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

“No, as I write about in the book, I made a couple good decisions amongst many bad ones and among the good ones I made were I never named him, I never showed a picture of his license plate. I never like sent, you know, basically.”
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 talk to a lot of professors and professional types. And the last guy I talked to said, listen, I don't even really think this is a philosophical question. I think what I would say is you're kind of being a jerk to this guy and you shouldn't be a jerk to people. Those are the exact, he used the word jerk, which was a great old Tai. Did you call 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
“Something clicked into gear, and then it became a thing that I thought about all the time and that I really cared about and was sort of at the center of my life. And so that was, that's all the backstory for how the show came about. But it really is, I can trace the show to that event. And that event was in 2005 and the show started in 2015. So it was at least 10 years of kind of prep in some way or shape or form to get me ready to write the show.”
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
“My main mistake and the beginnings of this what's now a lifelong interest in the subject is I was like, well, there's got to be a right answer. And what I eventually realized is, no, there's no right answer. There's a bunch of theories that will say, here's why what you're doing is a little bad or a little good or more good than bad or whatever, but there's no one, you're not going to like suddenly turn a page in a book, read something and be completely satisfied that everything is answerable. Like this is a complicated, weird, confusing situation. So the effect that this had on me was to kind of coalesce years and years and years of what I would call a amateurish interest in the subject. It was a thing that I would like read an article about.”
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 was like, oh no. And so I just couldn't stop, I couldn't get over the idea that there was a right answer. That was my.”
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
“Walked me through a bunch of arguments as to why what I was doing was bad. And by the way, some of them didn't think it was bad. Some of them thought, look, there's Aristotle writes about shame and the importance of shame. And if you feel no shame, you have no sense of disgrace. What you're doing is essentially shaming this guy into what you see as a better value system than the one he currently has. And I was like, okay, but also shaming people doesn't sound like a great way to spend your time. And they're like, well, no, it's not great. Just shame people like this and whatever. And so I just ended up having a dozen conversations about this. I talked about it to every, I was so annoying. I've never been more annoying in my life because this is all I could talk about. We went to a wedding. My wife and I went to a wedding and we sat next to this guy I had gone to college with who I knew was very smart. And I was like, hey, give me your take on this. And I told him the story. And he was like, I'm outraged. And I was like, I know, right? And he was like, no, I'm outraged on his behalf. You're being an asshole.”
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 all of a sudden, like one night on like the second night or the third night, we were talking about everything that was going on. And we suddenly both got like sick to our stomachs. And we're like, we feel bad and we don't know why. There's something wrong with this. This is bad. Oh my God, this is bad, but we didn't know why. And I was like, I need someone to tell me why what I'm doing is bad because I'm pretty sure it's bad. So I went on the internet and I looked up a bunch of philosophers who taught ethics and I called them on the phone and was like, will you talk to me? I'm just this guy. Here's what happened. Will you talk to me about what I'm doing? And they all said yes because it turns out, as I write about in the book, philosophers love talking about philosophy. They're so excited to talk about philosophy at any hour of any day. So they sort of in 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
“Then I went to 20,000 and it started circulating. And I started getting press requests from Good Morning America and NPR in these places. And my wife and I were like, this is amazing. Like, we're going to save New Orleans all by ourselves. We're going to do it, you know.”
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
“Rates are so high. And how about this? I said, I'll donate $836 to the Red Cross, and we call it even. And the guy was like, I kind of want my car repaired, man. And I was like, well, that's my offer. Think it over. Tell me what you want me to do. And so I went back to work. I was at the office. I went back to work and I told everyone the story. And then they started getting angry and being like, that's so obnoxious. Like, how can this guy do that? And then other people started going, I'll add 100 bucks. Tell him it'll be 936 to the Red Cross. And then people started piling on another 200, another 50, another 20, whatever. So then I was like, wait, there's something here, you know. So I started like a blog, basically. And I said, like, how much money will you donate to the Red Cross for the Katrina Relief Fund if this dude decides not to fix the bumper on his car? And it exploded and it went to $5,000, then it went to $10,000.”
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 because the guy said his fender needed to be replaced. And I kind of lost my mind a little bit because, again, I'm a dude who doesn't care about cars. And I found this to be. Ridiculous and overly fastidious and sort of car culture just annoyed me. Also, it was literally the day of Hurricane Katrina almost destroying New Orleans. And I had friends who lived in New Orleans and I love New Orleans. My wife had gone there on a vacation fairly recently before that had happened. It was just one of these moments where I just kind of lost my mind. And I said to the guy, I went and looked at his car and if you shined a flashlight on it, you could see that there was a little sort of L-shaped, not even dent, like a mark, like a little tiny indentation. I think that my wife's license plate holder had just kind of pressed into his fender a tiny bit. And you could barely make it out. And I said, you know what? This is not $836 of damage. I know that that's what it costs to replace a fender, but this is ridiculous. And this is why car insurance.”
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
“Well, I think because it's a subject that interested me before I even really understood that it was a subject, like the concept of making ethical choices or trying to make better ethical choices than the ones you made or coming into contact with ethical dilemmas and then wrestling with them, that was something that I always found really interesting. There was an event that happened in my life where my wife bummed into a guy going about one mile an hour in traffic. And there was a cop there. They were both rubbernecking, or at least my wife was rubbernecking at another accident that had happened next to them. And so there was already a cop there. So we saw that there had been this little kachunk and he came over and he looked everything over and he says, I don't see any damage here. And my wife and this guy exchanged numbers and went on their way. And then we got a bill in the mail for 836.”
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
“These theories are really weird and funny. So I said, I promise it won't feel like homework. Now that being said, the third episode literally begins with the character Cheeti standing at a blackboard with Philosophy 101 written on it. And I was like, maybe I spoke too soon. But that was how I not only convinced them to let me do it, but also tried to reassure them that I wasn't going to bore people to tears, that it was like, I know this is a show about moral philosophy, but I also fundamentally understand that it's a half hour sitcom on a major network that needs to have jokes and funny stories and plots that are entertaining. And I kind of just ask them to trust me. And they did. And it was really cool of them that they let me kind of take this wild idea and run with it.”
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 the last thing I did, and I think the most important thing I did, was I said, listen, this is a show about what it means to be a good person. And the engine for this, the mechanism is the study of moral philosophy. And that's not going to be shoved into the margins. It's not going to be like a casual reference here and there. It's going to be the guts of the show. It's going to be in every episode of the show. One of the characters is a moral philosophy professor who is going to be like teaching people stuff. And I know that that might seem like a risky idea, but I promise you it will not feel like homework. It's going to be funny and it's going to be entertaining. And I think that moral philosophy in a way that no one maybe would think at first glance is actually a very funny discipline to me. It's like the thought experiments are really funny and the people who involve.”
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 went in to pitch the show, I said, Here's the show, and I laid it out for them. I told them what the pilot would be. I told them what the themes would be. I told them what the general arc of the entire first season would be. And I said to them, I've been working on this for a long time. If you have a lot of questions, answer them. I promise I'll have answers for you. Like there's no aspect of this that I haven't thought about. I also told him that Ted Danson and Kristen Bell were at least in theory interested in being in the show, which helped a great deal because once you have Ted, Danson, and Kristen Bell in your show, they don't care what it's about, like be about anything. Like, those are two big stars, 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
“Did a couple things to try to make it palatable to my bosses. One of them was I worked way harder and for way longer developing the idea than I think I would have normally if I were writing a show about six goofballs in an office somewhere in Pennsylvania although pause for a second to say that Greg worked for an entire year on developing the office before he ever met with me or any of the other writers. He put an enormous amount of work into that show but my point is that I worked harder on figuring out what the story was for the entire season because they'd given me an entire season to work with than I would have normally. I had the entire season mapped out before I pitched it. The second thing I did is I talked to Ted Danson and Kristen Bell who I wanted to play the main parts and they had expressed interest in playing those parts.”
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 just seemed like the best idea I had and the most interesting. And then that presented a number of challenges. Like, for example, how do you sell a TV network on the idea of doing a show that's explicitly about moral philosophy? That's a tough sell. And so Question number one What is moral philosophy”
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 there's a lot that's been said about people like me on television and my family on television. And so I had this idea, I had the nascent idea for the good place rattling around in my head and had for a couple years. In little tiny pieces, this idea had been kind of like bugging me. And so I thought about that and I started it excited and I developed it on my own time. It just became very obvious that like that was the interesting idea. And of the many, many rules of creation or of writing that have been taught to me over the years by a number of very smart people, the best and most trustworthy is write what's interesting. Don't fake it. If you have to fake it, if you have to try to tell people that your idea is interesting, then you're dead, right? So like this.”
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
“Never done a family show. And so being a good rule following soldier, I put a lot of thought into like, what would it look like for me to do a family show? And the truth is there's not that much that's very interesting about my family. Like I'm from, I'm like a, I'm a sort of middle class white guy who grew up in like a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut.”
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
“You know, like I had been doing something essentially the same at that point for a decade, which was writing stories about a group of people in a place on earth, the office was a group of people in an office in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Parks and Rec was a group of people who worked at a government office in Indiana. And Brooklyn 9-9 was a group of people who were police officers and detectives in New York City. And it was like those shows were so fun and it's great, but they were within the same general umbrella. And I sort of thought like, man, I could do it again. I could come up with a group of people who were working on the International Space Station or a group of people who work at an ice cream parlor in Belize. But it feels like I've been given this opportunity and I ought to take a kind of crazy swing. So they really wanted a family show, 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
“I had a thought which was like, man, I kind of owe it to myself. And I kind of owe it to the idea of being a creative force on television to try something insane.”
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 Parks and Recreation ended, Brooklyn 9 was still on the air, but Parsons Rec ended and the people running NBC sort of said to me like, we'd like you to do a new show and you can kind of do whatever you want. It was one of those deals and we will guarantee 13 episode seasons. Now even today, the business has changed so much that that's far more commonplace today than it was at the time. At the time, that was a very exciting kind of, oh my God, like they're not going to make me do a pilot and then look at the pilot and then determine whether they're going to put it on the air and then order a small number of them and maybe cancel it after five if the ratings aren't good. All of the sort of pitfalls of a new show were at least temporarily removed. So when they made that offer, which was very kind of them,”
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, like if you could go back, if you could go back and say, here's my list every year. And that would be certainly a more effective way of achieving what I'm hoping it's achieving, which is like to give you some kind of pattern in your life or to sort of give you some kind of path you can follow of like, here's where I came from, here's where I am now. Yeah.”
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 an object enters my life, that I do care about, it gives me a sort of moment's pause or an opportunity to kind of reflect on what I have that matters and what that means about me at a different age. When I was 25, what were the five things that mattered to me? How is that different from 35 or 45? It is weirdly a game I play a lot with myself. I've never really thought about why, but I would guess that it's like a way for me to kind of check in on my life to see like what's in my surroundings that has value to me or that matters to me and why does it have value to me or matter to me at that moment, you know?”
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 is true, and I think it's because I'm not a particularly materialistic guy. I'm not bragging about that. I'm just sort of stating a fact. I don't have a lot of things that I care about. Like I'm not like a wristwatch guy or a clothes guy or a car guy. Like I just, for whatever reason, I've never, I literally never wash my car. Never, unless it's so dirty I can't see through the windshield and it feels like a potential death trap. Like I just, because I don't care and I just think like it's a box that gets me from point A to point B and I don't care what it looks like. And if they get dented, I don't care. The thought of like spending money on car upkeep is bananas to me. And that I don't hold it against people who do care, honestly. Like if that's your thing, that's your thing. Great. More power to you. But because I don't, I have a lot of objects I care about.”
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
“Fremulon is now became my production company. So now the end of all my shows, there's a graphic for an imaginary company called Fremulon. It's a whole, there's a whole other metaverse thing going on where there's a company called Fremulon and a guy named Ken Tremendous working at 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
“It is a very weird aspect of my life, but it is very funny to have an alternate personality. The backstory for Ken Tremendous for some reason is that he's a pension plan monitor at a made up company called Fremulon Insurance.”
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 was like, but it's a fake name. What do you mean, verify me? Like that's ridiculous. And I was like, do you know I wrote back like on the DM thing? I was like, you know that this isn't my real name. And they're like, yep, don't worry. We're verifying you. And I was like, okay. So I'm verified on Twitter as an imaginary fictional personality.”
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, when I used to run a blog with a couple of my friends, there was a sports blog called Fire Joe Morgan that was us complaining about bad sports writing and bad announcing. On that blog, I was Ken tremendous. When Twitter started, I was like, I don't know what this is, but I don't want to be me, so I'll make it Ken tremendous. And just everything I do online just became Ken tremendous. And what's endlessly funny to me is that, first of all, long ago stopped trying to hide the fact that that's me. Like if you Google Ken Tremendous, my picture shows up. Like, it's not like I'm trying to pretend to be anonymous. But about two or three years, I think, into being on Twitter as Ken tremendous, they sent me one of those notices. It's like, we'd like to verify you.”
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
“Later, when the internet sort of really began to be the place where everybody spent their time and avatars and handles, online handles became a way for people to cloak themselves. I thought, well, this scares me. The internet scares me. It's dicey. I don't really want anyone to like track me or know who I am. So I'm going to just do everything I do on here anonymously. And I chose Ken tremendous as my sort of internet name.”
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 explanation is not super interesting. I was in college and I was walking home from somewhere. And I'm obsessed with crazy names. Always have been. Like I loved Monty Python growing up. And one of the best things about Monty Python is that all of the characters and their sketches have bananas names. And I loved, loved, loved crazy names. I think I was, again, this was like something got rewired in my brain at a fairly early age, but I was walking home and the name Ken tremendous popped into my head as a funny name to use in something. I didn't know what. It was just like, that's a funny name because Ken is kind of a normal, boring, straightforward name. And then putting the word tremendous after it just made me laugh. I went back to my dorm and I jotted the words Ken tremendous down on a piece of paper. I thought maybe there was a short story or a comedy piece for the lampoon or something where I would use that name.”
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 just wouldn't be truly happy until I had gotten first editions of all of their books. And for a while, I was doing this with no money. We did not have a lot of money growing up at all. And I took And yet it didn't slow me down at all. Any money I had for my student jobs was going right to used in rare bookstores. And I was scouring in the early, early days of the internet, I was scouring eBay for. Obscure copies of Dondalillo novels that someone might not know the value of and stuff. So it just started from that. It just was like a thing that my uncle did who got me into it and it's continued. It's only burning brighter as I age and now actually make money so I can, it's dangerous. I have enough money to spend on these things now.”
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
“Lit up. It hit some pleasure center in my brain. And I started becoming a completist where I would say, okay, I have a first edition copy of Penin by Vladimir Nabukov because I really love that book. But now I have to get all of his books. And the whole thing, I got to get all of them. And so there were certain authors that I just started collecting.”
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
“In the way that I think of those collections, I just loved it. I just loved that feeling of like building a collection of something. So I'm clearly predisposed to this, but my uncle bought me a couple first editions of books that I liked. And when you collect books, you get incredibly fussy about they can't be in direct sunlight and the humidity in the room has to be at the right level. And it's all this kind of ridiculous hobby stuff. But one of the things you do is you take the book cover off and you put it in this plastic sort of mylar stuff to keep it from getting spilled on or keep dust off it or whatever. The feeling of that plastic in my hands and the sheen, the sort of like shininess that it made the book look like. I mean, it's literally no different than what libraries do, right? It's the library. It's that plastic that goes around the covers of library books. Again, something just kind of like.”
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
“My uncle Steve, who now lives in Ireland, was a book collector, and he sort of introduced me to it when I was a teenager. And I've always been a kind of a collector of things. When I was a kid, my dad's form a college roommate for my fifth birthday bought me a bunch of baseball cards. And to this day, I can recall the sense memory of opening the plastic around. It used to be called rack packs where there were like sort of three sections of cards. And I remember ripping them open. I remember holding the cards in my hand and flipping through them and the tactile sensation of that is like incredibly drilled into my memory. And I became obsessed with them and I bought, I spent all my money on baseball cards and plastic sheets to put them in and I organized them and I collected full sets and later when CDs came out like the feeling of buying CDs and holding them and opening, it's almost fetishistic.”
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 wish it were. I wish it were on the, I wish he had done the maze on the front of the Denny's menu, and then on the back it just written off, dashed off a note to me. That would be amazing.”
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 it was so like the cognitive dissonance, I guess you would call it, of receiving that object and opening it and reading it in his own hand was so, my hand started shaking because I thought this is like I shouldn't be holding. I should be wearing gloves or something in order to read this. But and it's incredibly meaningful to me. And I framed that letter. That letter is also on my wall underneath the picture of David Foster Wallace smoking a cigarette.”
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
“Oh, I'll tell you, there's one thing that isn't a book that I would save, which is after the good place ended, I got a call from my agent that said, where are you? I need to send you something. And I was like, just send it to my house. And he was like, no, it has to be hand delivered. And I was like, all right, what is it? And he was like, I don't want to tell you what it is. Just wait. So a messenger came to my office and handed me an envelope and it was a handwritten note from President Barack Obama saying that he had watched the good place and really liked it.”
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
“Most of the objects, in fact, the only real objects that I care about, I think, are probably books. So there's a writer named David Halberstam, who is a sports writer. He was a friend of my wife's family. And he was a Red Sox fan. I'm a Red Sox fan. And in Christmas of 2003, he inscribed a copy of one of his books to me with a long message about how he really thought 2004 was going to be the year. The Red Sox had just gotten Keith Fulk, a relief pitcher and Kurt Schilling, a starting pitcher who they might put them over the top and they just lost a heartbreaking playoff series to the Yankees. And he wrote this thing that was like, I really think this could be the year. And then it was like 2004 is the year they won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. It would be awfully hard not to rescue that piece of literature from my house. So the answer is when I play this game is usually five books.”
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
“Really, really a rare copy of that book because obviously back then, no one really cared about paper quality or acidic paper or anything else. This copy happens to be extremely bright and crisp. I would probably save that just because I feel like that would be cruel to let that burn up in a fire.”
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 you assume that nothing in the house is going to be salvageable after you remove these five objects. So you can't hedge your bet. You can't say, I'm going to take these things and then hope that this other stuff survives. You're saying this is it. The house is burning to the ground. You get five things, right? So I'm not actually sure that photograph is probably top five, but I also have a copy of Infinite Jess that Wallace inscribed to me when I met him. That is probably if I had to choose, that's probably the one I would take. I might take both of them. Maybe that's too much David Foster Wallace. But I think I would take that book. I also, I'm a book collector. I collect first editions. So the rarest book I have is I have a first edition copy of Moby Dick that is an incredibly good shape.”
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 play this game a lot with myself. Here are the rules of the game if you want to play with me. The rules are Your family and your pets are safe, so you don't have to worry. One of those objects doesn't have to be a human being or an animal, right?”
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
“Lasted for years and years and years. And so Greg's thing, and this is what that Vanity Fair article is referencing, was at the end of every episode of the show, you should have at least a little bit more information about some of the characters than you did before the episode started. And it doesn't have to be a huge thing. It doesn't have to be like my dad was, you know,”
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
“How did it land there? I can tell you definitively that I did not pinch it because I believe I was completely unaware of this phenomenon. So that's why you have a room full of funny people because you just say, okay, here's the character, here's the subject matter, pitch on what she would like. Pitch on some aspect of the culture. And some, I wish I remember too, someone pitch that and immediately was like, oh my God, that's perfect. I don't know why, but that's perfect. So we changed it to someone got her this poster of two babies dressed like jazz musicians. And again, it didn't factor into the episode in any meaningful way. But that poster was then added to the set, she put it up next to her. Later in the season, we designed an entire episode over the fact that another person who sat near her hated it so much that there was like an HR complaint lodged against her. And it flowered. It just bloomed into this thing that was 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
“Overlapping in the overlapping area of the Venn diagram of what we already know about her and what we can learn about her that would broaden her character, that would make her into a more interesting person, dimensionalize her a little bit. And so what we came up with was that she loved those kind of photographs that people take where babies are dressed like adults. There's like a baby, there's like a weird corner of the photography world where it's like a baby but dressed like a jazz musician with like a like a Fedora and like a toy saxophone. And somehow, I don't know why, but somehow that was like, that's perfect. Like that is exactly the kind of first thing.”
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
“Just very, very uptight. And so I had in the script that someone bought for her a sort of vaguely Christian kind of self-help book. It was like seven habits for following in the light of God or something like that. It was just like a sort of one of those books that are perfectly lovely and helpful for people who are looking for some guidance in their lives and who are religious. And it didn't factor into the plot at all. It was just a detail of the script that that's what she got. And Greg was like, no, we should come up with something else. And I was kind of confused because I was like, it's not even a joke. We don't even make a joke about it. It's just literally like she opened the gift and then that's what it is. But he was like, yeah, here's the thing though. We already know that Angela is religious and we already know that she is the kind of person who would buy a book like that or who would like a book like that. And what would be better is if there was something that were like...”
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
“His gift, a woven oven mitt, and just lost his mind. And so he changed it from a secret Santa to a Yankee swap, which is where you can swap your gift for any of the other gifts. It's another game, right? Because he wanted to unload the Even Mits and get something better. So when I wrote the episode, I did this thing where I was like, okay, well, the reality, I've been a part of many Secret Santa's and many offices. And I know how you do it. You do a draw. So I put all the characters names into a hat and I did a real draw. I said like, okay, Oscar is drawing now and I picked out and it was creed. Okay, Oscar's going to buy Griff for Creed. So I did it the way it would really be done. And there was one of the characters had Angela. Angela is a character on the show who was very uptight and fairly religious. And she was very prim. She didn't like to curse. She didn't do anything that was sort of, she was.”
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
“Season that was about a Christmas episode. And it was an episode where they were doing a secret Santa, so they'd each drawn a name and they had, you know, this person is buying a little gift for this person and this person is buying a little gift for this person or whatever. And the premise, which was really funny, was that Michael didn't like his gift. Michael's gift came from a character named Phyllis on the show and she had knitted him some oven mints. And he just didn't like them. He didn't think they were a big enough gift. And he had gotten, he had drawn Ryan. Ryan was the temp played by BJ Novak. He had drawn Ryan in the Secret Santa gift exchange draw, and he had bought Ryan a video iPod. So even though it's a classic Michael Scott thing because there was like 25 limit or whatever, and he, because he was so desperate to be loved, just bought this kid a $400 video iPod. So he gave a video iPod to his person and then he got 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
“That if people, if audiences don't in some way identify with characters, they don't like those characters. And that doesn't mean in the world we're in now, and this has been true probably since roughly speaking, the sopranos came on board. And suddenly the main character of the biggest show on TV was a sociopathic mobster who killed people regularly. You wouldn't call it, strictly speaking, likability, but you might call it relatability. You might say the main characters on a show that have to have some aspect of them that people can see in themselves or at least identify with or say, I have a cousin who's like that or something like that. Those are the amino acids, right? That's like the basic building blocks of life. Yeah, as far as teaching moments, as many aphorisms as Lauren Michaels had about comedy, Greg has just as many. And so I'll give you one example. So I wrote an episode of the office in the second.”
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, the F equals MA of sitcom writing, it's stuff like, okay, here's what matters in stories, right? What matters is characters motivations for doing what they do, the plots having good twists and turns in them so that comedy is all about thwarting expectation. And if people see something common, then they'll laugh, being surprising escalation is another big one, right? If you see a story where the same thing happens two scenes in a row, you get bored. So whatever happens in the second scene has to be bigger and more intense than what happened in the first one. There are certain things that I think you would establish as F equals MA type rules that you would then undermine. Like you would say, there's a certain quality that executives like to refer to as likability, which is a kind of a reductive term, but it essentially means”
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'll answer both of the questions, which are different. The day one stuff, the PhD level class, day one, in the same way that a professor of Newtonian physics would say would write F equals MA on the board, and then everyone would scribble it down in their notebooks or type, I guess. It's showing you how old I am that I'm still imagining people taking notes with a still scribble. There you go”
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