How do you feel about leaving? Are you angry? I’m not really angry about it. There are moments, flashes of different emotions. What I feel is a sense of loss—a loss of my colleagues, my staff. But overall, I feel energized and invigorated. I recognize the rightness of what it is.

That’s very Zen. Well, you can fight it all you want, and you can be angry. Ultimately, I feel that’s not a place of strength for me. Anger for me is a damper, not a motivator.

For some people, it’s the only motivator. Yeah, believe me. Hollywood is full of them.

What was your worst day? There were some days during the beginning of Rome that were really hard because it wasn’t working. We had made a calculated gamble, which did not pay off, to not do a pilot because it cost so much money. It was cheaper to just order 12 shows for $100 million. That was a huge mistake. Those were dark days. But again, you learn.

Increasingly, the industry is run by conglomerates that hate risk. How does that affect the creative product? Fear has always been a pervasive factor in this town. It’s partly financial. For HBO, there used to be nothing to lose. It’s human nature that once you get invested in a perception, you start second-guessing yourself and you make safer choices.

How has your day changed? I find myself driving slower, which is probably good.

What decision do you most regret? A bunch of years ago, we had done some shorts with Jack Black and Kyle Gass as Tenacious D, and we had tried to get them to do a series, and the inability to sort of push that over to the next level was always a big disappointment. I think for us it would have been great.

Where are the smart people in Hollywood working these days? The stuff that’s happening in the gaming world is fascinating. Just the creative leaps games are taking, the narrative, the storytelling that goes into them. Wrapping my head around the way a five-year-old consumes entertainment like that is difficult. So I end up playing a lot of Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam and Spider-Man on Wii.

What do you wish your parent company, Time Warner, had done differently? Not merged with AOL.