My First Million - How To Master Storytelling

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

Episode 589:  Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with David Perell to reveal every framework he knows to become a better storyteller, a better writer, and a better creator of binge-worthy content. This episode was originally recorded for the podcast “How I Write,” hosted by David Perell. —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2BnqYArwaw Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:16) Binge bank (6:03) Storytelling (8:05) Intention & Obstacle (14:22) Hasan Minhaj (15:53) Writing vs Speaking (18:06) Pacing (19:01) Hooks vs Frames (22:30) Viral tweets (26:49) MrBeast (27:26) Storyworthy (29:10) 5-second moment of change (32:02) Origin Stories (42:07) Tony Robbins (43:25) Transformations (44:12) Steven Bartlett (46:17) Viral videos (49:09) Miss Excel (56:04) Change your state & focus (58:31) Paul Graham (1:03:43) Advice to writers (1:06:53) Writer's voice (1:11:48) Dave Chappelle vs Netflix (1:18:18) Distribution (1:21:40) Twitter / X (1:32:34) Writing with humor (1:45:02) Newsletters — Links: • Write of Passage - https://writeofpassage.com/ • David on Twitter - https://twitter.com/david_perell • David’s Website - https://perell.com/ • David Perell on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0a_pO439rhcyHBZq3AKdrw • David’s Podcast - https://writeofpassage.com/how-i-write • Get HubSpot's Free AI-Powered Sales Hub: enhance support, retention, and revenue all in one place https://clickhubspot.com/sym — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Pitch your startup for a shot at a $1M investment with Sam Parr as the MC https://clickhubspot.com/pitch My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

All right, look, it's Sean here. I don't want to toot my own horn, but beep, beep. This is an interview that somebody else did with me. David Perel, who you might know online as the writing guy. He invited me out to San Francisco and we did an interview for his podcast called How I Write. And my episode is doing so well, so well. It is, I have this little Chrome extension. This thing is doing 11x.

11x means it is 11 times higher performing than his normal videos. something good is in this video that is doing 11X on YouTube and it's all about storytelling it's all about writing it's stuff that a lot of people ask me about but I never have taken the time to sit down and talk about it well David got me to sit down and tell you everything that I know about the stuff I hope you like it I was a little sick during the interview but it was my Michael Jordan flu game I came I came prepared and I brought the heat I'm really hyping this up and it's because I'm excited about it

I'm really proud of this interview it's doing really well a lot of people are messaging about it. And so we want, he asked David, hey, can we run this on our feed? You know, we took the, took the episode from him. We're going to run it on our feed. It's basically an interview where he's the interviewer and I'm the guest talking about storytelling and writing. So if you like those two things, you're going to like this episode. All right, enjoy this episode. We need. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. The story is a five second moment of change. Whoa, what does that mean? You want to work backwards from the emotion. The only things people will

share is things that are L-O-L-L-T-F-O-M-G. Wait, so hold out here. Stop the podcast. So, like, what should I do next time I sit down to write? The real great writers, I believe, are great at framing their ideas. Oh, interesting. So Mr. B. Steve Bartlett, Dave Chappelle, Hussein Minhaj, those are the people I try to learn from.

You know, I could teach a 32nd master class. It's just this. Sean Puri is one of those guys that I really wanted to learn from. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to tell better stories by listen and good storytellers, but Sean has really deconstructed the storytelling process. And you hear people saying all the time, oh, storytelling is really important. You should get really good at it. But there's not a lot of people who come in with concrete, clear frameworks like he does. So this is a masterclass on storytelling. Come on in. It's time to roll. I said this to you when we

first show cans, but this podcast was probably the biggest increase in terms of how much I've admired a guest and how much that's grown through the prep process. And so I just want to compliment you on that. And in particular, there's a lot of things that you do really well in your writing that I'm not good at. And this is one of those episodes where I just have a bunch of questions and I'm here to make my writing way better. And the place I want to start is storytelling. I have no frameworks for thinking about storytelling. Before you do storytelling, can I give you a compliment on your compliment? Yeah. So great compliment, first of all, very specific. But the is actually it's a writing tip which is I didn't the thing you said where you're like you know

I started kind of going down your rabbit hole and my like what respect for your whatever you said like my uh do whatever your score went up a lot during that process uh I learned this from these two guys Dylan and Henry they're young guys and they were like 21 when I met him and they were recording these videos I was like how many views these get and they were like oh nobody watches these and I'm like but you guys are like really trying like is it like someone someday somebody will watch these. He's like, yeah, specifically, we're creating a binge bank. And I was like, what's a binge bank? And he goes, it's when you basically stack material so that like, even though each one of these, if we just looked at the view counts, it'd be kind of discouraging.

Like, not that many people read this or watched this. But they were like, we started thinking about it differently. Instead, we said, all right, each one is not getting that many views. But I'm creating a bank where if somebody ever said, I'm curious about this guy. I want to learn more. What is this guy all about? that in the next hour, you would walk out with like, my reputation would be way higher with you, right? Like, you would feel like you know me, you would like me, you would respect me.

And it changed the way I thought about that. And so then I, because I used to not, I used to like be like very, um, results driven. It's like, oh, if it's not immediately paying off, it's hard for me to get excited about it. But when I thought of the binge bank, I just thought, oh, I need to create this library that if anybody, like if David's going to do research,

is going to spend an hour or two hours going like down the rabbit hole. I need to leave a little breadcrumb trail that by the end he's like, I love this guy. I'm all about this guy. Guess where I ended up. Guess what like the final thing was, which was like the shabang of, all right, I told me a blog post that I probably forgot about as my guess. It's like that 40 page PDF with all your main principles. That was like the pool I swam in for the longest. And I ended up there. Yeah. Who knows? But like that's the, you leave that trail. I should probably do it better. But like this idea of create a binge bank, I think is so much more valuable than a resume or a

portfolio. It's like, people will come knocking. They will get curious about you and like give them a way to, to just binge your content like it's a Netflix show. And by after two hours, they should feel like you're the man. That's, that's a goal. I think people should have. So what do you do to do that intentionally? Well, the first thing is like you don't get discouraged by like how small your thing is today. That was like the first part, which is if you create something and the feedback loop is not quite there. You're either going to just willpower your way to keep going. You're going to be a very wise person and say, let's take time. I'm neither of those things. Bad at willpower and not that wise, right? Like I kind of know that's the answer, but it's a way to trick yourself. And

the way to trick yourself is to say, oh yeah, this one thing, it doesn't have to like go viral for this to be successful. This is for my binge bank. I know the idea of a bitch make is important. I want to have that as an asset that's there for me. So what are the 10 things that somebody should go consume? And I started paying attention to that and start putting that together. One of the things that you are very good at is that I feel like you're just good at learning skills, putting names to them. And this is a good time to dive into the storytelling. So I guess that you had this whole day.

You're like, oh, I'm going to go check out Aaron Sorkin. And he always comes back to like this one core principle. Tell me about what you've learned from storytelling. And then maybe even like the meta of how you learn new skills. The storytelling thing is cool because, you know, I think everybody intuitively knows storytelling is a pretty dope ability. And I look for this mismatch between things that have a lot of value, but you're not taught or even better. It sounds kind of lame to say you're working on it. Like if I find that, I'm like, oh, this is a good one.

Another example of that to me is enthusiasm. Anybody who's been around somebody who's like got high energy enthusiasm, you like that person. That's inherently like a, it's a very likable trait. Of course, there's an over-the-top obnoxious version, but generally you want to err on the side of have energy, have enthusiasm. Those are people you want to do projects with, work with, be involved with. But nobody will ever be like, yeah, I'm practicing my enthusiasm. Right. Like, I'm practicing this.

That sentence doesn't even compute. So if there's a thing that has value that other people don't practice or try at, and even better, it's like almost taboo or lame to say you do it, I've found that those skills are actually like, premium skills to me because you almost like differentiate yourself in the marketplace. Storytelling is another one of those. Joke telling is another one of those. Like if you're like, I am working on like getting funnier. They're like, are you trying to be a comedian? No.

Like you like funny people though, right? Like of course, everybody does, whether it's relationships, work, content creation, whatever you're doing. If you're humor level, if you're more humorous, people will like it better. Nobody practices. So it's like, what do you expect? Just, you know, that's magically happen? Like we kind of know, everything comes from.

everything is downshare of practice. So storytelling is one of those skills where I knew that I loved whenever I met somebody who was a great storyteller. I wanted to get better at it. So then who's the best in the world of this, right? That's the next question. One of the people that came to mind when I Googled around was Aaron Sorkin. He's written, you know, famous TV shows, I don't even, West Wing, Newsroom, the social network movie. It's great for writing dialogue. And in these interviews, he says this thing. He's like, they're like, what's the key to storytelling? Like, can you teach a like a three-hour master class. He's like, I could teach a 32nd master class.

Like, like, it's just this. It's intention and obstacle. And he said it even better. He goes, I worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. And I was like, I don't even know what the hell he's talking about, but the way this guy's serious about it tells me,

like, I need to go dig in. What is he talking about? So what does this mean? Intention and obstacle is just at any given moment, the hero of the story, whether it's you or someone you're talking about, has to have a very clear intention. What do they want?

And under that is like, why do they want it? How bad do they want it? What happens if they don't get it? That's what goes into intention. And then obstacle. Like, who's in the way? Right? So, you know, Harry Potter wants to live.

What's in his way? Voldemort's trying to kill him. The most powerful wizard of all time is trying to kill him, right? Intention, an obstacle. And basically, if you watch, if you read any story or you watch any movie, you should be able to pause at any moment and just point at the screen and just say, what do they want right now and what's in their way? and if you ever go like five minutes without that being clear,

people will lose their attention will drift away. And so once I realized that, I made that the central premise of any story. And what I realized was that this was a incredibly powerful tool. It is the fundamental like building block of storytelling. And the more interesting thing, which we could talk about is it doesn't have to be life or death. So most people think of it when like the example I even gave was Harry Potter trying to live and most evil words are trying to kill them.

Okay, cool. But you can shrink that down and actually you get bonus points when you can do intention and obstacle on a lower stakes moment. So I wanted a croissant and all the places were closed, but I need my croissant. You need your croissant. But the audience has to believe that you truly needed it. And you got to tell it. It would be like you got to make them believe that you really wanted it. ideally because you actually did, right?

You don't have to fabricate the story. It should be real. I'll give you an example. I was at a like executive offsite. My company had just got acquired. Like I put on the exec team of this now, like 2,000 person company. And I don't, I feel a little bit out of place.

Like I've never worked in a company bigger than 20 people. And I wanted to use storytelling to kind of like, as a crutch, as one of my tools in my toolkit. How can I use this to better myself? All right. So we're supposed to go around the circle. And like say what's been going on? What's something, what's this, what's something recently that happened that you want to share with the group?

Some BS like icebreaker. And every single person just did it in a work context. Oh, we're working on this thing. But then this person on my team has did this problem or they quit or whatever. Oh, we're working this thing. But then legal said this. And it's kind of like boring, boring, boring. And I was like, yeah, recently had a big moment, big day.

And, okay. Pause, right? Get people curious. I said, I just moved out of the house. I was young, right? So I was like, I just moved out of the house. I'm living in my own place. I've been living there for a year now,

but I've never invited my mom over. And my mom was in badgering. Why don't she invite me over? Well, she doesn't know is I'd never invite her over because I don't want to, I don't know how to host. She was always the host if someone came over. I don't know how to do adult things. So people are kind of laughing, right?

Because I'm, but I'm like, I was like, I had been trying to get her to treat me like an adult. But the reality was, like, I'm not. I'm actually still a little boy, right? And so I'm telling the story about how my mom comes over and I decided to cook. I decided to cook Brussels sprouts. The most adult food there is. Problem is,

don't know how to cook Brussels sprouts. So I'm doing it, blah, blah, blah. And I tell the store of cooking the Brussels sprouts. And I just kid you not, everybody's like, everybody's entertained. They listen to it. During the break, everybody made a point to come up and be like, dude, that Brussels Struts story was hilarious. That was so funny.

Like, what was that? And what even just happened? They kind of couldn't even explain it. And for me, it was just another example of using storytelling, even on low stakes moments, actually builds likeability and fandom more so than the dramatic, I was skiing and there was an avalanche. That's cool, but it's unrelatable. And actually, there's something fundamentally unlikable about it. And I want to write, usually if I want to write something, it's because I'm trying to, whatever, I'm trying to have

fun, but I'm also trying to build an audience of people who like me or are fans of me or get customers who want to, you know, buy my product or whatever. I try to use likeability. for that. It was interesting. I was at a sort of a very fancy dinner. It was like multi-billionaire's house. And it was one of those dinners where everyone is like, you know, people had flown in for the dinner. And there's like an Olympian who's sitting across the table

who I was like a big fan of grown up. And we're all going around doing introductions. And it's my time to do the introduction. So I'm nervous. I really want to impress everybody. Like one of my childhood heroes. A nine o'clock at the table. Yeah. So I can't wait two o'clock, right? And I, you know, sort of put

myself up and I talk about, hey, this is what I do for a living. And I'm like, I was crushed. You know, man, everyone would love this. And we're, we're hanging out after, after dinner and back in my apartment. My buddy goes, yo, you did the worst job ever. Like, that was a horrible intro. It's like, what do you talk about? Every word to the bone, like, had my one-liners, like, ready to go. Crushed it. He's like, no, you were just trying to sound impressive. In a moment like that, you tell a funny story or you make a joke and you lighten the mood. You did exactly the wrong thing. Right.

Yeah, that's, first of all, great friend. Great friend. Can we call that out? And you're absolutely right. I learned this from Hussein Minaj, the comedian, because I was going to go on stage. I was like, hey, dude, like, you do this for a living. I don't know how to do this stuff. And he goes, you want to, he goes, comedy is a low status game.

So he goes, you know, you're going to be up on stage and you're nervous. So your natural tendency is going to be to puff your chest out to kind of project this false bravado. but he's like actually what you want to do is build connection with people and you build connection with people through vulnerability through low stakes through low status specifically he starts his comedy special I went and wrote it out to try to like understand what he does his last comedy special he starts out he's sitting on a stool he's talking about how intention him and his wife been trying to get pregnant and they haven't been able to and they went to a doctor and he's like the worst news ever. It was my fault. My balls don't work, basically, right? Like, is there a lower

status thing as a guy than to be like, yeah, my junk doesn't perform? Also, it's just the way, like that word choice is inherently funny. Exactly. And so, you know, he's obviously a master at this and trying to, trying to learn from people who are, like, I'm in business. I don't try to learn how to be a better storyteller or better writer from business people. Why would I do that? I would try to learn from the people who their thing is storytelling, our writing or entertainment, because they're going to be the best at this. You know, Aaron Sorkin, comedians, those are the people I try to learn from. And so I think that was one principle that sounds like you learned the lesson the hard way, too.

How is storytelling different for you in writing versus speaking? It's not that different. In general, one of my biggest writing rules is write like you talk. Most people have this false thing we do. I think it's from school. Like school kind of teaches you. They're like, read Shakespeare, write these essays. You know, I need six pages, six pages minimum, you know, double spaced, you know, all

this stuff. Use a big vocabulary. It's all the things that don't work in the real world. You learn in school. I think what school teaches you is basically just pretend. Like, hey, be something you're totally not. That's what good writing is. In the real world, I don't think that's true.

I think, you know, good. writing is simple. Good writing is easy to read. Good writing is entertaining to read. Good writing has a voice. It's not just like this, you know, archaic sounding thing. So anyways, you know, one of the principles is write like you talk. So if I'm going to write a story, I will actually say it first and then I'll just write down what I said. That's like a starting point for me. Because for most people, myself included, if you sit down the like blank page, you know, of death is like the most intimidating thing. It's very hard to even get started. But it's, If you are stuck and you just say, okay, so what is the story?

Like, forget the words. What are you trying to say? I'm trying to tell a story about the one time with the brus of spouts and blah, blah, blah, blah. Cool, what makes it interesting? All right, great. Where did it start? What's the start of the story? Well, start is when I blah, blah, blah.

And what's the end? Well, the end was when this happened. All right, cool. Sounds like you got a beginning, middle end. You know what happened. And you roughly hit the outline. Cool, maybe now start writing. And so write like you talk is an important.

And the other thing is there are nuances that are different. For example, in writing, I'll use a ton of like parentheses. Because you can't do that in, you can break the fourth wall basically when you write. But when you talk, it would be like me saying, so we were going this way. You know, we always take that route. It's like that's a parentheses when you're talking. When you're writing, it's actually much easier to do. But when you're talking, you can use pauses, a dramatic pause.

How do you do a dramatic pause in writing? It's kind of hard to do. You have to use line breaks or dot, dot, dot, whatever, right? Like you got to try that. So some tools are a little bit different, but I would say 80 to 90 percent of it is the same to me. Have you learned anything about the pacing of a story, like the how you drag it out or compress it? Like, does that change for different platforms? How do you think about that?

Definitely. You know, I think another misconception is shorter the better. You know, too long is too boring. And actually, you know, anything could be any length. It just says you can only be as long as it is interesting. That's a general rule. It can only be as long as it is interesting. If you can go this long, you know, a long, you know, blog post, but it's interesting

to all the way. Fantastic. That's the right length. However, you should always try to understand, like, what is your level of credibility or buy-in with the audience? So here in a podcast, you can kind of riff in a podcast. You could be like, dude, we could talk about something we said in the lobby or be like, oh, you just had Sam Altman on. Does he have a bodyguard?

Like, we could just not talk about writing for five minutes. Totally fine. However, if it's cold traffic on the internet, you better have like an amazing headline and a first line that's going to hook people and be right about the match what the headline was because you don't, you don't have that reputation with them. So if you know your audience's level of buy-in with you, you can kind of dance around subjects versus be very direct and immediate and try to bring up. provide value right away to hook people right away. So, you know, TikTok is a platform where you're swiping, like, and if it's not interesting in the first like 0.9 seconds, you're gone. So on TikTok, you see people right away try to say a thing. On podcasts, you'll see people shoot the shit and build, you know, there's a chemistry thing because people aren't going to

swipe away from the podcast in the first 30 seconds. It's not usually how people consume podcasts. And so you got to know your medium and you got to know your audience. What's the level of buy and you have? How do you think about the hooks for A story. Like, one of the things I've noticed with comedians and really studied is how fast they're able to build context. They can do it in like six to eight words where some people just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on at drones. And that hook of how you bring people into the story is super important. I agree. However, so what is a hook? So a hook is basically, it's the first thing you're going to say, it's trying to hook their attention. Great. I think actually right now, for,

For the type of person who's going to listen to this, you probably have studied a little bit of copyrighting maybe, or you've kind of pay attention to what, like, oh, this person's blown up on Twitter. What do they do? Oh, they write their threads. And the first line of their thread is like, here's the unbelievable story about how this, you know,

Chinese immigrant took a simple thimble and turned it into $10 billion, whatever. So I'm like, unbelievable sounding of a thing that you're like, oh, you have to pick. It's like maximum clickbait, right? I actually think that hooks somewhat over. rated underrated is frames so what's a frame so a frame is you take an idea an idea can be this big or it can be this big depending on the frame so i can be like um you know uh what's i don't

have a good example on top of my head but we'll do one that we just talked about that hussein and i's a comedy thing right i told a little story about what he's doing in um in his opening line so i could just say here's what he did it at the start of his thing i could say here's what you're you can learn about public speaking from one of the greatest public speakers in the world, Hussimin Hodge, right? So I can take the same content where I'm going to talk about starting with a low status thing, but I can put it in the frame of this is not just for comedians. This is actually, when you're at a dinner party and you're supposed to make an intro, and you don't know what the hell to say, this is how to not make an ass out of yourself. You change the frame.

And so I think that more important than a hook, which is just like a grab you by the throat, attention grabber is think about how you're going to frame your ideas. Hooks are about the words you're going to write. Frames are about the idea and how you're going to make that idea relevant and how you're going to connect two ideas that seem unrelated to be related. The real great writers, I believe, are great at framing their ideas more so than like just coming up with that perfect one-line hook thing that's going to like, you know, just kind of trick the person into clicking. Yeah, let's get super concrete here. So you wrote a super viral threat on Clubhouse. And this was the standard way to do a frame. So it says one, parentheses, clubhouse existential threat, number one,

time to value ratio, let's brainstorm. And you're like jargon, fancy words. I don't like that. That wasn't me writing it. That was somebody else. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't like it. It like, brainstormed like no storyline. And then it didn't do that well. And you, in, you're like, so dot, dot, dot, everyone seems to think Clubhouse is the next big thing. But I think it's going to fail. Here's how I think it all goes down. Yes. Why did you choose that? So if you compare the two and like on YouTube, you should put these like side by side so people can see it. The other one was written by this guy, Chris, who created an app that was kind of like Clubhouse went super viral. It was called Secret back in the day. I don't know if you remember this. It's called

Secret with super viral. They raised like $100 million. The founder like sold some secondary, bought a Ferrari. It was like the hit product for like a very short run over time and then it died. So if anyone has the credibility to say why Clubhouse might fail, that guy was actually the guy. The problem was he was extremely dry, told no story and just said, and used like very like, you know, 12th grade reading level jargon like Clubhouse's existential threat, the time to value ratio like immediately felt like homework. whereas my thing was everybody thinks X, but I think Y, and the most important part was here's how I think it's going to go down, not here's why I'm right. So here's how it's going to go down is basically like gossip, it's story.

Here's why is logic and rationale. So that's kind of why I wrote it that way was. And then the rest of the thread, the reason this thread got like 20 million people to read it was because I wrote it almost like a screenplay. I was like, I didn't say, here's the five problems with Clubhouse. I wrote, you're the founder of Clubhouse. First of all, fuck yeah. You're winning. Everybody's talking about your app.

Your app is cool. Kanye's in your DMs. VCs are throwing money at you. And I set it up, right? Like, that's the setup. That's you right now. And already, you know, if you're reading that, this is not how most business tech Twitter writing goes.

Most business tech Twitter writing goes is it, it's an intelligence contest. And I was telling a story. And so, you know, that's why I think it worked. I think if I had ridden it with the, you know, me trying to be the 9,000 IQ guy in the room, it would not have worked. So when you see people say that I'm writing now and I'm like, all right, I'm not going to do intelligence contest. I'm going to try to do exactly what Aaron Sorkin said. There's intention and there's obstacle. I'm going to frame what I'm saying in terms of story.

I'm going to focus on the frame and say that my writing still is just like, yo, this is lame. what do you think is going on there that makes it feel dry or like it lacks a sense of momentum? Well, in the same way that comedy is great, but not every line should be a joke. Storytelling is great, and not every piece of content needs a story. So I think one challenge is like,

I wrote that one as a story. It did great. That doesn't mean everything I write online is like screenplay story type of thing. That worked in that situation. It's not going to work in every situation. So you've got to know the tools and when to use them. Hammer's not good if you're just trying to open a door.

Sometimes a key is what you need. And so that's the first thing. Don't just force it in. The second thing is like you probably need reps. Like, I don't know, I've done this a lot of times. That wasn't the first story I've ever written. So if you're like, cool, I'm going to get better at storytelling. Be prepared.

Like, tell 100 stories starting with maximum cringe and get to not cringe, right? But it's going to take 100. Expect that it's going to take 100 stabs at this. And specifically 100 intelligent reps. So it's like, do it. and then the next one you have to be like, what could I do better? Oh, my hook was a little weak there. Or, oh, you know, it droned on too long.

Or I don't really have a point. Maybe this shouldn't have been a story. Maybe it shouldn't have been something else. And so 100 reps where each one you try to say, what's one thing I could do better than the last time? Just one thing. That's it. And then you just keep going. And if you can do 100 of those, then I bet your stories will work.

It's not going to be, it's not going to feel forced because you'll learn the skill through those 100 reps. This is the Mr. Beastism of, he's like, everybody asked me, like, how do you do YouTube good? He's like, I tell them all the same exact thing. Make 100 videos and every video make, do something better than you did before. Anything. Doesn't even matter what it is. One thing better than before, do 100. Then come back and talk to me.

And he's like, two things happen. First of all, nobody does it. They all wanted just like some answer. They had no intention of actually going and doing the work. And then of the few people who actually do the work, they never need to talk to me again. By the 100th one, they figured it out. They're doing great. They never come back for advice.

That's why it's the perfect advice to give someone, because it's true. and it saves both of us the hassle, you know, if you actually followed it. Yeah. What did you learn from Storyworthy? Storyworthy is an amazing book by this, like, teacher guy who's like, the 20-time storytelling champion of the moth storytelling. I didn't even know what this thing was. But whatever.

If you're the champion of something, I paid a little bit of attention. He's got this book. And in the book, it's basically how to tell better stories. I would say, you know, probably worth reading the book. he's got one thing that I really took, which was stakes. So he's like, every great story needs stakes. Meaning if the story is intention and obstacle,

but if you don't make it clear what's at stake for the person if they don't get it, then the story's not going to have not be very compelling. So, you know, when you tell a story, let's say it doesn't have to be high stakes. Like it doesn't, he's actually very, again,

the other thing he says is like, don't tell, like, it calls like vacation romp. So it's like, don't just tell a story about this great night you had, this party, because like, nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about your vacation. Nobody wants to hear about your cool college party you went to.

Like, just fundamentally, those are bad stories. The second thing is like, a great story is not just I was swimming in the ocean and a shark bit me and I survived. Like, it doesn't need to be extreme. And again, it's actually almost better if it's not. But you still need stakes. So how do you have stakes even if it's not a shark biting you off? And his answer was, the stakes come from the emotion.

So as long as you believe that that, person was going to feel a certain way, then the story has stakes. So, for example, if I'm trying to impress my mom doing the Brussels Sprouts thing, embarrassment is what's on the line, right? Like, I'm going to be embarrassed and my ego is going to take a hit. So as long as you believe that that's true for me, the story will be entertaining when it's, when I actually tell it, when it's actually delivered. The other one he says is, he goes, what is a story? Story is a five second moment of change. Whoa, what does that mean? A five second. So he's like, you know, uh, everything in you tell in the story comes to this one moment, this five seconds where the characters transform.

You know, just I use movies because it's easier that most people don't have like a big archive of writing in their head, but like we've all watched the same shows and movies. Every rom-com is like some version of the following. The guy's a player and he's never going to settle down. That's the start of the movie. Or she's a high-powered lawyer. It was doing great in her career, but never made enough time for love. That's always the start of the story.

There's only two rom-coms, right? like she was in love. She thought they would get happily married. He broke her heart, start of the rom-com. So, well, guess what the ending of the rom-com is going to be? Always the exact opposite of that. If she was the high-powered lawyer who never made time for love, she's not going to be in love and she's going to actually quit her job as a lawyer and

be, like, open up a bakery, right? Like, that's how the movie's going to end. Or if he didn't want to settle down and he was a player, by the end, he's going to be chasing her and he's going to, like, propose to her, right? He's going to want to settle down. So, spoiler for all rom-coms ever. And it's actually all movies ever, die hard, Jurassic Park. You could do the same exercise.

Watch the opening one minute. The end is going to be that character, the opposite of his current lifestyle or belief system or habits. You know, Scrooge hates Christmas. He loves Christmas or whatever. Every movie, every story is the same. So the heart of the story is the five-second moment when they actually made the transformation, when they switched. And it's usually when they lost it all, when they had the heartbreak. break, when they hit rock bottom, when they had no choice but to be brave because they were finally

cornered, like, whatever it is, right? You know, in Batman, when it's like, he's in the cave and he's got to get out and nobody's ever made it out. I don't know if you remember this part of the Dark Night or one of the Batman movies. And the mentor was like, only one person's ever got out. He's like, how did he do it? He's like, he didn't use the rope. Basically, he jumped with no safety net. And so the five second moment of change is the character climbs up the thing takes off the rope. If he doesn't make this jump, he's going to die. But actually because he was going to, because of that makes the leap, it actually makes

it. That's the transformation moment. Everything is based all stories. If you don't know what's the five second moment of change for the main character, you don't really have a great story. How does this apply or not apply to like the story of a company? Like I'm trying to tell the story for a passage or, you know, you think of all these companies.

Oh, we start in a garage. We have no money. this is what we believe. Right, you have Airbnb, you have the Obama-Os, and then you have Brian Chesky, who's, like, going to the houses, and he's, like, taking photos with his own camera. He's, like, doing the hustle. It's like, these founders really believed.

So how does, how do we take these ideas and apply it to what we're building? The origin story of all Silly Malley companies is similar. So let's take Airbnb, for example. What was the, you know, moment of change? The moment of change, you know, the origin story of Airbnb is we were, broke jokes who had, right, the beginning of the rom-com, we were broke jokes. Not only did we not have a successful company, we didn't even have an idea. So like, we were the worst situation for an entrepreneur.

No money, no team, no idea, no respect, no reputation, no nothing, right? Even worse, wrong founding DNA. We were all designers. And the narrative was, you got to be an engineer to build a, you got to be a developer to build a tech company. And so, well, the moment of change. is basically they, I think they had no money. Like they didn't have enough money to pay rent or something like that.

So the moment of change is basically one of them had a crazy idea to be like, hey, what if we rent out our space here for this, there's a design conference in town. What if it create a like bed and breakfast for people who are coming? Because all the hotels are sold out. The bed and breakfast, we don't have a,

we don't have a hotel. And they're like, well, we can just put an air mattress here. And they laughed and they were like, whatever. then three people came, stayed, paid the money and had a great time. They're like, holy shit, this might be a thing. And then there's several holy shit moments, right? There's like,

we ran out of money again. So we did the Obama owes serial thing. They tell the story about when they were getting knocked off by the Samoa brothers of Rocket Internet. They were cloning their company and going to kill them. And he tells that story. It's like, we, you know, face this life or death moment. And then we had to make a decision. And we changed. We went from being scared to being like, we're going to compete with these guys. We're going to beat them. And that's the moment. That's what each of those micro stories is about.

The way I've learned this is you have what's called signature stories. So your signature stories are like the four or five stories that if I only could tell you these four or five, you would know everything there is to know really about me. So for example, your origin story. Like for you with write a passage, what's the origin story? Like I'm assuming you didn't just create this because life was good. You already were good at everything. And, you know, there must have been some moment where you were like, I got to do something here. Will you help me improve my origin? Yeah. Give me what it is right now. All right. So I worked this job at this New York advertising agency. And I was super intimidated by my boss. He's like 6'4, you know, big beer. He's just not like super welcoming guy. Super talented. And I wasn't doing super well in my job. And he sort of calls me into his office. And I was working on a pitch deck for, you know, McCarty. I was trying to be all impressive and stuff like that. And I wrote in the pitch deck that

the idea that we had was going to be epic. And he was like, yo, that is not a good word to be using. He said something to the effect of you're not in college anymore. We don't write like that here. And then through writing that sentence, he then started saying, hey, you really need to improve your writing. You're just not a good writer. And I was like, well, you know, I tried learning to write in school. I don't even like writing. My whole job is writing, and I got to get good at this. So that was in like November. Then we go through December. I get a raise. I'm like, oh my goodness, this is going to be great. Life's going well. Then January 5th, seven months out of college, I get laid off. And of course, in my head, I'm like, I got laid off because I'm not a good

writer. Uh-oh, I got to learn this crap, but I don't even like writing. But then I'm seeing all these people who are good at writing and they're just making moves on the internet and stuff. So I spend years, two, three years and I'm learning how to write. I start building an audience. And during that time, people reach out to me. They're like, hey, you're pretty good at this. Can you start teaching me how to do it? And I'm like, wait, I learned all these things on my own. I had to figure these things out at a desperation for how to learn how to write. Then that led into write a passage. And that's how the company got started. Okay, great. So let's workshop that. Cool.

All right. So let's go back to the origin. Let's do. So there's a beginning, middle, and end. Okay. Beginning, your start of your rom-com. You're working in a job. You're not, you said you're not doing so well.

Your boss kind of embarrasses you. And you end up getting laid off. Act one of the movie. I think to make that part, just to make that part better. So I think you have the element there. Act three is, you know, so we know, act one is going to be, don't like my job and my job doesn't like me. Even worse, my job doesn't like me, right?

second part is I'm not doing so well and I'm kind of embarrassed and I'm kind of intimidated by my boss. Great. Super relatable, super likable, all that. You have a moment where you got specifically embarrassed around the epic thing calling you like a college kid or whatever and you're like, okay, hopelessness. Max Payne got laid off. Cool. And I'm sure you had some feelings about that. Act three is now I get paid millions of dollars to teach people writing and I'm doing a podcast interviewing my writing heroes and they're like, dude, you're awesome.

I'm a big fan. Okay, great. So we have the element of an amazing story. How do we actually make it better? Yeah. So the first part is your act one, you didn't focus on the pain enough, the attention and the obstacle and the feelings you had at that time. So for example, you said, I wasn't doing too good at the time.

And then you're like, but then I got promoted or a raise. So I don't know what that is, right? You might not just leave the promotion of raise out. It doesn't really add to the story. Sort of confusing, conflicting messages, right? Never let the truth get in the way of a great story. Let's start with that. So why did you not think you were doing well?

The company was constantly trying to figure out what do we do with this person? I can't believe this happened, but he literally brought me into his office. And he goes, I need you to stop thinking like Jeff Bezos. And I was like, can you explain? He's like, do your job. You are a sales guy. Focus on that. I don't want you focus on the future of media and where that's going.

And so there's just a lot of tension there. And he and I never really got along that well. Right. So yeah, I think you want to I bet you, if you zoomed in, go back to the memory bank and you remember like any moments where you felt the opposite

of how you're going to feel at the end. At the end, you felt really proud and you've accomplished and you've overcome. But at the beginning, you probably felt embarrassed, you know, somewhat insecure, whatever.

So for example, if you were like, I, yeah, I remember there was this new guy that just got hired and I was training, I was like trying to like welcome him and train him a little bit. And then he got promoted before I did. And I was like, doing something wrong or, you know, at my performance review, I remember there's a category for

pros and he had like three words and then cons or whatever, like needs improvement was huge, right? A little anecdote like that I think will like make that more real of what was the moments where you said, if you said I wasn't doing so well that it really hit home for you, you know, something like that. Let me just wrap everything we've spoken about into what I'm gathering is it's the rom-com. I got my beginning. I got my end. I want to perfect yin yang between them. Okay. Then what I want is I want to build up to those five seconds of change. So I want one emotion lead up to that change. That is the moment of, of tension where something pivots. Then I get to the end. There is the opposite. And then what I want to do is

intention and outcome. Obstacle. Intention and obstacle. Thank you. So my intention is I want to be good. I want to be good at my job. I want to be valued. I want to be respected. Actually, I could even bring it into like, I want to be a worthy human being. And I'm in my first job and I'm like, dude, you have no skills. So I'm that. And I'm like, my job is about being a writer. And my boss thinks that I'm not very good. So not my obstacle. So that's sort of what I'm getting from you. Right. Yes. Exactly. You nailed it. Now let's go to the five second. Because what you said was basically some version of you were like, the beginning was pretty good. And the ending was pretty good. the middle you were like, so then I got laid off.

And so then I started thinking about, well, I want to improve my writing. Sounds like an arbitrary epiphany. Maybe there was a mentor that told you something or maybe you read something online that inspired you or maybe you had a long talk with yourself on a long walk one night. And you were like, you know what? Screw this, right? Probably a moment when you decided, actually, I'm going to get good at this. That's usually a very important part of every story.

It was like, what triggered the turnaround? So you want to know that. and then you want to explain that part. And then you basically were like, and then I got better and then everything was great. And it's like, whoa,

whoa, what do you fast forwarded the montage too fast? Like what triggered the turnaround? And then what did you actually go do? Not like in a long specifics, but like what's the first thing you started to do to get momentum? And then what was like maybe some resistance you felt that you overcame? Because like,

you know the Pixar rules for storytelling? I don't know if you see this. 22, yeah. The most important one. I don't know what the 22 say, but I remember one, which was something like the hero doesn't have to win.

The audience loves the hero because of the way they try. And that was really important to me. I was like, oh, that's right. Every underdog story is lovable because of how hard they try. And if somebody just tries something and immediately it works, that's not a very good story and you're not very like, you don't feel good for them. So you've got to say what you tried,

what resistance you felt, and then how you overcame that resistance, it doesn't have to be a long thing, but you want to make it feel real. And the last thing I'm kind of emphasizing to you that I think anybody can do in their storytelling is you're not saying what happened. You're zooming into moments to explain how you felt

with ideally some relatable, visual, or audio, like, moment. So it's like, I remember he said this to me and I'll never forget these three words. He said, you know, like whatever, some sentence. Or I remember looking around and, you know, there was nobody else there. Like Tony Robbins, I'm a big Tony Robbins fan. He does an amazing job telling his story.

He's like, I remember sitting in my apartment. I looked in the bathroom and I was doing, because I used to do dishes in the bathtub because my dishwasher didn't work. So I'd soap up the bathtub. All he's trying to say is I'm a loser. I was a loser. Now I'm super successful. Why?

Because I'm Tony Robbins and I figured it out. And you can too. But first he has to convince you that he used to be a loser. Otherwise, the whole Tony Robin's stick doesn't work. So he's like, how do I convince somebody I'm a loser? I could say that I wasn't doing too well, or I could say that I used to have to wash my dishes in a bathtub because that paints a picture of a loser.

He's like, I remember I was sitting. And he says, I was sit in my apartment and I didn't have any furniture because I didn't have any money. So I just had this one chair. Like, I didn't have a sofa. I had a hard chair that I used to sit on. He's like, it was just a chair. He's like, and I remember the song was playing that was like,

there's some song where he's like, I don't have a friend or something like that's only me in my chair. And he's like, dude, that's me. It's just me in the stupid chair. And he's like, so I went for a run. And he's like, even though I hadn't run in years, I was overweight, I went for a run. And even when my lungs were burning, I was like, no, you may be a loser at all things in life, but you're not going to lose this run.

And he tells the story. And it's kind of inspiring when you're hearing this. And he's just zoomed into one moment that's visual, that's audio, that's a feeling. And he's convinced you of that before state so that the after has some impact. The two things that I'm getting there is, first, you can tell a story. A story is not a record of what happened. Absolutely. It is not you saying, this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened.

It is almost this. It's a transformation. It's a, oh, interesting. The story is just a change. The world was one way, and then it was another way. I was one way, and then I was another way. My company was failing, and then it was succeeding. All the story is is just change.

You only want to include the what happened so much as it explains how that change came to be. Yeah, it's not. is just a timeline of events. And then you're also really queuing into emotion. Yeah. How about? That's what like people respond to, you know. Like in my writing course, I used to teach, I used to teach this one thing that I was like,

you know, you want to work backwards from the, from the emotion. I learned this from a guy who used to be my, I don't know, intern or something like that. We hired him when he was 20 years old Steve Bartlett. Today, a lot of people know Steve Bartlett. He's got a big podcast called Diary. was CEO. He's built a company. He's done a bunch of things. He's on Dragon's Den. Like, he's a famous guy now. I met Steve when I was 20. When he was 20, I was 25 maybe. And he flew from the UK. He lived in our office, like, slept in our office. And he wanted to work with us.

And we worked together for, I don't know, nine months or a year or something like that. And Steve was awesome in a bunch of ways. And he was obviously just like a 21 year old and a bunch of other ways. But the awesome thing I remember was he was like, he told me something. He goes, I just think about what is Jenny in her bedroom going to think when she sees this. I go, who's Jenny? Who's Jenny? What are we talking about? He's like, oh, like, if we're making a piece of content that's going to go on social media, social media is Jenny in her bed laying down, just scrolling, just swiping. And she's like, basically, this has to make Jenny and Jenny, like, stop, think something and share this with their friends. Otherwise, it's going nowhere. There was

no point in writing this thing or doing this thing because it created no reaction from the person. They're just going to keep swiping. The world is full of infinite content. We only stop at things that we have some reaction to. And so I stored that away. And then I heard the same idea from another person. This is how you know a good idea. The BuzzFeed guy goes, everything we do at BuzzFeed is about Debbie at her desk. I'm like, Jenny in her bedroom, Debbie at her desk. It's going on here. He goes, he goes, the most powerful network in the world is the board at work network. He goes all when BuzzFeed was like growing like crazy at the time. He's like BuzzFeed basically taps into if someone's bored at work and they just want to like, you know,

have a distraction for five minutes, we want to make a piece of content that will distract them and get them to forward it to a bunch of other people who are also bored at work. Right. And that's the whole network is the board at work network. All right. Second time I heard the idea. Then I heard the idea a third time. This Greg, Chris Quigley, he ran an advertising agency that would make videos go viral.

And at the time, I was like, going viral is like a lottery ticket. Like, how do you do a viral video? I don't know. It's just like something amazing must happen. So I go, what's your hit rate on virality? Like one out of 100, two out of 100? He goes, no, like eight out of 10. I go eight out of 10.

And he's like, yeah, look, he showed me their views. And I was like, how do you do this? And he's like, well, you know, over time, the more viral videos you make, you have like a base of an audience. But he's like, that just gets you like some people will see it. But how viral goes is how much they share it. He goes, so what we do is we work backwards from an emotion. He goes, the only things people will share is things that are L-O-L-W-T-F, OMG, AWW, like all the acronyms for all the emotions. So like, oh my God. Wow. Like ha ha ha ha.

Like if it doesn't do that, nobody will share it. So he goes, we first start with this is the desired reaction we have. Then we'll write a script or write a, write a blog post or whatever. And then we'll go check. Do we think that's going to create this reaction somebody? No. All right. Let's juice it up. How do we make it more funny? How do we make it more outrageous? How do we make it more endearing and heartwarming? Like whatever those are. And, uh, So once I heard that three times, I was like, okay, I get it. I need to create a reaction out of the average person just in their bedroom or at their desk. And I need to start with the emotion my target emotion and then work backwards from that. Write the thing that will create that emotion. Yeah, it's funny because when you write, you're like, okay, I'm publishing this on the internet, a bunch of people are going to read it, you know, get a big audience. And so you think of, hey, there's all these people. But actually, you're just writing to Debbie in her bedroom or salient her desk, you know, and people consume your content alone. And when you're writing,

you are writing to one person in one place at one moment in time. And you have to remember that because the nature of the connection that you're trying to make is different. And to double down on that idea in a lot of our media environment, especially with a platform like Twitter, when you scroll Twitter, like you're on the throne, you're on the bus, you're waiting in line, you're, you know, your friends seven minutes late. You're like, come on, where are the car? You're on. trying to, reservations coming up, and you're just sort of browse and browse and browse and your brain's only like halfway on. And if you can really first understand your own state when you're in that environment and then write to the person who's in that state, now you have a

very keen sense of who is this person and you're writing for one person, even though if you're looking, you're saying, hey, 119,000 impressions, those are not 119,000 people at once, like a football game. There are 119,000 individual people at 119,000 individual instances in time. And if you think like that, you communicate very differently. Yes, perfectly said, you're writing to one person at one moment in time. That's, I think, a very good point. And the other thing that this reminded me of is, do you know this person miss Excel? Have you seen this person? Yeah, yeah. So she, for anybody who doesn't know, she's basically like an Excel influencer, for lack of a better word. She basically teaches people Excel tricks, but the reason she got popular is she went on TikTok.

She started dancing while like putting an Excel trick on the screen or a tip on the screen. Weird combo, but it works. I was reading some interview with her and they were like, how do you create your content? Like what's your process? I was like, I'm curious what her process is. And she goes, I don't, she's like, it's kind of weird. She's like, most people, if you say, what's the process? And they're like consistency, like wake up at a certain time, start right away, you got to write every day, you've got to post in a certain time, you got to do all these things. She's like, I don't do any of that. She goes, I literally first, like just changed my own energy.

She's like, I work. She's like, I'm kind of woo-woo-woo-wooed in that way. But like I basically get myself into a peak state of mind. Like I get myself into a certain mood and a certain state of mind where I feel magnetic. I feel charismatic. I feel it's just like it's like it's like a, it's like a science called energetics. She's like, I work on my energy and two things happen. ideas start coming to me much faster than if I sat down and said, what are some ideas?

I need to post some content today. And so she's like, I just work myself to say, I let ideas come to me. An idea will hit. And as soon as it hits, she's like, I run to my phone, hit record and I just do it. She goes because I believe all content is just energy transfer through the phone. It's my energy shifting to you, my emotion that I have, how I feel about this. If I feel excited about this insight that I have or excited about this tip that I have, I want to get you excited about that tip too.

And the best way to do that is for me to be there first. And I think this is a very underrated thing for writers because most writers, they're not performers. All performers know this. No athlete goes on the field without being warmed up and being hiked up. No stage performer goes on stage just kind of cold and low energy. But almost every writer starts cold and low energy and just sits there somewhat miserably. And there's even some weird glory from like,

this like, I don't know, this like pain, that's martyrship of like how you need to be as a writer. I think that's all stupid. I think it's very similar to performing in any other way. I think you should get yourself in a great state of mind and then have that energy and then sit down and write and let it flow and let that energy rip through you. So that the other person who reads it is going to feel the same excitement you have about the insight or feel the same excitement you have about this plan or whatever it is. You know, you want that to come with it. And a lot of times when people write, they have this idea, they're away from the computer, like they're at the bar with their friends, they're on a walk with somebody else, they're at Thanksgiving

dinner, they're like, man, you know, Auntie Diana, she has no idea what's going on in the world. That woman was crazy and you're so annoyed at like 11 p.m. at Thanksgiving. And then you try to write like three days later. And the problem is they're not capturing the energy that Miss Excel is capturing before she does the videos. And people end up writing in such a sober state that their writing ends up being boring and sterile. 100%. The thing I said at the beginning of this podcast where it was like,

I look for things that I think are important that other people don't practice, overlook, or be too embarrassed to say they're working on. This is an exact example of them, of one of those. Nobody wants to work on their like state, their energy.

They don't want, you know, Ms. Excel does. She's like, I'm going to make myself magnetic before I make content. Well,

I like that. I don't even know what that means. That sounds provocative, right? Like, okay, it's better than whatever the hell I'm feeling. And when I sit down to write, okay, that's a new standard for me. I'm going to do that. And so I think most people would probably in their heart believe that this is true,

that if you kind of got your energy right before you did the thing, it'll probably turn out better, nobody's going to do it, which is the best part. It's the arbitrage. It's how a less talented person like me could do really well. Wait, so hold on here. Now have the broadcast. So like what should I do next time I sit down to write? How does this actually work?

Where am I going to dance? Do some jumping jacks? We do it actually. Exactly. That's exactly right. So state change is three things. Number one, radical change in your physiology. So you can sprint.

You can do push-ups. You can dance. You can do 20 air squats. You can dump your face into cold water. Whatever it is, it's the fastest way to change how you feel is a radical change in your physiology. So first thing. So do that. That's the very first thing.

I have a friend who's a professional poker player. He does the same thing. He goes during poker players are like notoriously degenerates. Like you're literally sitting there in a casino, which is like the worst air-pumped-in environment. There's no windows. And you're around other degenerates all day. People are smoking. It's bad.

He's like a monk. And he, during a tournament in the breaks, he goes in the parking lot and he does wind sprints. He's not doing it to be a better runner. He's not doing it to increase his V-O-2 max. He's doing it because he wants to make a better decision when he gets back to the table. He knows he makes better decision than when he changes the state. And that's part of his edge is why he's been a European, like, you know, poker champion. a tour champion

several years. So, first thing is a change in your state. The second thing is a change in your focus. So what do you even focus on? Like,

you know, the way I imagine is I have this laser beam of focus. I don't know if this is true, but it's what I've convinced myself, which is if I just turn my attention to this, I will crush this. This will be amazing.

If I put 100% of my focus on this podcast right now, oh, this podcast didn't stand a chance. And the only limit to me is just where I'm, pointing the beam. And if I'm trying to point it in five different places or whatever, that's going to be a problem. This also works with like, if you have to write something and there's a deadline, if your focus is on the deadline, it's the wrong place to focus. If your focus

on, you know, how hard it is for you to do something, if you're focused on how hard it is, it's not a good place to focus. You need to focus on the thing you want. So, you know, don't focus on the wall where you're like trying not to crash, like turn, right? It's a focus on where you're turning. And then the last one is basically your story. So what's the story you tell yourself. We all have some story that we tell ourselves. And if you improve the story, you'll change the state of mind that you have. So if I go into the story, if I go into this podcast right now, and my story is, I'm just doing a favor to David. I'm just doing this. Oh, man, like, you know, I had to drive an hour to come here. And, you know, this means I'm not going to be

able to do this thing. And that's the wrong story. Obviously, I'm not going to perform very well. I'm not going to be at a peak state. Whereas if my story was, there's going to be someone who was this one person, one person who's listening to this podcast. And they're going to hear one thing that I say, one story, and they're going to be like, wow, I can't unhear that. That was amazing. And that person was going to go on to do amazing things. So they're going to write me a letter one day and be like, dude, that podcast you did,

change my life. I'm going to approach this podcast differently, right? The different words will come out of my mouth if my story about what's happening is different. So similarly, if you want to basically change your state, physiology first, focus, second, story third. Nice. One of the moments I had around story that I thought was really revealing was I worked with a coach and we were talking about my writing and I was in a slump. I was down. And what's a writing slope? What does I mean? I just wasn't, I wasn't feeling it. And I just wasn't proud of the stuff that I was doing. And I couldn't get inspired. And he said, well,

what is it that you want? And I said, well, you know, I used to write these, these pieces, these long-form pieces that I was really proud of. You know what I want? I want to be a creative force. I want to be a creative force. That's what I'm going for. And I sit down to write. I'm like, I want to be a creative force. That's what I'm all about. And it's like, hold on, hold on, hold on, stop the train. You said you used to be a good writer and you would get in a great flow. what did you do back then that you don't do now? I was like, huh, actually is pretty simple. I find an idea that was interesting.

I would try to figure out that idea for myself, and then I'd figure out for myself, and I'd say, well, then I've got to share this with other people, and I just do that over and over and over again, and I never stopped. That's all I did, and that's all I focused on. He's like, hold on. What you're saying is now you're focused.

on being a creative force, that's your story. That's not working for you. Let's get back to finding an interesting idea, not judging the interestingness, figuring it out for yourself, and then sharing it with others. Ever since that, no more slump. Right.

All that was was a change in my story. Yes, amazing. That's amazing. And I think, you know, the other part of what you said there, which is letting curiosity be the guide, the driver, sounds very simple, but all great.

ideas are actually quite simple. It's the beauty of them. You know, there's a, I think there's a profound benefit of revisiting simple ideas and then saying, am I doing those? I don't look for new ideas as much as I look for ideas I've already heard that I haven't fully actualized yet. And, you know, that's one. You've read like Paul Graham wrote this essay, great work. I assume you've read that one. Yeah. I recently, I read it two nights ago. So good for the first time. He wrote like a year ago and it was like 13,000 words. Sounds like I'm not doing it. I guess it's too long. Well, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So I'm ready to, I'm thinking about what I want to work on right now. How do I want to do this? And I went back to that. And in that, he has this great

line. He goes, if I had to boil down all great work into one one word, it would be curiosity. And he says another thing, which is curiosity drives a level of excitement. It goes, an excitement. Excitement is really a great indicator. He goes, excitement is the engine and the rudder the boat. It's the engine and that excitement is motivating. It's a driver to get you to go do things, but it's also the rudder. It also can point you in the right direction. If you don't know which path to choose, just choose the one that's most exciting. Just keep following that. And that will lead you to the right place. It's excitement is the engine and the rudder. I think is a really powerful idea. And every time I've drifted away from that, like you did, like I start with that,

good things happen. And then I'm like, ooh, now ambition is the driver or doing it. something that sounds cool or important or money is the driver. And then like all the bad things happen. And I'm like, why aren't these working? And it's like, well, because you stopped doing the working formula, which was leading to all these great things because you thought you needed to like, you thought you needed to do something different. And so many people are like, oh, I hate writing. And most of the time, it's that they associate writing with doing things that they don't want to do. And then when they think about, well, it's time to write, they subconsciously, don't allow them to write about the thing that they're the most curious about or excited to write about.

Because in school, that's not what you get to do. No one's excited about the average school paper, maybe one or two things, but people just aren't trained to think like that. One of the things that I need to reconcile with you and try to sort of figure out, because I've got two Sean ideas, and we need to figure out how they sort of come together, is this line that you have, if you're in your head, you're dead. Love that line. So good. At the same time, you are always deconstructing things. You have, you find something that you like, and you're like, hold on, what's going on here? Let me try to break it down.

Okay, I'm actually going to go check out this book, go talk to this expert, try to figure out what's going on. So how is it that you are deconstructing, thinking, being fairly analytical, but at the same time, not getting in your head, those things feel like polar opposites to me. Yeah, two things. One, I read something yesterday, this is like mini book online. And that was called, I think it's called like a technique for, a technique for coming up with new ideas. It's like some old book. And in it, it said this thing. He goes, the most valuable traits you can have sound like opposites when, you know, if you pair them together.

So he goes, you know, imagine an entrepreneur who is both visionary and detail oriented. That's a, that's a Steve Jobs, for example. Like Steve Jobs is famous for being a visionary. He doesn't ask the consumer what they want. They just want faster horses. You know, they want a car actually, right? That's how he'd advance the iPhone and it figures out what to do.

But he's insanely detail oriented where he's like, what is the inside of the box look like? And they're like, dude, Steve, nobody's going to look at this. He's like, I'm going to look at this. I will know what's inside the box. It needs to be beautiful at that level of detail, pixel level detail. Same thing for all things, right? I consider myself a creative person.

I'm also highly analytical with data. sounds like opposites. And so there are many things where the exact opposite, if paired together, creates a like one plus one equals three type of reaction. And they're often presented as false choices. You're either this type of person or you're this type of person. Screw that.

Be the type person you want, which sometimes means having both gears and knowing when to go into which gear. When do I need to be creative? When do I need to be analytical? When do I need to be hard-charging entrepreneur? when I need to be silly, playful dad, you know, paint my nails, whatever, right? Like, I have to have these gears to have the life I want. Similarly, you want to be in your head at the times it makes sense to be in your head.

The brain is a valuable tool. It just cannot be the master. So, you know, I need to be in my head when it's about, maybe it's analysis. Maybe it's, oh, I'm feeling fear. I need to actually use logic and ask myself, is this fear even true? And what's the probability of that? And if that happened, how would I handle it? I guess I would just do this.

I guess it's not so scary after all. So usually if the problem is emotion, you can solve it with emotion. If the problem is logic, you can solve it with logic. And so I try to use them at the right times. If you're in your head, you're dead is basically a, it's more of a life philosophy than it is a work philosophy, which is people who kind of go around life not feeling a whole lot and not being present in the moment, they're in their head about stuff. They're missing life.

And that's a problem, more so than done a writing tactic. Have you ever seen that advice from Ray Bradbury where he says, don't think? You ever seen this? So I heard that what you said here. And it immediately reminded me. He says, I've assigned and my typewriter says don't think. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. He's like, I'm trying to surprise myself at the keyboard.

And the only way to surprise myself is once I'm in my head, I can't do that. And I think that a lot of writing a first draft is like this. You're trying to get outside of that part of your brain that judges, that condemns, that says, no, no, no, it's not good enough. And just put stuff onto the page and you know that you're doing it well when what you're doing is like, whoa, where did that come from? Where did that come from? Where did that come from? And then the question is, how do you engineer yourself to do that? Like for me, if I'm sitting and typing, can't do it. Like, my ideas, that for me is where I do editing. The thing that was game changing for me was voice transcription getting really good because now I can stand and talk.

Talk and walk. Go outside. Walk and talk. Just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Half of Austin definitely thinks I'm some sort of like crazy psychopath kind of guy.

But you know what? It's made my writing better. And a bunch of people I work with, they're like, how do you just bang out first draft so fast? I'm like, because I don't sit and type like everybody else does. I just go for a walk.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think you need to figure out a way to engineer that for yourself so you can consistently have it. I think everybody's got to do. different version of how to do it. What you said reminded me of something, though, you go, you're talking about Ray Bradford, don't think.

I think this is a very useful troubleshooting tool. So, when you're stuck, many ways to get unstuck. And one way to get unstuck, like I said, radical change and something physical you do. I mean, that's a good tactic. Music is a good way to get unstuck, too. But in general, a philosophy for how to get unstuck is if you're stuck in the specifics, go

general, meaning if you're stuck in the logistics of how something is going to happen, it's not quite adding up. What you've got to do is not just keep trying to do this. You can just zoom right out. Go super general. All right, super general. What am I trying to do here? I'm trying to do this. Super general. If I had all the superpowers in the world, how would I do this? Right? Super general is just like, you know, who's somebody who's done this before? Or super general. Okay, I don't know exactly what type of thing I want to write. What inspires me, right? The way to get out of these sometimes is to go general, to go, and so even if, like, don't think it's hard because it's very hard to turn off the brain, but it's not so hard to redirect the brain. And so redirecting it, I think, is a useful tool. You can redirect it towards, I'm going to go rock climbing, I'll go exercise. I'll take my brain off of it. It can also be, I'm stuck in the muck here and I need to just zoom out and that's it. Or if I'm stuck in the general, so, for example, sometimes I'm stuck in the general. Like, what do I want to be in life? And like, you know, what I want to do and who am I and all this stuff? Specific. What's the, Like, what's the best idea you heard in the last two days?

Like, if you were going to write about that, what would it be? Or, like, what's the most interesting phone call I've had? You know, then you go specific because you're stuck in the general. So it's a very useful thing to do is just like to get unstuck. No, if you're stuck in the specifics, go general. If you're stuck in the general, go specific. And you'll redirect the brain. I want to switch over to talk about voice.

You're really good at putting your voice onto the page. And you do something very specific. that I'm not sure how consciously you do this, but you're so good at getting inside the head of a reader to understand, all right, how are they feeling about this at the moment? And basically, you said it earlier, breaking the fourth wall. And then by doing that building trust and connection, and then it creates this friendly casualness as if we're having a conversation that, my goodness, that is levels away from what most writers are able to do. Have you ever read the boron letters?

years ago. Okay, so this is must read. Yeah, copywriting. Copywriting. I'm surprised you don't have them like printed out of your pocket. They're that good. So the boron letters are this amazing thing by this like kind of renowned copywriter, Gary Halpert, I think, writing to his son. And he's in jail. So the writer is now in jail and he's writing to his son, Bond, I think, is his name. And so it's like a series of 23 letters. And I put, but they're hard to find too. It's really annoying. There's like one blog. So I put it, I hosted them on my blog now, um,

because I was like, this is crazy that he's so valuable and so hard to find. So anyways, um, he posted the, he wrote these letters and he just wrote it again to one person. He's like, I'm writing to my son. But obviously these were kind of like general principles of life and copywriting and marketing and he's teaching. He's trying to teach him everything he knows. But the, but because of the way he wrote it with such a casual like, like, like warm relationship. He's not even just writing to one person. He's writing to his son. And because he's ready to his son, he's like, and this dear bond is where things get interesting. Or he's like, you're probably wondering, dad, why do you say this? We're going to get to that. But first, a little

detour. And he just started writing so differently that I was like, ooh, I like this style. This is just like has a swag to it that is just like appealing to me. So I started stealing that basically. I was like, oh, I'm going to write like that. I'm going to write like I'm writing to one person. And that one person is like my little young grasshopper. It's like, this is my kid or it's my, my little cousin, or it's me when I was younger. It's like, I know what you're thinking, blah, blah, blah, blah. But mama me, you're wrong, right?

And I'll just like try to like, try to just make it fun and interesting as if it's written to one, one person that has like a warm relationship, somebody that's kind of like, I want to be the sensei. And that's how I write in those where it's like a master teacher relationship. And other times it's the opposite. It's, I'm the beginner. And I know that other people are more, more, knowledgeable about this and I'll be like and I just will be open about that I'll be like so being

the idiot that I am I'm going to I decided I was going to do these three things I knew there's probably a better way to do this you probably know four for four better ways yourself you're probably staring at now wondering how can this guy be so dumb well the answer is blah blah blah right and I'll try to say it like that because I'm just trying to make it where I'm trying to imagine what is the reader thinking at this what would I think if I was them and then I try to address that in the moment because it's very frustrating to me when like imagine if you ask somebody this question you're like how did you do it and they're like I just did this and you're listening to a podcast and then that podcast host doesn't ask them like wait wait wait what do you mean it just worked

like how or what do you mean he gave you a million dollars why did he give you a million dollars right like it's the most frustrating experience in the world when that doesn't get addressed so in writing I try to do that too like I try to just call out the thing I would be wondering about or I would be skeptical of or I would be excited about in that moment. I just try to include it in the dialogue. One of the things that we talk about all the time and read a passage, one of my core principles, is imitate and then innovate. And it's exactly what you did there. So I asked you a question and you said, okay, have you ever heard of this thing? Well, Gary Halbert does this very well. And then what you did was you deconstructed exactly how he does it. And then you said,

you found a general principle of his work. So you said, he's not just writing for one person. He's writing to his son. And then the implications of that are this, this, this, and this. And the roadmap that you took to give me that answer, I think is very revealing of how you think about writing, where you start somewhere, you deconstruct, and then you say, how does that show up in my own world? And then you try to build up a generalizable principle that then you can use for your toolkit whenever you're typing yourself. Yes, that's exactly right. I think that is a great thing for anybody to try to do. If you want to get better at something,

that's the way. Yeah. By the way, I randomly just thought of the best example of framing from way earlier while you were talking, which is kind of how the brain works. The brain relaxes it and something comes to it.

Have you seen the Dave Chappelle thing called Unforgiven? Have you seen this on YouTube? No. All right. So do you remember a while back, Dave Chappelle was in a feud with, I think it was Netflix. And he was like,

the Chappelle show was put on Netflix and he wasn't getting any royalties. So like it's his name, it's his face, it's all his life's work. And not only was he not getting paid for it, he had had a big falling out with the creators of the Chappelle show where like he ended up quitting. Right when they, the story what the time was, they offered him $50 million. He said no and he went to Africa and became a crackhead instead. That was like the rumor. It's like, if Chappelle's a crackhead now and he's in Africa.

And it was like, and later he was like, no, I just said no. Why don't have to be a crackhead in Africa? I went home. Like, what are you talking about? So anyways, here's the objective. His objective was he wanted people to boycott the show. How do you get people to boycott the show? You got to, if you want to drive people to take action,

you've got to be smart with how you're going to, like, how you're going to persuade them through the written word or in his case, he wrote it first and then he performed it on stage. And what he did was instead of talking about Netflix or talking about his show or saying, go boycott my show, please. He started a, he, he, He reframed the problem in a totally different way that I thought was brilliant. He just changed the frame completely.

So he tells the story. He goes, I remember I was 14 years old. First time I ever did comedy, I was 14 years old, I go to this comedy club. And I tell this joke, and he's like, I'm going to admit it. I was good right away. Comedy came naturally to me. I'm not one of those people who was like, it took me a decade. He's like, honestly, I was good and I was 14, 15 years old, I think.

And he's like, I was underage, but I was good. And he's like, I came backstage and there's a guy who's been doing this for 20 years. And they were like, hey, kid, you did pretty good, man. That was good. And he was like, one guy came to me. It was like, hey, man, I like that joke. I had this big audition coming up for this TV show or something like for this other thing. You mind if I use that joke?

And he's like, even as a kid, I'm 15, this guy's, you know, bigger, older. I looked up to this guy. He's like, I didn't want to do it because I was like, my joke's all I got. I got no money. All I have is a comedian is my jokes. he's like but this guy was kind of asking I felt uncomfortable he said he just needed it for this audition so I was like all right man like sure you could use the joke for the audition the guy's like all right cool he's like several months later I go to the club I'm about to perform

that guy's before me he tells me he tells me he's like I was pissed and he's like I didn't know what to do he's like afterwards I went up to the guy again I'm a 15 year old kid I'm like basically it as I'm this powerless kid and this guy's taking advantage of me And he goes, I told him, I was like, hey, man, you said you were just going to use it for that thing. Like, I don't want, I want my joke back. And I think maybe you had to give him a hundred bucks or something like that. And the guy's like, the guy kind of roughed him up. He grabbed him.

And he was like, I was just asking to be nice. You know, I could just take it. And he's like, I have scared. I didn't know what to do. And I let that guy take my joke. Okay, so that's, he's like, I'm going to tell you another story. He tells a story about later on, he's in New York. and he's like, I got a date with this Jamaican girl.

He's like, fine girl. Yeah, banging on. I couldn't wait to go on this date. But I didn't have any money. I'm still a struggling comedian. But now I'm older. I'm 22, 24, something like that. He's like, and I walk around New York and I see these guys doing like that three card money

where they like, you know, that game. And I'm watching it. And a guy puts down 100 bucks moves the thing around. I know it's over here. He guesses the wrong one. He loses. He shows it's over there. Next guy goes, same thing puts down 20 bucks.

I know it's over there. He picks over here. He loses. I'm like, God, I could do this. So I step up. I put all $100 down. I say, I'm going to double this. That I'll take my girl out tonight.

I know the ball's over here. I say that one. Ball's over there. He's like, what the hell just happened? He's like, I was pissed. I lost $100. I had this date tonight. He's like, so I stuck around and I watched.

And I realized those tourists, they didn't leave. They were still here. And they did it again. He's like, oh, they hustled me. Like, those guys are in. on it together. They pretended not to know where it was. And I was the mark who came up and said, oh, I figured this out. They got me. And then somebody else came up. And they were about to make the same mistake. And I told him, don't do it. They're all in on it. And the guy goes, oh, okay.

And he leaves. He's like, the guy ruffs him up again. And he goes, hey man, he goes, I don't care what you think. He's like, never get between a man and his next meal. He's like, you just took money out of my pocket. This is my job. This is my livelihood. This is my livelihood. and taking away a man's livelihood is the equivalent of killing him. Well, he tells him that. Okay, cool. Then he finally gets to the Netflix story. And he basically weaves together the parts from before.

He's like, they didn't ask me if they could put it on Netflix. They didn't ask me to, basically like, they didn't ask for anything. They just took my name, took my face, took all my content. They just took it. He's like, and then the second thing was the people would say, well, you signed the contract, Dave. He's like, I was a 21-year-old kid, hired lawyers to read these contracts. They told me everything I said, hey, you can use this forever in perpetuity in all parts of the universe. And they're like, it's standard Dave.

Don't worry about it. This is standard Hollywood stuff. Don't worry about it. So he's like, so I signed it. Later on, I realize those guys all go out to dinner every week. The lawyers on my side, their side, they're all in on it. This is just like the three card money. That's how Hollywood is.

I was the mark. So yeah, I signed it. But whatever. And he got the whole audience on his side by like making this argument, by using these two stories. I think it is the most brilliant, like, example of PR or like a written story that I've ever seen. The way, by the end of that thing, you're like, I will delete Netflix if they don't take the show off. And it's exactly what happened. People saw that, that video on YouTube.

It went super viral because it was so well done. People boycott in Netflix. They took it off. And Netflix said, we don't have to do this day, but we voluntarily will do this. Like, we were also moved by your story. We're not going to put special up there unless you say, we can do it. Even though contractually we have the rights to do whatever we want, we're going to honor the non-contract here. I thought that was the power of like, you know, reframing not like,

oh, I'm getting screwed. I want money to like a more universal, you know, you're getting picked on by the man. You're getting screwed by people who are all in on it. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. That's yes. You just go watch this thing. It's amazing. Yeah. I want to talk about distribution. So one of the things that we're working on at Reda Passage is what I want to figure out is I want to figure out how to take anybody, people who don't write all the time, don't really have an audience, they've just published something really good. Like say that you are an absolute expert in like the distribution of San Pellegrino waters from like the little town in Italy, how they, where they package it, you know, what's the story of the label, all that sort of stuff.

And you are like, this is how the sparkling water boom came. And I'm going to tell the story of how it begins in a little town in Italy with San Pellegrino water. Okay. And, You have this expert. He and she never written online. They write something. It's awesome. And I want to help them distribute it. They come to me and they say, what do I do?

How should I talk them through that? I think distribution is built over time. I don't think that's something you can do from day one, right? Like it's kind of back to that 100 videos thing from earlier. If you're going to write online, there is sort of a beachhead moment. You have to create. You have to create a trusted audience over time, and you have to know that the distribution is earned.

Why distribution is so valuable because it's hard to replicate. So, for example, my buddy Jason used to say this thing. He goes, oh, I have the one, two, three rule of interestingness. What does that mean? He goes, tell me one thing that's interesting. Right? You tell me one thing that's interesting about San Pelagino. I'll say, that's interesting.

Tell me two things that's interesting. I'm like, those were interesting. That's two interesting things. You tell me three interesting things. I'll say, you're interesting. And this is just like a general philosophy I think you should have with writing. It's like you don't deserve that like trusted follow or relationship. I tell you, and three is a small number.

Really on the internet might be like 20 things. Like you might have to tell somebody 20 interesting things before they're like, this guy is interesting. I can't wait to get his next one. And you just have to build that up. Like you have to build, you have to consistently be telling somebody something interesting multiple times for you to earn that,

that, you know, channel between them where they're now going to be receiving your content or they'll be willing to vouch for you and spread you to another person not just on the merits of the one thing but because you are interesting and you consistently share interesting things and then when groups of people think you're interesting it's even more powerful right because then another person comes in and just says oh everybody thinks this guy's interesting cool i'll follow right like which is why the more twitter followers you get the more you're going to get right and it's actually not a bug people get mad about that like the rich get richer um it's not a bad thing it's actually

a useful mental shortcut. The people who have earned a following are probably likely worth following, with some exceptions, but it is a useful hack versus I have to individually vet every account to figure out who I want to follow. That's the slow way. Like I'm going to follow the people that other people follow. That is, it sounds just like, oh, you're just being a, it's part of the herd mentality or group think or whatever.

But there's a reason it exists. There's like an evolutionary advantage to doing it too, which saves you a lot of time of having to individually vet every person. So I would say to that person who wants that distribution, it's cool. That's one interesting thing. Let's do 20. And, you know, start with your friends, start with your friends and families, start with some group chats, start with some, you know, maybe you have to push the wheel a little bit,

you know, send it to some people who might find that interesting that you know of with a personalized message of why you think they might find that interesting. Yeah, you're going to have to do some of that hustle at the beginning to get to get the word out. But you should also not like have some expectations that just because you said one interesting thing, it deserves to be, you know, spread everywhere. This is not really how it works. Right. On Twitter itself, you have built a huge audience without writing that many things.

And you've had a few things that have just absolutely cranked. What do you think that you understand about that platform and communicating there that other people are missing? Well, I'll say this. I think what I did worked on Twitter. So basically, I remember I was at 20,000 followers. which is a lot in general, but I was like, I'm going to get to 100. Now I'm at 400. So I'm like, oh, I way overshot that goal.

400,000 followers. But most, I'd say the generic best practices, be consistent and define what your niche is and then talk about stuff in that niche. I don't really do that. So I would say I defy that, but I don't think that's what helped. I think I almost won in spite of doing that. I think if I had been more consistent and I had defined my niche, I would be at a million followers instead of 400,000.

So let me put that out there. Even though I didn't follow the best practices, I don't think the right takeaway is those are the wrong. I think the right takeaway is it would have been even bigger had I followed those. The one thing I did get right was I knew when everybody's attention was on a certain subject, I had an interesting take. It's not my writing so much as it is the thinking. I'm sure. I haven't listed all your interviews, but I am sure one of the most common themes is that great writing is just great thinking.

clear writing is just clear thinking. Writing helps you think better and better thinking helps you write better. They're so tightly intertwined that the unhelpful but true advice is I think I had an interesting thought to say and I said it at the right time when people were paying attention to that subject.

And then thirdly, I wrote it in an interesting way that helped the spread of it. I wrote some thread about the metaverse that went super viral and I don't think it's because of how I wrote it. I think it's because the thought in it was genuinely a good thought. Like I remember at the time, Facebook could just rebranded to meta.

And Zuck went on Lowell X Friedman podcast. I was like, yeah, I read this really interesting thing on Twitter, blah, blah. It's like, he wasn't saying it because my prose was great or my grammar was great or my hook was great. He read it because he thought the core idea, underlying idea was unique and interesting. And I think that's more what to strive for is like you're building up these two skill sets, having unique and interesting things to say, being good at packaging ideas. two distinct skill sets, you can't do only one and not the other, or it'll reveal itself to be pretty shallow. If you just have interesting things to say, have crappy packaging, you don't get very far.

If you have great packaging, but mundane things to say, people get very fatigued of it. It doesn't really work. One of the ways that I like to judge a writer is like, if I, like, as a measure when I read their stuff, is like, how good is this person at building a connection with their readers? So some writers, like, let's take chat GPT. Chat Chbitty is like a zero, right? It can be super informative, right? It's, you learn a lot, but you're not actually building any sort of emotional connection.

Same thing with Wikipedia, right? And then there's other people like you. I think this is something that you're very intentional about. And I think that for the average word that you have, there is like a real connection that is built. And I think that you're really focused on that because of your goals as a creator. and how do you go about doing that writing so that it's not going to be just this one and done but so there's actually going to be like a glue

of like, Sean, like, I like this guy, want to consume his stuff. And actually, I want to consume stuff every single day. When you say connection, what do you mean by that? You mean trust. Do you mean likeability? What do you mean? I think what I mean is an indispensability

from that creator. So I did the lamest thing ever once. I hired a consultant who was an expert at personal branding. I pay this guy, five grand. That feels like, almost feels like you're not even being serious. I framed it as the lamest thing ever. I'm aware how lame it was.

And it's not like I was like, oh, I want to change my image or whatever, but I was like, well, truth be told, if I am a creator, that means I am kind of an individual brand. Okay, so what? And this person, worked with all these people. So I was like, all right, let's do this. It goes back to the theme of what is something that is super important. What's something that's valuable that other people either overlook or actually would be embarrassed to do. Totally. And your boy's not embarrassed. So I'll do it. Right. Right. So I hire this guy. And I said out and we talk and I'm like, okay, I learned a bunch

of things from them. One of the things you taught me that you guys, people will follow you to the ends of the earth if you are giving them a feeling that they can't get anywhere else more consistently than anybody else is going to give it to them. So what does that mean? He basically was like, think of yourself as a little Shopify store and your only skew, you're a merchant. Got them. Your merchant, your only skew is basically one, how somebody feels after they consume your content. So for example, I used to love Ted, Ted back of the TED Talks. I remember TED Talks used to be the shit. They were so good. People make fun of them or whatever.

2014. Yeah, like 2012, 2014. Ted Talks were the shit. And or even before that, I was in college with the miracle. So why do I like a TED Talk? Even the sound, the music of the, the whoosh out of a TED Talk or the intro sought the sound. The way that it looked, it was like this like training, like Pavlovian training of like, you're going to hear one really cool idea in 18 minutes.

and you're going to walk away feeling inspired. Inspired about the world in some way. Inspired to either go do something, inspired that the world is improving in some way, inspired to make a change, whatever. And Ted is a merchant of inspiration. And so I thought about that. I was like, oh, yeah, that's right.

I listen to these comedy podcasts. Why? Because I get this feeling that I'm hanging out with my, like, my friends, my funny friends, but like, they're not my friends. They're just comedians. They hang out. But that's why I think comedy podcasts are so popular

because they can consistently give somebody the feeling of camaraderie, bullshit with your boys without you ever having to like actually be funny, have funny friends and go hang out, right? And so like you're getting that without the cost. Amazing. And so anyways, and this is why like, you know,

we got acquired by Twitch. People watch Twitch. People watch other people play video games because you get the feeling of playing a video game without having to actually sit down and buy a system, buy the game, get good at the game, play the game. You get the same rush watching this guy try to win. just by watching. It's kind of amazing. So once I realized that, I was like, oh, okay,

this guy's right. You know, what I got to do is pick what feeling I want people to have. And then I got to deliver, all I got to focus on is delivering that to them more consistently than anybody else is going to give it to them. If I do that, all my personal brain dreams will come true. You know, so that was the big takeaway. That was the lesson I had there. So when you say, it seems like you're intentional about it, that's what it, that's the underlying thing that it is, picking up front what am I trying to deliver? What's that feeling? And it consistently be like, all right, how could I do that?

What's a story I could tell? What's a framework I could give them? What's a nugget I could give them that would do that for them? It seems like I want to talk about editing. And it seems like your thing is that you're really good at writing first drafts. And actually you're not like a you don't seem like somebody who's like an eighth revision. I'm going to put this away for, you know, six years kind of guy with editing. You seem like you're pretty off the cuff.

you're sort of like Miss Excel. What does they want to have the emotion I want to have? I would guess. Then you sit down, you write it. Then you go away for a few hours. You know, maybe going to walk, come back, look at it. Ship it off. Right.

So for you, let's bring together emotion, editing. How do you edit for the sort of emotion that you're talking about there? Okay. First thing I learned was from Sam Parr. He has a principal. I think he came on your show too, which is the walkaway. So you do the shitty draft. you dump it and I kind of knew editing was important and the mistake I used to make is I'd edit

right away. That's terrible idea. Don't do that. So you first do your research and your thinking. You dump your, you do a quick brain dump and you got to walk away. So you read it. Well, the last thing I do, I read what I wrote and then I'm going to like forget about it. So I then will go do stuff. So I will go work out. I'll go play with my kids. I'll go for a walk. and I'm not trying to think about it at all. I know I'll come back to that later. And I know it sucks today. I'm going to go,

I'm going to edit it later and make it great. I'm certain of that. But I don't consciously think about it. And then I come back to it. Usually, let's say, four hours, six hours, eight hours, 24 hours later. And I'll read the thing. And immediately I'll be like, oh, this bad, bad, change this.

Oh, I don't know I talk about this instead. Or I wanted it to have this takeaway. I don't think it has that right now. All right, where would I punch that up? Like, I wouldn't have wrote this if I didn't think it had the potential. to give you that because I was very intentional up front

thinking this will do it it's not coming through where and the analogy I'll use is like imagine our river is flowing so there's a useful analogy because I think a lot of people are like there's nothing there

and I'm going to make it happen another story you could tell yourself is it's a river the water wants to flow my ideas are excellent people are going to love this they want to consume this and my ideas are worth consuming

but there's some rocks in the river that are blocking the flow. What are the rocks? All I got to do, if I just simply remove those, the water will flow. Nice. It was a more empowering thing for me

versus like, I'm going to make this good. It's bad. I got to create good. It's like, no, I kind of assume if I got to the point of writing something, it's going to be like,

there's something good in it. I just got to remove the suck out of it, right? The Pixar uses that analogy too. They say, uh, all movies we make start with, start with suck. And our only job is to just remove the suck with every draft.

So they do another revision. Say, what sucks about it now? Well, it sucks that the main character's not that likable because blah, blah, blah, so then they remove that suck and they come back again. That's kind of the same mindset. So I'll just look at it after I come back and I'll say, is this doing what I want to, do I think this is dope?

Does this do what I want it to do? And if not, what are the rocks I can remove? What's the suck I can remove from this? This part's boring. This intro doesn't really hint at what's to come. This ending is just kind of like, so yeah, that's it. That's the idea. I don't have a good ending.

Okay. So then I'll just find that area and I'll just try to fix that. Cool. How about with humor? What have you learned about writing with humor? Are you formulaic about that? Have you studied it?

That's where I'm looking now. Like I'm starting to pay attention. What I've learned so far, I'll tell you what I've learned so far as like a white belt in the humor game. It's just, you know, you don't want it to be, humor is the sauce.

It's not the entree. So some people are writing something to be funny. Like it's, this is meant to make you laugh. Usually that's not me. Usually it's, I'm trying to get a point across,

but I'm going to make you laugh along the way, which will make this more enjoyable for you to consume. So it's the sauce on the, on the meal, but it's not the meat. It's not the protein of the, of the thing, which is good.

Depressurizes it. It's like, oh, it does it apply a little bit here? That's the first part. The second part is, all humor is just surprise. So every joke is a setup and a punchline, but the punchline,

if you see the punchline coming, it's not very funny. So humorous surprise means I have to set it up in a way where you don't anticipate this is what I'm going to say. And the contrast of what you thought I was going to say and what I actually said is what makes you laugh. So you just kind of have to look for those moments where there's a bit of an expect, you set up an expectation and then you subvert the expectation. Jerry Seinfeld article in the New York Times. Here's how he starts it. I knew this was going to come in clutch and it just came in handy.

He goes, when I got my first department in Manhattan in the high. summer of 1976, there was no pooper-scooper law, and the streets were covered in dog crap. I signed the rental agreement, stepped outside, and my car had been towed. Despite this, I still thought, this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life. You know, sets it out. Pooper-scooper, funny word, what's going on there? And I think that maybe we can go into funny words, because it is interesting how certain words have a much higher propensity to be funny than other ones, right if he had said there was no law around cleaning up your dog's extrament that that now is very poopers scooper is like jovial funny right exactly and then he goes and goes sort of takes

you into this other time period you think about poop but then he goes my car had been towed and you're like oh my goodness this sounds terrible and then you said surprise which is why i thought about that. He goes, despite this, I still thought, this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life. And this is in like this ode to New York City. Theo Vaughn is super. That's exactly who I was thinking about. He's super popular right now. So good. And he's been great. I followed him since like the real world days, basically, road rules days. And so he's, if you just listen to him talk, that his brain just does something different. His brain is like almost wired different. That was my initial story. But I was like, I bet you could practice Theo Vaughaning a little bit. As, because like,

what Theo does, if you've never seen him, it's not going to make any sense. But if you've seen him, this will make all the sense of the world, which is that the Yovon will basically improvise. He has no idea what he's going to say, but he improvises he uses random language or he'll make up a story that makes that is totally not true, but it's kind of believable when he keeps us, you know, a deadpan face way he's doing it. You can kind of practice that. And so, yeah, I think, you know, practicing is obviously the best way to do it.

Well, that's a big one. Let's follow this. Made up language coming up with words. things that other people hadn't thought of. And how do you go about doing that? Like, it's a fun little thing to play around with. One of the things that I did is I liked thinking through the juxtaposition. So I wrote a piece about how I fell in love with the Bible.

And I was like, it needs some little bit of humor in it because it's, you know, it's the Bible, right? It's this. It activates a part of your brain where you're like, okay, this is, you know, exactly. Right? The Bible should actually just say, bathe. That should be the whole thing. exactly so it activates that i was like i need something that's funny so i was like okay what is the emotional state that somebody's and i was like working on it i was like serious you know you think of almost like this fancy library and then i'm like i would do my bible studies at a schlotsky's parking lot in a strip ball in the hill country and now you just get this juxtaposition i'm not

sure it's like that funny but i think that it adds so much life to the piece and i always try to think of like if I'm trying to be funny or create suspense, what is the emotional state that the reader's in for most of this piece? And then let me just like what you were saying, like, let's bring a little bit of Tabasco sauce of the opposite. Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. And I think, you know, an exercise you can do is, so like a Theovan exercise is basically he takes a thing. So let's say it's the Bible. So it's the Bible. So it's the Bible. but what a theovan humor like kind of lane he does is he'll he'll call the bible something else that's kind of funny like he'll be like uh you know he'll be like man that jesus is binder and he'll be like

it's the it's the bible but now he calls it's jesus's bind then he'll do another one and he'll be like he's like that old you know like the old himalayan diary and it's like what what he's saying like he just keeps coming up with different ways to say the bible or he'll just be like you know that big brown behavior book and like he'll just keep going and like I never done this before, but like, you could try that. So you could just take anything and be like, I'm going to come with six. Like, I'm just going to keep going. And it's so hard to do.

Like just now when I was doing it, I don't know. I was like, why the hell are you trying to do this live on a podcast? But that's how you get better, right? So, you know, doing that is it trains your brain in a very different way of thinking than we are used to. And that pays off because, again, common traits uncommonly together is very, very valuable. You don't need to be the funniest, nor do you need to be the smart. is if you're pretty smart and you're kind of funny, you're like the best. You know, and so that's my whole strategy was basically to do that.

It was like, I know I'm not funny enough to be a comedian, but I'm funnier than the average smart guy and I'm smarter than the average guy. So it's like pretty smart, kind of funny. That's a good combo. Well, it's funny because I went to, you know, I was at church last weekend and I was with a friend and basically we, after the service, she was like, man, you know, that was a, that was a really good sermon. And I was like, well, what do you like about the pastor? And she was like, you know, he does a really good job of talking about very serious sort of like weighty things, but then layering in tons of humor, right?

So like, he was talking about, he was talking about, you know, you could have said good people go to the light and they're focused on moral values and integrity and bad people move to the darkness and they run away from, you know, righteousness and stuff. And you're like, okay, that's not right. And he goes, at any moment, you can either be a cockroach or a moth. Right. And I grew up in South Carolina and, you know, you go into the pantry sometimes and there's some cockroaches on the ground and like, you want to step on those things, but those things fly. And they go all over the place. And and like they'll start eating your ritz crackers. I swear those cockroaches are so big.

They can practically pick up the babies and they'll take them to cockroach land or wherever, right? And cockroaches, they run away from the light. Right. And then you have your moths. And the moths, they go to the light. And then he like weaves these cockroaches and the moths throughout the entire sermon.

So you're getting this like chuckle, but then through the chuckle, it's like creating this avenue for like extreme depth. And somehow it's in the juxtaposition of those two things that the sermon ends up really hitting, and the humor like lowers your defenses on like needing to be a super, you know, perfect person and all that. And it's like, okay, we can have some fun here. But then the fun actually allows us to then get to the depth. That's framing, right? He framed differently. Same principle framed differently. All of a sudden, more accessible, more fun, more,

entertaining, more memorable. And memorability is, is massively underrated. You know, what's the point of having the good ideas if nobody. remembers them, right? Like, you know, part of your job, a responsibility, if you actually have something worth remembering is to take the time and effort to package it in a way that is going to be catchy and memorable. My buddy Trevor, who's my roommate in college, he made his whole career doing one thing. He basically reads white papers, which are like scientific journals. They're the most like boring, like read the abstract, read the whole study, whatever. People, it's crazy. The scientists spend their whole life working on this day and then they package it in the

dullest format possible, with pride, because that's like a, you know, high status. High status for them. It's like, it's so boring that only another person who's dedicated their life to this would possibly read this, which means that none of the insights take it, take it to the real world until, you know, somebody comes and builds that bridge. So he built that bridge. He's, he would go learn something. He'd read this and he'd go talk to the scientists, like some, you know, somebody's been doing this for 50 years. And, you know, the number of people who follow them and listen to them is like, you know, you know, know, 35. And then my buddy, he started writing a blog and newsletter that eventually YouTube,

and he built like a hundred thousand person email list about a really like dry subject, which is like, you know, growth mindset, which is like how it applies into the classrooms and stuff like that. And so he, the way he did it was the same type of frame. He's like, imagine two tigers. One tiger grew up in the zoo. And, you know, a tiger that grows up in the zoo, you know, and he does it. He'll teach this to like third graders or he'll teach it to the New Yankees, you know, CEOs of companies or, you know, kids, basically. He does the same speech, both of them because it's so easy to, easy to understand. So memorable.

He's like, tiger that grows up in the zoo, has a life been easy or hard? Pretty easy, right? Do they fight for their own food or is it given to them? It's given to them. Okay, cool. Jungle tiger. Jungle tiger is life hard, right? Lots of adversity.

They have to fight for their own food. They know how to survive, blah, blah. If you take a jungle tiger and you put it in the zoo, what happens? it'll get bored. So if you take a zoo tiger, you put it in the jungle, what happens? It's like, it's dead. Like, it doesn't know how to survive. And he's basically like, you want to be a jungle tiger, right?

Like, and how do you do that? Well, you have to get out of your comfort zone, the zoo where everything is easy and handed to you. And so when you reach those moments where you're out of your comfort zone, say to yourself, like, this is my jungle tiger. I got a jungle tiger this right now because I have to go, I have to put myself out of my comfort zone to do this. He gave them a language to remember a whole set of principles that were all

previously packaged in very boring scientific terms. You know, one of the things that I'm noticing from you, like, I always think, I'm doing these interviews, like, how is my writing process going to change? And one of the biggest things I picked up is, I don't need to learn from writers at all. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go study comedians and I'm going to be more deliberate about finding communicators who I really like and then trying to say, what are they doing? And then bring that into my writing. And then also, I think that you really see a fluidity between mediums, that talking, writing, humor, storytelling, these things can all sort of play together. And they're sort of like paint colors where,

yeah, you can have, you know, you have the white paint, the black paint, the blue paint, the green paint. But then you can also have like a, you can begin to mix them together. And then you can get all these different colors. And that maybe we shouldn't be thinking about writing is like all these separate lanes. Actually, for a lot of the different skills that you want to learn to make yourself a better writer, don't even study writers, the best people for that might be in a totally far off field. Yeah, yeah. You nailed it. Good job. You synthesized it very, very well. I do think it's a good strategy to basically pick and choose from adjacent fields because you're going to do something different than other than you're only looking in your own lane. It becomes very,

it's why everything becomes the same because we all look at the same things. We all study the same things. And so like, you know, I was hanging out with Mr. Beast and he said the same thing. like what YouTube channels do you like he's like I don't only watch YouTube that much anymore I'm like you're the number one YouTuber in the world you like literally even breathe the YouTube he's like yeah my channel but then I was like so where do you learn from he's like well right now we think that one thing we're weak at is character development so we study shows TV shows and movies that are good at character development or whatever and then he's like trying to steal from other areas then he's like everybody else if you're just on YouTube looking at other

YouTubers you'll just become lost in a just sea of sameness and I think that's a useful tip for people to take on. I want to end here. You built a newsletter called Milk Road and you had to train another writer to write your voice. And you believe that learning to write is actually teachable. So when you're teaching other people to write, what were some of the things that you focus on? Yeah. So the teaching was important because I didn't want that. We had to send the email out every morning at like 6 a.m. I was like, I'm not doing that. I'm not good with consistency. anyways, I don't wake up that early. I know that no matter how fun this is,

that I will hate doing by like day 30. So from day one, I was like, I'm not going to write this, but it's going to be in my voice and style. How do you do that? Hired a guy who's never written before. And I sat him down and I was like, first my business partner,

I was like, you write this and I was the editor. I was his editor for 30 days. I said, cool, now you're the editor. Now you've got to hire a writer. We hired the guy who's never written before in any professional capacity or even blog. I don't think you got a blog either. But I taught them, and basically what we did was we took up one thing that helped

as the newsletter was a consistent format. So it wasn't like 10 different formats. It was one format. And I broke down why we write it, the way we write it, line by line. Our opening line at Milk Road was always like, good morning. This is the Milk Road. And we would say what we do. And then we would say in a funny way.

And then we would tag it with a joke. So we would say, we are the number one source for figuring out. what happened in crypto yesterday. Think of us like, think of us like a tocha struddle, a fresh, tasty sweet for you and a treat for you in the mornings. And then parentheses, we tag the joke again.

And we would just be like, what the hell happened to toaster struddles anyways? Kids these days, they're missing out, right? And it's like, we would tag that. We would always tag the joke. And we'd be like, we are, GM, we're the, we're the milk road.

We are, we give you exactly everything you need to know about crypto in the morning and nothing, nothing that you don't need to know. And then we would say, we would tag it by be like, I would say something like, we're reading this newsletter is the second best feeling in the world.

The first best, of course, is when you're in a car, you roll down the window and you start doing that cool dolphin thing with your hand, right? Like some relatable, funny thing that's just like, put you in a good mood. And we were like, can we get you to smile? And can we get you to be like,

I love these guys? Can we give you a reason to open this? That's not based on the Bitcoin price. It was another way of thinking about. it. And so we, you know, so I started training. It was like, the first line, this is what we do. Here's why we're doing it. And here's 10 examples of doing it good. And then he was like, cool, got it. I can, I can pattern match to that. The other thing that we did was he was, he was doing the school thing where he's like, he thought he had to be a different guy. Like, oh, maybe I need

to be a really sophisticated, do sophisticated analysis. Or I need to do kind of like people think when they write, they need to do something outside of themselves. Now, the whole point of writing is to take you and just push it out. And so don't try to create this fake thing that you think other people might want. Just take you and push it out. And so for example, he would talk about subjects and the writing was fine, but the subject was boring. So I was like, dude, why'd you pick this? He's like, I don't know. I felt like, you know, it was in the news, people needed to know about it. I was like, did you care about this? No, not really. And I was like, would you have ever like texted me or Slack, yeah, Slack message me or send me a voice note being like,

dude, did you hear about this? This thing's awesome. Or this is crazy. Did you hear about this? this is really interesting. He's like, no, I would never say that. I'm like, cool, why are we telling, why are we telling 200,000 people about this if you wouldn't tell me? And so what I made them do, I was like,

every morning I want you to send a voice note, send a voice memo and just tell me the news before you write anything. Just be like, oh yeah, everybody on Twitter's freaking out because they're worried about this thing that happened. Or the price is up today because of, because there's rumors about this right now. And what that means is that if that happened,

then this would have. So he would just say it to me. And it was such a good filter because he could stop himself. If he was going to tell me something that was boring, and he would catch himself like, I would never say this to somebody. It's boring to me and it'll be boring to you. So it filtered out the subject beautifully. So like those are the two big things was showing him what we do in and like giving him a sample and then saying,

here's what good looks like. Here's 10 more examples of good. And then secondly, installing that one step of like, don't do that imposter thing where you start talking about shit that you. you're not even that interested in, because guess what? Nobody else interested in it. Like, and the filter for that was, send me a voice memo. If it's not interesting in the voice memo, it's definitely not going to be interesting

in low text. Why do you think that dolphin thing is so funny? It's hilarious. It's relatable. And like, you know, it's not that that's funny. It's just like, funny that we put, again, it's unexpected. Like, why are you writing this? You know, everybody says we're the best.

We said we're the second best thing in the world. So you're immediately like, what's first best? First best. And then I can't say a serious thing. I have to say an unsirious thing. So I'm like, the first best thing is this feeling, because we all know this feeling is great. Like, you know that feeling.

It's an amazing feeling. And so we just knew like, okay, things like that are surprising, likable, funny. You can do them in one line. So it's not like you have to like set up a long story or joke. It was very useful. It's very efficient as a like mechanism there. Sweet. That was good fun.

Thanks, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want. to I put my all in it like no days off on the road let's travel never looking back