Jerry Seinfield on his career and craft [Progress in harnessing the mind]

Skip the first 7:35; the host, Tim Ferriss, reads advertisements for his sponsors. The rest (except for another commercial interruption at about 30:50) is a fascinating conversation with Jerry Seinfield, who's just published a new book about his career and craft, Is This Anything? One of the most interesting lines of discussion is about how Seinfield 'trains' is brain to write. Yes, he's a stand-up comedian performing for a live audience, but he creates his material through writing.

He repeatedly uses talks of the brain as a dog that needs to be trained. The training must be systematic, and the system(s) must be simple. THe first talks about writing at about 12:30 or so, though the dog metaphor doesn't show up until somewhat later.

First of all he emphasizes that writing is difficult, very difficult. There are two phases (c. 15:00 or so): 1) free-form creative, 2) polish and construction. Writing is 95% rewriting. Once he's polished a bit to the point where it sounds pleasing to his (inner) ear, he takes it on stage. He registers audience response and uses it to guide more rewriting. C. 17:42:

Creating, fixing, jettisoning, it's extremely occupying, it's never boring, it's, the frustration I'm so used to it at this point I don't even notice it, And, it's just work time.... I like the way athletes talk about "I gotta' get my work in."

A bit later he uses the phrase, "the systemization of the brain and creative endeavor." That's clearly something Seinfield has thought about a lot, and over his whole career. And then 18:34: So basically it's on stage and off stage, the desk and then the stage, and then back to the desk, and then back to the stage, and that's endless." So we've got two desk phases, creative and rewriting, and then back and forth between desk and stage. Seinfield then does on to talk about being cranky and irritable. That's the source of those little insights around which he builds his bits.

Skipping over various material, including his TV show, his younger years when he looked into (c. 30:00), "yoga, Zen, a little Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, Buddhism, I read a lot of stuff...I was looking for a working philosophy" and from that he created his own "operating system" his term. "It's very pragmatic. It's not faith-based in any way."

Seinfield then starts talking about his daughter, who has a "creative gift." (c. 33:57): "When you have a creative gift, it's like someone just gave you a horse. Now you have to learn how to ride it...You either learn to ride this thing, or it's going to kill you." And now we get back to writing (c. 33:41):

If you're going to writing, make yourself a writing session What's the writing session? I'm going to work on this problem. Well, how long are you going to work on it? Don't just sit down with an open-ended "I'm gonna work on this problem." That's a ridiculous torture to put on a human being's head... You've got to control what your brain can take... You have to have an end time to your writing session. If you're gonna sit down at a desk with a problem and do nothin' else, you gotta' get a reward for that. And the reward is the alarm goes off and you're done. You get up and walk away a go have some cookies and milk...That's the beginning of a system.

He goes on and gets around to exercise, mentioning a book, Body for Life, by Bill Phillips, which he praises for the way it systematizes exercise. And now we come to it, the dog, (c. 38:10): "You gotta' treat your brain like a dog you just got. You got it; it's so stupid. The mind is infinte in wisdom. The brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained....Do not confused the mind with the brain."

Though it is obvious enough, notice Seinfield's distinction between mind and brain. Though he no doubt knows that the mind is somehow in the brain, he doesn't talk about it. He talks about the brain. And he talks about training is as though one trains one's body or as one trains a stallion or a "stupid little dog." This training is being executed by an operating system. His instructions about writing remind me of the routine of Anthony Trollop, the Victorian novelist, who set himself to writing 250 words every 15 minutes for three hours a day between 5:30 and 8:30 each morning. Following this routine he wrote more than a novel a year for 30 years.

Let's return to Seinfeld. He tells us that we should never tell anyone about what we wrote on the day we wrote it. Why? Because they might criticize it and that would rob you of the satisfaction of having done your writing for the day. That satisfaction is very important. It's your reward. (c. 40:34): "The key to being a good writer is to treat yourself a baby, very extremely nurturing and loving, and then switch over to Lou Gossett in Officer and a Gentleman and just be a harsh prick ball-busting son-of-a-bitch about that is just not good enough." You switch back and forth between these two modes, which Seinfeld likens to two "quadrants" of the brain.

Ferriss then asks him about performing and whether or not, when he's just finished a (killer) set, he asks for feedback from other comics. Before Ferriss finished Seinfeld remarks that "you just got feedback" (the audience's reaction); you don't need anything more: "You don't have to ask anyone anything."

About performance, Seinfeld goes on (c. 42:44):

There's no greater reward than that state of mind you're in when that set is working. If you can extricate yourself from your Self, which is the goal in all sports and performance arts, if you get out of your mind, and are able to just function ... there is no greater reward. But, you know, if you want to have an ice cream Sunday, go ahead. It's going to pale in comparison.

We're now only about halfway through the interview, but it's time for me to wrap this up. Feel free to listen to the whole thing.

It seems to me that Seinfeld is talking about behavioral modes, in the sense that I've written about them in many posts here at New Savanna. The idea of behavior mode comes from Warren McCulloch and it refers to distinct pattern of global brain activity that supports a particular kind of behavior. McCulloch is was interested in such things as hunting, sleeping, exploration, courtship and so forth. Seinfeld talks 1) creativity (generating ideas0, 2) critiquing, editing, and rewriting, and 3) performing. His operating system moves the brain (a stupid little dog) from one mode to another. Notice his emphasis on boundaries. The writing session has a definite beginning and a definite ending. So does a performance. The trick is to learn how to move the brain from one mode to another.

Finally, I note that being able to talk and write about the mind-brain in these terms, for a general audience and without mystification, counts a human progress as surely as DeepMind's recent breakthrough in protein folding. Why? Because, ultimately, a human behavior and hence all progress depends on the mind. Learning to harness the mind's activities is the deepest and most difficult task before us. Without that, little else can happen.

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Addendum: Somewhat later in the discussion the Seinfeld raises the subject of depression, nothing that he still gets depressed, saying nothing about how often, for how long, nor how severely. Ferriss notes that he too gets depressed. Seinfeld mentions that about 20 years ago he read that depression seems to accompany creativity; that gave him a sense of relief. He does not, however, belief that creativity comes out of depression (as he said before, it comes from irritability and crankiness). You might want to take a look at this post from August, Perhaps these conditions aren't mental disorders at all (anxiety, depression, PTSD).