YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Grazer

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95
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2017-11-12
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2017-11-12
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  1. “That's Yes, I have a gratitude journal that somebody gave to me, a tech titan gave me, I said, what are you doing? And he writes in this gratitude journal. So every day he tries to address this piece of paper. We, Veronica and I gave them away at our wedding. Every person got a gratitude journal. And I try to, because I want to stay in my lane. I don't want to enter someone else's lane in terms of light. Their life choices or their value system or their economics or their lack of economics. I want to have compassion, but I want to be in my lane and being in my lane, I can have gratitude, like thank you for the health that I have right now that animates my entire life, my mind, my life, my physicality. So I want to be in that zone.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “But you can create a discipline where you try to sample stuff. Like, why is Gucci good now? Because if it's new creative director, who picked it? Pinot picked him. Why'd Pinot pick him? How does Pinot pick directors? I mean, how does that work? You start going that way.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “It's not a mocking smile. It's more of an I agree. Thank you smile. No, no, I know. Oh, cool. No, I mean, some people do. They see things in an elevated way. And sometimes they're accidents, but you should make it, I tried to make this always part of my journey. But I mean, Harold Ramos, may he rest in peace? I adored him. He wrote Animal House and Stripes. And I met him, and he had such an, I thought Animal House was like one of the funniest movies, but he had a really brainy Harvard brainy, I guess they don't have to always be aligned, but he had a very brainy way of stating what that movie was about. And I thought, whoa, that's really heavy, you know, like, and so you know it when you hear it if you're available to hear it.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Want the person to say what they think the thing looks like, even if it's just a feeling. So often I do this little, I used to do this little trick of like I would meet a director that has very good credentials of executing great taste. But he might not be want to message the same thing that I want to message. So you really have to make sure, like, so I would go if I made a comedy and I did this many times, produce a comedy and I got this A plus director and I go, well, God, what would it look like, Ted? And then they start talking, and he starts talking about wide shots. Well, I know that's not right because comedy is a close-up medium. You know, there's like all these little giveaways that I'm sure you guys will have within that you can codify in your own manifesto. So it's a very doable thing to think through.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Taste Just taste having taste to pick To pick the right subject, to pick the subject that is also authentic and hasn't been inhabited from either at all or through a fresh perspective. So the taste in picking the right thing, the taste in executing, knowing what is good and not good. It's really completely qualitative, you know, like what some people think is a good meal other person might not think is a good meal. If someone think there are people that think that's a great car and there are people that don't think it's a great car. So I would just think taste alignment and the ability to execute it. And so when you build the foundational parts of whether it's your business or the business that I'm in, which is making stories, you have to pick people with similar taste. And I always, in testing that, I always go, well, what does it look like?”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Perspective, even though it was an effective story, personified through the parents, it didn't do very well at all, but it was a good movie. It just didn't have commercial results because it was a kid's story represented through adults. So you have to actually calibrate all these things and be very precise about it. But I can actually apply, you know, there's like really by associative parts in storytelling to any one of your startups. I'm positive because I happen to believe that everything is a story. I'm sure it's refutable, but I think that everything is a story. And when you lose track of your story or whether it's a company or human being, it creates a misdirection.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So I created a movie, this thriller called Fear starring Mark Wahlberg and Rhys Witherspoon, where she picks this guy that is really charming and cool and popular, but really a psychopath. But the father is powerless and can't just go, hey, your boyfriend's a psychopath. He has to be like, hey, you really sure you want to go out with him? And you have to really be think it through. And so that becomes this horrible, this nightmare film that is a very, very, very effective film. Unfortunately, I picked, I lived it through the parents point of view as opposed to the kid's point of view. So it shows the points of view, but it's balanced through the perspective and the stakes in the man's 45-year-old man's brain. If it were in the kid's brain, it would have made 150 million dollars. But when I put it in the wrong...”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Be able to capture in a story or something I'm observing. So, what happened is I have a daughter. Her name is Sage, the one with the hair, the one my hair up. So now she's prior to that, she's three and a half years old. We're going skiing. She doesn't really know how to ski. We're in the chairlift. And I go, follow me as we dismount. She goes, no, you follow me. I thought, this is going to be a nightmare. Like, this is what's going to happen. At three and a half, she says, follower. At 16, I'll be completely powerless.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “It's very important when you create any kind of story that your protagonist is suited for the population or the audience. So you really don't want to have a story that I want to end on that. Well, no, I mean, I think if you have a story that's designed to have emotional impact as an endpoint, which is my goal, you have to think to yourself, is that, what is your audience, and make sure that the characters that are personifying this idea are the same age or likeness to your audience? Because sometimes you can forget that and you go, wow, this is a young person's idea, and I have older people as protagonists. That often is just a calibration that is off. It's a calibration that's off. I made a movie that was, I'll look at our time, I made a movie called Fear. Fear starred Mark Wahlberg, commonly known as Marky Mark at the time, and Reese Witherspoon. And it was based on a lot of the movies that matter to me are based on an experience like Friday Nights, like something I experience, something emotional or real that I'm”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “I start with a theme and then I find a story that is compatible to that theme, that actually is a vehicle for that theme. So a beautiful mind, I was just being present looking around my world and I would see people, kids that were stigmatized by even the mildest mental disability. And I felt shitty about it. And you'd see, you can see out in this area, you see guys talking into garbage cans. And they're not just talking into garbage can. They're mostly living in an alternate reality. And that alternate narrative is the narrative of them talking into that garbage can. And it's not something to understand it. So I think feelings are so central. They're the differentiator. And if you lose track of that, I think you're really lost.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “But because I was in the column of feeling like, wow, anything could happen, it could all go wrong, I couldn't, almost couldn't talk on that award. I was like, I went up, I was so nervous and I had this piece of paper, and I'm shaking with the paper, and you look at Russell Crow, and I say to the audience, I know that my nervousness seems imperceptible. They thought that was kind of funny. But then I noticed all of the biggest female stars in the world were in the front rows, like Sandy Bullock and Nicole Kidman and every one of them. And I had known a lot of them from meetings or working with them, and they were all looking at me like, you can do this. You can do it. Because they could tell I was crashing, you know Maybe it teaches you something about pre anticipatory anxiety.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “So, well, I mean, it Okay, what did I learn? My learned was to certainly not to treat anything as a reality until it becomes a reality and that reality is a fluid experience and that reality is always changing. So whatever data that they were supporting that doesn't went. So basically stay down the middle lane. I was pretty good at that, but I did fall out of the lane and I thought, well, I could win and I'm going to win. I'm going to go up. And then I eventually I did win for a beautiful mind. But so that was good.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “And the winner is, and he's got the envelope in his hand, he's ripping it open, and it looks like he's going to say Brian. I mean, because I'm hypnotized. I feel like a bee is coming off his lip. So I get up, I won't walk. I get up and I walk all, well, very close to him. I'm up out of my seat. And he said, Braveheart! That's not Brian. That's another movie. That's a whole other movie. So I have to turn around and walk back to my seat. And I walk backwards because I'm so embarrassed and I walk backwards. And this is so vivid. I mean, this got me on taking sleeping pills because it was so... So when I turned around, one chairman of one studio goes like this. Loser to me. So I'm going, oh, this is such a bad thing for me. And so I sit down. In a sweat, and the real astronaut that Tom Hanks played, Jim Lovell is like two seats down.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Know it because everybody said it. In fact, some very, very famous investment bankers. One of them came to my office who I didn't know and he said, I just want you to say a few words about my pancreatic cancer company. And I go, I don't even can't think like this. You're jinxing me. This is too much for me, too much pressure. And so now it's the day of the Oscars. I got my tuxedo on. I got the thing. And we're at the last award. And Sidney Poitier is going to open the envelope. And he's a very dignified and he's a very deliberate communicator. He speaks slowly.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Then I don't even think like this. Now the Oscars are coming about. And the Oscars, they nominate, there's like five movies that get nominated, and Apollo 13 gets nominated for Best Picture, gets nine Oscar nominations, it excludes Ron Howard, which was a super bummer for him and a bummer. No nuance there, just it was a bummer. And then, so that was for him, it was really terrible. But now we're in the Oscar race, and everyone is saying Apollo 13's 100% going to win. Las Vegas odd makers. Everybody's going, hey, you're going to win. What are you going to say? I go, I don't know what I'm going to say. I don't know if I'm going to win. I don't know anything. I've already had up and down like this the entire time. So now what happens is it's the day of the Oscars and I've got my speech in my pocket, right in my pocket. I know I'm going to be saying this speech.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “We make the movie, and the movie does really well, and we're all really happy. But then the studio goes, like a version of, don't be too happy. Let's see how it does overseas. So I'm realizing, okay, now I'm on this journey. I thought I was happy, but now I'm not happy. And no one's happy because it didn't get released overseas yet. So then it gets released overseas, does really well. We have a few more of these things. Wait till it gets to home video. Okay. So then all of a sudden, all the financial platform corridors are satisfied and it does well.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So that never good enough doesn't ever work. I do have one failure. I mean, I have one failure of, I produced Apollo 13, and Ron Tom and I sort of became kind of, we're friends and partners, and we all go, well, if we can just make this good, that's a win, and we're feeling so good about ourselves because we're feeling like we're making something good that's not going to make very much money, but at least it'll be good. Why want to make a lot of money? Because everybody knew the end of the movie. They all lived. I mean, like, so then all of a sudden...”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I have a lot of failures. I mean, unfortunately, I've had enough successes that it sticks out, but I do have a lot of failures, and I fail different types of failures. Sometimes when I violate my own rules and I get lazy with my own rules about choice of a movie, where I get sloppy, lazy in the choices of building the foundation, like anytime you say, okay, so sometimes I've picked a director where I go, he's good enough. Because you're making hundreds of decisions. Good enough.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “It worked. It worked. It was like partially antagonized, maybe. I don't know. I don't know what happened, but he talked. He came back. I mean, I have the utmost respect because I've worked with so many actors having produced somewhere around 100 movies, and he was as the most professional. I mean, he actually acted in every frame of the movie, wrote all of the music, wrote all the music, and composed the music, and was a father. And he just don't get to see him much, but has the most respect for him.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Injuries to become self actualized enough to actually perform and to be liberated from all of his emotional injuries so that he could look at the audience and say what he said at the end of the movie, which I won't say in this audience. But so I thought this is amazing. And then we were able to get him to do the movie and he ended up, of course, being the only rapper ever to win an Academy Award. And it was a great thing. He's so talented.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “But then he sat down, and one thing led to the next, and he told his story, which was an amazing story, which became the basis of Eight Mile. And so he was able to fully encapsulate what it was. And it was just a flashpoint moment where he was able to grab this, and he wasn't like saying, I want to start or anything. But I could tell it was it because it introduced what rap battles are, which is very cinematic. It was a theme that I cared about. All of my movies that I care about begin with a theme, not a story. Because themes are not challengable. Love, if love is a theme, it's hard to challenge that and say, oh, I don't believe in love, you know, or in his case, that story was literally like, how does he going to get through these emotional?”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “And he won't look at me. I'm over here and I'm talking and I'm talking and he won't talk back and I'm trying every little trick and nothing's working. It's got to be 30 or 40 minutes into this. It felt like three hours. And he goes, I'm out. I'm thinking, you're out. We didn't get to talk. You didn't talk. So I'm thinking I'm going to have to beg him somehow. I have to find some way. So I used the word like he's at the door. And I used something like, I don't want to say it, but it was like, come on, you can animate or you can something. And then he turned at me and looked at me like, again, like this is not a good thing to happen to Brian Grazer.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Interesting. I want to meet that guy. So then I know I go to my friend, longtime friend Jimmy Iveen, who's like one of the more most important music producers ever really, I think, and he's such a superstar for picking. And he goes, yeah, I can make it happen. But it wasn't easy to meet Eminem. But he said, I can arrange it. You know, he's kind of a recluse by making it happen. This is before he really blew up and became a star. So he comes into my office. In Beverly Hills, and he sits there like this.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Is the culture, the pervasive culture, not a subculture, and much less an inferior subculture. So I went on this journey to try to do that, this learning journey that was more artists, more people, blah, blah, blah. And I wanted to capture the humor and the truth. And now I'm about eight years into just doing this, and I keep it alive, and I'm watching the VMAs that they're doing in New York when the VMAs were super cool and the camera pans, I see this kid Eminem, and the camera sort of sits on him, and he's got this icy, icy urban glare. Like, I'm killing somebody. And then all of a sudden, he becomes this sort of fluid, self-effacing guy that smiles and laughs and is really elastic. And I'm going, wow, what a range. So I'm thinking, this is really...”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Missions. Like, I'll meet every in 48 hours, I'll make a point to meet every magazine editor, like literally, and sometimes newspaper editors. And so I can say this, I think I met, well, I met the most, one of the more accomplished newspaper editors, Frank Rich. Frank Rich was really credible, really, really, really smart and very high quality. And he said, I said something to him, I met these guys. And he sort of dismissed it as an inferior subculture. And I said, I don't think it's a subculture. I think it's the culture. And he sort of kind of, you know, blew that off. And I thought, you know, I'm going to try to look at this kind of as an equation that I'm going to prove in a story form, like try to bring some cinematic form to this equation and prove that hip-hop.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “But he's also, like, he's speaking some truth about what's going on in the inner city, what's going on on the East Coast in this music genre that was early rap. And so I started thinking like, what is early rap? What's going on? So then that led me from OGB, I think I'm going to meet Slick Rick. Now, slick Rick is really funny. So he's a guy, a British dude wears a patch on his eye and has to be carried in like this, like a king. Slick Rick the Ruler. So I'm thinking Rick the Rula is really funny, but also cool. Then that guy got me from that point, I meet Chuck D of Public Enemy, and that's another thing. And I'm thinking, wow, this is a really important movement that's going on. And while I'm in New York, because I do these...”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “So I find a way to meet old Dirty Bastard, ODB. And it was a trip. Everything cost money. I mean, I met him. He said, meet me at a studio, but he wouldn't let me in the studio. I was on the sidewalk. Everything was like an a la carte thing. Like if I wanted to go in, that would cost a little. If I wanted to watch him do something, a little extra. It was bang, bang, bang. Everything was all a carte. So I just chose to stay on the sidewalk. That's what I should do.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Okay, sure. What if I said no, I couldn't. No, I can tell the story. So the way, well, I was dedicated to having curiosity conversations. Had to be, I should really know, but it was at least 20 years ago. I was in New York and I was in a cab, a taxi cab, and the cab driver had on like a local radio show, talk radio show, and old dirty bastard is being interviewed by this radio guy more than 20 years ago. So I'm going, whoa, this guy's choosing to be called old dirty bastard. That's his choice. He wants to be called that. So that already was interesting. So now I'm listening to ODB talk and I'm going, wow, this dude doesn't even make any sense. But he was so getting away with it and committed to it. I'm thinking, I want to meet him.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And I put some gel in my hair. It wasn't my gel, it was someone else's gel, put it in the hair, and she goes, that's awesome. And then that's how it began. And then And then just to further that a little bit. So then I did it, and it was very, very polarizing. Some people thought a very small percentage thought, hey, that's cool, like maybe 20%. And 80% thought, what a dick. I could see that they thought that. And sometimes they said it. And I just thought, wow, it's polarizing, but yet it reveals something. It's like a litmus test. So then I just kept it going.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Well, it converges upon a couple of things. One was One was I was a pretty successful movie producer and I wanted to have an identity beyond just because I saw that there were other successful movie producers like four or five of them and they all had facial hair and I couldn't really grow facial hair and so their beards were helping define them a little bit and I sort of thought I couldn't do that and then there was one producer like to throw stuff at people and I didn't really want to do that and so I kind of was at a loss at trying to create an impression beyond just being a producer and then I was swimming in my swimming pool with my daughter at the time she was like six and I just popped my hair up and she like I love that so I thought really so we get out of the pool and we go you know”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Well, no, the only thing I've been to basically, I had a house on the north shore of Oahu because I like to surf. And it's a little tribal there. It's hierarchical in this sort of tribal sense. And you're not supposed to look people rather than you look at them in the face to give them respect and just divert your eyes just a bit because that could produce negative consequences.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “He said it to me, and it had a lot of impact once again resonated. By the way, because I'm in tribal cultures, you should look, because I've had houses that I've owned and tribal cultures.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Because when you really have eye contact and it's happening, coming to life, it is again like a great date and it's the best date. And through eye contact, it becomes deeply neurological. And it's very powerful. And I realized, and then I thought back to myself, I thought, well, my partner, Ron Howard, when I was really amped up and everything, like super amped up, when writers would come in and meet with us just before our first movie in 1982, a night shift, he'd say, you don't really look at them in the eyes. And I go, well, I heard everything they said, and I can repeat it back. But he goes, yeah, but it's not respectful. And so I changed it sort of temporarily, but then I kind of lost touch, and then I realized that I animated it once again.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “And I just thought about that. I thought, wow, it's really true. I know that's not deeply profound, but it was sort of deeply profound to me. And I just kept thinking about that, and I thought about how that worked in every one of these, none of these curiosity conversations would have happened. They would have vaporized or meltdown on the launch pad if I didn't really have eye contact.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And it's a way to create intimacy and trust, and you learn so much through eye contact. And I didn't realize that it was so fundamental to all of my curiosity conversations. But it was only about a year ago, I had a waiter that I go to a restaurant all the time and the waiter said to my wife, wow, I really like Brian, but I didn't really know that he could know me well enough to like me because I didn't think he knew me or anything. And he just said, I like him. I like him because every time he speaks to me, he looks at me directly in the eyes and it makes me feel like a human being.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yes, okay, so I just finished writing a book called Eye Contact, but it's born out of the world of curiosity. And I didn't even really, my appreciation for eye contact became kind of retrospectively came alive. The use of eye contact, the importance of eye contact, it's a tool that can't really be replicated through anything, and I don't think through AI.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Well, cult leaders are kind of like, in a way, they sort of operate the same way a dictator does. They're seductive, they're charming, they're cunning, they're intelligent, but they have a belief system that they are going to impregnate you with. And it's an interesting study to inhabit.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Because it shakes me up. It shakes me up, wakes me up. Also, if you ever seen, like, just quickly snap by just the fog of war about McNamara, I mean, like, that's the point of that. You don't have to like him, but it humanizes him through ultimately entering his perspective as to how and why he expressed why he was what he was. So I met... Daryl Gates, who I knew I wasn't going to like, he was one of the founders, creators of SWAT team police and forensics and became the police chief of Los Angeles and was right at the center of the Rodney King riot and eventually was quickly removed from office. So, you know, I do do that. Yes. I've met many cult leaders, leaders of really very, I'm not going to say their names, very intense cults.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “And I was talking at the Rich Carleton Bar with them. That we're all drinking non alcoholic beverages. And she just looked at me and said, let's go. And so they left after five minutes after I flew. It was literally. But I did think, didn't feel good, felt like a big waste of time. But it taught me to prepare. Hope I'm prepared for this.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “So he just wasn't really that interested, but I was, I just kept going, just kept going. And then I remember Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, I had to go back to a meeting with them. They go, how could you take it? The dude totally insulted you. And I go, yeah, it was kind of a bad experience, I guess, but I got a lot out of it. So you get a lot. You can gain a lot from failure. You learn a lot from failure. I learned a lot from the failure of meeting Isaac Asimov, which took a long time too as a preeminent writer, author of science fiction and quite prolific. But I wasn't prepared well enough. I got my little coach ticket to fly like about 35 years ago to meet Isaac Asimov. And it turns out his wife came who was actually also his psychiatrist.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “No, no, no. But he doesn't know. I know that he knows quite a bit. Edward Teller took about two years to meet and he said to me, it took about two years and I met him like with military security around me right outside the LAX, like outside of LAX private airport because he had a lot of Army guys and it was like nearly a cavity search so I could have this conversation. But he really, really had no interest in me. I mean, he had no interest really in storytelling, and I asked him what was the last movie he'd seen, and he brought up Walt Disney's animated film Dumbo. Not that that doesn't qualify as a movie, but it was quite a while ago.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Okay, so Edward Teller was the To be the fight of the father of the hydrogen bomb And also was creating the Star Wars program to protect the North American continent at the time of the Reagan presidency, I believe. And that was like through missiles and webs and everything else. And I'm just wondering if Jeff Bezos is in the room, because I did have a chance to have a curiosity conversation with him about 16 years ago. He blew my mind then, and I still get to be friends with him, and I know he's speaking, but he knows a lot about Edward Teller, much more than I do. So if you're here for that conversation, you might want to ask him. But I did put a lot of effort.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Okay, well, now it's almost a self-perpetuating system, but And people know I do this. So I have a trainer that works me out, and he goes, wow, did you see William McCraven's commencement speech in Texas? I go, no. And so he shows it to me while I'm on my elliptical, and I go, well, I better meet William McCraven. And then I get to do that. And that was amazing. But how do I do it? You go to blogs, you listen to podcasts in your case, and you go, wow, that'd be hip to meet this person. But I said that so casually. So there are so many ways to stimulate an interest to create a pool of possibilities.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Well, I have a son who is just turning 18 years old, and I don't want him to blow it. So the other day he was thinking a couple months ago, he really wanted to go to Tulane. There's a bunch of schools that are on the list, but think in Tulane. So now I'm at Aspen Ideas Festival, and we see Walter Isaacson, who I did the Albert Einstein series with. And I go, oh my God, you're going to meet Walter Isaacson Thomas. And not only is he this guy, but he is the key to Tulane. He's on the board. So he meets Sir Walter Isaacson just before we go on stage. And he's talking, he goes, my name is a great kid, amazing kid. He says, hey, they say hello. And then I look away because I think things are going well. He's looking on his iPhone. Walter Isaacson's right there. That's not a good move, I don't think. You can't be on your iPhone.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “But I think if you have an insight, you see the movie Dunkirk, you get a chance to meet the director for a second. You don't want to say, how did you make Dunkirk? You know, you want to say... The best thing is if you saw it, you can't pretend you saw it if you did it. And then you have to say the unique trait about Dunkirk, like the multiple perspectives of the characters that made it such a subjective experience. I mean, I can just invent stuff, but I mean right now, but I don't want to waste everybody's time. But you have to... The question was”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “Conversations and meetings with you. Okay. Okay, I'll accept that. I will, sometimes I'll give a speech or I'll have a conversation, and people go, no, I don't want to say it that way. Let me say it. I will say no. I mean, I've learned to say no. I don't like to say no because I'm a pleaser, but I've learned to say no because often people just want to know the shortcut. They might disguise the shortcut question, but they want the shortcut. Like, hey, how do you be a producer? I hate that question. I don't want to say hate in this crowd There are things that just aren't comfortable for me, like, hey, there's no harm in asking. Well, there is a harm in asking.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Because you figure out how to reach them. They don't want to stand there while you type out their email. They just don't want to do that. Now, so now in the email, I think once again, you have to say to connect your interest and their interest and then have an insight that lands in the middle. And you're going to say, give me an example. It's really hard.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “Well, you have to start with an insight about the person that's not dull, not generic. If you're generic, I'm also, I teach the graduating class at USC, so after six years, there's one final class, and it's now called Starting at Zero. And I'm going to do one session that's if you get the chance to have 30 second contact in a restaurant or a foot basketball game, you see that person you want to meet how to not blow it. And generic questions always blow it. The other thing that always blows it is to ask for information that you could get yourself. So anything you can search you don't want to ask, you never want to ask in a conversation if you see somebody, how do I reach you? It's the worst thing.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Oddly enough, each conversation was like each individual lived inside of a, was like a dot living inside of a greater constellation of dots. And I just always had faith that they may connect some day. And I found that many of them do connect and form perspectives that are additive and storytelling and then storytelling is like a startup. Every one of these movies I've made was nurtured out of zero and is kind of a startup. So it all kind of works together.”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “The very minimally you're being really polite. You're asking somebody genuinely with eye contact and caring. You're asking them, what are you doing or how do you feel? You're getting into something that's kind of real. And the minute you're into some real place, it becomes a really powerful self-perpetuating force that leads to many other questions that are really edifying. So I definitely think that you should do it. The other thing, I mean, I'd add to support it is you do have to do homework. It takes a lot of case building and preparation so that you're a good date. My pledge was always I'm going to be a great date. The best date you ever had was a guy or a girl, whatever it is. I'm going to be better than that with this one-on-one conversation. I'm going to keep it so they leave feeling like, wow, something I got something out of it too. It has to be win-win, and it can always be win-win. And these conversations...”

    2017-11-12 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #279: The Most Curious Man in Hollywood — Brian Grazer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT