this is nineteen ninety six, ninety seven, you know, we're writing on a little computer with floppies, and I would take the floppy disk home and put in my computer at home, my desktop computer
at home. I would print out those pages and I would read through what we did and make little notes. And then the next day maybe perhaps we would start with oh, these little shifts, and then we would we would move forward. And I remember David had written a manuscript before and us screenplay before, so he understood better than I did that the pain was worth fighting through. Like maybe we'd get to an hour in and if a scene wasn't coming, I would be like, well, let's
pick a up here tomorrow. And he sort of taught me in a way that I've kept to this day, which is no, you get to the end of the scene, you can fix it tomorrow. But we're going to get to the end of the scene now.
When Brounders went into production, your screenwriting career began in earnest and you've said that it also served as a crash course in film school.
Can you tell me what you mean by that.
We were invited to be on set every day of the making of the film, and that was because we had kind of taken it upon ourselves to find the right director for the movie, which was not in our job so portfolio at all. That's the purview of the producer, but we didn't want to leave it to the fates.
And we were just young enough but not too young, just young enough really to unders to try to do it ourselves, and through a series of things we were able to so in a way, since we brought the director to the party, he then extended back to us
the invitation. And because we were expert in the story, we were expert in poker in a way that nobody else was, and we were around the same age as the lead actors, and so we realized we had the opportunity to be on set every day we consciously decided to treat it like film school, meaning we decided we were going to ask questions, not willing nilly and not sort of while people were trying to do their jobs.
But if I wanted to understand what the cinematographer was thinking about, I would ask at lunchtime, or I would ask at the end of the day, or I would say, can we have dinner. The director John Dall, who's someone we work very closely with to this day. He directs on both of our shows, and he's a dear friend to this day. John was really great about explaining stuff
to us. I'm staging the scene this way because it's from this point of view, and if we stage it from here in the camp are here, it sort of demonstrates that. And he would kind of walk us through that and walk us through first principles of how to think about staging and shooting a scene. And because it was happening in front of us and we were a part of it and questions would come to us about the intention of a scene or about a line, we
were really a part of making that movie. But we were also getting.
Our education that that's quite unusual to be writers on a set, Like, what sort of other insights do you feel like you got as a writer at that stage in your career that you just wouldn't have got had you not been on set every day.
Well, a huge one, I mean really learning how to talk to actors.
Now.
I had acted in college, I had directed plays. I knew a bit about that, but the time pressure of a film or a television show, the stakes because of how much money everybody's spending, the various egos, So learning how how to manage that relationship with the artist who's going to translate your work is really important. Then some
of that is watching. Some of that is engaging and having it go well, or engaging and realizing you didn't really know exactly what to say, or you didn't know how to listen correctly, and also learning how not to hold on too tight, how to if you know what the scene needs to do and an actor has another way to get there, knowing that you can hear the actor out, and if you're willing to listen in a posture of calm, genuinely not just a pie, if you're
genuinely willing to listen for the better idea. Actors are so highly attuned emotionally, that they can feel that they can feel you're not defensive. And then if the better idea is to steer them back to the original idea, they're very willing to go there. And those are all things that someone can tell you, but until you're there doing it. And also you realize how much stuff you can cut out, because how much stuff can just get accomplished by the way an actor looks in another actor
you know on the page for your first screenplay. Everybody, I think wants to make sure nothing is missed. I want to make sure I communicate everything, and so you might put too much in the scene. But when you're standing there and you're looking on the monitor through the camera you're watching, and you see two actors meet eyes, it can almost be wordless sometimes, and that's a great look I love for both characters. I love characters who speak in bursts of dialogue. But I also know what
the limits of that are. And that can only happen if you've been part of shooting and editing something.
That's been about twenty five years since you and David wrote Rounders, and I'm curious what does your writing process look like now, Like, what have you kept from those original days in the basement to now that you guys, I guess are working most actively on Billions.
What we've kept is that the story itself is still something that we like to work out together with a bigger group of people. You know, we have someone who's come in and helped on both Super Pumped and Billions. Beth Shackter is a woman who's become a partner helping us show run both shows, and so she'll sit with us,
and we have a writer's staff as well. But if it's an episode that David and I are writing ourselves, we'll take some input from people and talk stuff through, and then the two of us will talk about the story a lot, and then we'll start passing documents back and forth. We don't write over the screen together anymore, rotating who's typing. We write separately, but together. We'll sometimes be in the same room, but I'll be at my desk and he'll be at his. So we'll outline an
episode together. We know what the story is, and then we will break up the scenes in half and you know, just kind of rotating them. We'll put our initials throughout, like one of us will just put DLBK, DLBK, and then we'll write our scenes and then we kind of rotate. We'll put them into a master document, and one of us will go first and rewrite the whole document, and then the other person will go and rewrite the whole document,
and then we'll send notes back to one another. I mean the You know, David's been my best friend since we're fourteen fifteen years old, so we're like brothers, but without any of the baggage of having been raised by the same people in the same home. So it's a very easy relationship in terms of our ability to communicate about these matters.
So when you're going off to write your own pages, your own parts of the scripts, can you talk me through what that process looks like.
Yes, I and it's a bit different. Pre and post pandemic took me through both. So pre pandemic, I guess are two main ways. One is I love to write on a couch. If I can be on a couch with a laptop in my lap and my big head and at home, if I'm on a couch, I don't need headphones necessarily. I can have music playing on the stereo. I always have to have music playing, or ninety nine percent of the time I have music playing when I'm writing, and I try to I have to pair the music
with the scene I'm writing in some way. It has to it has to relate to what I'm writing, either in counterpoint to it or supporting it.
Oh, can you give me a couple of examples of that, Like how you pay music to sing?
Well, it's all throughout the show. I mean, it's all throughout everything that we do. Like when you hear the music on the show, a lot of the time, that's music that was written into the script because I was writing to that music. Wow, and those things are you know.
I guess a key example would be Tom Petty's Even the Losers, like I was writing, which is a central song to episode eleven of the second season of Billions, And I mean I just remember writing and writing to that song and then realizing that song would take us through the whole episode and it had thematic unity with the episode. And I would say that's constantly happening. Again, not every episode or every scene, but very very often
that's the way that that happens. And for David as well, he doesn't write with music as much, but he's thinking about it too, and the other way that I'll write. So it's a couch. But I also really like There's a restaurant in my neighborhood in New York called Red Farm, and it's a Chinese restaurant and the owner just passed away, but he was a dear friend and I would go into the restaurant many weekends. So during the week I
might be on a couch on set somewhere. I always have a couch at my office so that I can write on it. And we have a bunch of offices depending on what stages were on to shoot the shows. But on weekends, which is when I do a lot of the writing, especially if we're in season, I would go to the Red Farm, this restaurant. I would get at small booth. I would get a big pot of oolong tea and I would just sit there and put
my headphones on and write. And you know, I write in about two hour bursts, usually still, and then take a walk. And you know, if it's there's a deadline, perhaps I'll go to Red Farm right for a couple hours. You know, I probably start at home right on the couch, then feel like okay, change the scenery, go walk over to Red Farm, which is just a five minute walk, sit there for a couple hours, and then you know, perhaps by then that would be it for the day,
or I'd come back into another hour at home. And the best part of it is when you're kind of not aware of any of that when you're working. And when I'm working and I feel hyper present and at the same time barely tethered to the ground. I'm just somehow existing this ether that's betwixt and between and I'm hardly aware of what's happening between the music and the tea and the you know, spices of the food or whatever.
I'm just in a different place. And obviously I can do that without tea or without uh, you know, spices, And that's you know, that's the that's the joy, that's the kind of the the pleasure of doing this. Because the story part is very hard, uh. The part of outlining and breaking story and and and for me anyway is hard.
Uh.
But the writing of scenes once that work has been done, meaning the actual writing of the dialogue and figuring it out, and that may mean changing story too as you're going. That part is the part that is what makes me willing to do all the other work. That's the part that's the kind of even when it's very difficult, it's kind of pure joy.
What makes the story part so difficult.
I think I'm working from different parts of my brain when I'm breaking the story parts really analytical and like math, and I hate math. Writing the dialogue is like painting or something you know, or like playing the guitar and writing a song. It's a it's it's for me. That's the part that feels like I'm unleashed, whereas the other part feels like if I'm doing it right, it just requires so much rigor and focus.
That's really interesting.
And so like with the I guess with that flow state that you described, when you're writing dialogue working on scenes, do you find it easy to just switch into that gear, like when you've got your music on and you're at the restaurant or you're on a couch.
Does that flow state come to you quite quickly?
Yes? I mean I don't want to really say that, but yes, I mean, like getting to sit down there. I have bad adhd, you know, really diagnosed bad adhd, and so getting to this sitting down is fucking hard. For me. But once I'm doing it, then that part of it. If that part of it isn't going, then the other parts weren't done right, then the story's fucked up. Or then the actual project isn't what I should be
working on because I'm not connected to it. But yeah, the part of it where mak making characters, talk, moving them around a setting, imagining what's going to all that stuff is pleasurable to me. It's hard, but it's pleasurable. And it's you don't always I mean, I would say, you know, you don't always get into that level of flow state that I'm describing. That's the part that that's the part that makes it all worth doing. But it is relative. The more I've done this, the more or
that it happens. And it is relatively easy to fall into that space.
So you said getting to the couch though, that's the challenging part. So what tricks have you found to get yourself to the couch to start writing?
I mean, the morning pages are the best trick in the world, right. Julia Cameron describes them in the artist's way, and that's the life changer for me. I mean, that's the thing I did at thirty to figure it out. And it's still the thing. I mean, I still do that every morning.
Yeah.
For those that are not familiar with morning pages, and I must say I've experimented with them myself. Can you talk about what your process for doing morning pages is.
I find some people sort of tweak it a little bit.
I do not. I do it exactly as Julia Cameron describes. The only tweak, sorry, the only tweak is I meditate first. And I asked Julia when she was on my podcast, and she'd prefer if I did the pages first and then meditate it. But so I do meditate first. But then the next thing I do in my day is I open a journal and I write three long hand pages and I just do not stop my pen from moving. I don't race through it, but I'm I'm keeping my
so I take a breath and I'm in it. I'm aware of what I'm doing, but I am just allowing myself to write. Any thought that comes down, I will not stop moving the pen, and I don't read it over. You know, if an idea comes up during it that I think is useful for something, some creative project or something, I'll immediately transfer it, but then I do not go back to those pages, as she says, don't go back for five years, or maybe never go back. And it
is a way to get your subconscious going. It kind of I think of it as tipping my subconscious out onto the page. It also gets rid of the detritus. Man, it's like the I think it's like the mental equivalent of drinking the water first thing in the morning and rehydrating. I somehow just feel better having done it. So that and meditation and also walks, like walking helps, exercising helps all that stuff that just gets rid of the wanderlust or whatever it is that keeps me from doing the work.
Books sometimes, I mean sometimes I'm picking up the guitar and noodling around and putting on music and reading a book. I mean, you know, straightening up there looking no, I don't want to paint a picture. That's impossible to attain. Like, it's hard to get yourself to do the work when you're someone with ADHD and your job is to produce pages and television. It's like a hard for me. You know, it's not hard work compared to like real backbreaking work
that a lot of people do, but for me. That stuff's hard, but I've gotten better and better at it and it's something I continue to work at. And I think also having a partner where I have to deliver for him helps because Dave can't hand in the script until my part's done right, so I can't be the person that's making our team suffer. And like when I wrote the one movie that I wrote alone that we made, Solitary Man with Michael Douglas, I wrote that by myself
and it was a much harder process. It was before I meditated. That was twenty two thousand and nine. I think that we made that movie and I started meditating in twenty eleven.
So.
Maybe that would have helped. But that took me years to write that movie, and partially partially, I think because it wasn't like, well, Dave's going to have his pages done Sunday, so we agreed on that, so I have to get mine done Sunday too.
It's interesting that, yeah, using that like almost like an accountability buddy, which which I really something that is a lot of quite common amongst guests that I've spoken to. We will be back again with Brian soon where we'll be talking about where his best ideas come from and how he knows whether he has an idea that's even
worth pursuing. And if you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work, I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co. That's how I Work dot COO. Now, the thing that listeners would probably be most familiar with in terms of your work is the show Billions. And
you are what is called a showrunner. And I imagine that there are a lot of listeners that have no idea what a showrunner is, So can you explain what that is?
What that involves the showrunner on a television series, the closest equivalent would be if someone were a director and producer on a movie. So the showrunner is responsible for overseeing the shooting, the creating, so the writing and the shooting and the casting and the editing and the post production of the show. And the showrunner is involved in overseeing the marketing, you know, dealing with the marketing department
and approving all their great ideas. Now, we work with incredible professionals who run the departments that actually do all those jobs or many of those jobs that we don't do personally. But we are responsible for delivering the show. We're responsible for every aspect of delivering the show, and that is so we hire the directors and then it's our job to talk to the directors about what the show should be like and answer their questions and help them.
And we have the final cut on the episode, so the director doesn't cut, and then we do with our editors, and so the showrunner is really the person or people charged with safeguarding the tone, spirit of the show and the physical shooting of the show.
Now, you mentioned research before when you're talking about rounders and how you know you'd spend a lot of time in poker clubs, and I think I've heard for billions you hang out with real life billionaires.
I'd love to know.
I like, do you have a kind of a specific approach that you take when you're researching to try to get inside a world?
Well, an immersive approach for sure. Yeah. I mean it's funny when someone writes about it it's hanging out with billionaires. I mean it's interviewing them and embedding with them the way a journalist might at times, I'm not hanging out with them, like certainly in the beginning, by seven years into making the TV show, there are a couple of people who have achieved that kind of success who I've become friendly with and I might go play sports with
or something like that. That said, even when I'm doing that, they know and I know that I'm paying attention. I'm not fully losing myself because I'm not them, I'm not of them. I'm a different thing. I'm the artist. I'm a writer, I'm an observer. We're spending time, but with a very clear purpose, and that purpose is to understand.
I mean, all this goes back to curiosity, which is a cornerstone of anybody who wants to write or tell stories or be any kind of an artist, I think, which is to have tremendous men of curiosity about your subject. And so in the poker clubs, I love poker. I was pretty obsessed with poker. As soon as I heard these people speak though that other people are there there just thinking about poker. I'm there and I'm like listening to their language, you know, and I'm why do you
talk that way? What does that mean? How did you become you? What got you here? I mean I'm immediately just thinking of all those things, like how's this person in this basement playing in this game now? Like what what does he do when he leaves here? Like how does he make peace with what just happened. I'm just that's the way that I go through life. You know, That's probably why I became a writer, right, And so that's when you're doing the research. I mean, that's the process.
It's books and conversations and going to places and keeping your eyes and ears open. It's basic. I think I never took a journalism class, but I imagine a lot of it is stuff that's taught in a.
Journalism Now you've been working on Billions for seven years, and you're also working on Super Pumped. I want to know, like where's the space for new ideas? And I guess, like what I'm curious about is like, I'm sure that you would get ideas all the time, but how do you know when it's an idea that is worth pursuing given that your schedule sounds quite busy?
Curiosity? It comes back to that, right, what keeps me engaged and curious and wanting to know more? It's super pumped happen because you know, we read this manuscript, this book that Mike Isaac wrote, and it spoke to us. It was like, we want to know everything about this world and we want to and it seemed fascinating. We wanted to tell it. So much of this is not intelle.
You eventually have to apply your intellect to the problem in hand, like to prosecute the questions, but the the falling in to it is not an intellectual process for me anyway. It's an instinctive process. It's a tactile process.
It's a you know, it's it's about something that kind of makes me stay up late and think about it, or wake up first thing in the morning and I find myself journaling about it, and I find myself sending texts to Dave and you know, first thing in the morning, or uh, it's not I think from the beginning, it wasn't like I walked into a poker club and thought, the market wants to see this. I thought, I want to immerse myself in this. I want to know everything
about this. I want to understand these people. Oh fuck, this could be a movie. That's the method by which I can gain an understanding of this, and if I love it and I'm fascinated by maybe other people will be too. I think we can make this fucking great. If we make it great, maybe this is the way we become screenwriters. Like it's very much that's the order
of if I had to reduce it to thoughts. I mean, it's all I can say instinctive, But if I had to break into thoughts, that's probably the way I would order those thoughts.
Now, because of everything you've done, I imagine that a lot of people approach you for feedback on their work, and I'd love to know why when someone asks you for feedback you respond with what kind of feedback do you want?
Well, that's only really like fellow professionals, most of the time, all I can say is no, I can't hear, I can't read, because like the lawyers, truly don't let me, and the lawyers basically explain the risk, and I then say no, I won't. But let's say somebody who is a fellow professional who is represented. I know she won't sue me if I read your thing, and then someday she thinks, oh, there's a project, you know I wrote about a bowling alley. Hey, this thing is about darts.
I think they stole my idea. But yes, if a fellow professional says, will you read, I will say what kind of feedback do you want? Because sometimes what somebody wants is just encouragement. That's mostly a waste of time. But if they want real feedback, if they want me to really get in there, I will give them full,
detailed notes. And that won't always be a pleasant conversation, but the hope is it'll lead some We're good and I'll tell you my friend, our friend Craig Mason did that for us on the Billions pilot script and it was invaluable. Our friend l would Read did that too. They read the script and Craig gave us. Craig is one of the best screenwriters in the business, gave us two hours of conversation because he noticed some things. Hey, the way you get into this scene is confusing. Let's
talk about what else you could do to get into it. Hey, here's a moment. It would be good to be alone with the character and bond and you don't take all those ideas. But as the questions get raised, it forces you to reevaluate the work. And I try to do that for my friends. We do that for each other, but civilians can't really take that kind of feedback. They don't really want it.
Now. Feedback, of course, is a request on your time, and I would imagine you would get all sorts of people reaching out to you to ask you to do things like me asking you to be on how I work. And I'm curious as to how you make those decisions, like what you say yes to and what you say no to.
You I mostly say no no. I like this podcast. That's why I did it, and I think it's a fascinating subject matter and maybe useful. So like maybe someone who wants to be a showrunner a screenwriter, maybe this is well. I think about this all the time. A couple of things. One, my kids are older now, so in some ways it's easier when my kids were younger, and I had to really take that into account and
wanted to take that into account. But if I can be playing guitar and writing songs, that's what I want to do, So I want to protect that time in reading, you know reading. I would say the other thing, like, if we go back slightly, the thing that made me want to do this to begin with is how much I love reading, how much books have given me, and I still try to protect enough time to read. I still read like a couple books a week, and that's really, really,
really important to me. So everything gets fit in around time I spend with my wife Amy, who is also a great filmmaker, writer and novelist, you know, and my work responsibilities exercise and you know that, and within that, then I try to just pick a few things that I'm willing to do.
What's your approach to saying no, because I imagine, having said it so many times, I imagine you probably have some different strategies that make saying no easier or quicker for you.
I try to say no very quickly. What you said is exactly right. I try to say no very quickly and very directly. I can't do this. I try not to say check back with me in six months. If I say that, I mean it at the time. I try not to say that. I try to really think about whether I'll ever do the thing, but I just say a quick no. It's not going to I can't do that now. I don't really give a huge explanation, usually because they want the yes or the no really, So I try to be definitive and I try to
be quickly responsive. I just just happened the other day someone asked me, and I just said, they asked me for a blurb. I had just read read a book and given a blurb to somebody, an older writer I read this who wrote an incredible his work had meant a lot to me. He asked me to read the book. I won't give a blurb if I don't read the book. I read the book, and then so happened. I finished that, and I got a request from somebody to do a blurb. And at first maybe they wrote me a few months ago,
and I said, I'm just not sure. I don't think I have the time, and they wrote me again and I just wrote back and I said I can't do I'm sorry. I wish you well, and I meant to. I said, it's a really complishment to write a book. I just don't have the time to read your book, and that you know that's true.
So I'm impressed that you're reading two books a week. I think I heard a statistic that the average person, or maybe the average American, reads one book a year.
Which come on that can't be true. That can't be true.
I know right like that that nearly gave me a heart attack. That statistic, and he's very depressing as someone that does write books, like i'd left to know maybe like in the last six months. Given you know, that's a sample of about fifty books, what's one of the books that has had the biggest impact on you?
I am in I will tell you I'm reading a book right now that is so fucking good and it's not what I normally read, and it is just incredible. And I'm just going to get the exact title books. I don't want to get it wrong. Here, Burning Boy, The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster, And this book is a biography of Stephen Crane, great American writer from the late eighteen hundreds. Paul Ouster, though is I think the writer I read most closely in
my twenties, and he is an incredible fiction writer. He has written some of my favorite books. I haven't read him as closely over the last ten or fifteen years for whatever reason. Things go in seasons. But I saw this book in the books and it's, you know, like six hundred page biography of a writer that I've read Red Badge of Courage like everybody else, but I haven't read anything else by Crane. I don't think though, I'm going to read all of it. I hadn't read anything
else by Crane except Red Badge of Courage. So I left it in the bookstore one day and then I went I love bookstores, my favorite place to go. I went back two weeks later. I started staring it again, and I was like, you know what, something's calling me. This book's calling me. And I started reading it, and I just have to tell you, it is the most magnificently written book about America and this guy and capitalism and war, and it's amazing halfway through, and it's slow going,
like I read. I do read two books at the same time, like off and I a fiction and nonfiction book going, and I say two books a week. It might be two books in ten days and then three books over the next whatever. But I do have two books, usually two books going at the same time. And I'm reading this Paul Oster book slowly, but I'm just blown away by how much I how much I love it. So that's a full that's just a full recommend from me. To anybody listening to.
This, I'm so good to check that out. I'm exactly the same with my reading habits. I've always got a fiction at a nonfiction going at the same time.
Oh I love that.
Yeah, yeah, it's so good.
I'm reading the Power of Regret, Dan Pink's new book at the moment, you know, interviewing him in a couple of weeks, and I got to say, I'm just loving it. It's I who would have thought reading a book about regret would be just captivating and it is. So that is my recommendation for the listeners wanting another book to read.
I'll give you one more though, and you should have this. This would be a great guest for you. And do you know if I say little Steven Stephen van Zant, do you know who that is?
No? I don't.
Little Steve van Zandt is best known as being like Bruce Springsteen's creative partner guitar player since the beginning, produced some of the albums with Bruce, but he's also was one of the leads on the Sopranos. He was Silvio on the Sopranos, and he said this incredible life of and so he was Tony. Basically he served the same role for Tony soprano that he served in real life for Bruce Springsteen, and he was Silvio on The Sopranos.
And he wrote this book called Unrequited Infatuations. That's all about the work. It's completely about process. It is a full on premer about the process of being a rock star, writer, producer. He would be a magnificent guest for you. He's a great talker and an incredibly well read person. And the book's great Unrequired Infatuations. It reads like a novel, but it's a memoir.
Wow, Okay that I'm going to check out. And I'm going to check that book out now, Brian.
For people that want to connect with you in some way, consume more of what you're doing.
What is the best way for people to do that?
The two I mean, I'm on Twitter and I'm active on Twitter at Brian Koppleman. I'm also on Instagram. I'm slightly less active there, and on TikTok I'm slightly less active even than I am on Instagram, but always oh, I think on TikTok, maybe I'm Brian w compliment, but I'm verified there, so you'll know it's really me, and you can find me on Twitter or Instagram too. There are some impersonation accounts, but if the blue check is there, then it's me.
Awesome.
I'll link to the correct accounts in the show notes. Brian, It's just been such a treat, like this hour has flown by, and I'm so grateful that you did say yes.
So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's just been such a pleasure.
My pleasure, great questions, great talking to you. Can't wait to hear it.
I just loved this chat with Brian, and I think the thing that's still sticks with me weeks after doing the interview is the idea of how he writes to music and how that creates the emotion and the vibe that he wants to create and communicate in the scene that he's working on.
I just love that image. Now, if you're not.
A subscriber or follower of how I work, now might be the day to do so, because next week I have got Eric Barker on the show.
Now.
I have subscribed to Eric's newsletter along with three hundred and fifty thousand other people for many years, because he writes a newsletter that is evidence based about how to live a more bowesome life, and I'll be interviewing him about some of the very quirky strategies that he uses in how he approaches his own working rituals. How I Work is produced by Inventium with production support from Dead
Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Liam Riordan, and thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mix for every show and makes everything sound so much.
Better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.