You know i once made dinner for my mom and she said: oh my gosh darling. This is so delicious and i said mom you got to try it first before you give me the compliment, i opened the door for an elderly lady. You would have thought that i won the nobel peace prize. Do you allow yourself to have expectations? No yeah, i don't either.

I think expectations are the catalyst to so much unhappiness and are grounded in wild selfishness and lack of energy. Let me start with this. I love your books because it's popular culture, documentaries in written form, is that fair. I think it's it's good news for me, because the approach that i you know look oral histories, i think, are really important, because there's no way even ernest hemingway at a keyboard can convey the varisimilitude the sensibilities, the uniqueness of everyone's individual voice and perspectives, and so, When you have like in the snl book when you have billy murray talking about the last time, you saw gilda, radner, live or in this book when you when i was talking to david chase and julia louis dreyfus, and i mean literally hundreds of others.

I did 757 interviews because i feel like it's a great opportunity for readers to get behind the curtain and really hear directly from the people involved. But i'm trying to create a book of record whereby i can come in and i can use supplemental facts like sometimes financial information or other things, just ratings or sales. I remember you know it's funny. You just said that that subscriptions to kate, you know like i've.

Always loved that you've done that, because what you're doing is you're helping me the reader, because a lot of times what you have in your books is, you have two different people describing the same event from you know very different points of view just as humans like To do things, and i think effectively in the ones that i've i read you bring in an outside voice. That kind of brings some non-debatable data that not that it steers you to believe one person, the other, it's just there as an anchoring for why. While i interpret you like origin stories, me too mister here we go your origin stories. What what put you in the position to have one of the more significant careers? In writing i mean most immediately.

I i got divorced when i had a nine seven and three year old and uh. I was an executive before that and uh. I decided that i wanted to uh raise my kids, and so i had shared joint custody whole time and that's when i became a full-time writer and uh that gave me the opportunity to uh be at home and take the kids to school. Pick the kids school up live with, i mean they're with me half the time and i i wrote in my my entire professional schedule was built around my kid's life and i think you know i wouldn't do it any differently.

Um i always enjoyed writing. I worked at the washington post both for the new york times and other things, but um look. I think. Writing, as you well know that it's a solitary enterprise for the most part i mean, unless you're working on a tv show and you're in a writer's room or whatever and uh.

I think i enjoy interaction with others, and i i like the idea of working with a team and being part of a team but um. For me, it was uh, it was no contest and the the choice was uh turned out to be a great one, because i got to be you know with my kids you've taken me to your adult life. I really want to know about the neighborhood and the parenting and the foundational things. I think i had uh polar opposites for parents.

You know i once made dinner for my mom and she said. Oh my gosh darling. This is so delicious and i said mom you got ta, try it first before you give me the compliment and uh it was that i mean there was kind of like unbridled enthusiasm and devotion, blind, yeah and uh. My dad was just the opposite.

He was very consumed by classical music, so we listened to a lot of. I wasn't allowed to listen to rock and roll except on headphones and he would uh. You know his way of coping was uh, classical music and poker and uh so uh. He lived that life because they were on opposite ends.

You know end zones. There was nothing between the 40 yard lines that i kind of learned while i was living at home. I think that was a lesson that i had to learn. You know once i went off to school and then in jobs you know i mean look.

I remember the first time i did something at a job and uh. My editors, i was at the washington post. My editor said yeah. This is good and then walked away.

I was like where's like the big golden star that my mom used to you know give i remember exactly where i was in plainfield jersey in the bradley shopping center at mcdonald's, i opened the door for an elderly lady. You would have thought that i won the nobel peace prize. My mom lost her. You are a gentleman, you are a.

You are a golden-hearted boy, the way you treat people, not just your sister, but this woman - i think about myself - i'm a 46 year old man and there was two areas of positive reinforcement for me in the first 15, 18 years of my life, two core positive Reinforcement engines in my life was my mother on the category of behavior, what i would call emotional intelligence, kindness as a framework and the business world, and i'm a 46 year old man who is black and white, a very good businessman who is obsessed with teaching people That you can be nice and a good businessman, and i sit there and i'm like my god - and this is like how many people get affected, like the things that i look at people who struggle because school is their positive reinforcement engine and then real life comes In and there's nothing similar to it as a matter of fact, one of my biggest fears about modern parenting is that parents are obsessed when they have the luxury to be paying attention which many parents in america definitely do um with eliminating any adversity in their child's Life we used to go outside, like our parents didn't know, oh my god, no idea! If you're over 45, a lot of us remember living life, where not only our parents didn't know, they didn't even know where we were, we went out and they couldn't track us down, because there were no phones. The high percentage of us kept that to ourselves and worked it through. Yes, except that, sometimes we don't even realize that we displace you know we we kind of like hold on to some of those things, and then we displace them in our adult lives, without even being you know, kind of aware of it, i get. Do you allow yourself to have expectations? No yeah, i don't either.

I think expectations are, are the catalyst to so much unhappiness and are grounded in wild selfishness and lack of empathy. Yeah, i mean it's just like setting it's not being negative. It's about it's about! Managing your life in a way that you know waking up every day, you know, are you going to allow others to disappoint you and are you good? Is your antenna going to be so high that you're going to get affected by the way they say something or if they don't say something, and then that's going to set you off on a you know, dark path. So when you don't have expectations for the negative, you also don't have it for the positive which allows you to be grounded in humility, which is very powerful.

What's the thing that everybody who's listening can take from the hbo story, if they're an individual or an executive of like what was the driving soul that helped it become what it became a word of warning to entrepreneurs and innovators. Just because you come up with the idea, just because you give birth to something doesn't mean that you will be entitled to stay with it. Bill rasmussen basically invented espn and chuck. Dolan, basically invented hbo.

Neither of them were around after a year and a half the parent companies took them out because they saw them more as a idm person rather than an operational person, and they didn't get to stay around. That's incredibly painful and so be careful when the lord wants to punish you, he answers your prayers. You can't just innovate once and then take a break. It is innovation has to be part of your dna.

Why is it? Why is the book called tinderbox, because the idea of hbo and hbo throughout the decades has been flammable it it? It literally blew up the business, it changed television in some ways, it changed our culture, it changed storytelling, it changed technology. The myriad impacts that hbo had beyond just that. Little desktop that sat on your television, and so i kind of like the combustible quality of that. What what are some of the key ingredients to a storyteller, like yourself, who's, grounded in listening for people who are good at what they do and who have a road of accomplishment that they've traveled on? I you have to generally be um absorbed by them.

Do you think curiosity is a core strength of yours, it's essential. I mean if i don't wake up in the morning curious or if i embark upon a book or any kind of reading assignment or any any day, even if i'm not writing that day um. If i'm not curious about something, that's like oxygen for me, i i just you know i might as well just fold up the tent and uh. You know watch an old movie,.