EVERY SPOKEN WORD
90 min read · 18,393 words- 0:00 – 0:32
Intro
- CWChris Williamson
(wind blowing) Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by host of the North Star podcast, and all around interesting internet person, David Perell. David, welcome to the show.
- DPDavid Perell
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.
- CWChris Williamson
We've had some, uh, technical problems, but we've managed to girdle them around and we fixed it, and we're fully working now, right?
- DPDavid Perell
We're resilient, my friend.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
No matter where we are, no matter what's in our way, we're resilient.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, we certainly are. So,
- 0:32 – 5:35
Morocco
- CWChris Williamson
we haven't got an agenda for today. We're just gonna talk about whatever's been going on. So, what have you had on your mind recently, David?
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah, so well, I've spent the last 10 days in Morocco, so that has absolutely been the thing most on my mind. And I mean, that was, that was wonderful. It's really the first time in recent memory that I've spent 10 days, I barely consumed any information, just pure observation, and pure just living, and really enjoyable. I- I had actually forgotten what it was like to just be in a state of pure observation.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And the ways in which your whole brain chemistry changes, the ways in which you experience the world differently. The ways in which time begins to dilute and kind of expand. Um, but then also now that I'm back, thinking through the benefits and the virtues of routine, and, uh, just something I've been thinking a lot about. But Morocco's an amazing country in terms of my takeaways from the trip. I think that tourism there is about to explode. There's three main reasons why. I think Africa is fascinating in terms of what it means for the future of the world, and geographically, Morocco is in a really interesting place. It's on the northwestern tip of Africa.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And it's nine miles across the Strait of Gibraltar to get to Spain. So Morocco, the countries that have the most tourism visits to the country are France, Germany and Spain.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And so, in the northern, northern part of the country, you'll hear a lot of French and a bit of Spanish, and then there's Arabic spoken everywhere. And so because it's so close, um, what the Moroccan government is doing, and they own 100% of the airline, which is called Royal Air Maroc, they're gonna position Morocco as a kind of gateway to Africa.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
Meaning that'll be the first place you go, and then you can sort of spread into it. And if you look at ... I'm an airline buff.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
So if you look at Singapore, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Iceland, all those countries, they own 100% of their national airline.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And they've used that national airline to increase business in the country, increase tourism, and Morocco is about to do exactly that. Then the government has what's called the Vision 2020 initiative, and they want to make tourism the biggest industry in the entire country. So right now, it's agriculture.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And man, I'll tell you, we're walking through the northern part of the country, so we're about an hour and a half south of the Mediterranean Sea, and we were going on a hike. So we were in just a very, very, very rural area. Super poor. And there were these women, we saw five women, and it was like a Frida Kahlo painting. These women had, uh, probably 20, 30 pounds, probably more, of, of leaves on their back just walking through the mountains.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
We saw donkeys and mules, you know, helping these farmers tend their fields. And it went to show that right now, agriculture is the number one biggest industry in the country, and that's sort of the problem. Agriculture in the ways in which they do it doesn't scale like a lot of more industrial, first world country. Uh, you know, Morocco's pretty developed, but it's very different from an American agriculture. I grew up in California. It's very different from what you see in many parts of the Central Valley. And so what they wanna do is they wanna really have tourism explode, which gets to my third point, that it, Morocco is like the most Instagramable country in the world.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
And this will be a great segue into some of the ways in which I think about the world, but like, the world is ... Look, it's not becoming more visual. I think people use that, but it's a bit lazy because if reading is, was the dominant way in which knowledge was transferred from after the Gutenberg Revolution until basically now, reading is inherently visual. What I like to say is that it's becoming more imagistic, and the world is being run by images. And th- the dominant place where a lot of that is happening right now is Instagram. And when you go to Marrakech, which is the number one tourism city in Morocco, the patterns (laughs) , we were laughing, actually look better on your phone-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
... than they do in person 'cause all the blemishes kind of go away. And we were joking that like, there were these, you know, 19th, early 20th century kings who were having all their workers design these beautiful palaces, just exquisite, classic Morocco. And we were joking that they knew that Instagram was gonna happen-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
... like 200 years before, before we did.
- CWChris Williamson
They're getting the architects in and they're thinking, "That's a 400 like photo there." That's like a five, four or 500 like photo.
- DPDavid Perell
Oh, these are straight 800 likes, man.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, man. God. There'll be people at home booking flights just so that they can get straight on the, upregulate their, uh, their Instagram algorithm. Um, so-
- DPDavid Perell
I hope so. I'm an ambassador.
- CWChris Williamson
I get it. Um, one of the things you touched on
- 5:35 – 9:20
Taking time away
- CWChris Williamson
at the start there was about, um, what happens when you take time away and you come back? I think the marrying of enough space to reconnect with just the world, and to take things in and be on receive, but at a much slower pace, a, a pedestrian pace as opposed to at a motorway speed, which I think we are often when we're interconnected with the internet. Um, and then coming back to realize, "Oh, well actually I also love my routine." Um, I wonder whether, I certainly feel this way, like ...... the grass is always greener, no matter which side of it I'm on. Like, sometimes when I'm away, I'm like, "Oh, fuck." Like, I- I- I miss my routine. And then as soon as I'm back, I'm like, "Oh, well, I do love my routine, but I miss the fact that I was immersed in this culture." I recently went to Rome and got to walk through the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and the Colosseum and Pompeii, and I'm just, like, overloaded with visual stimulus, right? Like, more than any, like, I could have scrolled on Instagram for a day and I would have got less, but it just feels like it's delivered at a more pedestrian pace, at a pace that my brain is built to deal with. And I don't get home and feel like I'm burned out. I feel like I'm energized. Whereas, you know, if you've done a, a long flight and you've maybe not got yourself off your phone or you've been doing whatever, I- I feel the dopamine hangover's a lot more obvious.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah. Yeah. I think I'd phrase it a little bit differently. I don't really have a pause button, so I just go ham every day and I just, like, rush like mad. And so I'm pretty intense with both, so I wouldn't even consider it a pause button. What I think a lot of is... I think of a lot of life like a rubber band, and if you look at what a rubber band is, is it's like tension and release. It's actually like great music, right? Like, great electronic music, which is what I generally listen to, is a series of adding layers and layers to music, creating a kind of tension, releasing that tension, and then flipping to a new form of tension and then releasing that. Um, and when you go to these shows, what you see is they do that not only with the music, but with color and with different visuals. So you're getting a kind of similar tension and release, but then the way in which that's manifesting itself is changing throughout the show. And so I think music is an amazing metaphor for life, part of the reason I listen to it so much, but it's... I also draw amazing instru- uh, inspiration from music. And so to get back to your question, when I think of the role of travel, when I think of the role of observation, the role of conversation, all of these things are extremely important, but I see them more as a kind of, like, tension in the rubber band where when I'm in routine mode, I'm in straight production mode and I'm capitalizing on, on the tension that I have created. Whereas what travel and pure observation is, and then I would bucket conversation and different experiences, is that is adding tension and it's like breathing, right? It's like you can't breathe out all the time, but you also can't inhale all the time. And it's like through that process of breathing and not breathing, you're not pausing breathing. It's just more of a, uh, a kind of rhythm and a cadence. And for me, travel is adding tension. And then when I get back, I want to have added so much tension that I can be in full production mode.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. It fires you straight back into your routine.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah, exactly. But there's no pause for me. I mean, I'm a bit of a nut, but there's no pause, and that's, that's an important distinction to make.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, I get that. Um, so
- 9:20 – 13:10
Writing for the internet
- CWChris Williamson
one thing that I wanted to get onto was a recent article that you have written about writing for the internet. Is that right?
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So, I mean, one of the ways in which I see the world is I'm always looking for arbitrage opportunities. So generally, I think that if you look at economic history, there is the efficient markets hypothesis. And that whole idea is basically that when you have many different people participating in a market, for the most part, you'll get the wisdom of crowds that'll kick in and they will value an asset fairly. And I think a lot of life looks like that. You know, there's, like, an old joke with an economist who is walking and sees a $20 bill on the ground and somebody says, "Hey, you know, you just found this $20 bill." And he says, "Oh, actually it's either fake or it's not real because if it was real, somebody would have already picked it up." And the joke, the point of the joke is like, look, sometimes there actually is a free lunch.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And so when I think of the ways in which the world is inefficiently priced right now, it's writing on the internet. There's been this inflection point where there's so much demand pumping to the internet for people who want really high-level interesting ideas. So if you look at what's happening with the intellectual dark web, if you look at what's happening in certain parts of Twitter, certain parts of YouTube, my goodness, the stuff that you can find is incredible. I mean, it's better than any college class I ever took, and it's not even close. I was, like, falling asleep at college class i- and this was right when the internet was, was coming up and a lot of these things were coming up, and I remember the last few years of college, I had no desire to go to class because, uh, what I could find online was simply more interesting. And those trends have really kept going. And so what you have is this supply of really high-quality information is growing way slower than the demand for it. And so what you see time and time again is people follow the same three-step strategy to absolutely transform and revolutionize their careers. And with this three-step strategy, what's amazing about it is it means that you don't have to pay your dues anymore. And so my goal this year is to help 1,000 people start writing. Eventually I want to do 10,000, 100,000, uh, because I believe so strongly in how writing can change your life. And so what this three-step process is, to g- have it be really simple, is you pick an area, pick an industry that is small but it's emerging, and you start learning about it. You learn as much as you can, and then you share what you learn. Pick an industry, learn as much as you can, share what you learn, and if you pick the right industry, if you pick the right area and that area grows-... you will be an expert in that domain, and you will have what I call a personal monopoly on that area. And so, I have launched a writing course, uh, which really isn't about writing. It's about audience building, it's about connecting with people. It's about getting smarter by sharing your ideas. It's about creating jobs and opportunities for yourself, speaking gigs, consulting gigs, finding mentors, all that sort of stuff. And it's about using writing as the new resume, because resumes are an outdated way to communicate your talents.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And if you can write, and if you can communicate your ideas, and if you can share your unique perspective on the world in a way that's both engaging and entertaining, you have a massive, massive advantage in this world. And so, I've developed a whole methodology for doing that, and it's an online course called Write of Passage.
- CWChris Williamson
Amazing. First off the bat, what- why
- 13:10 – 16:10
Why write
- CWChris Williamson
do you think writing is an area in which you see, uh, easily exploitable gaps as opposed to moving to video, as opposed to podcasting or audio platforms, or any other way of being creative, uh, another creative outlet?
- DPDavid Perell
Totally. So, writing is the most fundamental method of communication. So, it is the pillar of any successful career and the foundation of basically any other form of media. And then also, writing is hard. So, the way in which I see it as the foundation is like, say that you're doing a speech, right? So, you're gonna go stand up in front of 500 people tomorrow afternoon, and you have two different ways of preparing. The first one is you just practice and you speak to different friends and whatnot. And the second one is you actually write it out. You structure your arguments and- and you say, "This is what I'm gonna talk about. This is how I'm gonna structure my ideas." What writing allows you to do is to think, and then once you begin to rewrite, that is rethinking. So, writing allows you to grapple with and explore ideas from more perspectives and more sides better than any other medium. One thing, to go back to our- the beginning of our conversation, that you find when you're in pure observational mode, is you're always kind of on this topical layer, and conversation can help you dive down a little bit deeper. But if you really want to explore the nooks and crannies of an idea, to see it like a kaleidoscope from all different perspectives, writing is the best way to do that. Now, look, I have a podcast. I did television in college. I've done- I've published more than 100 YouTube videos. I am basically content agnostic. But writing is the way in which that I have become smarter, the thing that has given me the most credibility. Because once you write about something, that is like a proof of work. It's a proof of work of an idea. And so, you know, I'll ask you, like if you meet somebody who has a podcast on a topic versus has written a book on a topic, you're probably gonna trust the person who's written the book about it. Because we have this intuitive understanding that writing is rigorous in a way that no other form of media is. And when you write about your industry, because of the rigor of writing and the way in which we position the written word in society, writing has characteristics that no other medium of communication has. And like I said at the beginning, writing is the single most fundamental form of communication.
- CWChris Williamson
It's definitely held in very high esteem. Um, I think it's- even the guys that I know that are super good on Twitter, and like Twitter used to be, maybe three, four years ago, it was just a swamp, right? Of GIFs and just- it was- it was
- 16:10 – 20:10
Podcasting
- CWChris Williamson
terrible. It- and now you look on there, and you've got these life-changing maxims from guys like, uh, James Clear. James Clear's Twitter is unbelievable.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like that guy- that guy is able to just constantly, on a conveyor belt, put out whatever it is, 300 character limit maxims for life. Um, Naval Ravikant, like, you know, any- anyone from that sphere of people are able to write. And you are right. There is something very, um, uh, that makes you hold it in high regard, the fact that they can articulate the written word, not just the spoken word. I do think there's a place for both, but to comment on how current culture sees the podcasting sphere, I saw a meme the other day that was about four white guys when they smoke a joint, and it just says below it, "Dude, we should totally start a podcast." And it's like, it does feel like that space now, especially with how quick of an emerging, uh, market the audio platform is, is almost becoming too meta for itself. Like it's becoming- it's becoming its own pla- like a caricature of its own platform almost.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah, maybe. I've- look, I'm s- I think podcasts are incredible. My point is really just that, in terms of the podcast that I create, sure, the- I have, you know, more than 10,000 listeners and that's all great and people respond and they say nice things, but wow, when someone has read something I've written, the relationship that I've formed with them is so deep. Um, and look, it's still true for podcasts. I actually think audio is amazing at inspiring trust. You're basically like a god in somebody's head. You've like seeped into their ears and you wear these AirPods and you forget they're even wearing headphones.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
And then there's like some brilliant guy-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
... or girl, like speaking in your ear, and she's saying things that you've never thought before-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
... while you're forgetting that you're even listening to a podcast.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
I mean, it's incredible, right? It's-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
Look, it's unbelievable. But to go back to the original point, the way in which writing...... helps you hone and develop your thinking. I mean, take a guy like James Clear. I had the privilege of spending a morning with him couple months ago, and we had an awesome conversation. And as I was preparing for that interview, I saw that for three years in a row, he was writing two articles a week. That's 114 articles a year. And then if you read that book, the way in which he could distill his ideas in Atomic Habits, the way in which he could craft sentences and really compress all the wisdom, writing is able to do that in a way that no other media is, because it's malleable and you can play with it. You can distribute it. You can get feedback with it. It's visual. I mean, it's so funny, when I was trying to edit my podcast when I first started it, dealing with audio is just an absolute pain.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
I mean, you have these, like, waveforms.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
I mean, it's really like, if you were to torture somebody-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
... you would say, (laughs) at least for me, you would say, "Hey. Go edit 10 hours of audio-"
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
"... and you can't do a transcript with it."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And, my goodness, it's- it's hard and it's inefficient.
- CWChris Williamson
It's painful.
- DPDavid Perell
But when you look at writing, it allows you to sort of rewrite and rethink, which makes it a really valuable medium.
- CWChris Williamson
That's something that's- that's super interesting, the fact that you- you're not temporally constrained when you have the written word. Even when you do drawing, or if you do painting, you can maybe rub out little bits. But after a while, you can only rub out so much. You can erase small amounts, but that's not- unless you're doing it on a- a graphics tablet, you actually can't continue to go back over or else you're just gonna wreck the page. You're gonna
- 20:10 – 28:10
Confirmation Bias
- CWChris Williamson
wreck the piece of paper. Like, there's physical limits on how much paint you can remove. And also, when you're talking about video and audio, once you've done it and created it, the only way that you can make it better is to go back and redo it again from either the beginning of the sentence or the beginning of the entire thing to go through. So yeah, uh, the fact that it's malleable is a- a- a really interesting point. I think, certainly for me, writing is- it's a big challenge. I think one of the reasons there's probably a little bit of confirmation bias, one of the reasons why I hold audio in such high esteem is it comes easily to me.
- DPDavid Perell
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
And I know that for me to become even close to as proficient as I am at audio, writing would- it's not low-hanging fruit. Like, it- it's whatever the opposite is. It's like at the top of the tree. Um, and-
- DPDavid Perell
Well, okay. Here's the thing. What you're saying is- is- is one of the tragesty- the tra- the tragedies that I hope to fix. And look, this isn't just a writing course. This is really a communi- an online communication course. It just so happens that writing right now is the single highest point of leverage.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't be promoting writing at all.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
I have no attachment to the actual written word. And to be honest with you, I don't even consider myself a writer. I consider myself a communicator.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
I think of myself as somebody who's interested in ideas. I think of myself who wants to build an audience online. And right now, writing is the best place to do that. 10 years from now, that might not be the case.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
But to get back to your point, you know, I was thinking about how you were talking about painting. Typewriters were a bit like that. But now with digital-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- DPDavid Perell
... you can- you can sort of rework everything. But the big thing that we try to do in the course is flip all of writing education on its head. So if you look at the structure of writing education, any system, the ways in which it works will flow from its end state. So in writing, what are the essays that you're doing in school? You're analyzing some Shakespeare play that you never understood, thou shall not do whatever, and you're doing these essays that are almost all focused on literature. And the problem is, that's not the kind of writing that you need to build an audience online, and it's not the kind of writing that you need to do well in business. And so my point is, the way in which that- there- th- th- there's really two kinds of writing. There's- there's writing for school, which is driven by the PhDs who go get a PhD in English, and they influence the entire system of writing education. Paul Graham has a great essay on this. And then there's another kind of writing, which is the writing I'm really focused on, which is not writing to be, like, Thoreau, or to be like any famous author. It's writing to get ideas out of your head, put them on a page, and then influence other people, or share an interesting idea with other people. Because I'll tell you, if you look at history, the people who have been able to communicate the best have also been the very people who have been able to achieve things that they've wanted to achieve. And writing, to get back to what I was saying about being the most fundamental form of communication, whether you're gonna do your own podcast, whether you're gonna do your own video series. You know, I like watching a video series called Every Frame a Painting. There's Nerdwriter. Both of them are incredible. There's Wendover. They all have written scripts, so they start with writing before they go into video. And my point is that it's not about writing to be a writer. It's about writing to share your ideas with other people and distribute them and to build an audience, which is one of the most valuable skills in the world right now. I mean, the returns to- to writing are actually increasing. They're exploding. And so this isn't really a writing course. It's a communication course through writing.
- CWChris Williamson
Interesting. Why do you say that the returns to writing are, are, are on an upward trend at the moment?
- DPDavid Perell
I mean, look at the people who we've spoken about so far. You found me through my writing. We spoke about Naval Ravikant, he's a vociferous writer. James Clear is a writer. You interviewed Rory Sutherland. I listened to that podcast episode. It was hilarious.
- CWChris Williamson
He's a force of nature, man.
- DPDavid Perell
Right? He's a force of nature. He's the absolute man. And I got an advanced copy of his new book, and like, first of all, it's phenomenal. It- it- it will do very well. It's like Freakonomics for behavioral finance.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
And what you see, though, is if you take a guy like Rory Sutherland, he's an amazing speaker, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
But he has honed and he's crafted his jokes through writing.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
He writes for The Spectator, and that is where he works on a lot of his really interesting ideas. And when he has a great anecdote, like we had wheels on luggage before we sent people to the moon, I read that p- that very idea in The Spectator before I heard it on your podcast.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And it's just a perfect example of how things can begin with writing and you can hone and craft your message. I mean, this is what comedians do, right? What comedians do is ... So I live in New York, and one of the things that we do for fun is we go to different comedy shows. And w- the thing that you get in comedy that you get nowhere else is you never know who's gonna be in front of you.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
So if you go to a concert, you're like, "Oh, my goodness, Odesza or Green Day or Muse will be playing."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
I know that. If you go to a movie, you pick a movie, you buy tickets for that movie. With comedy, you're like, "I'm gonna go to the Comedy Cellar at 8:00 PM on Friday, and I have no idea who's gonna be there."
- 28:10 – 33:20
Creative Output
- CWChris Williamson
for an essay, very few people actually engage in a deep conversation where they're not distracted by their phone and they're not fragmented by other things going on. It's very often, I think, that people don't even have to think beyond the- the surface, the near level of what their thoughts are, to then actually articulate them. The deeper thoughts that they have about issues that are going on at the moment or emotions they've had or experiences that th- th- they've had, I think, based on my experience, often just stay inside that person's head. Unless you have a, a, a creative outlet like yourself or me, or you're a writer or a painter or a, an artist or a musician, at what point is a layperson now actually being pushed to articulate their thoughts in a really sort of true and deep way? And I think that what that's forcing or causing a lot of people to do is actually become detached from not only the ability to articulate, but also the ability to think. If you've read 1984, we know that a restriction in language is essentially the same as a restriction in thinking, because without the capacity to articulate a thought, you essentially can't have the thought itself or the thought only exists in isolation. And it's this cloudy, nebulous, difficult to define, like haze that's just, it's a notion, right? You don't, you no longer have s- th- thoughts, you just have sentiments and notions. And yeah, you know, before even talking about writing, uh, writing for a purpose or writing for a, a, um, a site or to build up a readership or to even get feedback, simply the process of being on send and trying to articulate your thoughts I think can be so therapeutic and effective for a lot of people.
- DPDavid Perell
Oh, absolutely. Um, there's a guy named John O'Donohue, and he asks ... He, he, he's an Irish poet and he is magnificent. It was like, this has been ... I, I, I've now read all four of his books. I'd never heard of him at the beginning of this year. And in 100 days, I just pored through them.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
And he's a Catholic priest, Cath- Catholic minister, and then later in his career focused a bit more on poetry, and he tragically died, I think in his sleep, at something like the age of 54, but just is a h- hi- just one of those minds that you hear him speak and he says things that you should have known, you should have recognized-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
... but you could never really put it into words. And he asks-... in his podcast with Krista Tippett, um, on, on, on On Being, he asked, "When was the last time that you had a great conversation?" And to echo your point, he was saying that most conversations are just two intersecting monologues. So one person says something to somebody else, another person says something back. And there's this weird kind of competition where both people are maybe trying to one-up each other.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
But every now and then, you'll have a conversation that it's not a game of ping-pong. There's no, there's no competition, but it's a conversation where you're elevating onto a new plane of experience. And what's happening is, as a human being yourself, you're saying things and finding ideas within you that you didn't even know existed, parts of your soul that you had forgotten about, but the other person is doing the same thing. And all of a sudden, you're moving into this new frontier, onto this new plane of experience. And what he says is that conversations like that sing afterwards in your mind for weeks-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
... and that they're like food and drink for the soul. And that's probably the most powerful idea I've heard this year. Uh, j- having good conversation, conversations where you are elevating onto another realm of human experience are, I, h- honestly, I think that that's what we live for. And, uh, to get back to writing, writing is trying to do that at scale.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. I, I think that the, the sum being greater than the whole of the parts, um, during good conversations is something that I've felt, uh, at a much higher velocity than I've been used to since starting this podcast just over a year ago.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, and that kind of pharmaceutical-grade dose of, uh, of exposure to it has been very enjoyable, and I'm gonna continue to strike this iron until all of the listeners who are, uh, who are tuned in-
- DPDavid Perell
Good. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... are going to appreciate, appreciate that they need to put their phone down in the car and just has- ask someone a question about something that they care about. Um, I got... So my messages have come down from the top. I know you're gonna speak to a friend of the show, George McGill, I think, at some point this week, from Social Chain in Manchester. And he sent me a question asking, uh, you to explain your thoughts about people who consume, uh, the vast majority of their content that's only been created within the last 24 hours.
- DPDavid Perell
Ah.
- CWChris Williamson
So-
- DPDavid Perell
Yes. Okay.
- CWChris Williamson
... he's a big, he's a big
- 33:20 – 40:20
The Lindy Effect
- CWChris Williamson
Mental Models fan. We've done-
- DPDavid Perell
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... an episode which will be already out now in podcast land, and all of the listeners should know what the Lindy effect is. Um, but-
- DPDavid Perell
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
... he's, uh, this has come down. I should have turned my notifications off, but for the first time ever, I'm glad that I didn't, 'cause that's just popped down from the top of the screen. So, this is as fresh, as fresh of a question as you're gonna get, it's hot off the press.
- DPDavid Perell
Well, it's funny, 'cause we were talking about comedy, right? And so, I was with... This must have been six months ago. I was with some friends, and one thing that I do is I hang out with all, people in all these different scenes. New York happens to be a hub for so many different industries.
- CWChris Williamson
Cosmopolitan as fuck, yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
And I try to be... Is- is surround myself with people from, let's see, uh, lots of people in crypto, lots of people in finance, lots of creative people, different artists, uh, some in fashion. But then this was really with the influencer community, some YouTubers and Instagrammers who I had actually met through Twitter. And we were leaving my friend's house, and of course, it was Friday night, we were driving up to a comedy show. And we get in the Uber SUV, it was, like, one of the big ones that my friend had ordered, and I go in right first, you know? Like, to those back seats, you're, like, crawling-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
... and squirming. You're, like, doing gymnastics to get back there, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
So, I'm, I go back, I do, like, a 360 backflip to get-
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- DPDavid Perell
... in the back seat of the car.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- DPDavid Perell
And I sit there, and I'm looking at what all the people in front of me are doing on their phone. And the ride was 20, 25 minutes, not so long. But what was stunning to me, just stunning, was as I watched the people in front of me tap and text with, like, this kind of ferocious intensity, I saw that none of them had consumed anything that had been created outside of the last 24 hours. So they were all within Snapchat stories, Instagram stories, text message, WhatsApp threads, whatever, but it was all new content. And I had this idea, and it actually, this encapsulates my process for writing probably better than anything else, and it will show you how, for me, I write a lot, but I'm not a writer at all. Writing for me is sort of the end state of this way of life that I think is extremely vibrant, and writing is the way in which, kind of this end state in which I capture my thoughts and experiences. So I had called this idea the perpetual now, and the idea was that the structure of, uh, of our social media feeds kinds of, kind of keeps us within this, this perpetual now. Every time you open Facebook or Twitter, it's always new, new, new, new, new, whatever platform it is. And then I go to... Unfortunately, my grandfather passed, uh, i- uh, about two years ago, and, and I was looking through his library, and in there, I saw more books from before the 18th century than from the 19th and 20th centuries.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh my gosh. (laughs)
- DPDavid Perell
And these books were covered in highlights. You saw Shakespeare here, different poets over there. And what I saw was this big shift from, look, this isn't what everybody's doing, but...... this is the way in which our social media feeds are structured keep us in this ever-present now, where what happens is we become blind to our place in history. We become, like, overwhelmed by the present. And then when something happens, we just sort of get knocked off our feet. And I worry that if we're not conscious of the structure of our social media feeds, we're going to drown in what I then called the never-ending now. I had had a conversation with a mentor, CEO of a pretty prominent media company, and he had told me in this conversation, "Wow, that's an interesting idea. You should write about it." And it gets back to beginning in conversation, bouncing ideas off of other people. And if I can look at others and see the surprise on their face or, quite frankly, more boredom, the, uh, b- more often the boredom on their face, then I can do more of what's surprising and less of what bores people. So I wrote up this article, put it in my email newsletter, got great feedback from people. They, uh ... A couple emails that said it was their favorite Monday Musings email ever, and then I turned it into an article. And now, your friend is asking us about it here. And one thing that I really want to do, and I think this is gonna be a project for the next six to nine months, and I haven't told anyone about this publicly, but this is sort of a, a platform that I want to start. Because I think that the never-ending now is problematic. And it's not problematic because we shouldn't be consuming present information. The issue is that the w- we don't have people building to bring up books and articles that are a bit older. If you ever, if someone ever sends you an older article, something from, let's say, before 2011, you know it's gonna be good. No doubt about it. And so for me, if someone sends me an article, I place disproportionate weight on how long that article is. If it's two days old and somebody's like, "Hey, you should read this," I know that that is a kind of impulsive share.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
But if it's 20 years old, there's, just like you mentioned, a kind of Lindy effect. And the fact that it stuck, stuck with us to this time means that it's gonna be disproportionately good. So now, I'm gonna say this, I know I have to do it because it's public, what I wanna do is kinda create a database of 10, 20,000 different articles. And then what you can do is you can go in, search by keyword, and there'll be mostly old articles from the last, say, 50 years. And then you can get in there. None of them are gonna be sensitive to time. They're just gonna be interesting ideas.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- DPDavid Perell
And then what we'll get is, look, one, one thing that is true about the internet is it has a kind of perfect memory. So we ... Th- there, there's no bigger cost to pulling back old information. Like, if I was going to the library, or if I needed a book from, say, 1970, I need to go probably to the library-
- CWChris Williamson
Yup.
- DPDavid Perell
... or go buy it on Amazon. Not true with the internet. So what I'm gonna do is build a database of thousands of articles. People are gonna be able to search. And through this platform, we'll get out of the never-ending now, and I'll just do it because I believe so strongly in the power of the wr- of the written word, but also I see and sense an opportunity where if we can design our platforms differently, we can increase the quality of knowledge consumption and escape the never-ending now.
- CWChris Williamson
I get that. That was one of the reasons why I
- 40:20 – 44:30
Google vs Medium
- CWChris Williamson
was super drawn to Medium when I first, uh, learned about it, that it was the first ever, um, I guess, intellectually stimulating platform that was delivering results to me based on their either effectiveness or popularity, rather than their relevance.
- DPDavid Perell
Yep. Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Like Google, Google delivers its search results on relevance. I don't want what is most relevant to my search result. Like, what I'm after is what's best for it.
- DPDavid Perell
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
B- because something could be super, super 100% relevant, but actually deliver the message in a way that no one else found interesting. Like, and especially with the way that people can manipulate SEO tags and all the metadata and headers and stuff like that, like, it ... Medium for me was a real change w- with regards to the way that they deliver a lot of their content, because when you're searching for things, you can search for them based on other people's ratings, which crowdsources the, uh, evolution of what gets to the top.
- DPDavid Perell
Absolutely. So I think that there's a couple more things going on there, and, and, and you bring up a really good point on the difference between Google and Medium. And I think Medium is pretty good, but not exceptional. I almost never-
- CWChris Williamson
It could be better.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah, yeah. I almost never read Medium as a destination site.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
So something about it, then, still isn't good enough.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think it is?
- DPDavid Perell
But ... Yeah, yeah, I'll get into that. So let me just start with Google. So the thing that Google is structured for is answering questions. So Google, the best results on Google ... And look, you can game the algorithm, but the Google SEO algorithm is pretty damn good, but it's for answering questions. So what you find is good, simple information, but I don't seem to find very interesting things on Google. And I rarely seem to come across, like, a perspective that is like, "Huh, I've never thought of it like that before." Google is much more like, "Okay, now I know what I need to do," or, "I know where I need to go."
- CWChris Williamson
I know how to make that cake. I know how to take the fuel cap-
- DPDavid Perell
Exactly.
- CWChris Williamson
... off my car, et cetera, et cetera.
- DPDavid Perell
Exactly, exactly. Whereas I subscribe to a newsletter, highly recommend it, email newsletter called The Browser, $40 a year, worth every penny and more. And they send five interesting articles a day-... all of which make my head turn to the side and-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
... kind of surprise me a bit.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And they offer new perspectives that I'd never heard of. So yesterday, on the flight, I read about the benefits of arranged marriages, and from a woman in India who is the daughter of two people who had had an arranged marriage, and she was talking about all the great things that came out of arranged marriages. And so I'm reading, I'm like, "Huh, I've never thought of that before. I would have never stumbled on this. That wasn't even what I'm looking for, but I'm really glad I found this."
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
Google doesn't do that. Okay, so Medium kind of tried to do something like that. What Medium tried to do was create a hub for people who didn't have personal websites to lower the cost of sharing articles online. And I think that, if I'm being honest with you, I think Medium was better a couple years ago. I mean-
- CWChris Williamson
I've missed the boat.
- DPDavid Perell
... Medium has been kind of watered down by a lot of self-help stuff and has still been very susceptible to what's popular and what gets claps. And with that said, there's a lot ... Uh, don't get me wrong, there is a lot of amazing writing on Medium, just stellar writing on Medium. But I'm not sure that the home page does a great job of surfacing that writing, and we need to get better about that, um, as a society, but really just personally. I, there isn't a platform where I can just go on the platform-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
... and at the (snaps fingers) snap of a finger, find an interesting article that is also personalized.
- 44:30 – 48:36
The value of writing
- DPDavid Perell
- CWChris Williamson
I get that completely. I mean, that's ... I guess that's the goal for Medium, um, that's what it could be or should be. Um, but, yeah, it would be, it would be lovely. Um, one thing that I wanted to touch on before we finished was talking about ... So, we've spoken about, um, you spending some time with some influencers and these guys kind of furiously being on their phones. Also, the value of writing. We've spoken about how it's both useful for yourself to be forced to articulate your ideas and also for other people to then give you feedback so that they iterate over time, and you kind of evolve your own consciousness as a b- back and forth with other people. Um, one of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is, um, the success of people on social media, especially the ones who have the biggest audiences, let's use Instagram and Twitter as an example, the guys who get to the real, real top-
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... being encouraged to use their platform in a way like this, like to, to use it to write things which are deep and difficult and meaningful and grapple with difficult ideas. I appreciate that when you have half of the internet (laughs) say, well, like, uh, like Kim Kardashian's not going to begin to grapple with the finer points of why Brexit should or shouldn't happen. Like-
- DPDavid Perell
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... that's, that's not her bag. But I do sometimes feel-
- DPDavid Perell
(laughs) .
- CWChris Williamson
... like, as, as I see, and I've seen this trajectory of some of my buddies as well that have made it to, uh, social media superstardom-
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... they almost, i- it almost feels like the ideas, as you get to the top of the tree, and obviously these are the ones that have proliferated the most because at the top you go further-
- DPDavid Perell
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
... they almost get more watered down. They're more beige, they're more vanilla, they're, they're less interesting, and they follow the same kind of, um, the same model, because that's the model that they know is effective, and to change anything would be a real risk. It would be lovely to see some guys who, uh, guys and girls who make it to the top of the tree and then begin to go, "Right, I now have this platform. Let's see what difficult things I can grapple with. Let's see ... I have half a million, one million, two million people that follow me. Imagine how good and how quickly my ideas could iterate, and how fast they'd evolve if I used all of those people's feedbacks."
- DPDavid Perell
Oh, absolutely. But, I mean, I wouldn't be too down on this. There are ... Look, there ... I wish that there were a hundred, a thousand times more, but there are some unbelievable content creators out there who are not trying to water down at all. I mean, in the podcast realm, you have Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who, uh, runs the Invest Like The Best podcast. Patrick does a phenomenal job interviewing and the level at which he maintains that podcast, I mean, that podcast has had some of the best interviews I've ever heard, and he still keeps raising the bar. I mean, it's wildly impressive what he's achieved there. Tyler Cowen, who funds me through his Emergent Ventures grant, hi- he writes at Marginal Revolution every day, and I'm wowed with his production of high-quality content, the quality of his Conversations with Tyler interview series. You have people like Eric Weinstein, who, uh, who come up with some just ridiculously interesting ideas.
- CWChris Williamson
He's on another, he's on another level.
- DPDavid Perell
Check out, check out the embedded growth obligation idea.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
I'll, I'll send it to you. You can throw it in the show notes or something.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- DPDavid Perell
But listeners, google it, embedded growth obligation. Fascinating idea, and whether he's right or wrong, the consistency in which he makes me think differently, and all of those people do, is, is impressive. And look, there's, there are certain incentives online for people to water down the quality of their content, but there's also so many people, uh, who are going the opposite route, and I am on a mission, and I'm stopping at nothing to teach thousands of people to write online, to improve their ideas, and to bathe in the reverie of intellectual ideas that make this life so interesting.
- 48:36 – 52:02
Whats next for David
- CWChris Williamson
That's awesome, man. I think moving forward, it, it, it does feel to me like in the last five years, we have turned a little bit of a corner in a really good way. The proliferation of the intellectual dark web, dark web and, and the hunger for these sort of experiences. I went to go and see Jordan Peterson live in Manchester.
- DPDavid Perell
I did too. I did too in New York.
- CWChris Williamson
And I'm like ...... he's a, a psychology nerd, like a Canadian psychology nerd talking about life on stage. I wonder how many people would have been there, like even five years ago, whether he would have got that proliferation of, of, of ideas through the internet. And it just seems like such an... It seems like something that shouldn't be happening, but there obviously is this massive, massive audience that's hungry for these ideas. People like Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris, Eric and Bret Weinstein. Like, you know, these guys are, are delivering, um, s- content which isn't immediately, uh, gratifying, uh, at least on the surface of it, if you were to look at what, what people usually consider to be gratifying, and yet they're the sum of the most engaged and some of the most loyal readerships and fan bases on the internet.
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a whole, that, that's a whole other conversation about Jordan Peterson. I have good friends who despise the guy and good friends who love the guy.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Perell
And there's actually some good arguments on either side. Um, but yes, I think that your point about how much people want interesting ideas, that's being underestimated and to get back to some of the things I'm working on, I recently wrote an essay called What The Hell Is Going On? Trying to explain. We were at Thanksgiving dinner, we were having a conversation about what was happening in society, and I was hearing my, my, uh, aunt and, and my uncle speak and I was (laughs) just like, "You guys are totally wrong. Just absolutely wrong. You're missing some critical components of what's happening right now." And I wrote an essay trying to work through those ideas and basically the world, of course, is changing and this shift from information scarcity to information abundance and the paradox, the weird way in which abundance can sometimes be harder to deal with than scarcity is fascinating and something that I really want to keep exploring. But look, I wouldn't get too down because I'm gonna make sure that, uh, that there's thousands of really high quality thinkers out there 'cause I have a course that's ready to, ready to really raise them and to teach them and to show them the way.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't doubt it, man. I don't doubt it. So for the listeners at home that are interested in the course and to find more out about yourself, where is best to find you online?
- DPDavid Perell
Yeah, perell.com is my website P-E-R-E-L-L.com. Go to the Start Here page and you'll find something good there. You can find me on Twitter @david_perell and of course I have the North Star Podcast. Chris, it was great talking to you and I hope that we get a chance to meet in person.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, me too, man. Thank you very much. Have a good day.
- NANarrator
(outro music)
Episode duration: 52:03
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