How Brian Grazer Overcame His Dyslexia | Joe Rogan

All right, cool. So we were just talking about your books and I said, let's save it. Let's save it for the podcast because I wanted it to sound fresh. I want you to re-say it. So tell me about, you wrote two books? I wrote two books. And as you know, I'm a movie writer and a movie and television producer and stuff. Just say it mildly. I mean, you made some fucking amazing movies. Wow, thanks. Thanks, Joe. My pleasure. Yeah. And all this, I think, you know, my whole life and whatever those stories are, the movies are and the successes, I kind of think anyone that's really focused can do what I do. So that was kind of the end product of the first book, which was, it was called A Curious Mind The Secret To A Bigger Life. And that book is really about, I mean, how much do you want to know about it? Everything. Okay. So basically, I couldn't read at all in elementary school. And it caused a lot of shame and then a lot of trauma. Did you have dyslexia? I had dyslexia. Very, quite acute dyslexia. And I think we're out in Woodland Hills, which was the fancy part of the valley. I grew up in the flats of Sherman Oaks, actually, as a little kid going to Riverside Drive Elementary School and then later to Nobel Junior High and then later Chatsworth High School. And in elementary school, I couldn't read at all. And they didn't classify it as dyslexia. It was just you're slow, you're dumb, you, why can't you answer this? And then you'd say, I can't read. And then that didn't make sense. It just didn't, none of those things computed really that somebody couldn't actually read a word. They really couldn't read a word. So when you can't read a word, then you find ways to survive, cope, and not have the teacher look you in the eyes and say, okay, Brian, come to the board and answer this question because you're never, it's just going to produce more shame because you're not, you don't know the answer. It's not possible. So I found that as that went on for a little while, for quite a while, around the fourth, fifth, sixth grade, I really looked at people. I really looked them in the eyes to learn. And I found that by looking somebody in the eyes, you could engage, I didn't know this then, but you engaged their heart. If you're really doing it with sincerity and interest, you can engage people and move them and evangelize things. Get people to like play on your team and, or you play on their team, they pick you and stuff. Good things happen, except the reading part. But it enabled me to learn a lot just by looking at people and talking to people. And I had this one mentor, this little grandmother, her name was Sonia. And little Sonia, she's like, four, 10, I guess, you know, and she would always say to me, she'd see me once a week, minimally, always once a week. And she'd say, you're going all the way. You're going to make it big. Think big, be big. And she had all these isms because half my mom's side of the family was Jewish. My dad's side of the family is Catholic. The Jewish side, the grandmother was my mentor. And the person that really was the single person that I could kind of count on in life. And she'd constantly tell me how things, I'd go great. You have a gift for gab, she'd say. And every time she said, you're going to go all the way, I'm thinking there's like absolutely no empirical evidence I'm going all the way anywhere, you know? Except my parents were always arguing, let's put him back. The teacher, Ms. Steg, said, let's put him back. So I just wasn't going anywhere, I didn't think. So that gave rise to me, gave rise to the fact that I thought the way I can really learn a lot is have these kind of curiosity conversations. And once I graduated college, I did this on a weekly basis and I still do it to this day, once a week. Sometimes once every two weeks, but never more than once every two weeks. I never, I'm pretty militant. I'm extremely militant about it. Like how do you do it? Like what do you mean? Well, what I do is I think about, it's often, and I know you do something possibly similar to this. But my system would be, I bombard myself with, now I can read, of course, and I was able to start to read like in high school. Can you tell me how they fix that? They couldn't fix it. It wasn't fixable. So how do you learn how to, Dyslexia reverses words on you, right? It reverses the way you view letters and scrambles. Yeah, well it's, initially as a kid it scrambles the letters. Then when it gets better, it reverses the words. And to this day, I still start on the right and go to the left. So it takes like really thoughtful discipline to make sure I'm always starting on the left. Do you mean with sentences or with words? With the sentences. Really? So you'll start at the right end of the, you should read Hebrew or something, isn't that? Or go write for love? Chinese or something. Yeah, different languages do that, right? Yeah, I guess they do. But incidentally, when you have Dyslexia, it's very hard to learn other languages. So very, very hard. But I can read and I bombard myself. So how do you switch it around? Like when your brain is making you read right to left? Yes. I started to learn, just create like an exercise, a discipline where I could, as in college, I was able to read, I could force myself to start on the left and go to the right. Is there a certain mechanism that's causing you to do right to left? Like do they know what the cause of this is? Not that I know of. Not that I know of. Probably something neurological and certainly genetic. I mean, I have no genetic trace, but it has to be a letter within your genome. I have to get having to guess. So you learned how to read. You learned how to figure it out. And then you said you have these conversations at least once every two weeks. So how do you do this? Like what do you, do you organize them? They're structured? They're structured. They see, there's a randomness to them because often you'd have to, I have to, it's not like getting on your show where everybody wants to be on the show. I say that with a compliment, of course, but I'm begging people because even though- Sit down with you. I'm begging them to sit down with me and I'm groveling and I'm calling assistants directly. I still, I have three assistants, but I make all of my own phone calls always. You know why? Because I have this discipline of getting to know assistants and going, hey, it's Brian, it's Richard around. Or, and I just like, I do that. That's so refreshing from a guy who's as successful as you are because so many times when people get that successful, you insulate yourself with a bunch of other people who do all the calls for you and open all the doors for you and you just kind of, you stay insulated and more aloof. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks. Well, I, yeah, people do, I mean, look, there are producers that are sort of, that are, you know, let's say we're in the same category, same ilk, that just do it differently. I made a lot of deliberate choices through trial and error. I saw, I went through the 80s where power guys had desks above the other chairs that are on the other side. The power guys always had black lacquer furniture. They did all these power things. And I thought, I want to, I want artists to like me, relate to me, and I always did everything to create a democratic environment because not that I was such a cool guy, but more like you just get so much more out of a creative person by not intimidating them. Sure. And I just saw, you know, my peers and sometimes often, you know, someone maybe a decade ahead of me, you know, I don't want to, I'm so close to saying names, but just those sort of tough guys, you know. And I didn't think that was effective. I just didn't think it was effective. And I wasn't making these really hardcore action movies. I was doing movies that were, they're designed to ignite emotion and feeling. In fact, even when I do public speaking, I say, oh, Brian Grazer, whatever they might say, but I go, I always say, I'm in the feelings business. I'm not a movie producer. I'm just, I'm in the feelings business because I feel like that's what we want out of a cinematic experience for me. Sure. And I think movies, I'm interested in doing or TV shows. So because I grew up loving those movies in the seventies and I'm captivated by things that move me emotionally and elevate me emotionally. So you make these phone calls and you arrange these conversations. So you arrange basically a podcast that no one's listening to. That's kind of like it. That's exactly. I never thought of it in those words. That is really funny. You should probably record them. So I've done it for say 35 years. Really? And you didn't record any of them? The first 15 years, nothing. I didn't write really notes either. And then the second 10 years, I would say 15 was nothing. I just did it. I felt like that could inhibit somebody or I felt like I was trying to do these sort of down low in a way. Like I didn't want to commodify them, like industrialize my conversations. And I had friends go like, can we be part of it? And I tried it once with a couple other guys during my thing. And it fractionalized my attention. And what I found, the great thing about the conversations, the one on one with no one else in the room, which that's all I do. Again, I tried it different ways. What you're trying to do, I'm trying to do is like create the best date that Isaac Asimov ever had or I mean, I have so many people, just Margaret Thatcher. I'm trying to have no idea of a time and space and I want them to have no idea of time and space. And because that is like your best date. And I always think like, what is my best date with a girl? For me, Brian, because my best date is I'm not even thinking about time and it just becomes almost like a biochemical event. It's just things are evolving. And I felt like I could do this with many Nobel laureates, with Sheldon Glasgow, who converted the four forces of nature to three. And I brought his name up because, well, first of all, I knew that your show, you could do whatever you want. And with Sheldon Glasgow, it's like I usually do an hour or two hours, but I hung out with this guy, shut up my whole day down for six hours. Wow. Just because I was so captivated by him and he talked about multiple subjects. So basically, I'm always got somebody that I'm really wanting to meet and it takes a year at least. Or sometimes years. To organize this. To get them to say yes or to be in the same city or be willing to say yes and meek flight in New York or some other place. It sounds like you have figured out the benefit that I've experienced from having podcasts and having these kind of conversations, one on one conversations. But you did it just for your own personal edification. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of amazing. I have gotten more out of talking to people like this and it made me grow more as a person and made me understand more about communication and how to talk to people than anything I've ever done in my whole life. Because you don't normally have this completely unfiltered. It's one of the reasons why I like headsets as well. Because it locks you in. It's like your volume of you talking is the same level in my ears as it is in your ears. We're all on this one, it's not like there's distance between us or in each other's ears. And we're talking, there's no phones, there's no nothing, we're sitting across from each other. How would I ever organize this? I had thought about that with so many different people that I've had a chance to talk to. How would I ever get Sean Carroll, the astrophysicist, to sit down and just talk to me for three hours? You had to captivate him. I would never get him to do that. No. I would never get him to, hey, let's put headphones on and you just tell me about stuff. Like explain to me about it. No one would ever do that. Agree. But because of this thing called the podcast, because I can share it with all the other people that are listening, I've had this chance to have these kind of conversations. And it sounds like you've done the same thing, but without an audience. Exactly. That's really brilliant. It's a brilliant way that you figured out that this is a great way to expand your own understanding of people by being one-on-one with these brilliant folks. Yes, exactly. And maybe you do this too, but I've found, I mean, I do meet a lot of people, I reach out to meet people that are expert. It's many different things that I don't do, of course. But sometimes I just become really motivated just to meet somebody because they're so uniquely committed to something. They're so obsessed. And I've even found that I've learned a lot from Uber drivers and baristas and stuff where ... But I do reach out to meet people that have really had a very intense, committed to a really intense journey and often have triumphed in it.