Take 91 - Dan Rutstein, former journalist and diplomat and podcast co-host

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for sure, dozens of unproduced scripts littering the floor.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

For every subject, there is most, sometimes even years of painful failure. This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is the default.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

That's the normal path to be able to first repeat. Like everything in our business, your hands get out.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

That doesn't matter overnight. I was being told by my manager that it's yours deluded. And I promptly lost it. And I remember thinking like, well, that's it for me. I believe my one-bit job. What I've realized with that moment is it's never one big job. There will be other jobs.

SPEAKER_03 1:01

Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss is brought to you by Scriptation. The Emmy Emmy Award.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Oh, it sounds awful when you say it. Let somebody with a more charming accent do this bit. Screaming into the Hollywood Abyss is brought to you by Scriptation, the Emmy Award-winning app for anyone that reads scripts, makes notes, organise them into layers, and save hours of time by automatically transferring those notes into new script revisions. Sither listeners can get a free month of Scriptation by going to scriptation.com backslash Sither. Now that's how you do it, Noah.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Welcome back to Screaming Into the Hall to an Abyss, a podcast about rejection, failure, and adversity. I am your guest co-host, Paul Bay.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

And I am your industry co-host, Noah Epslin. Today is a very special day for our podcast with a guest so special and successful. It makes John Rogers, Hart Hansen, and Jeffrey Lieber look like writers PAs. He has transcended not one but four different careers reaching levels of greatness most pe No, no, wait, wait, wait. Full disclosure. I asked Dan to write this intro as I didn't have enough time to write it myself. Why don't we do this again, but this time skipping all the self-aggrandizing stuff? Our guest today is my co-host Dan Rustin. Dan started his career as deputy sports editor at the Royal Gazette, Bermuda's only daily paper. He then spent 12 years working for the British government, including eight years serving overseas in the diplomatic service. He then moved to the private sector where he was president of the technology company La Duma and is now the president of Orange County Soccer Club. Welcome to the hot seat, Dan. Paul and I can't wait to start digging into this.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Thank you very much. It's great to be here. It's a bit odd, obviously, being the guest. Um, and being the guest when Noah was previously the guest, and his whole episode was, look at me, I'm Noah, I've got cancer, and I survived, and I'm still a famous writer. So the bar is set quite high. So I'm not sure, given I've got a clean bill of health, I'm not sure how I'm going to compete with that.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

I'm sure you and I won't be competitive at all. We won't be looking at whose episode did better. And uh and it's hard to beat cancer when we're telling some of these stories. But let's let's start digging in. Why don't we start digging into my first question? Uh since this podcast is listened to mostly by listened to mostly by writers, let's start at the beginning with a writing question. Why did you stop being a journalist? Were you not good enough? Were you fired?

SPEAKER_00 3:31

That's actually what I say to people. And now you've asked me, it's quite an offensive question. Um, I think I so I was a I was a news reporter who always wanted to be a sports reporter. And then I asked the newspapers out whether I could move to sport. They told me I wouldn't be allowed to. So I left and went to another paper and worked as a sports reporter, and then in a slightly weird way ended up in Bermuda working for a paper there, which was an extraordinary experience. And it it was amazing, and being a sports journalist is exactly as much fun as it sounds for a young man who likes sport, so interviewed fascinating people, travelled all over the world, it was great, but I wasn't sure where it was gonna go. So somebody invented the internet, which changed writing a lot. You went from writing a match report the day after a paper to people live tweeting games, and I wasn't sure I wanted to make that transition, and the career and the industry was definitely changing quite a lot, and then the practicalities, a lot of sports journalists I knew were divorced because you work evenings and you work weekends, and I at that time I'd met a lady who's now my wife who had a linear, normal, 95-ish type job as an accountant. So I think between knowing that I wanted to have a family at some point and knowing the industry was changing, I thought maybe it's time to give up this sort of dream young man's job. Now it's much more of a you know young person's job, but for me, certainly, it was a great job. But I thought it was time to go and try and get what I saw as a grown-up job. So I left to join government, but I definitely wasn't fired and I was very good at it.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

Picking up on that topic, Dan, uh you know, a lot of the when you were in this uh co-host chair that I'm presently sitting in very comfortably and very arrogantly, um, you have during the interviews of a lot of showrunners, they would talk about the toll their failures took on their families, especially their spouses. Uh you just talked about the woman who eventually became your wife, and you and since marrying her or since uh uh uh partnering with her, you've just failed from one career into the next, a tech leader, diplomat, and now uh a series of podcasts, uh I'm guessing a bunch of them because a bunch of them are about to fail, and hopefully one will succeed. What how does your spouse uh what's the agreement there? Like, uh, does she know you're gonna take these things expecting to fail, or that you're taking high-risk jobs, or like what is that like? Um uh you don't have to be that specific about your family in general, but just how you see it and how you manage that.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

So, part of the reason I gave up the journalism, I mean, I wanted to change the career for me, but also there was an element where I wanted to change for her and the future family life. I guess in a way, I didn't judge it brilliantly because I went from one, you could argue, slightly selfish job where you work bad hours, to another slightly selfish job where your spouse has to follow you every three or four years as your posting's changed as part of working for the government. So we moved back from Bermuda, moved to London, and spent four years applying for jobs in all sorts of different countries. And we got one and we moved to Germany, and I think it was eight months into being there, the ambassador asked me to move to Berlin from Düsseldorf. So my wife actually had a job in Düsseldorf, she had to give that up to come to Berlin where there was no work for her. Then she had to move to Los Angeles with me. So she I sort of I sort of planned it around the family life and then kept making her follow me everywhere, uh, even though she's much more successful than I am and certainly earns more money than I do. But now we're in LA and we're settled, you know, she's the uh she's the primary breadwinner, and during the pandemic, I was looking after the children because schools were shut for a year here, so it was a decision that we made that we'd swap, and after her following me around for years, she was now in charge, as it were, and I was at home. Now I'm I'm now working again full-time, obviously, but um family decisions were a big part of it, and there was lots of having to make these sorts of she sacrificed her career to an extent for me, and then I took long to come back into work for her, and it's those sort of things you have to do together. And the way that I know you, Paul, and your wife have an arrangement where she's successful while you're failing, and that's how your financial situation works, and we're doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

Yeah, except my for money, we don't take turns. She's successful, and I haven't reciprocated that yet. So we're just ours is just one one directional, unlike yours. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

Uh okay, uh, people probably don't know this, but but I want to go back to the beginning. You know, we don't, Dan and I don't talk about our own relationship very much besides teasing each other on this podcast. But when I first met Dan way back when, we our kids, uh, maybe we've mentioned this, go to the same school. And I think one of the very first events out of school that Dan invited me to, he was, you were still a diplomat uh working at the British consulate uh in Los Angeles, and he invited me to a very fancy event. And I just thought I was gonna be his like plus one or plus four, and he was one of the people there doing something menial. Uh and it turns out he showed up in a very fancy suit, like a $20,000 suit in my eyes, uh looked slightly like an overweight James Bond. And then he proceeded to give the keynote speech at this huge fancy embassy event, and I wasn't quite sure uh, you know, exactly what I was dealing with with this person. Uh there were thoughts in my head of like, am I five, am I six, who is this guy? But then within weeks of uh meeting each other, uh, you know, Dan left the Dan, you left the embassy job uh and you were looking for work. So my question to you is twofold. One, what caused you to leave the diplomatic services? Because it's a very cushy job, is anything of if, you know, like it's it's very stable, the opposite of what many writers deal with today. And what was that process like for you to leave government work uh and decide, hey, I want to get into the private sector, and and and how long did it take you?

SPEAKER_00 9:51

So um it doesn't surprise me that you were underwhelmed by me in real life when you saw me on my drawering posting, and I wasn't just giving the keynote speech, I arranged the whole thing. Um there was 250 people at uh you know a classic diplomatic garden party, and I was wearing a 6,000-pound suit. Um, but I looked like a uh not an overweight James Bond, but James Bond who'd just been celebrating saving the world by going to Vegas for a week and only eating buffets. But I think it was a it was a tricky decision. I decided two years before the end of my posting that I was probably gonna say. And I think it was three parts for us. Now I've been public about this before. One part was frankly the direction the British government was going in. So I was not a fan of Brexit, and the Brexit vote took place halfway through my posting. And I wonder if I was in London and Brexit happened, I might have resigned the next day. And quite a lot of diplomats did. Um, and you will you see it a lot. You know, it happened in America when the president changed from one direction to another. A lot of people leave government because they don't want to work for that person or go in that direction. So Brexit was a huge thing for me. Overseas, you can't just hand your notice in because you'd have to leave the country the next day because you're only here in your job. So I couldn't just leave immediately, but I decided that day I wanted to stay, and we got in touch with an immigration lawyer. So I think it was one part I didn't want to represent a government, or I didn't want to represent a country where I was very unhappy about the direction it was taking. As somebody who has a mixed-race family, it felt like a very xenophobic decision by the country, and I wasn't comfortable representing anymore. Although I did for the last two years give about a hundred speeches about why Brexit is good, because that was my job, so that was slightly conflicting. Um, so it's one part of that, another part, family-wise, you have to move every four years, that's how it works. And so I would have had to leave LA and you don't know where you're gonna go. And in the diplomatic world, Berlin followed by LA is as good as gonna get in some ways, and the fact that I might have to go to a country that we don't want to go to, or things would get complicated with our family. There are some countries where they don't like people who aren't white, and you still would go there, make it difficult for the family. So I think if you're gonna get off the merry-go-round, get off in LA rather than risk being sent somewhere you didn't want to go to. And we had moved house a lot, we'd lived in eight different houses in 11 years, and we're just bored of moving. Uh, and now we had two children. So it was one part, one part Brexit, one part the family. And then the third place, I wanted to see what the real world looked like. So I was a journalist for a few years, and that's not really the private sector, it's a you know, it's not really about bottom line, certainly not as a journalist reporting, you don't see that. I wanted to see if I could turn my hand to running a company and see what that's like. So I sort of took the plunge of moving into the private sector, and I'm glad I did, but it was not easy. So I know this is a long answer, and when I ask questions, I don't like it when people answer for too long, but I'm gonna keep going only because this will cover your next question potentially. So and this is a link back to your world, I think. You'll be amazed how many jobs I applied for before I found one. Um, when you're a diplomat and you sort of let people know you might be staying, you so many people say, Oh, you know, let me know, I'd love to have you working for me. And I think I believed people, and some of it's a very LA thing, but a lot of people said they would help. But obviously, when it came down to it, you know, I called everybody, started applying for jobs. It was probably somewhere around 30 jobs, and I didn't even have any linear job I applied for, didn't get an interview. Uh, I spoke to a couple of people who ran companies and we chatted, we just couldn't find anything. So I was going through this process where I knew I wanted to stay, and I was kissing lots of frogs and getting absolutely nowhere, which is strange because in the you can't get fired from government, you're guaranteed a job, you could go to the end of your career, and unless you steal something, you probably won't get fired. Even incompetence would be managed. But I was just applying for these jobs and being rejected, and it was it was hard. But then I found an amazing company and they gave me an opportunity to do something that I probably wasn't qualified for, and like probably every show runner when they get their first gig, and then I took it from there.

SPEAKER_03 14:30

Can can we talk a little bit about the anxiety of that period? Because that's actually sort of marks the beginning of our friendship. We were uh playing a lot of tennis because at that time I had left Colony, the TV show, I had yet to staff again on a different show. I had sold a project, but in your words, I was unemployed and I had been weeks were going into months, and I was looking for my next paycheck. You were interviewing at all these places and not getting jobs. We played more and more tennis, I think, in a way to like, you know, overcome this anxiety of are we never going to work again? Uh, but you you had kind of a, I remember we sit there between points and we talk about this a little bit, and you kind of made this comment where you are you're both extremely overqualified and extremely underqualified coming from government because you've never been in the private sector. Yeah, you set your ambitions on running a company or being an executive vice president. Do you think not uh being willing to settle helped your career? Because eventually you you you came out in a job that was quite high up.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah, it it's a strange one. And since I left, lots of my former colleagues have approached me and said, you know, it's very brave of you to leave. You know, I'm I would never do that. Um, or it's very brave of you to leave, how did you do it? I'd like to copy you. And it was a very strange thing because I was determined to leave. And no one really knows what diplomats do. And in some ways it's deliberate. There's a bit of smoke and mirrors for this whole thing. You know, you turn up, there's a car, there's a driver, you give a speech, you put on a slightly posher British accent than you normally have. Um people don't quite know what you do, but they know you must be important in some ways. And you are, you know, you've I've organised mini um prime ministerial visits and written speeches for prime ministers, and I'd you know done royal family visits and we would in my posting, I would sit in an office with the CEO of some of the biggest companies in America. You know, we would talk to Starbucks and we'd talk to Netflix about, you know, in this case their investments in the UK, uh, but also about other things. And so you had this amazing access and an amazing network. But what does that actually mean? What do you do day to day? How do you translate that into a company who just cares about the bottom line? Unless you go into a sort of government affairs job, and that's what a lot of people do, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to actually run a company, I wanted to be the person who then gets invited to the dinners that I used to host, and that was the sort of bar I set myself, and it made it a lot harder, and there's a lot of jobs I didn't take and couldn't take because they were the wrong level, and not it was about money, there was one ridiculous job I was offered, but it just wasn't the sort of job I wanted to do, so I just kept going until I could find a job, and I think a job where I could be I don't know if this is a good test, but I used to call it the party test, which is you're at a party and somebody says, What do you do for a living? and you start telling them. And it's not about whether they're impressed with you, it's about whether you're proud to say what it is. So when I was a sports journalist, people ask me, I love telling the stories. When I was a diplomat, it was the same. There were certain jobs where I just couldn't imagine myself describing to the meeting the new people I meet might meet in the playground at school. Like Noah and I became friends, he was a writer, I was a diplomat. You know, move that forward a year. You know, what do you do for a living? Oh, it doesn't really matter. I don't want to I didn't want to talk about it. And it wasn't my wife thought it was an arrogance thing, but it wasn't about how they perceived me, it was how I perceived myself. So I set a very high bar for what would work for me. And the downside to that is I didn't get lots of jobs, and I was getting to that point which we talk to showrunners about on this show, which is you know, are you worried you'll never work again? And there was a part of me that you know I was gonna be late 30s, and I would have been a guy who used to be a diplomat, and now I was unemployed, or I just couldn't get a high enough job, and the entry level I joined the private sector at. If I got that wrong, then that means for the rest of the career I'd be trying to find something else. Well, because I actually was given an opportunity to be president of a company, it made it easy to be president of another one, which is where I am today. So I made it harder, but I did it for a reason, and it just about worked out. But had I not got the job I got, who knows what would have happened? Maybe we would have had to go home.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

I was about to ask, uh, because I'm sure a lot of your listeners are curious. I was about to ask you guys how in the world you became friends, because you're so disparate. Like I know you both separately, and that you're you couldn't be more opposite. Uh, but but you see, you you both sort of answered that together. Like you were you went through a tough time. You were both like uh, I guess like uh uh Vladimir and Estergon in an adaptation called Waiting for Jobs. So I guess now I'm gonna ask you on the topic of jobs, you're in a swanky new one, uh Dan, uh, as president of business relations at the Orange County Soccer Club. Um how in the world did you stumble or fail your way up into that thing? Because if this was 20 years ago and you told me you were the uh uh president of business relations at a at a at a soccer club in America, I would have thought, oh, so Dan's in between jobs. Because 20 years ago, soccer wasn't that big of a thing uh professionally in the US, but right now it's it's hot. It is so hot right now, so it's a real swanky job. How in the world did you end up there?

SPEAKER_00 19:58

So it's very interesting. Uh it's uh obviously I would never say good question to Noah, but that was a good question, Paul. I think this is a reflection of America. Like you're Americans, and you probably hear people talk about the sort of the American dream, but because you live here, uh, and obviously you live in Canada, but that concept of sort of America's a land of opportunity, it's so different here. And I talk about it quite a lot with my dad, and he keeps saying, if you were in England, would you do any of these things? And I think the answer would be no. In England, people are much more linear, you know, they have one job, they get up in the morning, they put a suit on, they go to work, they don't see their kids, they come home, and that's it, and they work in that industry forever. Here, people have side hustles, and people, we've had people on this show who have been criminal lawyers and restaurant owners and doctors who've become showrunners because they want to pursue their dream in entertainment. And I think it the story of how I got it actually in a specificity is a story of what you can achieve in America if you try and push your own boundaries. So when I was leaving government, I set up a podcast, a whiskey podcast, which you, Paul, have been on. And actually, Noah's been on, even though he doesn't drink whiskey. Um, and I set it up for one reason, which was while I was a diplomat, I met the most fascinating people, because that's just the nature of the job. And I was worried that I wouldn't meet fascinating people anymore in the private sector. So I set up the podcast as an excuse to keep meeting interesting people and have a reason to talk to them beyond whatever my work was going to be. And it's obviously 90 something episodes of that podcast have had some amazing people on there, but during the pandemic, so my technology, and we can talk about, I'm sure no one's gonna ask me about this. During the pandemic, the technology company I work for. We lost all our revenue because of the pandemic, and I was laid off, which never happened to me before. So I was unemployed, looking after the kids because the schools were shut. And a guy used to work for me, got in touch and said, There's this guy who owns a football team, soccer team, who likes whiskey. He might make a good guess for your podcast. So we set it all up. He comes on the podcast. We chat about football and my background. We didn't record the podcast. And then a week or so later, he said, Do you want to come and do some consultancy for us? And then I started consulting for them. We did actually eventually record the podcast. But I started consulting for them, did two days a week. It went up to full-time, and then I was there for about a year, and then the president of the club left. And because I'd been president of something before, they asked me to be president. And now I'm president of a soccer club in America. As you say, at a time when soccer is absolutely the growing sport. It's still the fifth biggest sport here, but it's growing, and there's a World Cup coming. So there's a there's I guess it's this whole thing when Christoph Woutz won his Oscar and people said, you know, you're an overnight success, and he said it I was, you know, it took me 21 years to get here. I think for me, I've sounds like I got lucky and got a great job, but it was all deliberate in the sense of, you know, I sat on the podcast to keep my opportunities open because in America people do things like that. I was open to a discussion. I met a man who was open to a discussion. He saw I had the skill set of running a previous business, which is a bar I'd set myself for leaving government, and one thing led to another. Now I'm in a job that's gone full circle back to my sports journalism days, and I get to run a soccer team, which is which is amazing. And I've still got the whiskey podcast, and now I've got a soccer podcast, um, as well as this one. Um, so it's it's luck, but it's also a culmination of all the things I was trying to achieve just came together in the right way. And it goes back to something people have said on this podcast before is you know, you need luck in any career, but you have to be good when the luck comes so that you can maximize that opportunity. And I got lucky, but I made the most of it, and and here we are today.

SPEAKER_02 24:18

Well, yeah, and and for those listening, his whiskey podcast is called the United States of Dramerica. Uh it's they uh they have top quality guests, uh, and sometimes they just have to fill a spot. Like I knew Noah, I think, did that one week. Um the topic of podcasts. Um, what made you uh jump into this podcast uh interviewing screenwriters? Like, was it only to just retain your friendship with Noah, knowing that he's on The Ascendant and becoming a co-EP and a way to keep touch with him? Or like why why this? Like you could have you you obviously love this format. Um, why this topic? Because you could have chosen any of your other personal uh um hobbies or things that you enjoy or have passions about. I I don't imagine screenwriting to be a personal passion, or is it, and you just haven't told anybody?

SPEAKER_00 25:03

So I well, I I famously did what everyone does, and I wrote a script. Uh I wrote a pilot when I was leaving government called The Consulate, which was about a British diplomat in Los Angeles, because you write what you know. Um, but with no real pretensions to be a writer, other than you know, I was a writer for for 10 years, but that was journalism that was different. I think it it's interesting. So it happened, you know, we were both unemployed. Noah was worried about the future of his industry because it was during the pandemic, and he talked a lot about this topic, and I think he tweeted something in the days when he still used Twitter about you know, it feels like you're screaming into the abyss. And him and I talked about doing a podcast together at some stage, and we were going to do something about Greek mythology, I think, at one stage, and we just couldn't really think of anything that resonated. And this felt like something that he wanted to do because there were so many shared stories in your world. I know how to podcast, and I'm not, it's not so much I'm I'm fascinated by your world, particularly now I've met so many people in it, but the thing I've always been fascinated by, and our regular listeners will always hear me asking questions about leadership, is I I've always read books on leadership, and you know, I recently completed an MBA during the pandemic. Um, I am fascinated by people's stories of how they overcome their adversity, their challenges. So I was interested to do it partly because Noah needed help and I had the skill set to help him, but also I think I wanted to, I wanted to just use it as an excuse to talk to again interesting people from a world that I had seen from the outside and seen a bit of in my diplomatic posting at LA and get into talking about what I thought would be more like leadership challenges and uh you know overcoming adversity rather than this sort of very specific stuff we got into. But it was it was all part of that, and it goes back to my whole thing. I've always been open to taking risks and opening open to doing things differently to keep life interesting. So I don't want to just do a linear job and do nothing else. I want to run a football team, but then on the weekends talk to the chief test pilot for Virgin Galactic about over a whiskey, and then talk to people who created some of the shows that I watch. So um it's one part helping Noah, one part being fascinated by the principle of rejection failure, and then a third part liking Hollywood enough from the outside to want to learn more about it.

SPEAKER_02 27:42

So I I just have to know for my for personal reasons. Noah, did when you guys first met, did Dan slip you that screenplay?

SPEAKER_03 27:49

Yes. Yes, and and I gave him very careful notes, and like most uh new screenwriters, he took none of them. So that was uh uh and that by the way, that that screenplay he wrote comes up fairly often in our relationship. About once a week, he'll mention that he wrote a screenplay uh privately to me. So for a first screenplay, it was quite good. You know, he'll he he can he can I think he has a little bit of talent, this young Dan, but he he went in a different direction. Um, you know, the the let's talk a little bit about the origins of this podcast, and then it's gonna lead into my next question. I think you know, I can speak for myself, and Dan, you can answer on your own as well because you're sitting next to me. By the way, we are sitting next to each other, which is a podcast first. Dan and I have never actually been in the same room together uh for a podcast, but I am in LA for a few days and we are sitting in his house recording this podcast together. Uh so if we start, if I ask too difficult of a question, I think if you hear tussling sound in the background, it's because Dan and I are, you know, are working things out uh behind the scenes. But um, you know, I don't think either of us realized when we started the podcast that it would resonate with people the way it did, that it would resonate with ourselves the way it did, that we would, that it would resonate with our guests the way it does. Like we I thought it was an interesting thing, and I thought that people were surprisingly open on Twitter about some of their failures, and those were the first people that I reached out to saying, hey, those things you that that thread you posted, would you be willing to come on and talk about it? And they were surprisingly open with, you know, we, as you know, Paul, when we go to our general meetings, we we we mostly just talk about our successes. We have this sort of pattern down of this is what we did, this is what we did. We don't ever talk about the trenches. We always talk about the you know, the summits of our careers. So I think people actually like talking about it. And we've, Dan and I get a ton, I think we've mentioned this before, a ton of DMs from people saying, this this podcast is really helping me through a tough time where I thought I was alone in my failures. It's really good to see ex-writers, you know, big name writers going through the same thing. Um, but you know, where Dan and I are very different, this is leading into my question, is you know, I am a writer, so I try to ask the questions from my point of view as a writer. Dan is uh now the you know the president of a couple different companies, and he'll often ask leadership questions. We don't always ask those types of questions, but that's where our brains naturally go. The question that I've never been able to ask Dan on the podcast, but we've talked a little bit privately, is like, you, Dan, you hear all these stories about uh uh how hard it is to be a showrunner. And often, but not always, a showrunner is not adequately prepared for the job at hand because it's a very different job. They're writing by themselves, then all of a sudden they create a show, and then all of a sudden they're the boss of hundreds of people. Uh, some people have, you know, run, as we know, have run restaurants, and some people have run other companies, and they're a bit more prepared for this job. And there's, of course, there's a showrunners training program which tries to prepare people for this job. As a president, as a leader in a different industry, our non-industry co-host, you know, what are some of the pitfalls that you're regularly seeing people in our industry fall into? And do you have any suggestions from your side on, you know, I'm putting you a little bit on the spot here with this question on what we could do better from just the stories you've heard about managing uh from these types of positions?

SPEAKER_00 31:05

So I'm stuck. I nearly have to say good question, but well, and I edit this, so I'll just I'll take that bit out. Um I from the first day we started doing the podcast, having not really understood your world, I was fascinated by how fake I can say this, dysfunctional it is structurally. And that's fine. There's I mean, sport actually is also different, but it's dysfunctional in other ways about how things are run. But it it's amazing given how much money is at stake the way certain decisions are made, and some of it is very specifically about some of the rejections, you know, somebody sells a a pilot, and then the president of the studio changes, and then the project just dies because the nature of it is there's now no upside to that person making it because it's someone else's, and all that sort of stuff. So there's some of that stuff which is just very, very bad luck, and that's structurally not great, it's not a meritocracy, but that's sort of it is what it is. The bit I find the strangest is almost setting yourself up for failure. So, um, as I've said before, I like reading about leadership theory and all this sort of stuff, and there is a there is a leadership sort of theory around people fail well, people reaching a level at which they'll get to a level as high as they can until they fail, and the system is set up to make that happen because people get promoted for the wrong reasons. So you're a good salesperson, you then get promoted to head of sales, and the skills to do that are not the same as the skill of selling, so you're almost destined to fail, and that seems to be where you are in your industry, where you know you have a great idea for a show, brilliant, you're very good at ideas, and now you have to run a multi-million dollar business with marketing and HR and a whole load of other stuff. There's nothing to do with having a good idea for a story or being a good writer. So I think I asked lots of leadership questions to people, and nowadays people are talking about you know, when the room starts, they set the standard for what the room's gonna look like in terms of how they're gonna treat people and how diversity's gonna work and what people should do if there's a problem, and then they somebody had this amazing idea that they might actually do sort of staff appraisals and maybe not just do them at the end, actually do them like mid-season as well. All these sort of amazing new concepts that are coming to your world, which are absolute industry standards everywhere else. So I I think I found that part of it absolutely fascinating. And I think from the outside, and this is something I brought from government to my jobs. Um, government probably slightly overdoes it in terms of how they manage staff and people's objectives and appraisals, but at my technology company, no staff had any objectives. At the football team, no staff had any objectives, there's no appraisal system, you know, bonuses were based on maybe very specific numeric targets, but not broader things about staff development. And so I've brought that into those industries which I'd learnt from government, along with a whole load of stuff around better governance, and it just feels like I'm not offering myself as a non-writing showrunner on somebody's show, but it feels like having someone in the room to help the ideas people with some of the structural stuff, some of the people stuff, maybe some of the finance stuff could be really valuable. And it's weird that you give people these huge opportunities without them having any experience in that area.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

We're approaching uh uh the landing strip of this uh this episode. So I I want to I'm curious about this because you've been in through so many different careers and life changes. Like you've basically hit the reset button several times, and and I normally know that because I recognize that in you because I've had to do that for myself in my various career changes and switches uh switching it up. Um what what what has surprised you uh in this podcast in particular about screenwriters and showrunners, the ones you've interviewed, like uh that that's different um in quality from like your other podcast guest, like from other diplomats, from other tech people, from other journalists. Is there is there something about showrunners and screenwriters uh that is different from everybody else that makes them that way in your mind?

SPEAKER_00 35:35

Therapy. Um, maybe it just gets talked about more, but I think we were discussing it with somebody the other day. Actually, I think we did it on the on the actual podcast. I think we think like 75% of our guests are in therapy. Over half have talked about imposter syndrome, and I think some of it is your artists in a way that the CEO of a company isn't, you know, uh, you know, a more normal non-entertainment company isn't. So I think you know, you're the the great leaders I've worked with in government and in the private sector. I'm not saying no one has imposter syndrome, but I think there's much less anxiety and self-doubt and need for therapy. Um now I know in America I think more people have therapy than they do in the UK, and people have executive coaches, but I do feel like it's been fascinating. Nearly everybody has been, I don't want to offend anybody, but you know, nearly everybody has been, you know, a version of anxious or neurotic or paranoid or um, you know, lacking in not lacking in self-confidence, but definitely having self-doubt and imposter syndrome. And I think there's more of that in your leaders than I've seen outside. But then also that you know, obviously the flip side of that is that what makes people great artists and ability to create these incredible shows, and you've all got this in common with each other. Um, so it's not you know, it's not just the leaders have got that, it's got a lot of people in the industry are, but that's because you're you know, you're writing from your souls and you're standing in a room saying, Here's an idea I've got ready for it to be shot down and putting it on TV and ready for people to criticize it.

SPEAKER_02 37:22

Okay, now let me, if you don't mind, let me turn that question on you. Uh, because uh uh you know, just just how you've singled out uh a certain quality of screenwriters as opposed to other uh careers, you've been a sports journalist, tech leader, diplomat, uh now uh business relations president. Uh what quality do you have that links all of that? Like what is the thing in you that is that you've that's an indispensable quality that you've had to carry to each of those jobs?

SPEAKER_00 37:49

So I think before I answer that question properly, I think there's a there's a part of this which I think has a lot of similarities to your world, which is one of one of this isn't like the quality that makes me good at these things, but this is something that's definitely helped, and particularly as I've got older, is the sort of vulnerability that I think a good leader needs. So over my time, obviously I got laid off during the pandemic because the because that's what happened to the company and we lost all our revenue streams. But over the years, I've applied for and not got over a hundred jobs. So whether that was applying for diplomatic postings where you know they they say to you, we want to send you to Japan, and you go and interview and then you don't get it, and then they say, Well, we want to send you to India and you apply for it and don't get it, and a lot. Um, we didn't go to about 20 different countries, and then 30 or 40 times I applied for jobs when I was leaving government, and then when I was looking to move on from the technology company, same sort of thing. So I've been rejected my my career choices and my ability to do a job have been rejected a hundred times in different ways, which is not easy. Um and I learned a resilience from that. When I got laid off from the technology company, I told the uh I told my the person who laid me off, I said, I'm gonna do a piece on LinkedIn about you know what it's like to be laid off during a pandemic. And he said, Oh no, never do that. So you can only apply for jobs from a position of strength. If people know you don't have a job, then no one's gonna hire you. And I I chose not to believe that, and I wrote a very vulnerable, you know, here's three things I've learned being laid off during a global pandemic. And the response was overwhelming. I offered about three jobs out of that, I didn't take any of them, but um people were writing all sorts of things to me uh about their career experience and what they'd learned, and I think it's again like your world, I think when people actually open up about that sort of thing, it's extraordinary the response that you get, which is why I think this podcast has been so successful. But it gave being vulnerable and then be able to swap stories with people gave me great strength and encouragement that I I should keep going and trying to do the things I wanted to do, and I think I learned a resilience from all these rejections over the years that also I think made a massive difference. I think for me, my I learned a skill in journalism at the beginning of my career, which is the ability to talk to anybody and empathize with anybody and uh listen to people. So, you know, you interview somebody whose child has died in a tragic accident one day and then the CEO of a business the next. You interview, you know, interviewed somebody on death row, and then you know, the next day I'm interviewing a government minister about a tourism initiative. And that ability to be a chameleon and become an instant expert in complicated subjects is something that was really valuable as I went through my career. And I think where I am now, well obviously I know a lot about soccer, it's my sport that I grew up with, but running a soccer team isn't actually just knowing a lot about soccer. I think it's an ability to be open to learning new things, being open to talking to people and learning from other people, and then having the resilience as a leader to lead people and them have confidence in you, and then you can turn your hand to not necessarily anything, but you can certainly turn your hand to different careers.

SPEAKER_03 41:39

You you were with that last answer, you were sort of dancing around the sort of next question that I'm gonna ask, and it has to do with sort of the the thesis of our podcast, which is failure. I mean it's rejection, failure, and adversity. And we've talked about this a little bit before. What this podcast, when we went into it, it was like we want to talk about these failure stories, adversary stories, but we we tend to interview highly successful people. So it's really what it's about is overcoming failure, is using failure as a platform for success. And because we face it more often than most as screenwriters, we're we're good at talking about these things because we we've learned to deal with it now, and that's just part of our job, uh, it's sort of built into the DNA. You're not a screenwriter, and you said you did, you know, apply to 100 jobs and you didn't get it. Is there anything, um just a two-part question, there's anything that screen the this this podcast has taught you as a leader and that you've brought to your companies? And is there anything that this podcast can teach others? Because we do get, and you as you know, Dan, we get DMs not only from aspiring screenwriters and established screenwriters, we get DMs from people who are not even in our industry and saying, I found your podcast. It's really helped me get through this, so it's really helped me look at my job in a different way. Do you think there's sort of any practical tidbits of advice that is sort of solidifying for you through this podcast and how people can help, you know, better their careers?

SPEAKER_00 42:58

Yeah, and I'll answer the second one first, and I think it goes back to the day I chose to be vulnerable and ignore advice and tell people what I'd learned about being laid off and the response I got from that. I think that's when I really understood how much hearing other people's stories, because as you say, people spend their whole career, and social media's made this worse. People spend their whole career saying how successful they are and showing how successful they are. You know, it's that classic thing on LinkedIn, people do a post and make sure that they're the uh the calf, the key fob to their Mercedes is in shots. You know, there's just that's that's how people engage with each other. And you screenwriters are very good, and when Twitter was not what it is now, we're very good at sharing those stories. And I think sharing that vulnerability makes everyone feel better because they realize it's not just them who's been rejected ten times, it's happened to John Rogers, and it's you know, it's happened to Hart Hansen and and Bill Lawrence, who got fired about five different times before becoming ridiculously successful. Um, so I think knowing that vulnerability has value and sharing that with people. Value is a b is a big part of it.

SPEAKER_03 44:02

In terms of the first question about um how is it what have you learned specifically?

SPEAKER_00 44:14

I think and maybe slightly unfairly, my I think that there's two types of guests which I love on our podcast and I like their answers too. The writing your soul's work type people. Um so there was one chap who walked away from a very well-playing procedural to go and do something that meant more to them. Um, those sort of brave decisions where people turn down big paychecks to do something important. I think that set of information is interesting and I think has real value about you know what do you really want to achieve in your career? And the pandemic changed people's views on what they value and what they don't. So I think there's one part of that. And the other one is the many guests, and I think I said it when we had um a criminal attorney turned writer on the other day when I said, I think you're my favourite type of guest. I like the people who've done something else first and have taken huge pay cuts to then come and do screenwriting because that's what they really want to do. Now, obviously, the ones we talk to have then got to the top of that career. I'm sure there's plenty who have changed careers, gone into screenwriting, and it hasn't worked. But that bravery of decision to do something that matters, I think, is so important. And in your world, either to get into your world by leaving another career, or when you're in that world, to walk away from an easy payday to work on a project with better people or a project that means more to you or your community, I think that's where it's absolutely fascinating. And I think listening to those stories that apply in the outside world is of real value. My dad gave me a bit of career advice. He was slightly disgruntled at the end of his career that he didn't do all the things he wanted to do. And he said to me, when I was leaving sports journalism in Bermuda and I was looking at different options, he gave me a piece of career advice. He says, think about the speech that you're gonna give when you finally retire from work and you talk about your career. How will you feel in that moment about the things you're telling people that you did? And again, this goes back to my party analogy earlier. This is not about impressing the people in the room, it's when you stand there and you say, you know, I stayed with this company for 40 years because I didn't really want to do anything else. You wouldn't phrase it like that, but that's what a lot of it is. And I think I've tried to make career decisions based on how I will think about them when I've finished, and that's why I ended up pushing for the things that I've done. And you know, if I retire tomorrow and I can look back and talk about news reporter, sports reporter, diplomat, running a technology company, homeschooling my kids for six months, which was sort of wasn't quite my choice, but I chose to do once I was laid off, I chose to do that rather than look for work immediately, and now running a football team. Yeah, these are all things I can be proud of, and not to impress people, although I know you're very impressed, Noah, but it's not about impressing people, it's about knowing in yourself that you did the right projects. And I'm not going to go into any detail, but I took a consultancy gig with somebody because I sort of needed the money, and I knew it was there was red flags there, and I did it anyway, and it all went horribly wrong, and it was sort of my own fault, and I should have used the test that I normally apply to stop me taking that extra easy money because it nearly landed me in some difficulty, and I won't be doing that sort of thing again, and I think it is just making the decisions about things you can be proud of, and that's what some of your guests, our guests, have talked about when they pick what their shows are gonna be next. And I think there's a real parallel there.

SPEAKER_03 48:06

Uh thank you for that candid answer. You surprised me um earlier today, not surprised me, I just I've been thinking about it, that we're reaching a hundred episodes of this podcast. And in a hundred episodes, we've heard almost nearly a hundred people answer this final question that I'm gonna ask you a variation of. Uh uh based on the advice that you've heard, and based on the advice of the showners that have come on the show before us, uh, if you could give one piece of advice to somebody joining this industry that's a summation of all the experience that we've heard on this podcast so far, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 48:44

So it would be three pieces of advice. And again, because I'm still editing this episode, you can't now force me to only give one piece of advice. One is three people have said it. It's this whole just write thing. Um, and I'm guilty of this. I sort of dallied with do I want to be a screenwriter or not? And I wrote a pilot and I sent it to some people. I did take your notes, um uh, but that's all I've ever written. I still haven't written a second one. Um, so am I gonna get better as a writer rewriting 15 drafts of one thing that I wrote? I'm not. Um even if you're an Eric Guggenheim the other day said this, like he had early career success, but then then had to learn how to write after his early career success. He didn't just then try and take a whole load of other projects when he still didn't really feel he knew how to write. So I think there is this just write thing, just makes the most sense. I think the other thing is, and I think it should be obvious after listening to 91 episodes of this as people do, is this is not easy. In today's weird world where you can become famous by having a YouTube channel, um, you can become famous by being quite good looking and running your Instagram properly. Screenwriting is not the career for that. You might get some consulting producer gig for something, you might have an amazing idea and sell it and make some money from it. But if you want to have an actual career, there's no way this will be easy. And even if it feels like it will be easy, it won't be for very long, and then it'll be hard for a big chunk. So this is like it feels like it's an old school career, like there is no shortcut here. Um, you just have to work, and good things will happen, and then bad things will happen, even to the most successful people, and you've just got to keep going. So I think it's it's writing, it's being resilient and knowing it's gonna be hard. And then I think the third one is, and this is a mistake lots of people make in business and in jobs, is take time to celebrate the success. Now, some of that is because at some point bad things are gonna happen to you, but there are gonna be moments, and we've had guests talk about you know buying themselves or their partners, you know, a gift when a project is sold. Um, but you know, if you actually are in a room or you're at a premiere of a movie you've written or whatever it is, make sure you mark that moment properly because you never know if you're gonna get another one of those. And I think you know, I've seen it in other jobs where companies don't celebrate success. I make a big point like when we have a the football team, if something goes well, we stop and celebrate success from a sold-out crowd or a big sponsor deal, and then you move on. But you've got to take the pauses to celebrate the moments because otherwise, A, why did you bother doing it all? Um, and B, in your world particularly, the successes are amazing. And it's not just about the money, it is again. Some of the guests have talked about this thing walking onto a studio lot, you know, working with a movie star, being in an industry that millions of people around the world are just watching, and you're there. I mean, you're good at this, Noah. Um, you invite me to your house and make me watch episodes of NCS Hawaii, and then you pause the TV when your name is on the screen so we can all take screenshots, which I always screw you for. But why wouldn't you? Like, who wouldn't want their name on a TV screen? And the day that your name is on a TV screen and you don't care is the day you should probably go and do something else. And I think you lot need to understand that although our whole conceit of our podcast is basically what my wife would call whining on the yacht, um, because you're all in this industry, and I know it's hard, but you and it is hard, but make the most of those moments because you're lucky to be in this industry, and you need to remember that as well.

SPEAKER_03 52:42

Seeing your name in the credits will never become not exciting. And the day it does become not exciting, I think you're right, is the day you wrap it up. Well, as Dan normally says, Dan Rutstein, uh journalist, diplomat, president of a soccer club, overweight James Bond, thank you for coming on our show. I think it's been a pleasure. Well, that's a wrap on this episode of Screaming into the Hollow Wood Amiss. As always, this episode was brought to you by Scriptation, the screen, writing, and annotation software that at the very least has made my life easier and will make your life easier as well. Uh, we'd like to thank our wives who put up with us recording these episodes in our offices and basements and closets and bathrooms and anywhere we can get a little space to record an interview, and of course, we want to thank James who provided us with a great intro and outro.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

If you want to find us on social media, you can find Noah at NEVslin on Twitter, tweeting a variety of writer-based nonsense and some terrible puns and occasionally begging for sponsorship. If you want more refined tweets, mostly about football and whiskey, you can find me at Dan Rutstein. If you're interested in buying a copy of Scriptation, if you go to www.scriptation.com backslash stiffer, S-I-T-H-A, you will receive a special discount. Thank you very much for listening. As always, we appreciate you. Uh please give us any feedback, mostly positive stuff about me, and we will see you next week.

SPEAKER_04 54:25

And if you do say a negative thing about Dan, there is a chance I may buy you a free copy of Scriptation.