Join us
this new year for new conversations at the Commonwealth Club. Hello and welcome to tonight's virtual Commonwealth Club program. My name is Nick Offerman, I'm
an actor, author and woodworker, and I'm very excited to be here with you
moderating tonight's program. It is my pleasure
to introduce my dear friend Michael Schur,
author of How to Be Perfect. The Correct Answer
to every moral question. Michael is the brain and heart behind
many of TV's most popular shows, including Parks and Recreation, in which I played Ron Swanson pretty much the whole time and others. They want me to say Brooklyn Nine-Nine and The Good Place, building off the philosophy
behind The Good Place. Michael's book
How to Be Perfect, aims to tackle the complex moral questions
we face every day. Like, how much money should I give
to charity or why bother being good at all when there are no consequences
for being bad ? While it may not have all the answers
necessary to eradicate our imperfections, Mike's
book aims to leave us with knowledge that could allow us to become
even better people in the long run. We'll be discussing
a lot in the next hour, and I want to ask Mike some of your questions. So if you're watching along with us,
please put your questions in the text chat on YouTube and we'll get to them
later in the program. Mike, welcome. Let me start off by allowing you to respond to my welcome. I will respond by saying it is a delight, as always, to see you
and to hear your dulcet tones. And thank you for doing this. It's
very kind of you. It's my pleasure,
and I have to say it sincerely. You're gaining more gray hair as the years go by
and it is very becoming. Thank you. Yeah, that is what tends to happen
with gray hair I've learned is that it increases in frequency
and volume as you get older. But since I wrote a book on philosophy,
I've decided to embrace it and try to lean in to the aging, wizened academic type
and hope that that will take me places. So you're in favor is what you're saying.
You like the you like the. Like you like the new. It's worth it. All right, you're on your way. Wasn't wasn't. As the kids would say,
that is what they would say. Yes, Mike, I love your book. I it. It is such a great encapsulation of it in a book that I wrote some years ago. one of my dedications was to you
and it said for for showing me how funny we can be
while still saying I love you and that your whole sort of ethos,
you know you're you're this incredibly smart, talented comedy writer who creates and writes, shows and produces shows. But the whole time you have this,
you know, the sort of niggling sense
of like pursuing a sense of ethos with your work
that I think is astonishing because for me and most other people
who who want to make people laugh. Moral philosophy is not what springs
to mind is a sort of the foundation. How did how did that happen? How did you become such a great comedy
writer and creator who also is like a benevolent philosopher? Well, comedy writing is my profession, I guess,
and the thing that I've always loved doing since I was a kid and discovered,
you know, Monty Python and Saturday Night Live and David Letterman, like, it's all I ever wanted to
be, really was a comedy writer. Over the course of my life, I, I realized pretty early on that
I was oriented in a certain way, and I think that the impolite way to describe
that orientation would be kiss ass . And the polite way
would be to say a dutiful child who who believes in rules and order. And like, when I was in kindergarten, I have a very specific memory of a teacher
saying, OK, everybody line up and immediately getting into line and then looking around at the other kids
who hadn't gotten in line and thinking very clearly, I remembered this thinking,
What are you doing? Like this is insane.
She just said, Get in line. Like, How have you not already obeyed
that direction? So I think that somewhere and this is a
little bit of an Aristotelian idea. I think I had this kind of starter kit from birth that was aimed at kind of understanding
rules, understanding right and wrong and trying to do right. And then as a adult
that has blossomed into this sense of at various moments in my life, I have horribly fouled something up, caused someone some kind of embarrassment or anger or pain or anguish or something. And in those moments,
my instinct is always to go. I know that I know what I did was wrong,
and I don't know why. And eventually, that led me to an interest
in moral philosophy, because at the very least, I thought,
if I know why, what I did, what was wrong or bad, I can. I can avoid doing that in the future. So it is. It's the philosophy interest
is this kind of natural outcropping from again, what some people might call
being a kiss ass and other people might say a general interest
in right and wrong and rules and such. So you put those two things together
and end up being a professional comedy writer
who reads a lot of weird philosophy books. Well, that stands to reason and remind me. Wasn't there some seminal paper, either
a high school term paper or a college thesis that was about Wendell
Berry that you wrote it was in high school? Yes. This is what one of the many things
that you and I over the course of our lives have found
we accidentally share coming from two extremely different angles
into the world. You, as a essentially a farmer in central Illinois and me as a bored suburban dude in in northeastern New England have found over the years that we have
these very, very specific things in common. And one of them is Wendell Berry. My friend Jamie Hartigan,
when I was in college, was a great outdoorsman, and he turned me on
to the writings of Wendell Berry. And I ended up writing a paper
when I was a senior in high school about the writings of Wendell Berry and and just his sort of outlook on life. And then whatever. I was 17. And so call it 24 years later, you and I
one day were out at dinner, I think. And you mentioned
that you were writing about Wendell Berry and I said, That's interesting. I wrote about Wendell Berry once. So, yeah, there
there is a sort of eclecticism, if that's a word to the things
that I've been interested in in my life. I am not an outdoorsy person. I am. There's an episode of Parks and Rec
where everybody goes camping and Ben Wyatt refuses to engage
in the concept of camping. And at one point,
so I think you point out, someone points out that he didn't bring a sleeping bag, and he's
and he says, I'll just sleep on the floor. And your response is
it's called the ground when it's outside that I'm Ben Wyatt in that scenario. So I it's not that I adopted
a lot of this stuff wholesale, but I have liked in my life to poke around
and find different writers whose writings I just find interesting or attractive
or or moving in some way and try to sort of like eat them
and assimilate them into my life. Well, that that makes sense, and I I do want to say for the sake of my my family
who the side of my family who are farmers, I'm always quick to point out
that I grew up working on my family's farm, but I have never been a full on farmer. I'm the child of farming family, but I I feel like it's a false claim to be. It would be you'd be an imposter
if you claim to be a farmer. Yep, I hear that I would aspire
to my uncles and cousins and aunts are Earl. Heroic farmers
and I look up to them for it. I. There's so many questions
I have going through your book, I guess, before I get into some
some that I noted down, there's I was pretty fascinated with the there's sort of two things in the book that you cite as being having to do with the sort of inception
of this fascination of yours. one that's more tangible. I had never heard the story,
and it's pretty great. Would you would you tell the anecdote
about JJ's fender bender? Sure, I'll try to condense it
for the sake of time. But my wife in 2005, in a very slow moving tap, tap on a guy's bumper in front of him
going about one mile an hour policeman looks everything over,
doesn't see any damage. They exchanged numbers anyway. They go about their day. We get a claim from this gentleman
saying that his entire bumper needed to be replaced
and the cost was $836. Now, pause and learn that this was literally during the devastation
of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, which for some reason I don't know why,
but it hit that event, hit me really hard. J.G. I had just been to New Orleans very recently and had sort of fallen
in love with the city. I had a friend who lived there,
who had been forced to evacuate and and I just for some reason
more than the average enormous disaster that it was really hitting me
kind of hard. So I went and looked at the guy's car
and I saw this incredibly faint crease,
the kind of thing that you could. You could look at it from a distance of
four feet and not notice anything wrong. And if you got to 18 inches,
you would say, Oh yeah, I see there's a little crease there. So I told the guy in a fit of pique and righteousness that I didn't think that this was worth $836 and that he shouldn't care about his car
this much. And and I said, How about this? I'll send that money to the Red Cross to see two for the Hurricane Katrina
Relief Fund and we'll call it even . How about that? And he said, Well,
I don't know. I'll think it over. So then I went back. I was working at the office at the time,
the show, the office and I told the people there
what had happened, and suddenly they started pitching in
and committing more and more money. If this guy wouldn't fix his bumper,
it's a very weird situation. So as soon it's like, Well, now we have $2,000 pledged
and now we have $4000 pledge. And I made a blog and I told the story
and people started writing in and saying, I'll chip in 20 55 bucks
and I'll pay five bucks and this and that. So suddenly we had a commitment within like 24 hours of something like $25,000. And it just took off. It was the first thing that I was aware of that really kind of
in quotes went viral. This guy knows nothing of this,
by the way. He is completely not of this. So J.J. and I and then I start getting media requests
because it gets to various people, and I got NPR in and the New Yorker
and Good Morning America. They want to interview
me too to talk about this. So J.J. and I on the second night
are kind of going over everything and we're excitedly talking,
and now we have $28,650 pledged. And we immediately, both at the same exact
moment, got sick to our stomachs. And she said, This is bad. And I said, You're right,
and I don't know why. Like I, I know this is wrong. And if I had studied
philosophy in college, I would know why this is wrong,
and I panicked. I really did. I had a real sense of like,
Oh no, I'm in way too deep. And I started reading moral philosophy. I started looking up like, What is ethics? What is right and wrong? What is good and bad? I sent a bunch of emails
through a bunch of ethics. Professors have moral philosophy
professors and I read a bunch of stuff and I came to the not shocking conclusion. Most of the people,
when I tell the story are way ahead of me, and the conclusion was like, Look,
we were negotiating this guy
and me over a very minor incident, and it's entirely unfair of me to drag
in this entirely asymmetric disaster to make him feel bad
about what he's doing. Like, he didn't set the price
of a new bumper for a car. He didn't. He was minding his own business
as someone bumped into him. And suddenly I'm saying,
you shouldn't care about this because Hurricane Katrina is happening
and if you think about it that way. It doesn't make any
sense, and so I eventually called the guy a cop to the whole thing,
I laid out the whole story. I apologize. I sent him a check. He said maybe he would give some of it
to the Red Cross. I said, That's great. You are in no way
morally obligated to do that. And it was really
that was really in some way the the beginning of this whole journey for me
was feeling very strongly like, man,
if I had read all this stuff and I had talked to all these people
and I had a bit of a rudimentary understanding of philosophy before my wife accidentally tapped
that guy's bumper. I could have avoided so much pain
and suffering and embarrassment, frankly,
and shame and guilt and everything else. So that was like the that was like a
the pilot light went on for me at that moment, and over the next 17 years
it has. It's led to a steadier flame
of wanting to learn about this stuff and understand what I'm doing so that I don't
cause anyone that kind of pain again. Well, I'm grateful that happened. And would you be willing to give us the man's name and address because. No, no, I wouldn't. I'm actually I don't even know,
I don't remember, like I started this post,
you made the right decision. Thank you. Yeah, I and I made very few good decisions
during that whole period of time. And one of them is I never doxed to the guy before
anybody knew what doxing was like. I never put his his license
plate on the internet, and I never mentioned what his name was
or where he lived or anything. And I mean, thank God like
it would have been so, so, so much worse if that had
any of that stuff had had led me to, you know, that that kind of event
that would have been truly, truly awful. Well, I mean, I love that that happened. And I love I love what came out of it. And you know, it's amazing. You know, I worked
I did that series with Colin Kaepernick last year where I played his dad
and learning his story, like learning about people
like when he was in high school and the Cubs offered him 1,000,000 dollar
signing bonus to come pitch for the Cubs. Mm-Hmm. My beloved cubs and and he his gut said, No, I want to be a quarterback. And I just said. And the same was with the light bulb
that went on for you and J.J.. I love that that
notion that it can occur to humans when the vast majority of the rest of us, you know, if we're not conscientious
in the right moment, it will just will will surf on by on on the wave of like popular opinion where it's like, Oh, this is amazing
raising a bunch of money like it . It has all the earmarks or superficiality
of being a good thing. Right? But I love that both of you were like,
Oh, hang on, this is. Well, there were a bunch of things in my sort of debrief of it. There were a bunch of interesting moments
that I think were meaningful, not just the ones that led me
to read a bunch of philosophy, but one of the most important moments
was at some point he said to me, You know, look, I have kids and they've ruined everything in my life
like they liked. Everything in my
whole house is a disaster. And the one thing that I have
that isn't ruined, that is just mine in that
I have the way I want. It is my car. And I didn't have kids at the time. I do now. He was totally right. Like, I totally get it. But even at the time,
I remember thinking, like, Well, hold on. This is a different perspective
because I have this rant, this endlessly boring rant
that will come out after my third whiskey about how people care about their cars too
much in this city, specifically in L.A. that car culture is kind of pointless. The cars are metal boxes
to get you from one place to another, and we should only care
about the most energy efficient car or the safest car,
and anything else is absurd. And I have had that rant
since the moment I moved to L.A. In fact,
maybe before then I'm in this situation and this guy is upset about this
minor damage done to his car and what comes out of me in that moment,
and it was rattling my head. The dumb rant that I do all the time
where I very self-assured Lee proclaim
that I have the right information and that my take on
this is the correct take. And then a human being tells me
about his human situation and puts things into a different context
or perspective that I hadn't considered. And suddenly,
my hot take about car culture seems very shortsighted
and very kind of cursory. Because all humans are not created equal,
all people's lives are not equal. Everybody is living a different version
of existence and everybody else, and his attitude about his car suddenly doesn't seem overly fastidious
and kind of, you know, Niles Crane from Frasier E,
but rather incredibly understandable and explicable
because kids ruin everything. He had this
nice car that he liked to keep, and so among other things, and this is, you know,
stretching the boundaries of what you might consider philosophy. But among other things,
it gave me a different philosophical understanding of just human nature
to just get outside my own ego for a second, put myself
in the shoes of a different person and imagine what his car represents to him
instead of just digging in my heels and doubling down on my own
kind of viewpoint about the world. That's a great lesson, man. I mean, that is a wonderful thing. I'm grateful that had happened to him,
even though I even though I caused him discomfort and I suffered from a significant amount
of my own discomfort because of that. I think that we need to go
through these things from time to time, and when we do, we come out
the other side better for them. I agree. I just wish it wasn't a sob, but you
I mean, you've hit upon my solution and we may have spoken
about this years ago to two surviving Los Angeles traffic are famously horrible traffic, which just gets worse and worse. It always seems like a video game. We're just getting to work and back. seven people try to kill you in some ways. I'm not exaggerating. Like you're dodging people just careening across lanes of traffic
with no rhyme or reason. And at some point it occurred to me
instead of being combative, I I don't remember
what flipped the switch, but I thought, what if they're trying
to get to an audition? Or what if, you know, I just decided that it made me feel so much better
if I was generous to them and it was like, let's let's say they're not an asshole. Let's say that, you know,
they're going to the hospital like they're they're having a terrible day. And so I just started leaving a little earlier so that people had to do that. It wouldn't freak me out,
but I still get upset if I see a Saab. Well, you're talking about,
yeah, you're you're being generous is a good way to put it,
I think, right? Because you're basically
like when someone cuts you off in traffic,
that is the end of that interaction. Right? You're not going to
unless you're a lunatic, you're not going to speed
up, weave through traffic by yourself, cut the guy off, climb out of your car, go over, knock on his window
and have a conversation with it like he has cut
you off in traffic and sped away. And that is the last time
that you will think about that person. And so your options are let it fester and curdle in your soul
and think the worst about the human condition or throw out. Play a game with yourself
where you feel like, yeah, maybe he's running
late to pick up his kid from from the hospital because his kid
just broke his wrist and he just got that phone call that every parent dreads of
like your son's been in an accident. Now is that the case? Probably not. He's probably an asshole. He's probably a guy who doesn't care about other people
and has cut you off in traffic. But given the fact that there is no future
for you in that person at all, anywhere it,
it does help sometimes to imagine a possible scenario in which that person
actually had a reason to do what he did. And that doesn't mean that
we should be pushovers and be ultimately and forever forgiving to
the end of the Earth for all bad behavior. Of course, we should it. But in situations under which you have
no control, this is a stoic idea, right? The Stoics were sort of like control
what you can control, and you can't control anything
beyond what has happened. The only thing you can
now control is your reaction to it and the way that you respond,
given that given that thing that just happened to you, so control
that to the best of your ability, that's a that's a good kind of like Greek
philosophical lesson to try to follow. I think it also the the way that you handled, you know, looking looking at the situation
through another perspective, putting yourself in your neighbor's shoes seems like a possible Segway to ubuntuya. Mm hmm. Yes. Is that am I saying that right? Yeah. As far as I know, Ubuntu, yes, that's that's
how I've always heard of pronounced. Yeah, Nobunaga is a is a it's difficult to call it
purely a philosophy. It's more of a sort of community
wide ethos, or it's like a spirit
that sort of pervades entire nations in southern Africa, and it's difficult to describe it quickly. It's mostly
when people are asked to describe it. They mostly use
certain phrases and aphorisms, one of which is a person
is a person through other people. And obviously,
these phrases and aphorisms often differ in translation, depending on which
African language they're being taken from. But a person is a person through other
people is pretty close to describing it. Another one is I am because we are
and and we are because I am. So it's essentially trying to take the concept of individualism
or the ego and not eliminate it,
but place it on exact equal footing with the concept of community
health and happiness. So. For example, Nelson Mandela, in an
interview that I read about in the book, was asked about Ubuntu
in the way he described it was if if a visitor comes to your village, everyone's instinct is the same,
which is make sure he has water and food, make sure he has shelter,
make sure he's OK. Ask him if he needs anything
and basically welcome him in and treat him as if you are treat in the same way
you would treat your closest friend or relative if your closest friend
or relative came to visit you and you do that
when it's a complete stranger. So it's this kind of it's this sense that that you only are. You can only be as good as an individual
as the health and happiness of the community
allows you to be. So I talk about that in the book in relation
to this concept called contractual ism, which is a philosophy invented by a guy
named Tim Scanlon, Thomas Scanlon. He goes by Tim. Sometimes it's confusing who's a contemporary philosopher
still alive, still with us. And he had this idea of the way that you make rules in a society
as you're all sitting around a table and everybody has a veto
and you start pitching rules. And quite simply, the ones that get passed
are the ones that nobody vetoes. And this is assuming,
and this is kind of a big assumption, but it's assuming that everyone
is what he calls reasonable, which is a loaded
word that you can debate forever. But if everybody is being reasonable,
you pitch a rule. Hey, I rule is the first
rule is no one should murder anybody else. Anybody veto that? No. Why would anyone veto that? That rule passes and you just brick by
brick build a society that is only the rules that everyone
who is reasonable agrees to? So what what ends up happening is
you create this a floor. Basically,
you create like a set of minimums, which are like people
with widely differing interests and belief systems and worldviews
and everything else. There are certain things that we all agree
to that should be rules for our society. Let's find them, acknowledge them,
encode them into our society and then keep going until we can't,
until we can't find any more rules that we all agree to. So contractual ism is sort of setting
this minimum standard where we're all buying into the system
because we all know that if we don't buy into the system,
if we don't, if we can't justify our rules to you, then you won't yield to them. And if you can't justify your rules to me,
then I'll veto them. So we all approach this
from a position of like, let's be reasonable and try to find
what unites us instead of what divides us. So talk about that theory, which I really
like, which I think is very interesting. And then Ubuntu would be a sort of like, let's take that theory
and just kind of supercharge it and pump it up
and inflate it a little more and say that when we're not just acting out
of this sense of community like contractual ism relies
on the other people in the community because if you don't rely on them
and their reasonableness, then you're not going
to get any of your rules passed, right? So it's a cooperative venture
that you're engaging in. Ubuntu takes that idea and just kind of
like lifts it up and elevated to the highest heights of the community,
which is to say nobody does anything. Nobody makes a move here
unless we are sure that all of the other people with whom
we're engaged in this cooperative venture are happy and flourishing and safe
and have food to eat and water to drink. So it's very interesting
to take a extremely contemporary like late nineties American, you know, content based rules, philosophy and find the parallels in it
in this never really encoded or written down southern African
philosophy that has existed for centuries in all of these nations
and say, like, Wow, we're all we're
all getting at the same thing here, right? We're all aiming at the same idea. We're all climbing the same mountain. We're just climbing it
from different cliff faces. And I think that's fascinating. I do, too. I mean, my mom and dad are like that, and it's always struck me that notion of when somebody comes over,
no matter who it is, you know, in our house, it's
making sure everybody has a beer. And but, you know, or whether it's water or food or comfort,
you know, the creature comforts. And at some point
it can't help but occur to you that well, how far? How far do you spread out
that circle of neighborliness, you know? Right? I would do that for anybody in my town,
county state, you know. And eventually, if you know, if you're good with math, you realize, oh, that everyone is actually
our neighbor on the planet. Mm-Hmm. Everyone deserves a drink of water,
turns out. Yeah, exactly. And and as soon as that idea takes hold of
you, it's very hard to get rid of it. It's very hard to you realize pretty quickly,
like there's no line to draw here. Like if you're if your instinct
or your mission is to extend general courtesy
and comfort to the people around you, then that it extends all the way around
the globe and back from the other side. And you don't there's no reason to ever draw a line and exclude anyone from it,
and suddenly we're all holding hands
and singing songs and being happy. That's right. It's that easy. Let's take things back towards the contentious right you. Something I really admire about you and it and it reminds me of of great writers that I look up to like Wendell Berry. You're unsurprisingly,
one of the most conscientious and PG rated writers I've ever met, especially for like a,
you know, a very successful comedy writer. You and a lot of your characters often
refer to, like the most vile of villains
like the filthiest bad men and women are jerks and turkeys. Mm hmm. There's a total turkey. That's that's the heart of Leslie Knope
that I attribute to your voice. And you go on like, excoriate their crimes by saying like,
their behavior really stinks. And I and I love it because you even on social media, even on Twitter you like
are really well mannered. You know,
you don't don't resort to profanity much. So you can imagine my absolute delight when on Page
248 of the hardcover of your book, you rightly call Representative
Ted Yoho his attempt at an apology for calling his colleague
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an effing bitch. you call it And I was so delighted by that. But. I'm curious what you're planning to do when when that gets out and you get Joe Rogan. Well, to be fair, I I didn't call it bullshit. Well, I did call. I did call it but I I didn't. The reason that I called it specifically is because of a book called On by a philosopher
named Harry Frankfurt, who taught at Princeton and Oxford and and was an incredibly brilliant person
and who also wrote an entire book called On,
where he basically tried to pin down what he saw as a specific kind of rhetoric
that exists in the modern era. And he he wanted to distinguish from lying. And what he says essentially, is that
lying is a situation in which
you know what the truth is, and you kind of sneak in
and you remove the truth and you replace it intentionally
with a piece of misinformation that sort of lies in What he said was that is is a situation in which
the speaker is utterly unconcerned. What the truth is, it doesn't matter. What matters to the speaker
is that the words that he or she is saying make the listener feel
a certain way about him. So it's immaterial whether he believes it
or doesn't believe it, whether it's true or false, it doesn't matter. What he's doing is disregarding the truth in in searching for a reaction from his listeners
that will help him in some way. So the example
that one example that he gives is is a politician of either party,
it doesn't matter. On July fourth, giving a a rousing rah rah America is great and bald eagles
in the flag and the Constitution and the Founding Fathers and 1776
and Concord and Lexington, etc., etc. It might be the case that this speaker really cares
deeply about the founding of the country. It might be that the speaker couldn't care
less. It doesn't matter what he is doing. Let's say it's a he in that moment
is is he knows like it is good for politicians
to appear in a certain way. This is an event
celebrating the birth of our nation. I am going to spew forth a bunch of B.S. that I that it doesn't really matter
whether I care about it or not, because I need the people listening to me to think of me
as a certain kind of person. So very often in that section of the book
is about apologies and apologies are things that human beings I think are uniquely terrible at,
and I will not exempt myself from this. I am a I'm not a good apologize
or by any stretch. You also were volunteering
that about yourself. It is a very difficult thing to apologize. Well, when you screw up
and because we all screw up, this is a this is our cross to bear really
is that we we hate apologizing. It's embarrassing.
We don't want to do it. It feels icky. It's a thing that you put off
as long as you possibly can. And then when you do it,
there are better and worse ways to do it. And in that case, Congressman Yoho, who screamed an obscenity
at his colleague, his actual apology is the most
banana's thing I've ever heard in my life. It is truly it's worth reading. Looking up on the internet, actually,
you can watch him get deliver his apology because he starts off by saying that he that he is sorry for the neat, the nature of the tone or something
with which he spoke to his colleague. Then he immediately kind of denies
that he said anything wrong, and he's sorry if she misconstrued it
in a certain way, which is I'm not sure how anyone can misconstrue
that phrase an effing B. And then he starts talking about how
when he was a kid, he was poor and he was on food
stamps and his wife and he were were poor. And it's like, What are we doing, man? Like, we're not even on the track anymore, like,
but we've completely derailed here. And the problem with it, of course,
is that when you do apologize to someone, the whole point of it is to admit fault
and ask for forgiveness. And if you're off on some crazy tangent
where you're not, you're saying like, I'm sorry that I said it,
but actually I didn't say it. And if you think I said
it, you're an idiot. And also, I have problems too. And also look over there. And also,
what about this problem and whatever? I mean, it's a version of what I was doing when I asked that guy to care more about
Hurricane Katrina than his car, right? It's like,
it's like, Yes, I bumped into you. But what about this much larger problem
that. We should all care about much more like
you can't we can't live in a world where that's OK to do,
because if we lived in that world, no dispute over anything big or small
could ever be solved because we would all just look around, find
whatever thing is happening in the world. That's more important
than whatever you and I are arguing over. Drag it into the equation, point at it
and then get off scot free. Like, that's not a viable universe, right? So that apologizing isn't
technically really ethics. It's more,
I think of it as like an exit interview when you've blown something like it's
I made a mistake. Now I'm going to go through this ritual,
which is intended to heal the wound and also to kind of like,
put a period at the end of this sentence and and wrap it up into a little package
that I can then take with me and look out later and try to understand
why I did what I did, why it made me feel this way,
why it made you feel this way. And so if you're not even doing it right,
then there's no point in doing it. Like he would have been much better off
if you just said, like, I'll never apologize for that.
I was right. At least then he would be like,
OK, guys, jerk. But like, he's not. He's not pretending that he's
anything else like that would be a weirdly and more noble act to me than saying,
You're going to apologize . And then the opposite
of apologizing in public. Yeah. He would have saved us all a lot of 11 other question I had was, I mean, it's it's a fascinating thing. You know, you and I have had the pleasure
of working together a lot and it's, you know, you're for me, you're one of the writers that I came to. Wendell
Berry was the first that sort of awoke my, I don't know, sense of civic duty
as it were or just my sense of what we're we're talking about
where I guess I grew up. It was in my late twenties
and I came to understand that I needed to care about the more than, you know , feeding myself and and getting kissed. And and, you know, it's
and that's never stopped growing,
you know, the more we have this awareness. And but it was wonderful to discover
mostly with your help that we are in a business of storytelling
and so we can work that kind of messaging into, you know,
what we do, what we create as artists. And and for me,
that's always my palliative. When I get all heated up,
when I'm angry about something that's going on in politics
or in the world. And I get frustrated and say, what? How can we do anything about this? I say, Well, I have this job where I can encourage everyone to carry a handkerchief or say please and thank you or, you know, what have you. And and you know, I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the artists or, you know, the moments of culture
that have taught me that. But also in the book, you mentioned how. You're listing a list of all the ways you got lucky. You know, the place where you are
and one of the first ones is your home sick from school and your mom let you watch the movie sleeper. And that's something that
that I like hearing you talk about is if if there are people whose work we admire and enjoy, but then they turn out to be bad
in some way or have something questionable
about their characters. Mm-Hmm. We're still allowed to enjoy their movies
or music or books or what have you. Yeah, this is. This was the hardest
chapter to write in the book for for a number of reasons, starting
with the fact that I think. It is the question that the most people are wrestling
with on a day to day basis. I mean, maybe the question that we're
wrestling with, ethically speaking the most is something involving wearing
masks or vaccines or something like that. But in general,
if you broaden out the question of whether you can separate the art from the artist
is something that we have all faced because we now know
so much more than we used to about the lives and behaviors
of so many people famous and not famous. And not only do we know about the people,
we know about companies and we know about institutions and sports
teams and athletes and everything else. So at some point in the
last 20 years, unless you are a hermit, essentially you have had to ask yourself the question,
Oh boy, can I still watch that movie? Can I still listen to this music?
Am I allowed to? What am I allowed to listen to? What is it OK to listen to? Is it OK to listen to Michael
Jackson songs or Eric Clapton's music? Is it OK to look at Picasso as paintings or watch Miramax movies
that I used to love? Like, there is no escaping this question,
and so in my case, my sense of humor was essentially started by Woody Allen. Like, really like sleeper,
take the money and run bananas. Annie Hall Manhattan. These movies were foundational to
to who I was. It wasn't just like, Oh, I like that guy. It was like,
This is this created something in me, the set wheels in motion
that are still in motion today. And then you learn
when you're older about certain things that Woody Allen has done
and has been alleged to do. And you can't help
but wonder if you're me. What does this mean in terms of how OK it is to continue to support him? And I think there's no easy
answer to this. I write about it at length in the book
if you're interested in the entire answer, but. I essentially land here. I land in a place with this where I say. There is, for each of us, a line that we will have to draw, and the on one side of the line are people who have done things
who have whose behavior has been exposed. That is, in our minds, almost irredeemable
and to which we can no longer possibly imagine having that person
be a part of our lives. It just it's too like
there's no version of a redemption story for Harvey Weinstein. It doesn't exist like the amount of pain
and suffering and misery and awfulness that he caused is too great. And so you mia over there. On the other side of the line are people who either have done things
that aren't as bad in our opinion or were bad, but the person has then done some work on him or herself
and has changed his. Her behavior apologized in a way
that maybe was sincere and not B.S. or just or is so foundational to who we are
that you can't imagine taking a scalpel
and just cutting that person out of your soul
because you're a musician. And Eric Clapton's music was just
too important to you or you're an actor and whoever Mel Gibson's acting
is too important to you or whatever. And I think that the only mistake
that you can make, well, there's two. one is you can never draw that line. The other thing you can do in theory
is, say, everyone who's ever done
anything is in right. Like, I'm not going to care at all
about any of this stuff. I'm going to I'm going to just say that
it doesn't matter what you've done, I'm going to. There's no point it's
too hard to discern these lines. And so I'm
just going to support everybody. And if you do that, you're essentially
saying I have no compassion or empathy for any of the people
who have been hurt in the world by any of these people.
And their pain is meaningless to me. And I don't think that's a good idea,
either. So. But essentially, we have to draw that line
in this somewhere. We have to draw a line
and we have to say, I'm going to continue to support these people
and not these people. As soon as we draw that line, someone will point out
the inconsistency in our world. Someone will say,
I can't believe you support that person or not this person,
or how can you possibly not support this person when you're
supporting that person or whatever? And when that happens,
if there's new information, we might need to erase that line
and draw it again somewhere else. And that's OK, because this is a muddy gray issue that we can't possibly. There's no one rule that we can write. There's no system. We can run all the people through
and get an answer from a computer that says, Yes,
this person is OK to support and this person isn't. I think I froze somewhere in the middle. Didn't
I did. I freeze for like eight seconds. Just, you know, just briefly. OK, good. I hope I. Well, what the things I was saying
in those eight seconds were incredible. They were so smart and brilliant. Yeah, I'm sorry that you miss them. Well, thank you. Thank you for. For that. I mean, you know, as a civilization of human beings, it's important to understand
that it is a project that will. Require maintenance in perpetuity will never be done with this cake. It will always require improvement. Indeed. And as soon as we think it's done,
Jim O'Hare will sit on it. Are. Listen, we are having a very great talk,
but I want to I want to get to some audience questions,
right? Before before I get chased out of the Commonwealth club, are you in the Commonwealth club
right now? Oh, is that where you're zooming from? I assume so. I'm in the cockpit of my Tesla truck, my stainless steel wedge. That would, it looks like inside.
I didn't know that. Pretty freaky. Yeah. And then I had my helmet. But yeah, so I think I think I'm parked in the garage
at the Commonwealth Club. Gotcha. Yeah, OK. I don't. I'm being sent the audience questions,
but I don't have a name, so. Audience member one asks. Is there a certain guy that you follow
to help create these amazing shows since you and your shows are so witty? Well, no, I'm not quite sure
what audience member one means by guide. I I would say that
the guide that I've had is Greg Daniels,
who adapted the British Office into the American version and
who is my sort of writing mentor and guru. I would also say that I've had a number
of other guides in my life. People like Adam McKay and Tina Fey were
the head writers at SNL when I was there and and many, many other people. Lorne Michaels and Mike Shoemaker
and all these people who were sort of at key moments in
my career were in positions of authority and share their wisdom with me. And and then,
you know, every TV show is a massive collaborative project that everyone
is working on at the same time. I would like to think as corny
as it might sound that the that the shows themselves
are sort of guides that they take on lives of their own
and vibes of their own, and that when you were working on Parks
and Rec that you and Amy and and Aubrey and Adam Scott
and and Chris Pratt and the entire cast and Rasheeda like that,
that the cast became a sort of guide because you sort of start
to feel like I need to write. Stories
and dialog that follows the strengths and what's interesting about these people
to the best of my ability. And so you can kind of use the actors
and the and the other writers on the show
as guides, if that makes sense. So there's no one person. Greg is probably the closest
I have to her to a true sherpa in terms of learning
how to do this job. I agree. That's very generous of you to include some of us actors in that list. We're more like Tupperware
is where we hold. Gently hold your your ideas. Speaking relative to SNL writing, this is audience member number two relative to SNL and the Office Parks and Rec
Good Place was writing a book a uniquely different experience
as a writer. Harder, easier, weirder. Audience member two, I would say, was ten times as hard than writing a TV show for the simple reason that when you write
a TV show, there's a lot of other people who are sitting around near
you who are helping you. In fact, it's not even fair to say
they're helping you. You're all just doing it together. So, you know, if you're writing a TV show
and you're working on a script
and you write a joke that sucks, you turn to your left
and you say, Can anyone beat this joke? And one of the ten people in the room
will have a better joke. And then you put that joke in and then the show gets better
when you're writing a book. You write a joke that sucks
and you turn to your left and what you see is your own bookshelf
and there's no one there. And it's very scary
and you feel very alone. In fact, there were a couple of times where I knew that that joke
I had written in the book sucked, and I emailed the writing staff
of The Good Place and was like, Hey, I wrote this joke in a book in this book,
and it sucks. Can someone pitch a better joke
and instantly in 30 seconds? Like everyone, Jen Starsky and Joe mandean and Megan Amram and Aisha Buhari are like
everybody, wrote back five jokes that were better
than the one that I had written. And I thought, God, this would have been so much easier
if I had just gotten the group right? Yes. So yes, it was much harder. I really enjoyed it. It was a it was a fun kind of harder, but it was definitely much harder. But that is a great tip to aspiring writers
if you run into a tough spot. Just get a hold of your hit sitcom, right? The Great Life hack. Yeah. Audience member number three is asking, What is the story
behind your Twitter handle? Which is Ken? Tremendous? Correct. My at, Ken. Tremendous. So when I was 19 or 20,
I was walking down the street. I was in college
and I was taking a fiction writing class, and I suddenly thought that it would be
funny to name a character in a story. Ken. Tremendous. I don't know why. I don't know where it came from,
but I got home. And this is an actual life hack. If you're a writer, when you have dumb ideas like that,
write them down on a piece of paper. You will not remember them. They will disappear from your brain
instantly and you have to write them down. So I wrote down
Ken tremendous on a piece of paper and I always thought, like,
I don't know what that is. It's just a name
that's ridiculous. And then I started a blog with my friends Alan Yang
and Dave King and Matt Murray called Fire Joe Morgan, which was about sportswriting,
bad sports writing and making fun of it. And we, without thinking
for more than eight seconds, chose handles on this blogger site. And I chose Ken. Tremendous. And then it just became
my internet name like it. Just that was what I started
a Twitter handle. I chose Ken. Tremendous when I when I. Any, any time I like am on the internet,
that is my name. That's my name on Reddit
and a bunch other places. So I it's a completely meaningless silly story of just a name popped into my head
that I thought was funny. I will say that I have
a, as you know, Nick, nothing and nothing brings me more joy
than silly names. Nothing in the world. This is the Monty Python influence in me and my child had nothing in the world
makes me happier. And if you want to see some of my best work,
some of the best writing I've ever done, far better and more important,
I would say, than anything in this book. Go to the IMDb page for Parks
and Recreation. Scroll towards the bottom
and look at all of the names of all of the characters
who were in one episode, and you will find some of my
what I consider to be my greatest work. Welcome to the purpose family. I love it. I had one of those I did the same thing, came over with a stupid name,
but very still very proud of Goliath Johnson, which I shouldn't use that for Twitter. Now we we have a question from David. Hmm. Are you still the commissioner
of your son's Little League? Any new, interesting moral questions
in the league? And I am no longer
the commissioner of my son's Italy. I technically it was never
the entire league commissioner. I was the eleven. You are ten. You, commissioner,
and then I think eleven, you commissioner, and then when I was twelve,
I was on the board of the organization, but I was no longer the league commissioner or the grade level
or the age level commissioner. If you ever are interested in ethical dilemmas and and and and the joys of
just human negotiation, getting involved in youth
sports is a great laboratory because it's a it's a pretty silly thing
that is intended for the enjoyment and general development
of young men and women. And people treat it like it is the like. It's the Yalta Conference is really it is really funny
how that the the levels of intensity and how they range in the people
involved from from like, Hey, we're all just in a neighborhood
baseball league. Let's just enjoy
and have fun all the way to like. This is the end of times
and we need to act in the most intense way possible. So I was very fun and I believe
wholeheartedly in youth sports. I believe wholeheartedly in neighborhood
leagues. This was not a travel league,
this was just a neighborhood park rec league. And it does a lot of great work
and has hundreds and hundreds of kids who participate.
I'm very happy to have done it. I'm also happy
that I'm no longer doing it. That's hilarious. Anna asks. We have a couple of sticky ones now. What what is your viewpoint on the idea
that nothing you do can ever be
truly 100, 100% ethical? I know this was touched on
in a good place. Curious to know your personal thoughts. I, of course, do believe that in the world
in which we live, from the moment you open your eyes in the morning,
you're you're ethically compromised. There's no way around it. You're you're burning fuel
that's polluting the air and you're you own objects that were made in places using
forced labor that wasn't paid properly. And you're
you're engaging in various activities just by existing and that that mean
you're ethically compromised. It's just the nature of the beast. There's only one person in the world
who even attempted to avoid this. And it's it's this guy. It's Doug Forcett from The Good Place who decided to essentially
remove himself from society. Only grow beans that require very little water. Recycle his water and drink his own urine
so as not to disrupt the ecosystem of where he lived, and that is not a life
that anyone can lead. In fact, it's not a life
anyone should attempt to lead. The goal
here is not to get 100 on this test. That is impossible. It's not even a good goal, really. There's a woman named Susan Woolf,
a professor who I talk about in the book, who wrote a wonderful paper
called Moral Saints, where she essentially proves
in an incredibly elegant way that attempting moral sainthood
or perfection, if you will, is not only impossible,
it's a bad goal. It's a it's a it's a
a bad idea to even attempt it or consider it for various reasons
that I will let you read about. But that's OK. Like, not like you don't have to be 100%
ethical. No one, no one can be 100% ethical. And you don't. You shouldn't try. What you should try to be
is a slightly more ethical person than the one you were yesterday. And then the next day,
you should try that again and you'll fail. Like from time to time, like,
the world is too complicated and tricky, and the number of decisions
you have to make are too great and varied and impossible to parse
and figure out for you ever to have steady incremental increase in your ethical value
every day of your life, like you're going to take steps backwards
without even knowing it. That's OK. Like there, here's a woman who teaches at UCLA who came to the conclusion
that the number of ethical choices we face and moral choices
we face in life are so enormous and causes so much pain and agony. And also, she realized
no one asked to be born, right? We didn't have a choice in the matter. So she concludes that having children is unethical
because you're bringing someone into the world against their will
and you're then setting them on a course that requires them to make all of these horrifying
ethical choices and moral choices that will cause them
pain and agony and suffering. So we should stop having kids and die out
that that's the only actual moral path
that humanity can face. So if you take any of this stuff to the
to its logical conclusions and to the far ends of the bell curve,
you will find some disturbing conclusions, right? And that is certainly true of any attempt
at perfection. Like I, I really I really one of the most comforting things
I have learned is that it's impossible. You shouldn't try. You'll never get there. And that's OK. Sure. I mean, you're about as close as it comes, you're you're at like a 98.4 right now. There's some of that comedy
that you're known for. I appreciate your your optimism. We're we're getting close, we got time for
maybe one or two more questions. Here's one from Elaine. Do you have any tips for how to maintain both integrity and in quotes goodness in the craziness that is Hollywood? I get this. A version of this question a lot. And for obvious reasons, Hollywood is, you know,
the reputation of Hollywood is, is that it's like a den of sin and and horrifying behavior . That reputation
and in some cases as well earned. Obviously, Hollywood is a lot better
now than it was even ten years ago. I would say the way that people are
treated is significantly different as a whole. That doesn't mean it's great
or it's far from perfect. But I also believe
that Hollywood's reputation, while sometimes being
well earned, is a little unfair because the people in Hollywood
are famous. The people who work in in at consulting
firms and accounting firms are not famous, and so their awful behavior isn't
as interesting to the general public. And when someone
is revealed to be a monster and that person works for McKinsey
Consulting well. All right. It's his name is Jim Johnson,
and he works at McKinsey Consulting and he's a monster. But if Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves
or whoever is revealed to be a monster,
it's like, 00, that's interesting, right? So I actually don't think. And maybe this is naive, but I don't think
it's that much harder to maintain a sense of integrity or goodness
in Hollywood than it is anywhere else. There are different stresses on your life. There are different bad motivations
that you can fall into. Those things are, you know,
fame and power and money and success like those things
are corrupting influences. There's no question. But I think also if you work at McKinsey
Consulting the things that could corrupt you fame and well, not fame, but power
and success and status and and money. So I I I actually don't think it's
that much worse. And the tricky thing about Hollywood and
the way that I guess maybe it is harder is that the endeavors you're undertaking
are creative in nature, and that requires a lot of banging your head against a wall
and a lot of collaboration. And the oftentimes the hierarchical structures that are in place
are not totally clear. You know, like if you work at
if you work at a normal industry, like there's an org chart that says
this person is this person's boss and this person is this person's boss,
it frequently isn't that way in Hollywood. And so as a result,
you have this kind of weird, nebulous. It's unclear who reports to who
and who it's kosher to to, you know, go out with on a date
and who it is. You know, so there's there are certain
like weirdness is about Hollywood to make it difficult, but I think you just
develop your own sense of integrity and what you think matters about the world
and you try to stick to it. And it doesn't. It shouldn't
matter that much where you are. You should just do what you think is right to the best of your ability
and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe that was an unsatisfying answer. I'm sorry. If that was unsatisfying,
I mean, I think people would generally be dissatisfied with, you know, as you say, the actual amount of inequity that exists. You know, it's more banal. It's not it's not like there's
cocaine and prostitutes everyplace. It's like, there's you know, there's like bad
working conditions like long hours, underpaid cetera. Yeah. But I am here to say that Mike's shows are famous for being great places to work. And we have a good friend
named Morgan Sackett, who produces these shows,
and he does a great job of making sure everybody's taken care of,
not just the gorgeous people. one more question, one more question. I've got one from Connor. How do you approach
the need for survival over goodness, loggers actively
causing deforestation in the Amazon? Having to choose work for basic
needs over the greater good? Where's the line? Is there one? This is an excellent question
and what it's getting at is, is context. I think, right? It's easy in the abstract to say
you should not cut down a tree. It is harder to say to a person
whose family is depending on the money
that they get from working as a logger, that they shouldn't cut down a tree
because what's at stake for them is not the abstract preservation of the of the ecosystem or the environment,
but literally. Will I be able to make money today
or earn a living or feed my family? So context is something that a lot of philosophers
ignore to their peril. I think existentialist, for example, say
like your actions are your actions and there are good and bad actions,
and all you are is your actions. And you know, the example I give in
the book is Jean Valjean and lay miserable, stealing a loaf of bread
to feed his family. Well, when so when he did that, you know his family was starving,
he felt like he had no choice. If I stole a loaf of bread from a store, I would just be a rich
who stole a loaf of bread for no reason. And yet a lot of philosophers,
including Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Conte, would say there's
no difference between those two actions. It was an action that violated
an ethical rule, and we're both at fault. So they ignore very frequently
the context under which these things are done and there are people
in the world who can, to a greater or lesser degree, even care about ethics
as a concept, right? Like you and I are sitting here
having a pleasant chat from our homes in Los Angeles over
expensive computer equipment. And we have the ability to spend an hour musing
about the nature of ethical behavior. Well, that makes
that means that you and I are two of the. I don't know. Hundred thousand
luckiest human beings alive on Earth, something like that, right? Like, there are no stresses on our lives
that are caught that would cause us to not be able to do this right now. And I do think that
we have to be incredibly vigilant about when we judge people or
when we decide this is good, this is bad. The context matters enormously
in these situations, and the same act that is undertaken by two people
on different sides of the globe. The same exact action
might have incredibly different moral value to it. And the flip side of this coin,
obviously, is that I believe that when you're talking about the people
who are at the top of the power
and status food chain in the world. I believe they're morally obligated
to do a whole lot more than than someone who's not in that position,
like right now. There's a story that Jeff Bezos
is he built a giant boat and the boat can't get to the ocean
because there's an ancient bridge in Rotterdam
that is that has to that wood. The boat would knock into. So Jeff Bezos is paying out
of his own pocket to dismantle this old, historically important bridge
so they can float his giant boat out a canal and get to the ocean. Jeff Bezos doesn't
pay taxes in this country like he doesn't contribute anything. And yet he has no problem building
a giant damn boat that he doesn't need. That probably cost
500 $800 million, whatever. And then he has no problem
reaching into his pocket and throwing whatever it is a couple million bucks
at the city of Rotterdam to dismantle a bridge
and put it back together so we can get his
big dumb boat into the ocean. That's, you know, there's a whole other discussion
to be had about the ethics of capitalism and the and the and the tax code
and everything else. But as a basic idea,
I don't think it's controversial to say that if you have that ability
to build a big dumb boat that costs $1,000,000,000 and dismantle
a bridge and then put it back together, just you can get your big dumb boat out
in the ocean. The moral requirements of
you have to be greater than they are the average human being on Earth,
and you more should be expected of you
and you should be intent. You should intend always to act
with greater alacrity when a disaster strikes
or when a problem emerges. You should be thinking more
than the average person is about how you can be a good person
and how you could do good things because you have the ability to and
and by ability. I don't mean
like the intellectual ability. I mean, literally,
you have $1,000,000,000,000 and you have no problems. There's no there's nothing in your life
that is causing you any kind of stress or discomfort. And if that's the case, which is not the case
for most of the people on the planet, then you owe it to the rest of us
to think really hard all the time about how you might do more
good than you're doing now. Oh, yeah, I mean, at least. Pay some taxes. Yeah. Let's start with the bare minimum contribute. Chip in chip in for roads and highways and bridges and schools
and garbage collection and stuff. I mean, come on, man. Like, come on. What are we doing? Well, I hope, you know, I hope that this book is incredibly successful
because it's medicinal. It's good for us all. It's it's wonderful to to receive, you know, it's the kind of book that if every class in our education
system was in this casual, friendly and humorous voice, people would learn a lot more. You know, it takes I could I could never read Camus. I could never stomach that guy, but you really humanized him for me. I'm glad it turned me on
to how hunky he was. Oh my god, such a such a stud. That guy. 00. Easy on the eyes. Some say Camel Eye. I want to thank you, Mike,
for letting me do this with you. I'm always happy to see you, Mike. If you if you just got here,
you have terrible timing. Speaking with Mike Schur,
the author of How to Be Perfect The Correct Answer
to every moral question. That's right. Encourage you to pick up your copy of Mike's
book at your local independent bookstore. And if you'd like to watch more programs
or support the Commonwealth Club's efforts in making in-person and virtual programing
possible, please visit
Commonwealth Club dot org slash events. I am Nick Offerman. Please stay happy and healthy
and mind your manners. Please and thank you. Thank you, buddy.
