The Startup Ideas Podcast - Writing, Religion, and Walt Disney with David Perell

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

Are you ready for the next iteration of Where It Happens? Greg Isenberg is now the host of the podcast, which will be focused on catching up with incredible guests at the intersection of community, commerce, and content. Today, Greg is joined by David Perell, writer and founder of Write of Passage, where students learn a step-by-step method for publishing quality content and distributing ideas, leading to unexpected opportunities and increased serendipity in their work and life. In this episode, we chat about building Write of Passage, Religion, Walt Disney and more. A SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS►► This episode is brought to you by Retool.Retool is the fast way to build your own custom internal tools for your business. With a complete library of 100+ fully-featured, accessible UI components that you can drag and drop into any interface, Retool’s platform lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs, 10x faster.Thousands of teams at companies like Amazon, DoorDash, and NBC collaborate around custom-built Retool apps to operate faster and better. Also, teams of up to five can build Retool apps for free. We're huge fans of the product! If you want to learn more, go to https://retool.com/►► This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens.AG1 by Athletic Greens is incredible and we have been starting every day with it for several years. It’s just one scoop in 8-12 oz. of water each morning, and you're getting 75 high-quality vitamins, whole-food sourced ingredients, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. It's one daily habit that supports gut health, supports the immune system, recovery, energy, and focus!Right now, Athletic Greens is giving you a free 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. Take ownership of your health today by going to https://athleticgreens.com/wih►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,creators and commerce.You'll also find out when new and exclusiveepisodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.https://latecheckout.substack.comFIND ME ON SOCIAL:Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenbergLINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:Production Team: https://www.bigoceanpodcasting.comDavid Perell: https://twitter.com/david_perellSHOW NOTES00:00 - Intro00:40 - Why David launched Write of Passage04:00 - Have a bad 2-year plan but a great 10-year plan09:33 - Why everyone is a writer15:07 - The economics behind Write of Passage21:16 - How to build an audience25:15 - Community vs. Religion33:29 - Going to heaven, passive income, and getting laid41:54 - Vertical leadership, yes or no?52:13 - How to connect with David

One of my favorite people on the show, David Perel, someone I've been following on the internet. And I basically, I think I cold reached out to you. And I was just like, what you're doing is amazing. And you're the founder of Right of Passage. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about the business, why you started it, maybe some of the economics around it, where you want to take it, and just sort of dissect it all over the next hour or so. Yeah, of course, happen to do it. Yeah, tell us a story about write-of-passage, what it is, maybe just a little high level.

Yeah, so I hated school. I was a terrible student and did very poorly, and I was a kicking and screaming kid. I was super unhappy for the first 20 years of my life, and a lot of it was I felt like I was in a prison called school every day. And I grew up thinking, I can do better, I can do better. in terms of how a classroom environment is run, but also I felt like I was going to amount to nothing. I felt like an idiot.

I felt stupid. I felt dumb. I didn't see how I was going to be able to contribute. And that created a lot of nihilism and negativity in my own mind, which was really hard. And after college, I took a course called Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte. And I was just like, wow, this is the future.

cohort-based, live, great economics. And I saw how the internet was going to change the, had changed, the economics of education forever. We were going to go from teachers teaching at minimum 15 at most 40 students at a time to now teaching thousands, hundreds of thousands, and that the internet was going to fundamentally change how we thought about education. And so after taking building a second brain about a year later, I called Tiago. And I said, Hey, can you help me start? Read a Passage. He said yes.

And we did what he was doing for building a second brain. We applied that to online writing to the act of creation. And it's been going ever since. So did you know Tiago or you basically just took his course, got to know him, and then he became your business partner? Mostly the second. I just really admired Tiago. I still do.

And I was like, wow, this guy understands. something about information capture, something about sort of the creative process, something about online education that I would really like to learn from. And the man in his system just radically transformed my life. And so I reached out to him. I remember we had lunch in San Francisco. And I called him on a rainy day in New York City, December 7th, 2000 and 18. And he, in a five-minute conversation, said, sure, I'm happy to do it.

And at the time, I had very little money. And right around then, I got a $20,000 grant from Tyler Cowan's Merchant Ventures program, took that $20,000, hired a Hollywood film crew, flew them down to Mexico City. We made these seven video modules. And in 10 days, came up with all the concepts that would eventually form the bedrock of Rite of Passage. And here we are now. That reminds me, I just read the book about. Summit Series and how it got started. So Summit Series, you know, started off as sort of an invite only get together of entrepreneurs and creatives. And it got bigger every single year. And it was

started by these like at the time, like 21 year olds. And they ended up getting like these crazy people to the events. Like, you know, I think Bill Clinton played sacks at one of the events. Like, if that happens, like, you know you've made it. And then they ended up buying a mountain in Utah. Like they bought something called Powder Mountain, which, you know, for their events and to actually create a permanent community. And it's the whole story of how, you know, they had no money. And they basically put all their money into these events. And like, you know, it's the typical startup story, which is like, you know, you have this intuition that it's going to work out, but you don't really, you're not really sure. So it sounds like you had a little bit of that. Like you took the $20,000.

you're like, I'm going to take this bet. I hope it works out. But could you talk a little bit more of how you were feeling at that time? Like, did you feel like, oh, my God, if I spend all this money and it doesn't work out, you know, this is, this is it? I had nothing to lose. I had nothing to lose. I mean, I'm a born entrepreneur.

There's no working for anybody else. My dad was an entrepreneur. I grew up under that. And my dad always made me believe that I could do it. There was no other option. It was just an option of whether I'm going to do it now. whether I'm going to do it later. And I remember I knew very early on that having an online audience, especially around ideas and something that you know about the world, is super valuable.

I remember after I got laid off for my job, my first and only job, I called my dad and I said, hey, I'm going to go build an audience. And I have the worst plan for two years, the best plan for 10. And I think that was totally right. That was more than half a decade ago. And those first two years were brutal. And I think over a 10-year time horizon, it's going to turn out really well. But there's no other option for me, man. This is what I do. And shouldn't that be the advice for most 20-somethings, like, have a bad two-year plan, but a great 10-year plan?

I think in some ways, yeah. One of the issues with people in their 20s is they end up doing these stupid jobs where they go work in the soulless corporate environments, where they, you know, quotes get paid to learn. And sometimes that's true. Don't get me wrong. Sometimes that is very true. But the majority of people I know who justify what they're doing with, hey, I'm learning a lot.

It's okay. I don't like it that much, but I'm learning a lot. Most of them are having a lot of the ambition and a lot of the agencies sucked out of them. And I actually think that's quite tragic. I don't use those words lightly. I think that your 20s are a time of peak creativity. you have less to lose than at other moments in your life.

And of course, all these things are person dependent. But on a cohort basis, people in their young 20s should be taking risks. They should be trying to be ambitious. And the other thing that people in their young 20s don't know is that everyone is willing to help you when you're young. I interviewed 150 people on my podcast and I would just parade around New York City with microphones and audio equipment over my arm. got it stolen one time, and I would just interview different people, and I learned so much doing that. I just felt like every person I reached out to was super helpful, and I just learned, and I learned, and to this day, I've just surrounded myself with people who've done it before, who are smarter than me,

who give me really honest feedback, who can help me navigate the trials and tribulations of life. When you're in your 20s, if you make a mistake, unless you're Elizabeth Holmes, you know, you're getting a pardon. You know, when you become in your 30s and 40s and you're making mistakes, it's not as easy. You know, when you make a mistake, because people are like, what, you should have known better.

Like, you've been in the game. Yeah, and I think it, you know, really matters what kinds of mistakes you're making, right? Like, don't be making mistakes that are legal mistakes and breaking the law and stuff like that. But yeah, go take a risk and go out and, and try to, like, come up with something that you see in the world that is unique to you. I was talking to a friend from college, three or four years younger than me,

and he called me up and he said, he said, hey, I really want to start a company. And we started talking about it. And I said, hey, your ambition is like an eight or a nine, but your knowledge about what you want to do is like a two or out of three. And I think that this is very common. You have a lot of people who they want to either be seen as entrepreneurs or they have a genuine desire to make something of their lives, but they don't have the requisite knowledge, the differentiated perspective on how the world is, where the world is going. And you have to build that. You build that through expertise by reading, by talking to people, by doing stuff, and just by constantly taking all of these small bets. You know, I think a lot of the mistakes that people make is they take a way

too big bet too fast, where now, you know, Nassim Taleb always says, just keep surviving. just keep surviving. And you don't want to do that. What I did was I worked in a lot of like sort of a portfolio of small bats really inspired by Nassim Taleb's Anti-Fragileg, which changed my life when I read that. But then once I found the thing, I really went all in and committed. Like people are like, oh, so like what do you want to do after this? Like, you know, write a passage or you just teach your course.

Like what do you actually really want to do. I'm like, no, this is it. This is what I'm doing. I'm building a great education company. Like this is what I believe in. This is what I made. to do. And I feel destined to be building this company. And I'm now along for the ride. And I'm fully committed. So I sort of started off with trying all these different things. And once I found the

thing, I'm just like, hey, I'm all in. Yeah. What makes you so committed? The world needs this. Writing education sucks. Education is terrible. It's super expensive. Teachers get paid very little. it's not excited for the kids. None of the learning science that has come out in the last 70 to 80 years has actually been implemented. People aren't legitimately using the internet to advance themselves in more structured ways. There's a lot of people use the internet to sort of teach themselves. But these cohort-based styles of learning, which is really how we've always learned that are very true to how human psychology functions, talking to other people, going through these classes with others. I mean, it's just right for the taking.

And I'm like, it's so clear to me that it can be better. So who else should build it but me? You know, it's like, I see it. And I think it was Alan Kay who said the best way to predict the futures to invent it. And I hear that quote. I'm like, that's exactly what I'm going to do for education. Yeah, I think a lot of people, when they think about writing, they're really overwhelmed. And they're like, I have nothing to write about.

And that's not true. I mean, if you had nothing to write about, you wouldn't talk. You know, I think what people need to keep in mind is that when you write, and I've been writing for 15 years on the internet, when you write, it really does attract a lot of opportunities. Just this morning, I saw literally a world leader or among a world leader tweet something. And I saw that her DMs were open. So I DM'd her about it. And then she responded. It's like here it is like I'm a guy who's literally recording this from literally a closet.

Like I'm staring at my clothes. And I'm on the internet and I'm connected to this person who's probably in this parliament building, you know, super super powerful person. And it's only because I had built this audience on Twitter and she followed me for multiple years that she respects my opinion and she wanted my perspective on something. That only happens in an internet connected world, which we're in, and in a place where there's social products that are conducive to words spreading. And this has only happened in the last 15 to 20 years where now anyone can produce and share content for free. It's only really happened over the last five years. And my perspective, and maybe you disagree. But once Twitter changed their home feed,

to be more algorithmic based. It allowed people like me, people like you, to create content. And if a lot of people like that content, or even a few people, just started sharing it with more and more and more and more people. And it allowed us to gain audiences relatively quick in the same way that TikTok is designed for people to go viral. And because of that, people like us have been building audiences and words have been the format to do it. Previously, I felt like words had been very similar to how podcasting is. Podcast discovery

is notoriously difficult. It's notoriously hard to start a podcast, unless you have an audience already, start a podcast, disseminate it, distribute it, get it seen, get it listened, hundreds of thousands, thousands, even hundreds of times. And it's because the platforms don't lend themselves well to shareability. Do you agree with that or not? Yeah, totally. And I would just add substack in here. I think substack is not a lot of the same things that Twitter's had. And especially now, Substack is doing a great job of recommending newsletters. That's what people need help with. Distribution. It used to be that anyone could start their own blog, but those blogs wouldn't get read. And now, if you're writing on Substack, if you're writing on Twitter and your stuff is good,

it'll be seen and it'll be seen by people who you wouldn't be able to meet in real life. And that is something worth taking advantage of. And right of passage is a five-week program where people learn exactly how to step into this world and put it to use for them. It's about 6.35 a.m. here and I'm just about to have my AG1 by Athletic Greens. It's this powder that I look forward to having every single day. I put it in about 10 ounces of water. It contains vitamins and probiotics and whole food source ingredients that really gets my energy up, my recovery up, and my focus up.

And I look forward to it really, really every single day. Just like how I have my morning coffee, I love having my morning AG one. So for listeners to the pod, I think you might like AG1 too. So Athletic Greens is offering a one-year supply of immune-supporting vitamin D and five of these free travel packs with your first free purchase. All you have to do is go to athletic greens.com slash WIH and claim it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. I'm curious about like the business and economics behind right of passage.

Like I'm, I'm sure that it's a fulfilling mission and you love coming to work every day because it's just, it's in your blood and I can see it. But like you could be doing anything. You could be starting a venture back startup, raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Like I'm sure that you're looking at this and looking at this being like, oh, there's also a big financial opportunity as well. So can you talk a little bit about that? It scales. Like it scales very well. It doesn't scale like a software company, but it scales incredibly well. And I think that there's a few ways to think of it. So I'll talk about write a passage and then I'll talk about other schools and how they're thinking about it. So if you take traditional education, you at most could only have 40 students. And like that's at most. And then you're still doing lecture formats. And if you look at the science of lecture attention, people retain almost nothing. Like when people are just sitting there and listening, it's almost nothing. Now the teacher's also responsible for grading. They're also responsible for coming up with the content.

They're also responsible for exercises, for assignments, and doing all of that. I have a whole team to help me out. And I can do that because I have good profit margins in my business. So right now, we have five-week program, 438 students from 41 countries. I have 38 people who are helping me run this in some capacity. I have a full-time team of editors so that every single piece of writing gets editing within 24 hours. I have a full-time team of mentors so that whatever it is within the world of writing, that you're interested in, whether it's the psychology of writing, whether it's how to be

vulnerable in your writing, whether it's how do I distribute my writing, whatever it is, there's a different mentor who's gone through the course, who does this well, who's writing consistently, who basically teaches their own mini-course within write-of-passage. Then I have a full-time team, an operations team, a course design team, and that way, because we have so many students and every student pays quite a hefty fee, you know, you can't get in the course for less than $4,000. though we do offer scholarships. Because of that, we're doing fairly well every cohort,

and we can then provide a bunch more attention that someone in person couldn't provide. We're just counter-positioning and competing along different vectors. This is a classic thing in business, and it's a classic disruption-type thing. New use case comes along. They're overserving their audiences in some ways. We come in, meet customers where they're at,

but the new technology is moving faster. And one of the big theses I'm saying is look at all of the technologies around me that I basically have the shadow workforce that's working full time to make my product better. I have the team at Zoom that is working to constantly improve that product. This week they added screen sharing for breakout rooms. Now, if I were to build that in my own company, that would cost me half a million dollars. Zoom just does it with a quick software update and that's the end of it. I maybe pay $1,000 a year for Zoom to be doing that.

We have Circle. That's our community backend. Circles improving at a crazy rate, a crazy rate. It's gotten so much faster. For community management, it's gotten so much better. Their DMs, their 101 DMs are really good. If we were trying to develop that in house, it'd be really hard. And so basically, we have the winds of technology that are working with us.

We have scale that's working with us. And we can also be reaching the scale of the Internet. So if I try to run, if I try to run Reda Passage in Austin, Texas where I live, well, how many people are going to take it? So I'll tell you, I think we have 31 alums in history who live in Austin, Texas. So we have fewer alums than would fill your average classroom in person. Not only that, that 31, like if you threw something, you know, IRL, they might be like, oh, you know, I have something at that time or I can't make it. It's like, you know, rush hour or something like that. But now we have people from 41 countries.

And I remember I was in college, I was sitting in my bed, and I was reading Ben Thompson, and he wrote, people will always underestimate the scale of the internet. Because what you can do is you can build super niche products because a small percentage of a giant number is still a giant number. And that's how the internet works. You can go into these niches. You can build something for those kinds of people. In no way am I trying to build the writing education platform.

to solve all education platforms. We're much more like cereal. There's 30 different kinds of cereal. When you go to the supermarket, there's Lucky Charms, there's fruit loops, there's frosted flakes, there's all the healthy stuff. We are one brand of cereal. We're not for everybody.

And it's working. You know, I can tell you, because when I interview someone that's graduated right of passage, like to me, that's better than working at Google or graduating Stanford, whatever's in the water in that course is working.

And it sounds like from a business perspective, of like you're a humble guy, so I'll say it for you. Like, you're generating millions of dollars of revenue via this business. It's profitable. And, you know, you don't have to rely on VCs to keep the lights on. And, you know, you're doing what you love. You know, I just had recently, uh, Natalie Ellis on the show. I don't know if you know Natalie. She also lives in Austin. And Natalie runs a business called Boss Babe. And Boss Babe is basically, you know, the framework for how I think about community-based products is, you know, you have audience at the top. So how do you attract the audience? You take that audience, you actually

turn it into an owned audience. Maybe that's an email or something like that. Then you move that into a community. So maybe you use something like Circle. And then you take those people and you move them into a product that they're going to love. And she's really mastered this whole idea where she has this audience called Boss Babe, which is for female entrepreneurs. She has a community and courses and masterclasses that people can take. And then she has products that she also sells, like digital assets and stuff like that. And she told us she's making like $6 million in revenue, which is incredible. Within the framework of that, I know I'm putting you on the spot, but like, you know,

do you think of your business like that, like generating, you know, attracting a lot of attention at the top, bringing them through funnels, taking them through the product, you know, because we have a lot of people listening to this that are building their own businesses. So anything you can share there would be helpful. Yeah, the most important thing is to be sending out a unique signal into the world. That is the most important thing. It's going to become more important to be differentiated as artificial intelligence and GPT3, GPT4, as they begin to do a lot of writing for people.

You're going to need to have a unique voice. I always think of it like radio frequencies. The way that the internet works is everyone's tuning into different frequencies. And you have different radio stations. You got your radio station for learning, radio stations for comedy, radio stations for entertainment. But on the internet, those are social accounts. And the more unique your station and what you're saying, you get uniqueness and you get strong signal. You get strong signal with clarity and you get uniqueness just by being differentiated

having a different perspective on the world. And then people find your station. and if they like the content, then they want more. And so what we do is the community of write-of-passage, the course is now it's like a live event. So you like the band, you've been listening to their stuff on Spotify, on radio and stuff like that. Now you go to the live event, you have all these diehards,

and right-of-passage is like our Coachella, where people come in, there's all of these things, you can't possibly do anything or everything, but then you can come in, you can do two mentor groups here, you can write these five essays, and then for the next time, the curriculum is going to change in this, this, this, and this and that way, and then you go to different mentor groups. And now you've thought about these things for four months. And so now you're going to have a different

experience. I ran into a guy named Zach last week, one of the co-founders of Cabin, the Creator Dow, and him and Jonathan Hillis, they met right of passage and started the Dow together. I think that Dow's worth $38 million now, and they met each other in Rite of Passage. And I said, Zach, you know, it was crazy because it was a Saturday. We were doing a live writing things. We were chatting. and then I ran into him on the streets in Austin 90 minutes later. I said, Zach, like, what has you back and read of passage? And he's like, you know, it's the people and having these conversations, but having it be directed towards some kind of output.

And I'm like, dude, remind me how many times you've taken right of passage? He's like, this is my fifth time through the course. And I think that that's what it's about. It's about bringing these people together. And I always think of camp, man. I used to go to this camp called Sky Lake. And the big status symbol was they had these white shirts a little bit of green on them, and then they had a, like, a pine tree on them.

And for every year that you came back, you would get another pine tree on the back. And so I was like a two, three, four pine tree kind of guy. But I remember there was this guy named Jason. And Jason had 11 pine trees. And he was the coolest guy. It was like the coolest thing to have 11 pine trees. And that's how we think about right of passage. I'm sort of obsessed with how do you create culture.

You don't do it through rules. You don't do it through laws. You don't do it through guidelines. you do it by taking people who represent that culture and sort of promoting them, showing them off through shoutouts, showing them off through leadership positions, and then having them do things because humans are very imitative. There's this great video that I like to share on Twitter where there's this guy, he's at a music festival at the Gorge Amphitheater, and he's sort of dancing alone.

He's got like the speaker system and he's totally alone. And everyone's looking at him. He's like, what the hell are you doing? And then somebody else joins. And then the two of them are dancing. Everyone's like, you guys are total weirdos. And then you look 45 seconds later and there's like 150 people dancing because that's how humans work. The first person to do something weird.

The second person do something weird. The third person, a little less weird. And all of a sudden they've started a trend. There's 150 people. And I'm always about how do we create culture in that way instead of these very concrete verbal laws, rules and customs. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Like when I'm creating communities, I'm often looking, I'm often starting with very, little rules and seeing how people are adapting and doing things and then being like, okay,

how do I double down on that behavior? So, okay, for example, I just launched this. Me and my team launches Freedomint, an FD project called the Pencilcase Project. And I started noticing that people started calling themselves pencil heads. And I was just like, okay, that's funny. And then I started writing in the tweets, pencil heads. Like, hey, pencil heads. How is everyone doing? And people just went crazy. And that's the sort of thing that, you know, when you think about a community, like, what is it? It's like shared identity, shared language, shared rituals.

It comes from very much deeply rooted in religion in lots of ways. And I've heard you actually talk about religion before on other podcasts. You know, I know you're a student of religion, but could you talk a little bit about maybe some similarities that you see with what you're building at right of passage and interestingly enough how religion is structured? Yeah, it's funny that you talk about the similarities. I never have them be similar, so I'm just going to go on the religious tangent of why I think that this is important, and then we can sort of horses you and sort of try to connect these two things. I haven't really thought about that before. So I'm secular. I grew up Jewish, and I had this realization

that the Bible is the core text of Western civilization. And the more that you look at it, you realize that the moral framework that we have, whether you're atheist, secular, or Christian, Jewish, it is all within this Judeo-Christian tradition. And even the most atheist of Westerners actually have a quite Christian moral framework. And you see this in the Constitution, right?

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. It's not self-evident at all that that's the case. That sort of builds on John Locke's ideas, and that then goes back to the Bible. And I realized that when I was basically swimming in Christian waters, and I didn't understand the Bible. So every week, I do a Bible study with the teacher every Sunday morning for two hours, and I am deeply obsessed with learning what the Bible says going through it. And then I also work with a Hibabad rabbi in town so I can get a different perspective. And, you know, part of this is my own journey to find faith.

And part of this is my own interest in just feeling like in order to be an educated Westerner, you need to understand these things. So this is a huge part of my life. I have a piece called The Book You Need to Read, which is about the Bible, and why you're Christian, which goes through this logic just step by step. And I think that a lot of what it's given me an appreciation for is what writing does. A lot of people say, I'm spiritual but not religious. I think I'm closer to religious but not spiritual.

And I like the aspects of religion where it says this is how the world works. And I think that it's just fascinating to try to understand these different perspectives, the implications of them, what follows from them. And I spent a lot of time thinking about this. So now getting into your question about community, you know, I suspect that there's a lot to learn about the early growth of religion, right? Like you have Saul who's traveling to Spain, who then becomes Paul, and he's totally against Christianity.

Then he has this revelation with Christ. And all of a sudden he becomes a major evangelist for the Christian faith. And I think a lot happens there, right? like you're doggedly against something, then you become doggily for it. Then you have the 12 disciples and they're sort of going off saying these unpopular truths. I suspect there's a lot about community building that we can learn from those stories. But for me, they're very separate. And I'm very certain to not tie too much economic motive to my study of religion because I just,

I sort of want them to be separate. Yeah, to me, to me, they're similar from my perspective because when I look at religion, I see, you know, every great community, okay, you know, every great religion has a cortex, a Bible of some sort. Every community has a cortex of some sort. You know, every religion has short-term and long-term incentives, like, for example, going to heaven. And every community has short-term and long-term incentives. You know, and I can go on and on about that. I think, you know, even when you give the example of the 12 disciples, the 12 disciples are not too dissimilar from the example you explain at the gorge, like where you had that one guy dancing and then

a week him two and then four and eight and twelve. Like that could be the story of a religion in the making. Yep. But I understand why you're separating church and state. The separation of church and capitalism. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, you know, we live in the U.S.

So this state is a capitalistic state. So you're in Texas and I'm in Florida. So but yeah, I think I find it interesting that you are going, you know, going deeper into religion because it is in a lot of ways unpopular, like an R like group. Am I, am I misstepping by saying that? I feel like an R kind of crew of people. Like I don't know a lot of people posting and writing about. about religion and going deep and kind of having a pastor over here and a rabbi over there.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's ridiculous. You know, I think that I looked at a lot of the secular and atheist perspectives on, and I say this is someone who's not religious, but I just looked at a lot of people around me and I would ask, why are you not religious? And their answers for why they're not religious, I thought was very shallow when I looked at the average person.

And I said, hey, I don't know what my answer is. But whether I'm religious or not, I better have a good answer for why I think that the different perspective is false. You know, it's Charlie Bunger saying, hey, you should understand the other side's opinion better than they do, what they think better than they do. And for me, I don't care what Christians do. I care what the Bible says. And that's what I want to focus on.

And I want to know this stuff well because I think that that's what it means to, be an educated westerner. I think that this is a core thing. And I think a lot more people should be learning about it, not to be religious, but because it's important to know the Bible, because so much of your life, if you live in the West, this book, the Bible, the Old and New Testament, influences your life each and every day. And understanding that moral framework, how the stories that are told influence the constitution and the laws of the countries that you live in, I think it's an important thing to know, so I spent a long time doing it. Yeah, I think, you know, I love that.

And I love that you're not afraid to say it. And I love that you nerd out about it. One of the interesting things about religion for me is just how stories-based it is. Yep. And, you know, you can just look at religion. I know you don't look at it this way, but you can just look at religion based on, like, the Bible is the number one bestselling book of all time. Yep.

And so by definition, the story. are very compelling. And you can just look at it being like, I want to understand how to dissect these stories so that I can be a better storyteller myself. And actually say, like, I'm going to spend 12, 18, 24 months, just like learning it from that perspective and applying that into my life. Like, you don't need to be religious, quote unquote, to basically dissect something. And I think that's like kind of like the world that we live in now, which is like, it's so like, you know, polar opposites. I'm either in or I'm out. The Bible bestselling book of all time.

What is the best selling, what is the most highlighted Kindle book of all time? Give me a hint. The four-hour body by Tim Ferriss. Wow. Why is that? I don't know. And I think the four-hour work week is number four.

I mean, it kind of makes sense. You know, I think like four-hour body, So many of us are not happy with our physical appearance. And here you have a guy saying, like, here's how you can optimize it, like, in those words, basically. And for our work week, like, I remember, I bought that book in 2006, and it changed my life. I mean, it's a corny title, but, like, the concept of, like, I don't need to work 100 hours a week in Goldman Sachs or whatever to make a good living. I could like basically create systems and become financially free.

The concept of financially free is so compelling to people. And also the concept of passive income, you know, it's like what's so exciting to people? It's like going to heaven, passive income, looking good. That's it. It's all you need. Getting laid. Yeah. Well, it's funny because we were talking about the stories.

And a lot of biblical stories. whether you're religious or not, have something in them that is a lesson that then you can apply to business. So in 2019, I wrote an essay called Peter Thiel's Religion, which is probably the most popular thing I've ever published. And in that piece, I talk about the Canaan Abel story, which is my favorite story in the Bible. I think it's like 16 lines, and you could spend five years dissecting the implications of that story. and it's all about sameness and how sameness leads to competition. Competition can lead to envy, and envy can lead to violence and murder, basically. And how if you look at the Bible, twins are repeatedly a curse.

And the reason is that twins are like this symbol for two people who are too similar. And in the Cain and Abel story, there's Cain who kills Abel, throws a rock at him because he's basically envious of him. And if you follow what then happens with Peter Thiel, who is a Christian guy, at PayPal, he had this rule where every single person had to work on one thing and one thing only, and he would only talk to people about one thing. And he would, Apple, did the same thing. They have the directly responsible individual, similar. And what I think the lesson here is, is you want people to be differentiated, own their territory, not have other people stomping on those territories,

because that creates this competition and envy. And this leads into the philosophy of René Girard, who basically says that violence happens not because of differences, but more because two people are too similar. And similarity leads to violence. similarity leads to destruction, which is very at odds with how I thought violence went and deeply informs my worldview in terms of how I think about setting up a corporate structure for myself, how my friends operate and stuff like that. And I see the Canaan Abel story

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For example, say that you have, you're trying to get your finances in order, okay? And you have a chief operating officer, and then you have a chief financial officer. And you're trying to get your quarterly budget in order. Okay. So the operations person could say, hey, this is mine to own because I am an ops person. it is my job to set the budgets for each department, and I communicate with each department, so therefore I should own that project. Then there's the financial person who says, wait, I have finance in my title. That's my territory. And so then they both are working on it.

They have a disagreement. So one person wants to work, what is it, like a cash basis, another person wants to work on an accrual basis. I don't actually know the words for accounting, but they have different perspectives on how accounting should work. And now all of a sudden they're fighting against the thing for trying to fight for the same thing. They have a slight differentiation. Freud called us the narcissism of small differences. It was Kissinger at Harvard who said the competitions were so fierce because the stakes were so small. And so often people bicker over the smallest of differences. I heard about these two professors, one at Yale, one at Columbia, who loathe each other because of some difference in an interpretation of some character in Dante's Inferno. And they just

despise each other because they have a different interpretation of this very fringe thing. And so this shows up. And so in a company, what you'd want to do is you'd want to just carve it out. You'd want to say, no, this is the finance person's job. This is the operations person's job. And operations person, you are directly responsible for this, this, and that. Finance person, you are directly responsible for this, this, and that. And the buck stops with them. And we're very, very clear within the company to make sure one person owns certain things because once two people start to own something, all of a sudden there's there's competition, there's envy, there's rivalry, all these sorts of things.

And you don't want that. Yeah. I also think it's super empowering to the person to be like, hey, here's your, here's your territory. Like this is your kingdom. Yep. And you get to decide. And it's enabling versus like what sometimes CEOs do is.

they'll say like, okay, you'll get this piece or you'll collaborate with this person. And what ends up happening is like they don't feel the agency over the work. And that, yeah, to your point, creates problems. What do you think of companies, I mean, I know the answer, but what do you think of companies have co-CEOs? I mean, I don't have strong opinions, but I would be skeptical on it from the outset. That's my hunch based on the Canaan Abel story, is that like how to co-to-co? CEOs really work if there's not territories. Like you're just collected, you know,

you're twins and you're making decisions on the kingdom. Not, yeah, I didn't expect to talk, you know, too much Cain and Abel today. I got to say, I didn't have that on my bingo card with you, but I want to talk about opportunities. So I'm sure that you're, you're seeing a ton of opportunities building what you're building. Like, for example, you know, what would a right of passage look like for XYZ vertical? And I'm wondering. First of all, do you have any ideas where you're like, oh, I wish someone would build, you know, write a passage for XYZ. So that's one question.

And the other question is, you know, are you tempted to, you know, basically expand your curriculum? Like, what does this look like in 10 years, let's say? I don't know. But a lot of how I think about what the company wants to be is I sort of work back with who are my heroes and what is the fact that they're my hero, the fact that they're my hero, the fact that I'm so interested in what they did, how they built their career, I sort of ask, what is it about what they did that's really interesting to me? And the person I am just obsessed with is Walt Disney. I went to Disneyland earlier this year and I flew out to Orange County

to just say, what can I learn from Disneyland that I can then apply to write a passage? And I basically want write a passage to be like Disneyland for writing. I eventually want to have houses around the world where people can come in and have conversations that embody the right of passage spirit, testament to greatness. What does it mean to sort of be surrounded by people who've actually added something to human civilization? You know, there's no coincidence that right behind me, I have the story of civilization, books right here by Will and Ariel Durant. I have a whole collection from Michelangelo and Da Vinci. Like, I want this room to basically, be this holy place, this sort of cathedral of knowledge. And I would love to build places around the

world that embody that. And I want right of passage to feel like Disneyland. And some of the things that Walt did that I thought was fascinating is like, for example, when Walt was building Disneyland, people thought that he was going to throw his career away. He had been at the frontier of animation. He'd been at the frontier of movies. He had done all these things. And the war comes, the war ends. And Walt gets obsessed with miniatures. He gets obsessed with little models.

And he basically buys a house in the Los Angeles Hills just so that he can build a one-eighth scale train that goes all through his house. And he would invite people over. And everyone was like, Walt, what are you doing? You're one of the great entrepreneurs. And now you're obsessed with model trains. the heck is wrong with you. And so he then had attended a lot of world's fairs. He hated Coney Island in New York. He thought it was just the scum of the earth. And he was at, what is it, Knottesbury Farm. And at the time, amusement parks, they talked about each guest and they called

them marks, Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, Mark 4, this very utilitarian, numerical way of thinking about people. And Walt said, no, we can build something way better. We can combine my love for cinema with this belief that we can build a park that's not just great for kids, but great for parents, because he used to go to Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and he would go with his kids, and he would just sit on a bench, and he would just daydream, and he's like, why isn't their entertainment for me? He took all of those life experiences. He says, I want to go build Disneyland. And it's not a coincidence that when you walk into Disneyland, what's the first thing you see? You see the train. Now, that train is at 5 eighth scale. And that train, I sort of think metaphorically,

it's like a reminder to not be so purposeful about what it is that you want to do and to follow your passions regardless of whether you're certain that they're going to go somewhere. But at the same time studying Walt, I see that there's moments of a magical divine unlock. What he did was he worked with a designer and the two of them worked for 40 hours in a row to make the original map for Disneyland. Walt basically narrated and they drew a whole map of what the park would look like. Frontierland, thinking about the future over here and Main Street, Snow White Castle. and that original map was very close to what Disney ended up doing. And he was obsessed with getting the details, obsessed with getting the details right.

And what I love about Disney is he put product and he put quality above everything else. He was an artist, a creative, and an entrepreneur wrapped up in one. and I see so many people who get obsessed with the numbers, who get obsessed with the business model, who get obsessed with the exit. And I just think it's very uninspiring. I'm inspired by Walt because he cared about those details, every single one of them,

and he committed to getting the details right and wasn't so worried about cost, benefit, and stuff like that. And I think that it's important for the kind of companies that I want to build where the leader is like that. And then the other thing I've learned from Walt is to then surround yourself with people who could be the operational financial people. So Walt's brother, Roy, was that person. At one time, they didn't speak for two years. And they had a lot of tension at times.

But without Roy, the company would have gone bankrupt. Roy was sort of there to protect Walt. But Roy was really there to push Walt and his creative vision. And I'm so inspired by that because Walt just went all out, all out on trying to build the most beautiful things. that he could do and taking his imagination and trying to make it real. So you have a, you have a Roy on your team, like that equivalent? Yeah. My VP of Ops is like Roy and he's amazing. It's, it makes life so much easier. I can just bounce things off of him. I'm like, let's go, go, go, go, go, no budget.

Come on, man. And he is really good at disagreeing with me. He's extremely financially sound. he has built an education company very similar to the one that we're building and we go back and forth every single day and he's super super helpful i have that as well like my co-founder co-founder co-o theo taba you know i always say that he keeps the train on the rails and without him we'd be flying would be a flying train into a into a mountain probably um but now after your analogy i think about it is. He keeps the train on the rails and I design the trains. And I think that's a really important dynamic to have if you're building a company. Like you need to have the Walt Disney energy if you're marching towards something big,

if you really want to build something big. But you need to have Roy's soberness, basically. Like as founders, as founders with vision and product founders, were often, like, drunk on the product, frankly. And we need the soberness to bring us back to reality or else, you know, you don't get anything shipped or else you get like, I don't know if you remember in The Simpsons, Homer designed like a car. He designed like, I think at the time it was like an $80,000 or $100,000 car.

And like the horn was like like cucuracha or something like that. And it just like didn't really make sense. but, you know, his heart was in the right place. And it was just that he was lacking Roy to kind of keep him on track. Yeah. I remember earlier this year, I was with my co-founder. So this isn't Chris Monk, who's my COO. This is Will Manon, who's my brilliant co-founder and product guy.

And Will and I were going back and forth, talking about this super small thing. And we were just like, who's going to own it? Who's actually going to get this across the finish line? And it was a very tense conversation. and I was just like, okay, this isn't going to get done. And we've gone to the point now where we have small things that because we don't have a good VP of ops like Chris, who can take care of that, we're just going to bicker

because now the energy that you need to get that across the finish line, we don't have that. Fast forward six months later, we were in a meeting with an entrepreneur and residence who we have now. And we got to the end of the meeting and we were all ready to wrap up. And Chris goes, no, we are still at 5,000, feet. We need to land the airplane and then we need to get the airplane to the gate and then we need to get our bags off the luggage carous out. We need to get the Uber and get home. And it's so funny because I'm like, I'll take off, I'll go to 40,000 feet. I'll even come down to 5 feet to 5,000 feet. But I need somebody to do all that stuff at the end who can help me just boots on the ground. What do we tactically need to do? What are the objectives? What are the next steps? How will we know if we're successful? And I was super skeptical of these things to happen. a year ago and now I'm much more aligned and I just need his help to basically almost be like a

mini curmudgeon to basically be like, hey, I need you to do this. I need you to do this. We need to define stuff and it's super helpful. It's the stuff you learn. I don't know how old you are, but it's a stuff you like that's the stuff you learn in your 30s. I feel like when you're in your 30s, like you're like, okay, I know myself well enough that this is what I need in order to become successful. And I guess that even, you know, compounds as you get into your 40s. We got to wrap out. We're at a time, but I can talk to you for hours.

Where can our listeners find you and write of passage? Probably the most interesting thing is to type in 50 days of writing into Google and then my name, David Perel, and you'll get a 50-day email course. That's all about how I think about writing. It's totally free. And that'll help you think through ideas right. from abundance, right from conversation, right in public. All the basics are in that email series. All right. Check it out, everyone. Thanks, Greg.