YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Schur

lines on the record: 146
first: 2022-01-19
most recent: 2022-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Wonderful charity that you can find at rescue.org that helps people in need all over the world. We're donating one-fifth of it to the Rainforest Trust, which buys and preserves rainforest land. We've got other charities lined up in the worlds of social justice and legal justice and world central kitchen was the second one I think we donated to. So anyway, we're donating, I'm donating every single dollar I ever make from this to charities. 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 100% 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”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important. And I hope that whether it's from my book or from some other survey or some other set of articles or anything, I really believe that people could greatly benefit from just the basic understanding of what these people said about ethics, how they work, the different theories that are out there, applying them to your own lives. I know that I have gotten a tremendous amount of happiness and satisfaction from just even when I do the wrong thing, which is frequent. I take a tremendous amount of pleasure from wrestling with the questions and from at least having some kind of scaffolding or structure that I can go to and think about and use to examine the problems that I face in my life. So I just recommend ethics as a life improvement strategy. I think they're really interesting and really valuable.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you'd like I guess I would only say that whether it's my book or another book, and there are plenty of them that I think deal with this topic well and conversationally, I would urge you all to do a bit of your own educational reading on the subject of ethics. I think that ethics is, I would so much rather that my kids take classes in ethics in high school than advanced math or biochemistry and nothing against those subjects. But I think that the two subjects that are woefully undertaught in this country and that are really the foundational underpinnings of everything that I think is important for the continuation of society are ethics and civics. I think understanding the way governments work and understanding the way that ethics work and the way that we treat each other are vital.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The script. And so he just became that guy, he and a woman in Pamela Hieronymy, who taught at UCLA became our two go-to advisors. And when I had to write the book, or I wanted to write the book at the end of the show, I had just had such a lovely time working with him that I said, I think I need someone who really knows his or her stuff to sort of sit next to me and look over my shoulder and make sure I don't really blow it. That's the role he played. He was the guy who made sure that when I talked about philosophers and what they said, that I wasn't getting terribly wrong, and then would also explain to me a bunch of stuff I didn't understand. So it was just a happy coincidence that he happened to have written about the exact thing that we needed to know about at that moment. And then he just sort of joined the team and helped us out for the rest of the time the show was on the air.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 it'd 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 want to come into a writer's room and just talk to us about philosophy? And he was like, sure. So he popped into our room. We did a Zoom meeting with him. He came to LA once and he came in and talked to us about a bunch of stuff that we didn't understand. And he just became this kind of, he was like an emergency break-in case of emergency. Like we would, if we had a question about philosophy, we would smash the glass, pick up a red phone. It would be connected directly to Todd May. And we would say, please explain existentialism. And he would explain it to us. And we would say, thank you. And we would hang up and go back to writing.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's Todd May, and he wrote a book called Death, where it's very a great book. It's very short. It's like maybe 100 pages, easily readable. And he talks about how mortality gives sort of shape and definition to our lives because we know that everything ends. And morality is what 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 make a mistake, big deal. You're going to live for infinite number of years.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing that makes him 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 that season two involves a Michael Ted Danson's character is an immortal being from the afterlife who is trying to learn essentially human philosophy, right? And we had this moment where we were like, well, how in the world is an immortal alien whatever he is going to give a crap about human philosophy, right? He's eternal. He's an eternal being. Why would he care about whether you correctly interacted with a human being in some small moment? So we went looking, we were like, I wonder if anyone's ever written about the morality of immortality. What happens if you're immortal? Does morality matter? And turns out someone did write about that.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 5 billion people who read it would think like, how did you know that I have someone I should apologize to? Because we all do. Everybody's got something to apologize for to someone. And I don't think that all 5 billion people would apologize for whatever they should apologize for. But I'll bet that some people.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I made a mistake, and I should immediately apologize and try to heal this little wound. I don't think I'm succeeding at least 100% or even 50% at being that person, 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 for something like that, which is not, that's not an apology, man. That's not an apology. That's you saying I did nothing wrong and you're stupid enough to think that I did something wrong. So I'm sorry you're so stupid. That's what that is.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 and 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 icky. It's like you feel shame and your face flushes and you get hot and you start sweating. And it's just, it's a hard thing to do. But I also think that it's really important. And it's a thing that in my life I've worked on really, really hard to get better at it, to become a person who recognizes when I've made mistakes and apologizes for them, not eight months later or ten years later, but in the moment I really try to be a person who says, oh no, I blew this.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It's not like apologizing isn't an ethical question because ethics has much more to do with whatever it is that you did that you have to apologize, right? Whatever you do, 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get to a point where you get too worked up or too angry or too upset about things because it's absurd and you learn to take the successes with a grain of salt and the failures with a grain of salt. And I really believe that that failure for me at least was a tremendous gift. And I'm so, so grateful for it.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is great for a baseball player and incredible for an SNL sketchwriter, but for most people, if you failed at your job 60% of the time, you would be crushed. But because of the nature of the job and because it's constantly reminding you, this is an absurd way to make a living, right? Like this is ridiculous. You're hanging out with your friends in an office and making jokes all day. Like you can't.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can phase 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tina Fay 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. Cannot make one of them laugh for.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, okay, next sketch is Caveman Olympics by Mike Shore. People start reading the sketch, and then whatever the joke of the sketch is sort of sprung. The first joke comes up.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A read through. The host comes in, and Lauren comes in, and the cast sits around a giant table, and the crew piles into this room. They read through 45 or 50 sketches over four hours. And just one after another. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then there's a meeting afterwards, and Lauren and the headwriters and producers and the host all kind of pick here are the dozen sketches we're going to do this week. So there's a specific kind of failure at SNL that Is so painful and visceral that Still, and this is not an exaggeration, I'm not saying this for effect, I still have occasional nightmares about it.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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,”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was kind of trapping you Title a book with such a title cannot be. Yeah, so my failures that are valuable. Our sort of smaller scale than you, I think, would think. There have certainly been projects I've developed, pilots I've made, show ideas I've had that never went anywhere. You go along the process, you're making them, you write the script, they say, no, thank you. You make the pilot, they look at the pilot, they say, nope, we're not making this. Like that kind of failure is very common, very typical. I don't think They have taught me as much as some. I guess what you would call smaller scale failures. So going back to SNL for a second. So here's how SNL works”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truth as long as what you're arriving at is the truth. And so I really like that approach because in a modern world, I mean, for him, the modern world was 1896 or whatever. For us, the modern world is 2022. Things have already gotten so much more complicated than they were 100 years ago. But he was sort of looking around at an increasingly complex world and saying we don't have time to only use one theory here. We got to use all of them. We got to use everything we have, every tool in our tool belt. We should be able to use at any moment in order to arrive at something that we can agree upon 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 going to be okay and then I keep trying, man. Keep going, like putting one of those silver marathon blankets around me when the world is too wearying. And then I've got William James.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 that it's real. So he doesn't say you have to be a utilitarian or you have to be a religious dogmatist or you have to be Akanti and 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 Jambalia 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aristotle isn't like that. He's sort of like, hey, life is hard, it's complicated, and it's weird, and we're all going to make mistakes. The key isn't whether you made a mistake. The key is what do you do now? Like if you've registered that you've been too much of this or not enough of that, next time, 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 2400 years ago, but he thought slavery was totally fine. He has a lot of Aristotle writing that's like a defensive slavery. And you're like, oh, come on, dude. Come on. Don't blow this for me. I was so into you and now you're talking about how great it is to have slaves. But the other one would be William James. So William James, much more recent, lived in the late 19th century, early 20th century. His theory is called pragmatism.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 too magnanimous or not courageous enough or too generous or whatever. And he sort of says like, that's okay. You're going to blow it. Just check in, do an accounting of what you've done, and then adjust and keep aiming towards that dead solid middle perfect spot, right? 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 your dead to me, like I won't even look at you if you make a mistake, right? He's just very, very sticklery.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Army by himself and just getting shot. If you're not courageous enough, you'll abandon your at the first sign of trouble. You'll abandon your unit and flee in the other direction. And then that's not good either. So the key is be courageous enough to do your job, but not so courageous that you act rationally. So that process, I find the most forgiving of human foibles and weirdnesses and the most sort of humanistic.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aristotle is the first one that comes to mind because Aristotle's whole thing, Aristotle created what is now called virtue ethics. And he didn't try to write a rule book, right? He didn't say, do this, don't do that. This is okay. This is not okay. What he says is there's a number of things, qualities in a person, personality traits, call them what you will. And that matter. And those things are courage and generosity and magnanimity and things like that. And his goal was find the exact right amount of all those qualities. He called them virtues. And he said, if you can nail that sort of like dead solid midpoint of all of these qualities, that's what a good person is, right? So it's important that you be courageous. But if you're too courageous, you will be rash. His example is a soldier storming over a hill and trying to take on an entire army.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know offhand, I'm sure that Bentham also argued for a lot of things that not a lot of people argued for back then. He was, I would say, a proto-feminist and a big sort of equal rights guy. He was an animal rights advocate. He seems unbalanced 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Impenetrable in the way that a lot of 18th century writing now seems impenetrable, but some of it is really fun to read. And he wrote little fun poems, sometimes little jaunty rhyming poems about his philosophy. And he was a goofball. He was a weird guy. And I feel like he would be very fun to 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 your chicken pyard or whatever you're eating. A lot of the philosophers in the book and a lot of philosophers in general, like a lot of people from the last 400 years are now probatatic for a number of different ways.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 was miserable. So 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 in his writing, some of which is”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That he wanted his body to essentially be preserved and his head to be specifically preserved and his skeleton to be preserved and he wanted to be put on display at this university in London. He didn't found this university, but he was a sort of spiritual founder of it. So we said basically stuff me like a scarecrow and preserve my head.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 18th century English philosopher who is essentially the guy who invented what's called utilitarianism, which was very much in favor for a while, then completely fell out of favor and recently has come back into favor in academic circles. Utilitarianism essentially is do more good than bad. That's how you're an ethical person. If the things you do create more good or happiness or pleasure than they do pain or suffering or unhappiness, the reason I would want to have drinks with them, though, is because he was also a true weirdo. Like a truly weird guy who when he died, he told his friend,”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 way above average person who's more interested in philosophy than the average person Is not going to read critique of pure reason on a Shea's 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the real deep intense philosophy grad school level philosophy stuff, just the basics, like the very, very basics. Are really valuable and can be really helpful. But in many cases, even engaging with the basic ideas is really hard. And it's the primary texts are not, I would say, strictly speaking, enjoyable to read. 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like philosophy, or could be anything. It could be music or academia or whatever, that you're not necessarily a professional, but you at least are qualified, I think. You're qualified to talk about the subject in some long-form way. Now, that doesn't mean that I want to go on live TV and have a debate with a professional philosopher about who knows more. 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, then I think I agree with you because I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and mulling it all over.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Real lives of real people you know or real feelings that you and other people you know have had or you're imbuing the characters with those feelings. But you also at the end of the line, you really have this sense of like, I kind of get that character. I know that character really well now. I've studied that character. I'm fluent in that character in a way that you're rarely fluent with other people other than those really close to you, a spouse or a child or a parent or a sister or 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of you to say, and to a degree, I think you're right in the sense that I think that anyone who spends a lot of time thinking about the human condition and whose job is to actively observe it, interpret it, discuss it, write about it, engage with it, which is what the job of being a TV writer really is. Being a TV writer, if you are lucky enough to be on a show that lasts for a long time, you have spent seven years, eight years 125, 150 individual episodes with the same characters and you have done that thing that Greg taught me to do, which is slowly expand their personality profiles and their worlds and their sets of 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”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take what they wrote, synthesize it, and talk about it conversationally with people in a way that isn't condescending, but 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 the 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good as they can be. And yet, they wrote their books so densely and opaquely and in times impenetrably and boringly that no one wants to read them unless you're like a major, unless you're a 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 600 pages long and it's written in German and no one's ever reading it. And if you could just kind of, if you could somehow”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that it's the kind of subject like astrophysics that people would think, no way, I'm not doing this. I'm not going to understand it. It's pointless to even try. And when I was reading it, I had this thought that I couldn't escape. And the thought was these are the smartest people who ever lived. Generally speaking, they're among the smartest people who ever lived. Aristotle and Kant and Locke and Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham and David Hume and all of these people, you would put them in the top millionth of 1% of all of humanity who have ever lived in terms of just brain power. And they spent their lives, or at least parts of their lives, trying to figure out how we could be better people. That was their goal. What is right, what is wrong, what's good, what's bad, how do we improve ourselves? How do we make the process of being alive on earth as maximally?”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he's like, all right, there's only one mathematical formula that's equals mc 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. I set out as my goal because I feel after spending so much time wrestling.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to spend my free time, my precious free time reading a book on astrophysics about black holes and singularities and event horizons. And 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 50%.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I meant by that, and I was being a little facetious because I think that book sold like 38 million copies or something. I don't want to, it was tongue-in-cheek. But what I meant by it and continue to believe is that.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About that, or not? I could not care about it. I could just say whatever you could forget about it the moment it happens, move on with your life, never think about it again. But I felt like because I went through that, I couldn't shake the idea both that there are ethical components to almost everything that happens and that we are better off when we pay attention to them and really try to untangle them and wrestle with them. And so that was really the 10 years before the show was pitched and written was really the beginning of this journey for me, was coming to the realization that ethics matters, that I think that it's important that ethics matters and that you try to get to the bottom of these things when they pop up.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. These little mundane interactions that we have with other people have, I realized, significant ethical dilemmas to them very frequently. And our choice becomes, am I going to care?”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, the 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.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I apologized profusely because what I really realized is that the thing I was engaging in that made it so unfair was what most people today would call whataboutism. He was saying, hey, your wife bumped into my car and I need to replace the fender. And I was saying, yeah, but what about Hurricane Katrina? And it's like, all right, yeah. Hurricane Katrina is terrible. It doesn't have anything to do with the fact that your wife bummed into my fender, right?”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, before doxing was a thing, I didn't dox him. So that conversation with that particular professor made me think this guy has no idea any of this is going on. There's something fundamentally unfair about that. And so I called him up. Way it had been left a mere like three or four days earlier when I had gone to see his car was because all this happened so quickly. So three or four days earlier it was like here's my offer I'll donate this money to the Red Cross and he was like let me think it over And we just sort of made vague plans to talk again soon. So 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 going to come completely clean to you. I told him everything that had happened.”
2022-01-19 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #565: Michael Schur, Creator of “The Good Place” — How SNL Trains Writers, His TV University at “The Office,” Lessons from Lorne Michaels, Wisdom from David Foster Wallace, and Exploring Moral Philosophy with “How to Be Perfect” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT