Modern Wisdom - #072 - David Perell - The Power Of Writing

Episode Date: May 16, 2019

David Perell is a podcaster, blogger and writing coach. Why is the ability to write effectively the biggest opportunity which individuals can capitalise on? How can an improved grasp of language actually improve the quality of your thoughts? And why should you focus on content which is longer than 24 hours old? Expect to find out all this and much more, huge thanks to David for coming on and dropping some fantastic insights, Round #2 will be coming soon. Extra Stuff: Follow David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/david_perell Check out David's Podcast - https://www.perell.com/podcast David's Course Write Of Passage - https://www.writeofpassage.school/ The Browser Subscription Newsletter - https://thebrowser.com Eric Weinstein on the Embedded Growth Obligation - https://bigthink.com/culture-religion/eric-weinstein-intellectual-dark-web Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. Today's guest is fellow podcaster, blogger, writing coach and incredibly interesting individual David Perrell. We had no agenda going into today and ended up coming out with some fantastic insights into what David's been working on at the moment, chiefly why the ability to write effectively is his single biggest opportunity which individuals can capitalize on in the 21st century, also how an improved grasp of language can actually improve the quality of your thoughts, and why you should focus on content which is more than 24 hours old. focus on content which is more than 24 hours old. David talks about some really interesting articles and resources, all of which are linked in the show notes below. And of course,

if you do have time to give us five star rating on iTunes or share the episode with a friend, I would be very grateful. For now, please welcome David Paral. I am joined by host of the North Star podcast and all-round interesting internet person, David Perrell. David, welcome to the show. Thank you, I'm really excited to be here. We've had some technical problems, but we've managed to girdle them around and we've fixed it and we're fully working now, right? We're resilient, my friend. No matter where we are, no matter what's in our way, we're resilient.

Yeah, we certainly are. So, we haven't got an agenda for today. We're just going to talk about whatever's been going on. So what have you had on your mind recently, David? Yeah. So we'll have spent the last 10 days in Morocco. So that has absolutely been the thing most on my mind.

And I mean, that was wonderful. It's really the first time in recent memory that I've spent 10 to barely consumed any information, just pure observation and pure just living. And really enjoyable, I had actually forgotten what it was like to just be in a state of pure observation. And the ways in which your whole brain chemistry changes, the ways in which you experience the world differently, the ways in which time begins to dilute and kind of expand. But then also now that I'm back, thinking through the benefits and the virtues of routine and just something to be thinking a lot about.

But Morocco is an amazing country in terms of my takeaways from the trip. I think that tourism there is about to explode. There's three main reasons why I think Africa is fascinating in terms of what it means for the future of the world. And geographically, Morocco is in a really interesting place. It's on the northwestern tip of Africa. And it's nine miles across the straight of Gibraltar to get to Spain. So Morocco, the countries that have the most tourism visits to the country are France, Germany and Spain.

And so in the northern part of the country, you'll hear a lot of French and a bit of Spanish. And then there's Arabic spoken everywhere. And so because it's so close, what the Moroccan government is doing, and they own 100% of the airline, which is called Royal Air Morocco, they're going to position Morocco as a kind of gateway to Africa, meaning that'll be the first place you go. And then you can sort of spread into it. And if you look at, I'm an airline buff. So if you look at Singapore, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, all those countries, they own 100% of their national airline,

and they've used that national airline to increase business in the country, increase tourism, and Morocco is about to do exactly that. Then the government has what's called the vision 2020 initiative and they want to make tourism the biggest industry in the entire country. So right now it's agriculture and man I'll tell you we're walking through the northern part of the country. So we're about now and a half south of the Mediterranean Sea and we were going on a hike. So we're in just a very, very, very rural area, super poor, and there were these women. We saw five women, and it was like a free to

calo painting. These women had probably 20, 30 pounds, probably more of leaves on their back just walking through the mountains. We saw donkeys and mules helping these farmers tend their fields. And it went to show that right now agriculture is the number one biggest industry in the country. And that's sort of the problem. Agriculture in the ways in which they do it doesn't scale like a lot of more industrial first world country.

Morocco is pretty developed, but it's very different from an American agriculture, I grew up in California, it's very different from what you see in many parts of the Central Valley. And so what they wanna do is they wanna really have tourism explode, which gets to my third point that Morocco is like the most Instagramable country in the world.

And this will be a great segue into some of the ways in which I think about the world, but like the world is, look, it's not becoming more visual. I think people use that, but it's a bit lazy, because if reading is, was the dominant way in which knowledge was transferred from after the Goodenberg revolution until basically now, reading is inherently visual.

What I like to say is that it's becoming more imagistic and the world is being run by images. And the dominant place where a lot of that is happening right now is Instagram. And when you go to America, which is the number one tourism city in Morocco, the patterns we were laughing actually look better on your phone than they do in person because all the blemishes kind of go away. And we were joking that like there were these 19th, early 20th century kings who are having all their workers design these beautiful palaces, just exquisite classic Morocco. And we were joking that they knew that Instagram was going happen like 200 years before we did.

They get in the architects in and they're thinking that's a 400 like photo there. That's like a five, four or five hundred like photo. Oh, these are straight 800 likes. Oh man, there'll be people at home booking flights just so that they can get straight on the up-regulate their Instagram algorithm. I hope so. I'm an ambassador. I got it. One of the things you touched on at the start there

was about what happens when you take time away and you come back. I think the marrying of enough space to reconnect with just the world and to take things in and be on receive but a much slower pace, a pedestrian pace is opposed to at a motorway speed, which I think we are often when we're interconnected with the internet. And then coming back to realize, oh well, actually, I also love my routine.

I wonder whether I certainly feel this way, like the grass is always greener, no matter which side of it I'm on. Like sometimes when I'm away, I'm like, I'm like I miss my routine and then as soon as I'm back, I'm like, oh well, I do love my routine, but I miss the fact that I was immersed in this culture. I recently went to Rome and got to walk through the Vatican and the Cysteine Chapel and the Colosseum and Pompeii. And I'm just like overloaded with visual stimulus, right?

Like more than any, like I could have scrolled on Instagram for a day and I would have got less, but it just feels like it's delivered at a more pedestrian pace. A pace that my brain is built to deal with and I don't get home and feel like I'm burned out, I feel like I'm energized, whereas, you know, if you've done a long flight and you've maybe not got yourself off your phone or you've been doing whatever, I feel the dopamine hangovers a lot more obvious. Yeah, yeah, I think I'd phrase it a little bit differently. I don't really have a pause button, so I just go ham every day

and I just rush like mad. And so I'm pretty intense with both. So I wouldn't even consider a pause button. What I think a lot of is, I think of a lot of life like a rubber band. And if you look at what a rubber band is, it's like tension and release. It's actually like great music, right? Like great electronic music, which is what I generally listen to, is a series of adding

layers and layers to music, creating a kind of tension, releasing that tension, and then flipping to a new form of tension, and then releasing that. And when you go to these shows, what you see is they do that not only with the music, but with color, and with different visuals. So you're getting a kind of similar tension and release, but then the way in which that's manifesting itself is changing throughout the show. And so I think music is an amazing metaphor for life, part of the reason I listen to it so much,

but I also draw amazing inspiration from music. And so to get back to your question, when I think of the role of travel, when I think of the role of observation, the role of conversation, all of these things are extremely important, but I see them more as a kind of like tension in the rubber band, where when I'm in routine mode,

I'm in straight production mode, and I'm capitalizing on the tension that I have created, whereas what travel in pure observation is, and then I would book it conversation and different experiences, is that is adding tension, and it's like breathing, right? It's like you can't breathe out all the time, but you also can't inhale all the time,

and it's like through that process of breathing and not breathing, you're not pausing breathing. It's just more of a kind of rhythm and a cadence. And for me, travel is adding tension. And then when I get back, I want to have added so much tension that I can be in full production mode. Yeah, if I as you straight back into your routine. Yeah, exactly. But there's no pause for me. I mean, I'm a bit of a nut, but there's no pause and That's that's an important distinction to make Yeah, I get that and so one thing that I wanted to get on to was a recent article that you have written about writing for the internet

Is that right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is exactly right So I mean one of the ways in which I see the world as I'm always looking for arbitrage opportunities? So, generally, I think that if you look at economic history, there is the efficient markets hypothesis, and that whole idea is basically that when you have many different people participating in a market, for the most part, you'll get the wisdom of crowds that'll kick in and they will value an asset fairly. And I think a lot of life looks like that. You know, there's like an old joke with an economist who is walking in season $20 bill on the ground and somebody says, hey, you know, you just found this $20 bill and he says, oh, actually, it's either fake or it's not real because if it was real, somebody would

have already picked it up. And the joke, the point of the joke is like, look, sometimes there actually is a free lunch. Yeah. So when I think of the ways in which the world is inefficiently priced right now, it's writing on the internet. What has happened right now is there's been

this inflection point where there's so much demand pumping to the internet for people who want really high-level interesting ideas. If you look at what's happening with the intellectual dark web, if you look what's happening in certain parts of Twitter, certain parts of YouTube, my goodness, the stuff that you can find is incredible. I mean, it's better than any college class I ever took, and it's not even close. I was like falling asleep at college class, and this was right when the internet was was coming up and a lot of these things were coming up and I remember the last

few years of college, I had no desire to go to class because what I could find online was simply more interesting and those trends have really kept going. And so what you have is the supply of really high quality information is growing way slower than the demand for it. And so what you see time and time again is people follow the same three step strategy to absolutely transform and revolutionize their careers. And with this three step strategy, what's amazing about it is it means that you don't have to pay your dues anymore. And so my goal this year is to help a thousand people

start writing. Eventually, I want to do 10,000, 100,000, because I believe so strongly in how writing can change your life. And so what this three step process is to have it be really simple, is you pick an area, pick an industry that is small, but it's a merchant. And you start learning about it, you learn as much

as you can, and then you share what you learn. Pick an industry, learn as much as you can, share what you learn. And if you pick the right industry, if you pick the right area, and that area grows, you will be an expert in that domain and you will have what I call a personal monopoly on that area. And so I have launched a writing course which really isn't about writing, it's about audience building, it's about connecting with people, it's about getting smarter by sharing your ideas, it's about creating jobs and opportunities for yourself, speaking gigs, consulting gigs, finding mentors, all that sort of stuff.

And it's about using writing as the new resume because resumes are an outdated way to communicate your talents. And if you can write, and if you can communicate your ideas, and if you can share your unique perspective on the world in a way that's both Engaging and entertaining you have a massive massive advantage in this world and so I've developed a whole methodology for doing that And it's an online course called right of passage amazing First off the bat what why do you think writing is an area in which you see easily exploitable gaps

as opposed to moving to video, as opposed to podcasting or audio platforms or any other way of being creative outlet? Totally. So writing is the most fundamental method of communication. So it is the pillar of any successful career and the foundation of basically any other form of media. And then also writing is hard. So the way in which I see it as the foundation is like, say that you're doing a speech, right? So you're going to go stand up in front of 500 people tomorrow afternoon and you have two different ways of preparing. The first one is you just practice and you speak to different friends and whatnot. And the

second one is you actually write it out. You structure your arguments and and you say, this is what I'm going to talk about. This is how I'm going to structure my ideas. What writing allows you to do is to think. And then, once you begin to rewrite, that is rethinking. So writing allows you to grapple with and explore ideas from more perspectives and more sides, better than any other medium. One thing to go back to the beginning of our conversation that you find when you're in pure observational mode

is you're always kind of on this topical layer and conversation can help you dive down a little bit deeper. But if you really want to explore the nooks and crannies of an idea to see it like a kaleidoscope from all different perspectives, writing is the best way to do that. Now, look, I have a podcast, I did television in college, I've done, I've published more than a hundred YouTube videos, I am basically content-technostic, but writing is the way in which that I have become smarter, the thing that has given me the most credibility, because once you write about something, that is like a proof of work. It's a proof of work and about an idea. And so, you know, I'll ask you, like if you meet somebody

who has a podcast on a topic versus has written a book on a topic, you're probably gonna trust the person who's written the book about it. Because we have this intuitive understanding that writing is rigorous in a way that no other form of media is. And when you write about your industry, Writing is rigorous in a way that no other form of media is. And when you write about your industry, because of the rigor of writing and the way in which

we've positioned the written word in society, writing has characteristics that no other medium of communication has. And like I said at the beginning, writing is the single most fundamental form of communication. It's definitely held in very high esteem. I think it's even the guys that I know that are super good on Twitter. And like Twitter used to be maybe three, four years ago. It was just a swamp, right, of gifts and just it was it was terrible. And now you look on there and you've got these life-changing maxims from guys like James Clea, James Clea's Twitter is unbelievable.

Like that guy is able to just constantly on a conveyor belt, put out whatever it is, 300 character limit, maxims for life, Naval Ravacant, like, anyone from that sphere of people are able to write, and you are right, there is something very, that makes you hold it in high regard, the fact that they can articulate

the written word, not just the spoken word. I do think there's a place for both, but to comment on how current culture sees the podcasting sphere. I saw a meme the other day that was about four white guys when they smoke a joint and it just says below it, dude, we should totally start a podcast. And it's like, it does feel like that space now, especially with how quick of an emerging market the audio platform is,

is almost becoming too meta for itself. Like it's becoming its becoming its own, like a caricature of its own platform almost. Yeah, maybe I look, I think podcasts are incredible. My point is really just that in terms of the podcasts that I create, sure that I have more than 10,000 listeners and that's all great and people respond and they say nice things. But wow, when someone is red, it's something I've written.

The relationship that I formed with them is so deep. And look, it's still true for podcasts. I actually think audio is amazing at inspiring trust. You're basically like a god in somebody's head. You've like, seeped into their ears and you wear these AirPods and you forget they're even wearing headphones. And then there's like some brilliant guy or girl like speaking in your ear and she's saying things that you've never thought before while you're forgetting that you're even listening to a podcast.

I mean, it's incredible, right? It's, look, it's unbelievable. But to go back to the original point, the way in which writing helps you hone and develop your thinking, I mean, take a guy like James Clear. I had the privilege of spending a morning with him a couple months ago and we had an awesome conversation.

And as I was preparing for that interview, I saw that for three years in a row, he was writing two articles a week. That's 114 articles a year. And then if you read that book, the way in which he could distill his ideas in atomic habits, the way in which he could distill his ideas and atomic habits, the way in which he could craft sentences and really compress all the wisdom, writing is able to do that.

No way that no other media is because it's malleable and you can play with it, you can distribute it, you can get feedback with it. It's visual. I mean, it's so funny. What I was trying to edit my podcast when I first started it. Dealing with audio is just an absolute pain. I mean, you have this like wave forms. I mean, it's really like if you were to torture somebody, you would say, at least for me, you would say, hey, go edit 10 hours of audio. and you can't do a transcript with it.

Yeah. And my goodness, it's hard and it's inefficient. It's painful. But when you look at writing, it allows you to sort of rewrite and rethink, which makes it a really valuable medium. That's something that's super interesting, the fact that you're not temporarily constrained when you have the written word. Even when you do drawing, or if you do painting,

you can maybe rub out little bits, but after a while, you can only rub out so much. You can erase small amounts, but that's not, unless you're doing it on a graphics tablet, you actually can't continue to go back over, or else you're just gonna wreck the page. You're gonna wreck the piece of paper

like this physical limit on how much paint you can remove. And also, when you're talking about video and audio, once you've done it and created it, the only way that you can make it better is to go back and redo it again from either beginning of the sentence or the beginning of the entire thing to go through. So yeah, the fact that it's malleable is a really interesting point. I think certainly for me writing is it's a big challenge. I think one of the reasons there's probably a little bit of confirmation bias, one of the reasons why I hold audio in such high steam as it comes easily to me. And I know that for me to become even close to as proficient as I am, an audio writing would, it's not low hanging fruit.

Like, it's whatever the opposite is. It's like at the top of the tree. Well, okay, here's the thing. What you're saying is, is one of the tragedies that I hope to fix. And look, this isn't just a writing course. This is really a community really an online communication course. It just so happens that writing right now

is the single highest point of leverage. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't be promoting writing at all. I have no attachment to the actual written word. And to be honest with you, I don't even consider myself a writer. I consider myself a communicator. I think of myself as somebody who's interested

in ideas. I think of myself who wants to build an audience online. And right now, writing is the best place to do that. Ten years from now, that might not be the case. But to get back to your point, I was thinking about how you were talking about painting typewriters were a bit like that but now with digital you can You can sort of rework everything But the big thing that we try to do in the course is flip all of writing education on the Ted So if you look at the structure of writing education any system the ways in which it works will flow from its end state. So in writing, what are the essays that you're doing in school? You're analyzing some Shakespeare play that you never understood, thou shall not do whatever, and you're

doing these essays that are almost all focused on literature and the problem is that's not the kind of writing that you need to build an audience online and it's not the kind of writing that you need to do well in business. And so my point is the way in which that there's really two kinds of writing. There's writing for school, which is driven by the PhDs who go get a PhD in English, and they influence the entire system of writing education. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. And then there's another kind of writing, which is the writing I'm really focused on, which is not writing to be like thorough

or to be like any famous author. It's writing to get ideas out of your head, put them on a page, and then influence other people, or share an interesting idea with other people. Because I'll tell you, if you look at history, the people who have been able to communicate the best have also been the very people who have been able to achieve things that they've wanted to achieve. And writing to get back to what I was saying about

being the most fundamental form of communication, whether you're gonna do your own podcast, whether you're gonna do your own video series. You know, I like watching a video series called Every Frame of Painting. There's Nerdwriter. Both of them are incredible. There's Wendover.

They all have written scripts. So they start with writing before they go into video. And my point is that it's not about writing to be a writer. It's about writing to share your ideas with other people and distribute them and to build an audience, which is one of the most valuable skills in the world right now. I mean, the returns to writing are actually increasing. They're exploding.

And so this isn't really a writing course. It's a communication course through writing. Interesting. Why do you say that the returns to writing on an upward trend at the moment? I mean, look at the people who we've spoken about so far. You found me through my writing. We spoke about Naval Rava Kant. He's a vociferous writer. James Clear is a writer. You interviewed Rory Sutherland. I listened to that podcast episode. It was Hull the Arias. He's a full-sive nature, man. Right. He's a force of nature. He's the absolute band. And I got an advanced copy of his new book. And like, first of all, it's phenomenal.

It will do very well. It's like, Freakonomics for behavioral finance. And what you see, though, is if you take a guy like Rory Sutherland, he's an amazing speaker, right? Yeah. But he has honed and he's crafted his jokes through writing. He writes for the spectator and that is where he works on a lot of his really interesting ideas. And when he has a great anecdote, like we had wheels on luggage before we sent people to the moon. I read that very idea in the spectator

before I heard it on your podcast. And that's just a perfect example of how things can begin with writing. And you can hone in crafter message. I mean, this is what comedians do, right? What comedians do is, so I live in New York and one of the things that we do for fun is we go to different comedy shows and the thing that you get in comedy that you get nowhere else is you never know who's gonna be in front of you. So if you go to a concert you're like oh my goodness

Odessa or Green Day or Muse will be playing. I know that. If you go to a movie you pick a movie, you buy tickets for that movie with comedy, you're like I I'm going to go to the comedy seller at 8 p.m. on Friday, and I have no idea who's going to be there. Chris Rock might show up, Louis CK might show up, and what's going on. This is what's happening. They have a big show that's coming up, and what comedians famously do is they're always testing and refining their jokes through live performance. Yeah. And they go out there watching the reactions on people's faces.

And I remember a couple of years ago, I was working a company called Cycle, and we did a documentary on this. It was a short five minute documentary. And it was about this guy who went to four different comedy shows in a night and showed how he changed that joke and then we would get in the car, we were in the Uber and we would interview him and we said,

what did you learn from that? And what happened was through the process of sharing and then getting feedback, he was always refining his ideas. And that is why I encourage people to share so much because when you start sharing, you're always getting feedback, getting feedback, getting feedback. And through that, you can refine your ideas and get the framing right and stuff like that. And so to go back to Rory Sutherland, part of the reason, I mean, the guy is just brilliant and to go back to somebody who really does a good job of observing the world. I don't think you can find a better case study

than Rory Sutherland. But what he has done is through writing and through feedback, he has refined his jokes and now he has a couple stories that when people hear him for the first time, they just, they've left really hard. The repertoire is huge. I think even to take it to a more basic level than that,

something that I've been talking about a fair bit recently is many people don't have any creative output or any pathway where they are forced to articulate the things that are inside of their head. Like even if you take it away from writing for an essay, very few people Actually engage in a deep conversation where they're not distracted by their phone and they're not fragmented by other things going on It's very often I think that people don't even have to think beyond the the surface the near level of what their thoughts are to then

Actually articulate them the deeper thoughts that they have about issues about issues going on at the moment or emotions they've had or experiences that they've had, I think based on my experience, often just stay inside that person's head. Unless you have a creative outlet like yourself or me or you're a writer or a painter or an artist or a musician, at what point is a layperson now actually being pushed to articulate their thoughts in a really sort of true and deep way? And I think that what

that's forcing, causing a lot of people to do is actually become detached from not only the ability to articulate, but also the ability to think. If you've read 1984, we know that a restriction in language is essentially the same as a restriction in thinking because without the capacity to articulate a thought, you essentially can't have the thought itself or the thought only exists in isolation. And it's this cloudy, nebulous, difficult to define like haze that's just, it's a notion, right? You don't, you no longer have thoughts, you just have sentiments and notions. And yeah,

you know, before even talking about writing, writing for a purpose or writing for a site or to build up a readership, or to even get feedback, simply the process of being on send and trying to articulate your thoughts, I think can be so therapeutic and effective for a lot of people. Oh, absolutely. There's a guy named John O'Donohue, and he asks, he's an Irish poet, and he is magnificent.

It was like, this has been, I've now read all four of his books. I had never heard of him at the beginning of this year, and in a hundred days, I just poured through them. And he's a Catholic priest, Catholic minister, and then later in his career focused a bit more on poetry. And he tragically died, I think it is sleep at something like the age of 54, but just one of those minds that you hear him speak and he says things that you should have known, you should have recognized, but you could never really put it

into words. And he asks in his podcast with Christa Tippett on on on being he asked when was the last time that you had a great conversation and to echo your point he was saying that most conversations are just two intersecting monologues. So one person says something to somebody else another person says something back and there's this weird kind of competition where both people are maybe trying to one up each other. But every now and then, you'll have a conversation that it's not a game of ping pong. There's no, there's no competition, but it's a conversation where you're elevated onto a new plane of experience.

And what's happening is, as a human being yourself, you're saying things and finding ideas within you that you didn't even know existed. Parts of your soul that you had forgotten about, but the other person is doing the same thing. And all of a sudden, you're moving into this new frontier, onto this new plane of experience. And what he says is that conversations like that, sing afterwards in your mind for weeks and that they're like food and drink for the soul. And that's probably the most powerful idea I've heard this year. Having good conversation, conversations where you are elevating onto another realm of human experience. I honestly, I think that that's what we live for. And to get back to writing, writing is trying to do that at scale.

Yeah, I think that the sun being greater than the whole of the parts during good conversations is something that I've felt much high velocity than I've been used to since starting this podcast just over a year ago. And that kind of pharmaceutical grade dose of exposure to it has been very enjoyable and I'm going to continue to strike this iron until all of the listeners who are who are tuned in appreciate appreciate that they need to put their phone down in the car and just ask someone a question about something that they care about. I got some messages have come down from the top.

I know you're going to speak to a friend of the show George McGill, I think, at some point this week from social chain in Manchester. And he's sent me a question asking you to explain your thoughts about people who consume the vast majority of their content that's only been created within the last 24 hours. So he's a big, he's a big mental models fan. We've done an episode which will be already out now in podcast land and all of the listeners should know what the Lindy effect is. But he's, this has come down. I should have turned my notifications off,

but for the first time ever, I'm glad that I didn't because that's just popped down from the top of the screen. So this is as fresh as fresh of a question as you're going to get top of the press. Well, it's funny because we're talking about comedy, right? And so I was with, this must have been six months ago. I was with some friends, and one thing that I do is I hang out with all people in all these different scenes. New York happens to be a hub for some of the different industries. Cosmopolitan is so good. I try to be, surround myself with people from, let's see, lots of people in crypto, lots

of people in finance, lots of creative people, different artists, some in fashion, but then this was really with the influencer community, some YouTubers and Instagrammers, who I had actually met through Twitter. And we were leaving my friends house, and of course, it was Friday night we're driving up to a comedy show. And we get in the Uber SUV, it was like one of the big ones that my friend had ordered. And I go in right first, you know, like to those back seats, you're like crawling and squirming, you're like doing gymnastics to get back there, right? So I go back, I do like a 360 back flip to get in the back seat of the car. And I sit there

and I'm looking at what all the people in front of me are doing on their phone. And the ride was 20, 25 minutes, not so long. But what was stunning to me, just stunning, was as I watched the people in front of me tap and text with like this kind of ferocious intensity, I saw that none of them had consumed anything that had been created outside of the last 24 hours. So they were all within Snapchat stories, Instagram stories, text message, WhatsApp threads, whatever, but it was all new content. And I had this idea and actually this encapsulates my process for writing, probably better than

anything else. And it will show you how for me, I write a lot, but I'm not a writer at all. Writing for me is sort of the end state of this way of life that I think is extremely vibrant and writing is the way in which kind of this end state in which I capture my thoughts and experiences. So I had called this idea the perpetual now. And the idea was that the structure of our social media feeds kinds of kind of keeps us within this this perpetual now. Every time you open Facebook or Twitter,

it's always new, new, new, new, new, whatever platform it is. And then I go to, unfortunately, my grandfather passed about two years ago, and I was looking through his library. And in there, I saw more books from, before the 18th century than from the 19th and 20th centuries. And these books were covered in highlights. You saw Shakespeare here, different poets over there. And what I saw was this big shift from, look, this isn't what everybody's doing,

but this is the way in which our social media feeds are structured, keep us in this ever present now. Where what happens is we become blind to our place in history. We become like overwhelmed by the present. And then when something happens, we just sort of get knocked off our feet. And I worry that if we're not conscious of the structure of our social media feeds, we're going to drown in what I then called the never ending now. I had had a conversation with a mentor, CEO of a pretty prominent media company, and he

had told me in this conversation, wow, that's an interesting idea you should write about it. And it gets back to beginning in conversation, bouncing ideas off of other people. And if I can look at others and see the surprise on their face, or quite frankly, more boredom, the more often the boredom on their face, that I can do more of what's surprising and less of what boards people. So I wrote up this article, put in my email newsletter, got great feedback from people. They had a couple emails that said it was their favorite Monday musings email

ever. And then I turned it into an article. And now your friend is asking us about it here. And one thing that I really want to do, and then I think this is going to be a project for the next six to nine months. And I haven't told anyone about this publicly, but this is sort of a platform that I want to start because I think that the never ending now is problematic. And it's not problematic because we shouldn't be consuming present information.

The issue is that we don't have people building to bring up books and articles that are a bit older. If you ever, if someone ever sends you an older article, something from, let's say before 2011, you know it's gonna be good. No doubt about it. And so for me, if someone sends me an article, I place disproportionate weight on how long that article is. If it's two days old and somebody's like, hey, you should read this. I know that that is a kind of impulsive share. Yeah.

But if it's 20 years old, there's just like you mentioned, a kind of lindy effect. And the fact that it's stuck with us to this time means that it's going to be disproportionately good. So now I'm going to say this, and now I have to do it because it's public. What I want to do is kind of create a database of 10, 20,000 different articles. And then what you can do is you can go in search by keyword and they'll be mostly old

articles from the last say 50 years. And then you can get in there. None of them are going to be sensitive to time. They're just going to be interesting ideas. And then what we'll get is, look, one thing that is true about the internet is it has a kind of perfect memory. So we, there, there's no bigger cost to pulling back old information. Like if I was going to the library, I find I needed a book from say 1970, I need to go probably to the library or go buy it on Amazon, not true with the internet. So what I'm going to do is build a database of thousands of articles. People are going to be able to search and through this platform, we'll get out of the never ending now.

And I'll just do it because I believe so strongly in the power of the written word, but also I see and sense an opportunity where if we can design our platforms differently, we can increase the quality of knowledge consumption and escape the never ending now. I get that. That was one of the reasons why I was super drawn to medium when I first learned about it. That it was the first ever, I guess, intellectually stimulating platform that was delivering results to me based on their either effectiveness or popularity rather than their relevance. Like Google delivers its search results on relevance. I don't want what is most relevant to my search result.

Like what I'm after is what's best for it. That because something could be super, super 100% relevant, but actually deliver the message in a way that no one else found interesting. Like, and especially with the way that people can manipulate SEO tags and all the metadata and headers and stuff like that, like medium for me was a real change with regards to the way that they deliver a lot of their content.

Because when you're searching for things, you can search for them based on other people's ratings, which crowd sources, the evolution of what gets to the top. Absolutely. So I think that there's a couple more things going on there. And you bring up a really good point on the difference between Google and Medium. And I think Medium is pretty good, but not exceptional. I almost never read Medium as a destination site. So something about it then still isn't good enough.

What do you think it is? But yeah, yeah, I'll get into that. So let me just start with Google. So the thing that Google is structured for is answering questions. So Google the best results on Google and Look, you can game the algorithm, but the Google SEO algorithm is pretty damn good, but it's for answering questions. So what you find is good simple information,

So what you find is good, simple information, but I don't seem to find very interesting things on Google. And I rarely seem to come across like a perspective that is like, ha, I've never thought of it like that before. Google is much more like, okay, now I know what I need to do or I know where I need to go. I know how to make that cake. I know how to take the view of the app off my car, etc. Exactly. Exactly. Whereas I subscribe to a newsletter, highly recommended email newsletter called The Browser, $40 a year or worth every penny and more, and they send five interesting

articles a day, all of which make my head turn to the side and kind of surprise me a bit, and they offer new perspectives that I'd never heard of. So yesterday, on the flight, I read about the benefits of arranged marriages. And from a woman in India, who is the daughter of two people who had had an arranged marriage,

and she was talking about all the great things that came out of arranged marriages. So I'm reading, I'm like, I've never thought of that before. I would have never stumbled on this that wasn't even what I'm looking for, but I'm really glad I found this. Google doesn't do that. So medium kind of tried to do something like that. What medium tried to do was create a hub

for people who didn't have personal websites to lower the cost of sharing articles online. And I think that, if I'm being honest with you, I think Medium was better a couple years ago. I mean, Medium has been kind of watered down by a lot of self-help stuff and has still been very susceptible to what's popular and what gets claps. And with that said, there's a lot, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of amazing writing on medium,

just stellar writing on medium. But I'm not sure that the home page does a great job of surfacing that writing, and we need to get better about that as a society, but really just personally, there isn't a platform where I can just go on the platform, and at the snap of a finger find an interesting article that is also personalized. I get that completely. I mean, that's, I guess that's the goal for medium. That's what it could be or should be. But yeah, it would be, it would be lovely.

One thing that I wanted to touch on before we finished was talking about, so we've spoken about, you spending some time with some influencers and these guys kind of furiously being on their phones. Also the value of writing, we've spoken about how it's both useful for yourself to be forced to articulate your ideas and also for other people to then give you feedback so that they iterate over time and you kind of evolve your own consciousness as a back and forth of the people.

One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is the success of people on social media, especially the ones who have the biggest audiences, let's use Instagram and Twitter as an example, the guys who get to the real, real top being encouraged to use their platform in a way like this, like to use it to write things which are deep and difficult and meaningful and grapple with difficult ideas. I appreciate that when you have half of the internet, like Kim Kardashian's not going to begin to grapple with the finer points of why Brexit should, I shouldn't happen. That's not her bag. But I do sometimes feel like, as I see, and I've seen this trajectory of some of my buddies as well, that have made it to social media superstar them. They almost, it almost feels like the ideas,

as you get to the top of the tree, and obviously these are the ones that are proliferated to the most because at the top you go further, they almost get more watered down, they're more beige, they're more vanilla, they're less interesting, and they follow the same kind of, the same model, because that's the model that they know is effective

and to change anything would be a real risk. It would be lovely to see some guys, who, guys and girls, we make it to the top of the tree, and then begin to go right, and now I have this platform, let's see what difficult things I can grapple with, let's see, I have half a million, one million, two million people that follow me.

Imagine how good and how quickly my ideas could iterate and how fast that evolved. If I used all of those people's feedbacks. Oh, absolutely. But I mean, I wouldn't be too down on this. There are, look, there, I wish that there were a hundred a thousand times more, but there are some unbelievable content creators out there who are not trying to water down at all. I mean, in the podcast realm, you have Patrick O'Shaunasey who runs the Invest Like The Best

Podcast. Patrick does a phenomenal job interviewing and the level at which he maintains that podcast. I mean, that podcast has had some of the best interviews I've ever heard. And he still keeps raising the bar. I mean, it's wildly impressive what he's achieved there. Tyler Cowan, who funds me through his Emergent Ventures grant. He writes at marginal revolution every day. And I'm wowed with his production of high quality content, the quality of his conversations with Tyler interview series. You have people like Eric Weinstein who come up with some just ridiculously interesting ideas. Check out the

embedded growth obligation idea. I'll send it to you. You can throw out the show notes or something, but listeners, Google embedded growth obligation, fascinating idea. And whether he's right or wrong, the consistency and which he makes me think differently and all of those people do is is impressive. And look, there's there are certain incentives online for people to water down the quality of their content, but there's also so many people who are going the opposite route, and I am on a mission, and I'm stopping it nothing to teach thousands of people to write online, to improve their ideas, and to bathe in the reverie of intellectual ideas that make this life so interesting. That's awesome, man. I think moving forward, it does feel to me like in the last five years, we have turned

a little bit of a corner in a really good way, the proliferation of the intellectual dark web and the hunger for these sort of experiences. I went to go and see Jordan Peterson live in Manchester. I did too. I did too in New York. And I'm like, he's a psychology nerd. Like a Canadian psychology nerd talking about life on stage, I wonder how many people would have been there, like even five years ago, whether he would have got that proliferation of ideas through the internet. And it just seems like such an... It seems like something that shouldn't be happening, but there obviously is this massive, massive audience that's hungry for these ideas.

People like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris, Eric and Brett Weinstein, like, you know, these guys are delivering content, which isn't immediately gratifying, at least on the surface of it, if you were to look at what people usually consider to be gratifying. And yet, the sum of the most engaged and some of the most loyal readerships and fan bases on the internet. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a whole, that's a whole other conversation about Jordan Peterson. I have good friends who despise the guy and good friends who love the guy and there's actually a good arguments on either side. But yes, I think that you're

point about how much people want interesting ideas that's being underestimated and to get back to, so the things I'm working on, I recently wrote an essay called What the Hell is Going On, trying to explain we were at Thanksgiving dinner, we're having a conversation about what was happening in society and I was hearing my aunt and my uncle speak and I was just like you guys are totally wrong. Just absolutely wrong, you're missing some critical components of what's happening right now and I wrote an essay trying

to work through those ideas and basically the world of course is changing and this shift from information scarcity to information abundance and the paradox, the weird way in which abundance can sometimes be harder to deal with than scarcity is fascinating and something that I really wanna keep exploring. But look, I wouldn't get too down because I'm gonna make sure that there's thousands of really high quality thinkers

out there because I have a course that's ready to really raise them and to teach them and to show them the way. I don't doubt it, man. I don't doubt it. So for the listeners at home that are interested in the course and to find more out about yourself, where is best to find you online? Yeah, Peryl.com is my website, p-e-r-e-l-l.com. Go to the Start Here page, and you'll find something good there. You can find me on Twitter at DavidUnderscore.pl And of course, I have the North Star podcast. Chris, it was great talking to you, and I hope that we get a chance to meet in person.

Yeah, me too, man. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah