#346 - David Perell - How Writing On The Internet Can Change Your Life

Chris Powers: David. Thank you for having me down in Austin today. 

David Perrell: Thanks for being here, man. 

Chris Powers: I've been to many studios, but this is by far the most incredible studio I've been to. I've watched many of your videos, and I've always wondered where he is doing this. So it's a treat to be here today. I want to start with a story you told me on the way up the mountain in Colorado.

And I was like, what'd you do during the summers? And you were like, my dad sent me to public speaking camp. So, first off, why did your dad send you to a public speaking camp? A little more about your dad: Why did you think that was pivotal in your life?

David Perrell: Yeah, it was pivotal. So my dad always said, I will teach you how to speak well, and it will serve you all your life. And. It happened sequentially. One of the things that we had in our high school was a meeting this morning. I went to a super strange high school.

We had this morning meeting, and the entire high school—300 people—would get together in the same room. It was structured in three parts. First, there'd be an announcements section. Then, you would give a talk to the entire school, and everybody would meditate together in the same room. It's wild.

I gave many of those talks throughout high school, so I became comfortable giving them to the entire school. However, I was comfortable doing that because I would go to sleepaway camp in middle school for public speaking. It'd be one or two weeks, and all we would do was practice giving a talk.

We'd give a talk and get feedback and critique. I learned how to present myself and speak in public from a young age. My dad was right. I do that now, and he was adamant about ensuring I did that.

Chris Powers: What was your dad's background? Why did he know that that was important?

David Perrell:I'm not sure, but one of the most incredible things about my dad was whenever I was passionate or excited about something, he was all in. So, we didn't give Hanukkah gifts when we were growing up. We didn't make many fancy dinners like birthdays weren't a big deal, but when I was interested in something, he just went all out, so that was baseball, it was golf, it was flying aeroplanes, and it was public speaking. He got a sense that I had a knack for communication, and maybe that's something that he wanted me to be doing, and he pushed me to do it. I'm very thankful that he did.

Chris Powers: Okay. So you wanted to go to the camp. It wasn't like, Dad, I have to go to camp.

David Perrell:I don't want to go to sleep away camp. That was a bit much. That's like, I like water. I don't want to drink a gallon of water. And that was like drinking a gallon of water. I wouldn't say I enjoyed the public speaking sleepaway camp, but I did like doing the public speaking training and somehow ended up at these camps. One of the exciting things about my parents was that they did many strange, weird, and esoteric things. Like I can tell you, go boom, boom, like peculiar stuff. They somehow found a program where it could fly in the cockpit of an aeroplane when I was in sixth grade. They sent me to Spain when I was 15, and I lived with the host family there.

I went to a sleepaway camp called Embry Riddle. It was another aviation camp, and it was only for teenagers. I was ten years old, so I was the youngest person by four years, and I just got bullied like crazy. It was brutal. They put me in strange and uncomfortable positions reasonably lovingly, but it wasn't easy.

Then the other thing was that I was the youngest person to do things all the time. 

Chris Powers: In moments like that, if you were, I don't know if you would complain or show that, man, I'm the youngest; this isn't going around. Like, how would they react? Would they would just kind of like suck it up?

Or were they happy that you were not pleased, but they saw the benefit of putting you in a challenging situation? 

David Perrell: I'm not sure, but I was a Difficult kid. I was a problematic kid. Even now, when people come over and hear stories, I need to cover my ears, and people go, that was you.

I was furious. I was red with rage, and I was a tough kid to raise. I used to hate my parents. I used to spend a lot of time just being unhappy. And I think they were trying to figure out what to do with me. 

Chris Powers: Dude, that's not the David I know.

David Perrell: I've changed a lot. I was a depressed child.

Chris Powers: Well, it's funny. You read, and you're motivated. You're ambitious; you're a world changer in your regard. You are buddy David Cinra. Founders like you read about some of the gifts you have come with, including the dark and dark sides. People are not wired the way guys like you and I are entrepreneurs or ambitious types; the dark side can be dark.

David Perrell: I had a lot of pretty dark thoughts, surprisingly young, and needed to work that out. I still need to work that out.

Chris Powers: Well, interestingly enough, your hero is Walt Disney, who's not maybe a young kid who was rebellious and into mischief. Why was Walt Disney your hero growing up? 

David Perrell: Walt wasn't my hero growing up. He became my hero about three years ago. And so this is what's interesting. I'm not that into Disney movies. When adults go to Disneyland, they wear costumes and other stuff. I'm not like that.

I think Walt. He's a hero for me in two ways. One is how he merged business and imagination to create memorable experiences for people. The other is his sense of vision around architecture. So, the lounge's central piece is a drawing he made over 40 hours with an artist named Herb Riemann.

They sat down. It was in the mid-50s, and Walt thought this Disneyland idea might work. As legend has it, he walked around the room and recited what he wanted this park to look like. He had made multiple trips to Europe and was interested in architecture.

One of my favourite books is Walt Disney, and the way that he got inspiration from 18th- and 19th-century French interior design is super esoteric and strange. Still, he pulled all that together into this very distinct vision. And I have that painting as a reminder of how great things can come from the imagination, wonder, joy, and enthusiasm can go together, and how there are certain moments where there's almost a divine presence in there, and the muses come in. You can create something that's just really magnificent, and that is like the founding story of Disneyland.

And I look at it every day when I come into work to say, all right, let's create something like that. So, the reason that I love Disney is different from why most people do. And I only developed an appreciation for him once. Until three years ago or something. Did you? Now, I go to Disneyland multiple times a year.

I freaking love Disneyland. Seriously? I love Disneyland. I'll go with friends, and that's an architecture-type thing. And then what I love doing is just going with my friend's kids and watching. Yeah, I go; I've gone the last two Thanksgiving with Brent Beach Horn and his family and his kids, and the girls get so excited.

The fact that he created something that can do that for Millions and millions of people every year is outstanding. 

Chris Powers: Do you think there is a Walt Disney on the planet today?

David Perrell: It depends on how you define that. 

Chris Powers: You think there are people that because I'm going to tie that into something that I think it's your most viral tweet of all time, which is the logos one, which is you just said, we're losing our soul and everything, every logo is turning into the same thing.

And then you did this. You laid it out. If you still need to read it, you should read it. But I read it this week, and it's your message that we're losing soul and creativity. So was that discovering that part of discovery because you were saying you started loving Walt Disney around the same time?

David Perrell: Yeah. So what happened was I went to Paris. I made a trip there in May of 2022. I'd never been to Paris, and visiting Versailles, the museums there, and the Louvre, just seeing the bridges and the city's construction, I was so moved by the artificial beauty in Paris. And that sent me on this journey of discovery.

While designing the studio, I started right after I got from Paris or when I got back from Paris. And it's a Friday afternoon, like 1 p.m., and I called a friend and said, Hey, do you know a good designer? As fate would have it, she said, Oh yeah, my best friend in Austin's a designer.

You'll love working with her. So she comes in, and she's on these like, you know, five-inch heels, and she's like a combination of Miss Frizzle, It's Anna Wintour on Acid, and she comes on in and, you know, she's just sort of all over the place. And we started talking about design and worked together to develop what the studio would eventually become.

And she looks at me and says, I've never met somebody like you. You have such a strong sense of what you want, but you need to have an understanding of art and design history and an ability to articulate what you like. And then in this very sort of, she goes, thankfully, I am, you know, I've been graced, you know, so I can help you do this.

She helped me express what I wanted. I got into it by building out this studio. Right now, there's a lot of opportunity to create beautiful things. A lot of how culture moves is in swings and seesaws but at the level of society at large.

There are many greys, many flat surfaces, and very few textures. All the new homes that are built have flat white walls. It's incredibly boring, dull, and stale, and it reflects a lot of the SSRI world that we live in. But at the same time, there are such incredible tools for expression, and People feel that when they're in the presence of something well-made or well-designed, they come alive.

There's a lot of opportunity to go out, crush it, and knock it out of the park with good design. 

Chris Powers: You just said something that landed so well, and somebody told me this the other day: I'm good at telling you what I don't like. Like I could improve at then coming back going, this is what I want.

I can, but when I see it, I know it. I need help to get the person where I want to be. 

David Perrell: One of the most influential pieces of management philosophy I've read is an old PDF called The 11 Laws of Show Running. It's written for actors, and one of the core things is that if you are managing a team of creatives, you cannot say.

I'll know it when I see it. You can't do it. You have to be able to articulate what you want. So how do you do that? Well, when it comes to writing, I collect great paragraphs. When it comes to YouTube thumbnails, I collect great thumbnails. Regarding design, I have hundreds, now thousands, of images I've collected.

And so what I do is not to articulate what I'm going for. I try to create a triangle. And if you want to improve your writing or communicate anything, I think of the triangle where you say, here are three good things. And then you write one sentence that you like about all three things, and then you say, now be inside the triangle.

So now you have a quality barometer, giving them a sense of vision. You don't have to come up with anything; you can use examples of things you found to guide others. 

Chris Powers: Is there a purpose for it being a triangle instead of a square or something, or is there something?

David Perrell: A square works, but three is like a nice thing in a triangle. It's so easy to see and write. 

Chris Powers: Whenever I ask for something, you send me a mood board. It's like you have; it's on command. You've sent me podcasts, studio ideas, and thumbnails. How many of those do you start dropping things in for different parts of your life? How many mood boards do you have?

David Perrell: I have so many mood boards, so many images, so much that I've collected, and I'm super sensitive to what I love and what I hate. And if I see something I love, I ask why I love it. I deconstruct. I try to figure out what is going on here that is making me feel this way.

So, for example, have you ever listened to Theo Vaughn? He's so funny. So I'll probably listen to a hundred hours of Theo Vaughn in the last two months. And I listen to Theo Vaughn, and then I write, what makes Theo Vaughn resonate with me so much?

So I'll do my deconstruction; I'll find little things. For example, make up sentences. I'll make up words, and then what I do is I say, from there, I then go into the YouTube comments, and I say, what are other people saying that they love about Theo Vaughn? Then I take all that and say, okay, now I have a model of why Theo Vaughn speaks so well.

I'm always doing that for things that I find, so those are things that I love. Then, I also pay attention to things that other people love that I have no affinity for. And then I ask myself, why don't I like it? What is the thing that's rubbing me the wrong way? 

Chris Powers: So, well, I have to ask, what's one thing that you've figured out about Theo Vaughn that the typical listener wouldn't just pick up on; they think this is a funny guy.

What's something that you've, like, drilled in on, you're like, here's a layer deeper if you think about it?

David Perrell: can weave together sentences that have never been said before in human history. And he, he's able to make up words. So, for example, I got to credit Sean Puri about this because we're talking about this, but one of the things that Sean observed is that, so, say that he's talking about Diet Coke, he'll say, you know, that big old bubbly drink, or I'll say, you know, that Warren Buffett, right hand.

And then he'll say, you know, that red and that red silver soda, and then he'll like to say all these different things that lead you to Diet Coke. And you know what he's talking about, but you also need to learn what he's talking about. And all those things you've never heard somebody say that red and bubbly soda for, like Diet Coke, and it's hilarious.

Chris Powers: Alright, let's talk about writing. You've been touching on writing, so it would be hard not to talk about writing in this podcast for a bit. So you grew up—we'll call it rebellious. When did you start? Was writing therapy for you, and how did writing become a thing?

David Perrell: I was a terrible writer growing up. I remember reading Sula by Toni Morrison in my sophomore year of high school, raising my hand and saying, Miss Cohen, this is the first complete book I've read in my entire life. So I didn't read, I didn't write at all. When I got to college, I was the sports director for our college television station.

So I'd have to write a script for that, but it was a little. Then, in my first job, I worked in sales, and I remember we were doing this pitch for a Bacardi deck. I was like, got to. It sells this thing. I wrote the word epic, and my boss called me into his office and said we don't use the word epic here. Take that college language out, and he looked at me and said your writing is your biggest weakness. You have to improve it. So remember, he's like the 64 super tall guys. I'm like this, you know, this, you know. I remember in my head that I was three feet tall, looking up at this guy. It's like this giant human, and he's confident and has a big beard. And it's just like six floors. Like this guy can sell, you know, I'm super intimidated.

I was like, well, how do I learn to write? And he was like, well, you read good writers. You just got to practice. I was like, okay. About a month later, I got laid off from the job. And so something about the story that I told, I was checked. And here I am, living in New York City.

I'm hopeless at this point. I'm 22 years old, got fired, and laid off from a job; who knows? And it's because I didn't know how to write. Oh, my goodness. Around this time, I was spending a lot of time on Twitter, and I said, well, I got to start getting a job. I learned that I would read people who were writing on the Internet, and they were ordinary people.

And I said, well, they're writing and sharing their ideas. What if I learned how to write? I could do that. So what I did was I said, I'm going to go to Starbucks every single day for 90 minutes, and I'm going to get my 90 minutes of writing done. And that's what I started doing. And I did an abysmal job of it.

But day in and day out, and almost two years later, I got my first big client who wanted to learn how to write for me. It was a consulting client. It was, like, 1,000 dollars. And I was 1,000 for somebody to learn writing for me. Then, I decided to turn that from a consulting business into a course business.

Now I'm like, if other people are paying me to do this, I've got to get good at it. Five or six years later, I've gotten good at it.

Chris Powers: Was there a moment in that first two years where you go, I'm good at this because you started with, like, I just got fired. I'm a loser, blah, blah, blah.

David Perrell: No, but I will tell you a funny story. There's one thing that I remember happened. I published a piece called Naked Brands and will never forget Patrick O'Shaughnessy sharing it. I was a big fan of Patrick, and 6,000 people had read it. And I remember I was at the gym and ran up the stairs like I just won the Super Bowl.

Chris Powers: You wrote an essay, posted it on Twitter, and Patrick read it and shared it. 

David Perrell: Somehow, someway. 

Chris Powers: Okay. But in those two years, cause again, many people are listening to this right now. They're like, I suck at writing, and maybe they're not going to have the time to dedicate 90 minutes every day, but was there an inflexion point or an aha moment that perhaps nobody else saw where you walked away one morning. You're like, okay, I'm getting the hang of this.

David Perrell: It was slightly different. I learned how to get captivated by an idea and let it consume me. I remember feeling that way for a piece called What the Hell Is Going On. In it, we're at our Thanksgiving dinner table, discussing what's wrong with the world.

And one aunt's got her opinion. You know, one grandpa has his opinion. Dad has his opinion. Mom has her sister and all these sorts of people. And I'm just sitting there quietly. And I'm like. All of you are dead freaking wrong, dead freaking wrong. You have no idea because the thing is, you're thinking about this through the lens of the mainstream media, but the media environment has changed. Anyone can write and publish now, and we're moving to a world where the three-letter networks, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox.

They won't have the monopoly on distribution they used to have. Once media is democratized and individual creators are created, how we think about media, politics, education, and commerce will change. And it was all downstream from shifts in information flow.

I had read the history of media, looking at, for example, how the radio led to a lot of totalitarianism and what the printing press did with Martin Luther. We've studied this a lot in school, and I said the same thing is now happening with the Internet. There's going to be a crazy fragmentation, and that is going to change how we engage with the world.

So I wrote that piece, and I remember diving in. I was reading Martin Garry's Revolt to the public at the time, and I took a question like that and had this sort of piece epiphany moment that is foggy and hard to put into words. You have this intuitive sense that something is interesting there, and then I put it into words, shared it, and had people read it.

That is an intoxicating feeling—I feel drunk whenever I get that feeling. It's my favourite thing ever. So, it wasn't necessarily that I was a great writer, but I Learned how to take a question and turn it into an answer, and that whole process of falling in love with it was a huge game changer for me.

Chris Powers: And is that just tons of research cram doing your cut maybe triangle method of saying like here are all the things I can gather around this topic, and then you start working it together and working it together. 

David Perrell: A bunch of research. So that's what it was. It was basically: We'll get a bunch of research and synthesize it in various ways.

And that's actually how my writing started at the beginning. I struggled to take ideas from myself and put them onto the page. But I was good at taking ideas from other people and putting them onto the page. So, I called that writing from abundance. So I would read a bunch, I'd get, say, 10,000 words on the page, and then I'd almost try to squish it together and then create something that was the output that was the ultimate synthesis. And even now, I'm pretty good at that. Still, a lot of my more recent writing has been about how I take things from within me, experiences that I've had, things that I've been through, insights that I've come up with, and how I then get those onto the page without relying so much on anecdotes, quotes, and things from other people.

Chris Powers: Does every output you have taken about the same time? Or there's some, you're like, I wrote that in a day. That one took me a year.

David Perrell: Yeah. Some will kill you. 

Chris Powers: But to the reader, they might read both of them and think, like, they wouldn't be able to tell the difference of how much time was put into each one. And what's the difference?

David Perrell: Yeah. Well, one of the most important things for a writer is getting comfortable with deleting things that took a lot of time and knowing that just because something took a lot of time doesn't mean it's more insightful.

Chris Powers: All right. So you figured out you're good at writing. You run up the elevator, and Patrick shares your deal. And then, at that point, you thought, okay, I'm going to start turning this into a business. Other people should start writing. Why do you think other people should start writing?

David Perrell: So there's a few reasons. First, writing improves your thinking. There've been so many moments in my life when I thought I had a sense of what was going on, and writing Made me realize that I didn't know what I was talking about. It also allowed me to structure my ideas, and there's a certain kind of thinking that you can only do in writing because what writing does is freeze your thoughts onto the page, and now that the thoughts are frozen,

You can free up space in your memory to work with those ideas. It's the same reason that mathematicians have a piece of paper. Your teachers always say to use that extra piece of paper when you do math because your brain only has so much storage. Writing allows you to externalize that thinking.

So that's the first reason to improve your thinking. The second reason is that we are writing now more than ever. There's this idea that the written word is disappearing and going away. And I see why people say that, but it's also not true. We're writing a bunch of emails. You write a bunch of memos at work.

You text your friends all the time. And there are a bunch of people who learn to write in school in a very rigid and stultified way. They sound awkward and robotic when they try to write. Don't do that. But it would help if you untrained yourself from doing that. And if you can, you can be the person at work who writes the company memo and sets the strategy.

You can be the person at work who, when you see an idea, emails it to the CEO and says, Hey, we should reconsider this. We should change how things are. And I'm telling you, any company in the world, from Disney to Stripe to Apple, if you see something, say that you work at Apple, you work on a supply chain in China.

And you see something consistently happening with the iPhones that, if solved, would increase Apple's profit by many millions of dollars a year. You could talk, tell your boss and whatever, and get up the chain, but then you'd have the game of telephone, or you can take a weekend.

You can sit down to write what you see and send that email to Tim Cook. He will read that email. So, writing is your fast track to the top. Intelligent people read, and innovative and successful people read the most. The people running the world don't wake up every morning and watch Mr.Beast. They wake up every morning, and they read stuff. They read stuff. Mr. Beast is fantastic, but they read stuff. Then, I encourage people to share their ideas because if you share them, you can increase your surface area for serendipity. And that's when magical things happen that you wouldn't have expected.

People reach out that you don't know. People want to work with you, and people want to be friends with you. Most of my friends come through online writing in some way, shape, or form. And what you're doing is tapping a tuning fork and seeing what resonates. So you're saying, Hey, this is what I'm interested in.

I'm excited about this. The more specific and rigorous your ideas are, the more you attract people to your intellectual wavelength. Finding those people in the physical world can be challenging, but it's easy to attract them when you share your ideas online.

Chris Powers: Why do you say people write better in text messages than in Google Docs?

David Perrell: It's true.

Chris Powers: Why do you say that?

David Perrell: So, there are a few things. There's a conditioning thing where you will open a computer. You open it. You look at that blank white screen, that flashing cursor of doom, and you're like, okay, now I need to be polished and rigid.

You turn on the part of your brain that needs to be perfect and polished, which blocks people. Typing in a text message box and the blue bubbles makes people feel like they're talking to friends. And it is surprisingly effective that you can change the context if you're stuck.

Hey, if you're stuck, text me something. I know so many people who, many years ago, there was a woman who wrote a passage and sent an email to me, and she was like, I don't think this is the right thing for me. You know, like investigating the program, like she's an FBI detective or something. And I'm like, hold on here.

It was so well written. Here are the six reasons I'm sceptical of you and your program. And I'm like, okay, cool. It is just an utter teardown. So we get back to where this lady ends up joining. Five weeks later, she's getting to the end of the program, about to publish her final piece, and she gets another email.

I can't publish this piece because I'm not a good writer. And I'm like, Emily, you're a great writer. You sent me that email beforehand, and it was well thought through. The word choice was carefully made, but now that you're trying to write to the masses, you're stuck. Please write me an email.

So take your piece and write me an email; she did. It was good, so I changed a few things and shipped it off.

Chris Powers: So you've had 1500 people go through it. What's one thing that people have gone on to do since coming out of that program? They may have started like Emily, where they didn't think they were good writers.

What's the story of somebody that's come out that maybe people would know about?

David Perrell: My favourite example is Pecky McCormick. Pecky was working. He was the, the. VP of experience at Breather was stuck in his career, and he's like, what am I? I'm not satisfied with what I'm doing. I have a lot of potential staring at the walls, you know, doing that thing at work where you sneak off to the bathroom to get a few minutes away from the desk.

He knew he was made to do something more and was interested in Ben Thompson and business theory, but he was reading it and was like, this is so boring. It is so dull, and he comes in to write a passage. He starts writing and trying to think about what he's going to do, and he says, what I'm going to do is I'm going to write about business and tech and what's happening right now, but I'm not going to do it in a boring way.

I will layer on pop culture references, humour, and playfulness, and I will call it not dull. And that's what this guy has done. He now has 200 to 250,000 email subscribers. He published his first email newsletter and his first article in Rite of Passage, and his goal for the first newsletter was to get just 20 subscribers.

And he was like, please, and he's now, he's now grown that by an order of magnitude.

Chris Powers: That man went through a rite of passage.

David Perrell: He was in our first cohort.

Chris Powers: Did he think he was an excellent writer going into it?

David Perrell: I don't know. He knew he had potential, but he had never written anything.

Chris Powers: All right. Let's do a little bit of storytelling. You go to Patrick Collison's of it and cheat. You gave me a list of incredible stories. And so there could be some rhythm to these. We'll weave them in and out. Cool. But the first one out the gate, you said this was a great story. I went to Patrick Coulson's event.

David Perrell: Yep. So I, another person I met online, remember Patrick. Send me a direct message and say, Hey, you want to have lunch next time you're in San Francisco? And I'm a massive fan of Patrick Collison. I said, yes, let's do it. So we met, we had lunch. And then I get an email about nine months later, saying, Hey, I'm hosting an event.

Do you want to come up? And so basically what he did was it was at Sea Ranch, and he brought in 150, 200 people he knew through the Internet or scientists, different writers. And I'll never forget. I showed up. And I get this card, which says, Hey, welcome to see Ranch Cap. And there are eight things on the card.

It's like, we're going to sleep here, the meal times here, the event times and all this standard stuff. But I will always remember the eighth bullet point because it epitomizes what makes Patrick so distinct and the thinking you need to build a great company. The eighth bullet point says.

If anything needs to be impeccably perfect, let me know immediately. I've thought about that sentence extensively, and two things stand out. The second is to let me know immediately, which is to talk to me like I want to return to writing.

You let me know I'm writing this event. Come talk to me. It's not talk to somebody else; talk to me. Then, the first thing that impeccably impacted me was the gentle way of setting an extremely high standard. It's not if you're annoyed by anything or if anything feels wrong.

We want this event to be impeccably perfect. If it's not, let me know. One of Patrick's best traits is his ability to be bold, ambitious, gentle, and very human. That sentence perfectly embodied that.

Chris Powers: Bold and ambitious with a dose of gentleness, it is hard to pull off.

Most super bold and ambitious people lack empathy and grace, too. That comes with it. All right, you bet. Brent Bishore. How'd you meet Brent?

David Perrell: What do you want the story to be an hour or four hours?

Chris Powers: I don't know. I told them we've got time.

David Perrell: Well, meeting Brent was one of the best things ever happening to me.

Chris Powers: And how'd you meet him? Writing?

David Perrell: No. So Brent did a podcast with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and I listened to the podcast, and I said, this guy is the most brilliant business mind I've ever encountered. I said I needed to reach out to him. So I did. I said, Hey, let's do a podcast. At the time, I had a podcast called How I Write, but at the time, I had this little one called North Star.

I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. After I'd gotten laid off, I said I would start a podcast called The North Star because I had to figure out what my North Star was. I had no idea where I was even going with my life. So I reached out to Brent and said, Hey, let's do a podcast.

I'll always remember. I recorded it in a little stairwell at my friend's office. We enjoyed it, and he invited me to stay in Missouri. I went to talk about business and making money, but he wanted to talk about Jesus. Let's talk about faith later on.

I left with a straightforward idea from Brent: man, you can think whatever you want about faith. I respect it, but if you reject Jesus, you need better answers. And I said, yeah, you're right. Those are lame answers. So I met him; now he's one of my best friends.

Chris Powers: What do you remember? What were your answers at the time?

David Perrell: Oh, yeah, I mean, they were so bad.

Chris Powers: Were they just convenient?

David Perrell: I thought Jesus was worshipping a skyfarer. You can worship the Build-A-Bear you built at the workshop in sixth grade or Jesus, and they're on the same plane and dimension.

And also, I thought that all Christians were lame and stupid. I had no respect for Christianity itself. That was probably a function of meeting very few Christians where I grew up and living in New York City. But I was like, there's no way I will do that. It just felt like the lamest thing to be a Christian.

Chris Powers: Okay, we're going to weave back there. We've set the tone, but we'll get there in a second because this story needs to be told. A guy is working at McDonald's. How did you find this guy? His name's the Cultural Tutor. Is he the most prolific writer on Twitter or one of them now?

David Perrell: With my left index finger, I have scrolled worldwide and back on Twitter. When I see someone on Twitter, I have a pretty good sense of how much game they have.

Chris Powers: You're a left index finger. I'm a right thumber.

David Perrell: I'm a left index finger guy, you know, going, you know, who knows?

So, I've scrolled around the world, and it's funny. I can read about two to four sentences from somebody. If you give me that much, I can quickly see if somebody's a great writer. It doesn't; it's just the word choice, the word, and the sentence construction.

And there was this guy, Cultural Tutor, who I had been following, and he was exploding. One week, he had 10,000 followers; the next, he had 30, 70, 80, and hit 100,000 followers six weeks in. I remember seeing him join in May. It is now mid-June, late June, and he has a hundred thousand. He writes this thread and says, Hey, I've hit a hundred thousand followers to celebrate.

I'm going to launch my newsletter. That's the worst flipping idea I've ever heard. You're growing fast because you're sharing all your stuff for free. Now, you can subscribe to a paid newsletter. This guy is like, well, I need some, as he calls it. And so I can write about culture, I'm like, that's the worst idea ever.

But I need to find out who this guy is. He's a statue account. Who is the cultural tutor? And as fate would have it. At the bottom, there's this guy, Harry Dry, who responds with a blurry, weird, sort of distorted photo of the two of them, and it says, Proud of you, brother. I had dinner with Harry in London earlier that year, so I instantly sent Harry a WhatsApp message.

It would help if you introduced yourself to a cultural tutor right now. And he's like, whoa, what's going on? I'm like, okay, this was happening. You just said a hundred thousand. I want to chat with him. Who is he? So, I got on FaceTime with the cultural tutor. I'm like, who are you? He's like, well, twenty-five years old, just left my job at McDonald's.

I was sweeping the floors and cleaning out the McFlurry machines. I was lower on the totem pole than the guy who flips burgers. And it wasn't my passion, but what I felt I was made to be doing. So I decided to start writing, and I'm living with my parents. It's a challenging situation right now.

I'm training for the British military because either I will make money as a writer or go to the military. And I'm like, hold on here. So you have no job. He's like, I have no job. I'm like, you have no money. It's like, I have no money. And I say, well, what have I just paid you to write?

How much would you need? And he goes, well, I would need 2000 pounds a month. I'm like, That's not a lot. We'll give you more than that. And we'll call it a deal. Here's the rule. Write a Twitter thread every single day. And try to grow your email newsletter. He now has about 200,000 subs on the newsletter and 1.6 million followers, and he has just taken the world by storm.

Chris Powers: And why is he so great? Why was he the guy you lasered in on and knew it in four sentences?

David Perrell: So here's why many people write about culture, many write engaging stuff, and few do both.

He took ideas from copywriting and internet writing and layered them on to writing about 14th-century Rome or the Scottish Enlightenment. He is the first person I know who embraced copywriting techniques in writing about culture. Because of that, his writing has this spice and a sense of aliveness that almost no one in his space does.

Chris Powers: Back in the day, if you had been a great writer, your goal would have been to write books. Is that still the goal of every great writer? And now it's just like, right on the Internet. Has that been changed because we have the Internet?

David Perrell: I used to think that the answer was yes. And now the answer is no. I've been corrected by that take from watching people I know well publish a book; a book still has a cultural cachet, a weight, and a gravitas to it that writing on the Internet doesn't have.

Writing on the Internet is a great way to get started, meet people, test your ideas, and get ideas out there. But there is something distinct about a book that has yet to get away with the Internet.

Chris Powers: You know what the something is, or is it just the magic fairy dust?

David Perrell: Well, I think that the thing is, it's just that people look at a book, you can look at it, you can touch a book, and you're everybody, from your cousin to that weird person you knew in high school who you haven't spoken to in 30 years. They both have a sense of, oh, that book is,l, there's something to it.

Writing on the Internet is strange for uniquely curious people, whereas everybody understands a book. Everybody owns books.

Chris Powers: Okay. Back to the books. You meet Brent and give him shoddy answers. He tells you that he needs to be better.

But the thing I respect most about getting to know who you are is that you didn't just set it on the table and move on in life. It's like, I will prove myself right or wrong. And you've written your best piece ever, Proving yourself wrong.

So what did the next day, the following weeks, like, how did that kind of shift begin to happen where you said, I'm going to prove that Jesus happened or didn't happen.

David Perrell: Well, the way I framed it then, and I still think it now, is that what you do with Jesus, who you believe Jesus is, is one of the most critical questions in the world.

Either the story of Jesus is 100 per cent true. He's the son of God, who died for our sins. And I think that if you think that that's true, you fall over and you worship, or the story of Jesus is the greatest scam in human history. Billions of people worship at the altar of this guy, and in the book of Second Corinthians, Paul writes that if Jesus has not died and been resurrected. We, of all people, as Christians, should be pitied for doing the things that we do. So it's either a scam or the ultimate truth. And I'm like, Sherlock Holmes time, putting on my detective hat, and getting to work. You know what I mean? Because it can only be one or the other. And that was so exciting to me.

Chris Powers: Okay. But what did you do?

David Perrell: I was living in New York at the time. I started going to Tim Keller's lectures. When he was alive, he did this series called Questioning Christianity. And they were so good because he would lecture on ideas like faith.

Hope, justice, and identity, and he would respect the secular atheist argument of people like me who are living in New York. And he would say, I hear where you're coming from. He was very forthright about saying that I believe that Christianity has better answers to all of these seven, eight things that I've laid out.

And I'm. I'm going to try to persuade you otherwise while also really respecting that no matter where you are, there's a leap of faith, but no matter where you are, is a super insightful sentence for me because no matter where you are, what he showed me was that the secular worldview that I had required a lot of faith that I wasn't appreciating and understanding.

Any worldview requires leaps, and there's no null place where you can be without faith. It's not like, Oh, the secular thing is just right. And then we make a bunch of stuff up, and then we become Christians. No matter where you are, you will have to take that leap.

And there was a book I read, which is, With the best title, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. And I was like, whoa. So Tim Keller, that book, and then I realized, okay. Now that I've loosened the screws of my atheism, now let's look into what Christianity is. Well, I would go to Europe; these are the most beautiful buildings and works of art I've ever seen.

We're not producing things like this now. There's no way. I'm looking at the painting that's done. I'm looking at the buildings here in Austin. They don't look anything like the things that I see in Europe. So I'm like, hold on. It's more than just the know-how of architecture. It is the underlying worldview of those people who built that beautiful architecture, and they worshipped God.

They weren't secular people. A religious conviction drove them. And I looked at that and said, Well, hold on. Why don't I look into how America is structured? We also learn about the Declaration of Independence, which says we hold these truths as self-evident: that all men are created equal.

What a great sentence! All men are created equal. These truths are self-evident. Wait, hold on. They're not self-evident at all. The following sentence says our creator endows us with inalienable rights. And I go, oh my goodness, wait. They're only self-evident because a creator endows us with them. That is the creator who gives us these rights.

So, hold on, that means that if I don't believe in God, the entire apparatus of my morality is going to fall. It's going to disappear. So, I need to reconstruct my morality, build a new moral framework, or worship Christ. And so now I'm, now I'm just freaking out, now I'm freaking out, right?

I'm just like, everything I've lived on is a lie. I got to become one of these Christian guys, and I didn't want to do that either because I don't like Christian people, and that was my work. And so I was loosening the screws of my atheism, really coming to appreciate the influence of Christianity on the West, which I love.

And it was then coming to faith at the end. So it's a three-part series.

Chris Powers: And how long did that take?

David Perrell: Five years.

Chris Powers: And you wrestled until the end.

David Perrell: I'm still wrestling, man. I'm still wrestling. I mean, Israel means to wrestle with God. And the only difference is I wrestle now. I wrestle, then. Now, I don't wrestle with doubt.

I wrestle with my relationship with God, whereas before, I wrestled with whether God existed.

Chris Powers: And that wrestling may be what we discussed earlier. You don't become a Christian to have an easy life and a perfect utopia. You learn it to build a foundation for dealing with the difficult things in life, suffering, and dying yourself.

David Perrell: It's the only way I've found to make meaning out of suffering rather than seeing it as a waste of a life.

Chris Powers: Yeah. And it says, I'm going to botch where in the Bible it is, but you should find joy in your suffering.

David Perrell: James One, verses two and three, counted all joy in my brothers. When you face trials of various kinds, testing your faith produces steadfastness.

Chris Powers: I love that line. And that's where we are today as a society in America: finding joy in your sufferings right now. It's seeing somebody to blame for your sufferings rather than taking accountability for them.

I need to read that book. What was it called? I don't have enough faith. Someone once told me that I don't have enough faith. It was something about how it takes a lot of faith to be an atheist or to believe in any worldview.

David Perrell: And that's just the intellectually honest position of any worldview with faith.

And so the question, when you meet somebody and ask, what is your faith background? What leaps of faith are you taking in your worldview?

Chris Powers: You just said, and I think you tied this in, that you saw how my entire life was a product of American idolatry. Can you expand on that?

David Perrell: Yeah, it's funny because I grew up Jewish and attended Hebrew school. I did Judaic studies classes every day, but I grew up Jewish by culture, which I love, and I grew up Jewish by heritage, which I'm grateful for. I grew up, but I did not grow up Jewish by faith and doctrine.

That never really appealed to me. It never really got a grip on me. So it's essential to separate those three things because when it came to my faith and doctrine, I was a by-product of American idolatry, which is very simple. You do well in school to attend a good college and graduate school.

You do that to get an excellent job, have a smoking hot wife, and, like this iconic family, a friendly golden retriever, drive a Range Rover, and then have a white picket fence. Live the American dream. Then, you can retire at 65 and call it a life. And it is this very Americanized, post-World War II way of thinking about the nature of the good life.

And I bought hook, line, and sinker into it. Every aspect of that was precisely what my life was about. And I obsessed over what college I was going to get into. I was one of those kids who thought my life would be ruined if I didn't get into a good school. I was, I worshipped, the attractiveness of what, you know, my partner who, you know, what am I going to marry?

What's that going to say about me? How much and how well-liked am I going to be? So, do all the people around me like me? Do they think that I'm great? Well, why don't we think of my self-worth and the accumulated point total of all the people, like my sense of what all the other people in my life think about me?

The higher that point total, the better I am. Then, I want to be remembered in history. I want to change the world. I want to stamp my name in the history books with the things that I've done written down in ink. People of multiple generations will be reading about the great work that I've done.

That was the life that I lived. That was the path that I was following. And that is what I converted from because it had such a hold on my life. And it was good when it was going well. But the second that I started to have some troubles, things inside of right of passage, launching a second company, having that fold, we could never really have that work.

Having a relationship with somebody whom I thought I was going to marry, watching that fall like a house of cards and getting to a place where I was in such extreme suffering to the point where I was thinking thoughts that I never would have thought that I would have thought I mean just the darkest of thoughts.

I couldn't believe it, and at that point, I swear I only saw it in black and white for multiple weeks. I struggled to get out of bed in the morning. I struggled to find any meaning and purpose, and 2nd Corinthians chapter 7 verse 10 talks about the difference between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow and how worldly sorrow essentially leads to sort of despair and destruction, but godly sorrow leads to repentance, and that's godly sorrow that brings you closer to God, and that we can find meaning in that.

Salmon 26 makes the same sort of case, but in a very poetic way, about how the tears of sorrow, if they're sown correctly, can lead to fruits over time. The combination of those two helped me realize there's this amusing way that in the Christian story, as you begin to suffer, you get closer to Christ.

I mean, I'm sure that, like, I wonder if you feel it, like when you're in those moments of most difficulty, that's when you're most dependent on God. And I think that a lot of the reason God puts actual trials into our lives is to remind us that we aren't God and that we need to lean on him, totally surrender ourselves, and beg.

And that is when the most wisdom is revealed. That's when we get the most knowledge and understanding. And it's actually in that dependence that we're in our healthiest state because God is here and man is here. God is above; man is below. And it's when we're in a state of pride, which comes from success, we end up in these distorted places.

And so it wasn't just my American idolatry, but watching people, hearing stories of people who win the World Series, winning a Super Bowl, and selling their company all the time. You meet people who sell their company, and six months later, they're miserable. They're sad, and I didn't want that. I felt so much pain and brokenness and emptiness and despair in my life that eventually, I surrendered because I had no other way to live, and I just jumped. God just caught me like I feel like I just jumped, and I was just caught with open arms pulled in, and A real sense of depression lifted, and I haven't; I haven't been the same since.

Chris Powers: That's unbelievable. One way I read that book was becoming a king, but it was related. I lost my dad 11 years ago, but it is associated. The chapter talks about how young children are dependent on and trusting of their fathers. Your father is just hugging you. What can that do to you?

And at that moment, it made me go back to the description of what you just said in those moments: we need somebody, too. It's innate in us as children to need a father, and for me, it's been the only thing that's taken me out of being at what I'd call a zero in life.

I've felt the pain you're feeling up in there, and it sucks, but it is a beautiful thing to be able to lean on somebody.

David Perrell: I was at dinner with somebody and was telling him about this, and he said, Man, so life's going great, you know like you became a believer, everything's good now, you're good to go.

And I was like, no man, not at all. He was like, well, what's the difference? And I said, you still deal with the same kind of suffering. The difference is that I always needed to figure out where to go. Now I know exactly where to go and who to turn to, and I never have to question what rock I can hug onto for dear life anymore.

The rock used to change every week or every two weeks. When I was going through hell in early 2023, I realized that no rock could support me, and I was spiralling.

Chris Powers: Jamie Winship, I had him on the podcast. He said it, and I think he says it best: If you find your identity in whatever situation you're in on this earth if the outcome of whatever situation you're in is where you find your identity, high or low, the game's already been lost.

Girlfriend, my identity is that I'll be a loser if we don't get married. You've lost. If we do get married, I'm a winner. You've lost. If my business succeeds, I'm fantastic. If it doesn't, I'm, you know, a loser, and I've played that back through my head so many times. If the situation you're in and the outcome of that is where you get your identity, the game's been lost before you played it.

And that's a freeing place to be, and it's a tough place to be if that's where you're at. Going back to why it's not as easy as you, I feel like I bounce in and out of believing that at times I couldn't say I could sit here today and tell you if something catastrophic happened in my business as I could be like, well, I'm a Christian, right?

It's going to be okay. There will be a moment when a piece of me is at the table, and the success of that business is at stake. And that's why I'll live the rest of my life trying not to have those feelings.

David Perrell: It's a journey, but it gets better. It's gotten better for me in a meaningful way. Also, there's something helpful about being conscious of your idols rather than unconscious of them. When you're unconscious of them, they are chains, like handcuffs, that you walk in.

Chris Powers: We're going to do this last piece. We'll call it takes because that's what we called it. If people know you love them, you can say anything.

David Perrell: Yes. So there have been some studies from established universities and psychologists and whatnot and one of the things that. Eureta is what you should do is like four compliments or five compliments for every like one critique or something like that, or do the compliment sandwich, you know, start with a compliment, then like give them the harsh feedback, then end with the compliment.

People are like, Oh, that's great advice. I was like, Oh, that's excellent advice. I now think it is. Missing: I need to include the point at a hundred per cent. The thing that inspired this was John 117, which says that Moses brought the law, and Jesus brought grace and truth. And what you want is full grace and whole truth.

And as I see it, full grace and the whole truth are two of the great definitions of love, where what you're doing is, rather than doing this compliment sandwich stuff or anything like that, you can say anything to somebody. Regarding a critique or telling them, you can do better at this. Still, they need to feel this undercurrent of deep, roaring love. Then you can be direct with them.

You can tell them precisely the truth because that is the most loving thing to do. When people talk to others, they fall on one of two sides: not telling the truth. Which isn't loving because they're not like a good friend is an accurate mirror of who you are. It's an uncracked mirror.

It's a straight mirror. It is reflecting what is going on. And people are saying, Hey, Chris. Hey, David, there's this thing about you. There's that thing about you. And you're just seeing through your friend who you are. And when it's lacking, you're not getting the whole truth, but a bunch of people who give you the entire truth.

They're like that authoritarian dad. They're like, David, why in the world did you do that? You do this, you do this, you do this. And it's all true, but you feel this antagonism. Somebody is just punching you in the face over and over. It's like a UFC fight; they're ready to knock you out. That is not how we should engage as humans.

When people feel that undercurrent of love, love is established; one way to think about love is that no matter what you do, you can do nothing to make me love you more or less. I love you. When you feel that, and somebody tells you the truth, they can say anything. And that, to me, is like the mark of a good relationship.

Chris Powers: To be fair, these are the takes you sent me for listeners. These aren't the things that I'm giving to you. I don't think I said that. These are like lessons I've heard. If someone from the, I love this one. If someone from the 1700s came back, they'd first be surprised by all the technology, but then they'd wonder why our society is so age-segregated.

And it made me think, like, it is weird. We always hang out with people around our age.

David Perrell: It's bizarre. So one of my favourite questions is, next time you're with someone who doesn't have kids, they live in a city, okay? Ask them when the last time they spent more than 10 minutes with someone, with a kid who's not their family.

Most people I've asked this question to will say, years, or I don't remember doing that, which is weird. It is funny because if you think about how societies used to function, there were just kids there all the time, there were, you know, families and friends, people in the village as they would meet each other, they'd spend a bunch of time together. There's something very pure about children, if they have this like natural joy and playfulness, and it isn't a coincidence that many times in scripture, we're told to have the faith of a child.

There's something straightforward about it. It is adults who, in a significant way, distort things. Whether it's because of trauma, idols, or whatever it becomes, there's something very Pure about kids. And that's why people like being around kids. People will say, Oh my goodness, we went out in the fields, and they got so excited about a four-leaf clover.

I haven't been that excited about a four-leaf clover in forever. At the same time, you ask people, when was the last time you spent some meaningful time with somebody who's 30 years your senior, who isn't someone you work with or somebody in your family, and they'll say, never, I can't think of somebody.

For me, that is the single most significant life cheat code I know of: spend a bunch of time with wise elders. I'm super intentional about this. So, it's Wednesday, right after this, and I'm having lunch with a 78-year-old guy who's an elder at one of the churches in town.

He runs the prayer ministry there. Bob and I are together every single week. I am close to Brian, who baptized me and is such a dear friend. We get lunch together for a few hours every few weeks, and I tell him everything. I mean, that guy, like it's an open book. I've said it's an open book, the good and evil.

And I've got my struggles, and I'm like, Brian, I'm going to tell you no matter how embarrassing it is. And even last week. Inspired by Cloud Camp, which we did in Colorado last summer, what I did was I hosted a men's retreat for a bunch of young guys in town and brought in all the wise older men I know, and they gave a talk for 90 minutes to 2 hours just about what they've been through, how they think about life. Those moments are so, so gratifying.

It's so rewarding when you find those wise people who can speak truth into your life. They've been through stuff. The ones I like have a good relationship with the Lord, but that's unnecessary. It's just a cheat code, and I'm like, world, why don't we spend time with the kids who can give us freshness and these elders who can provide us with that wisdom?

Chris Powers: It hit me hard. My best friend is 20 years older than I am. And he's like, I wonder if you've met Pete yet. Pete will be at Cloud Camp this summer. He's like my best buddy, but he's like a mentor, a best friend, and a father figure.

I always talk to him, and it's been one of the best things in my life because of what you said; it's like a cheat code. He has kept me out of so much trouble; it's funny because when you're friends with someone that, for that long, I've probably been friends with them for 12 years. He told me so many things 12 years ago that I was like, yeah. And I'm living through those right now so that one hit me hard.

David Perrell: I mean, it's the same thing with Brother E every Monday, you know, you get on those calls.

Chris Powers: And hearing him say the other day at 85, I guess he was mourning, or he was repenting for, this guy that's been a pastor for 60-something years, probably lived a life that you and I can't even imagine.

And he's still at the end of his life, saying it was so obvious how much better I could have done. And you tend to hear that from people when they're old. You never hear, and this is, you know, you never hear work harder, make more money, and do all these things. And it's unequivocally the same message from every older adult.

Yet when you're young, you realize you, you, you might believe it. You might do some things to pivot, but you don't fully embrace it.

David Perrell: Yeah. An idol exaggerates its importance, and once you have that wisdom, you can see the different facets of life. You know certain things' importance; for example, young men overestimate them dramatically.

The benefit of business success tends to underestimate other things dramatically. And when you have somebody like that, who's been through the cycles and it's not just been through the cycles but watched people destroy their lives for whatever sin it is, it raises the stakes because there's a lot of things.

Where we will, for example, say that you want to, you know, try some drugs. So, like, you're young, like a young kid, you're like, do some drugs. Like, what's the big deal? And then do some drugs, and like, nothing happens. And you're like, all right, no problem. Let's do it again.

And then somebody says, don't do drugs. And you're like, do drugs, like not a problem. But then somebody says, I hear where you're coming from. But I knew Greg. And Greg was precisely in your shoes. And Greg was trying to do drugs here. And I'm just going to tell you Greg's story. Greg went from doing these sorts of medications to then doing those sorts of drugs.

And then once he did those sorts of drugs, he was done with then surrounded himself with those sorts of people who do those sorts of drugs, which then got them drinking. And that whole thing led to the collapse in this way. And I knew Greg well. So I'm just going to tell you, I hear where you're at, but there's some naiveté to what you're saying and having stories like that.

It's not about being fear-inducing, either. It's just about watching people whose lives collapse due to bad decisions. And when they can tell you those things from firsthand experience and deliver them with love, it's very clarifying.

Chris Powers: People's willingness to be vulnerable and share their mistakes has unequivocally changed my life. I live, and probably you do, too, in a world where most people around you tell you what you want to hear. More time is needed to give you accurate answers. Every significant critical change in my life, or what got me to look in the mirror for the first time, was hearing somebody I respected tell me all the bad things about them.

And then realizing, Oh, wait, it's not just me. And that opened up a whole new door for me. And some of that's wisdom. Older people share a little bit more. Younger people are still trying to make it. They don't want any blemishes on their resume. They got to get the next job, the next deal.

I was as broken as I've ever been. You know, years ago and from the outside, it looked like I was the most buttoned-up I've ever been. And it's a series of people, most of whom we know, that just shared this raw honesty, forever changing my life. My hope for the world is more than anything right now; it's something money doesn't have to buy; people can find somebody who will be vulnerable with them and tell them they aren't alone.

David Perrell: Yeah. My equivalent is having elders, people, and friends who clearly understand where I'm missing the mark. It is so helpful. Friends say, Hey, why are you always super tight when we're together, and you're just being yourself? And then suddenly, you get in front of an audience, and now you're not yourself anymore.

You're being super performative. Why does your need for prioritization seem to be all over the place? People are saying, Hey, you're constantly on the road. And I think you're running away from something, having people say, Hey, I want to let you know. You tend to build people up to a level they can't possibly meet.

When you do that, you're putting them in a position where they feel like they will disappoint you and will disappoint you because you're not seeing them. Having friends say, Hey, whenever a problem arises, I've noticed you tend to catastrophize things. You tend to take little issues and think that they're big ones.

And I'm just going to tell you, you do this every time. And those are five things just off the top of my noggin that people have just said to me. And now that I'm aware of those things, I'm like, Whoa, you're right. I do that, oh my goodness. And I'm haunted. I'm shaken by the idea of somebody not telling me that, and I'd have to go my whole life with these unconscious patterns.

Chris Powers: You just shot the catastrophizing thing right through my heart—a little punch in the arm. I can take the tiniest thing and roll and run it out, years in the making, or run the situation out to the worst outcome possible and live there; I agree with you on this one. So much of life is like a jet ski.

It looks impressive from afar, but once you do it, it's only fun for a surprisingly short time. Is there much more to discuss? 

David Perrell: Well, it's true. How many things do you have? I am very struck by the emptiness that comes with the far side of success for many people. When you sell a company, you become miserable.

It's funny, like. I saw a photo of this sort of McMansion called Middle of Ohio. No one lived anywhere close by. And this couple doesn't have kids; they have this giant house. And I look at that. I'm like, jet ski, you get that and are relaxed. And then you're two months in, and you're like, Oh my goodness, we have to maintain this thing.

We're going to be super lonely. I heard a line from David Brooks many years ago where he says that Americans get wealthy, and we buy loneliness when we move away from people. We get these big houses. We're nowhere close to anybody. And that line haunted me, and I think that there's just a bunch of things in life that are jet skis, and this is just the fundamental bug in human OS is thinking that once we get that next meal, once we get that next thing once we get that next girl we that that will satisfy us. It never does, and yet every day we have to wake up, and that's a lot of what spiritual life is about, just knowing that it's like a constant reminder that the next thing won't give you that sense of eternal satisfaction.

So, what are the things that you have that then do? And for me, it's different for everybody, but if I can bring it down to one word, it's relationships. It's friendship, like friendship. Relationships are the most significant things; having a small group of friends means you're just all in on them; you know them, and they know you. Hopefully, once I have a family, I'll say the same thing about them, but for me right now, to bring it down to one word, it's just about relationships.

That is the one thing in life that is the opposite of a jet ski. The more I get, the deeper those relationships bring, the more truthful and honest we are with each other. The more that love pours out, the better and better and better it gets. 

Chris Powers: I love it. Yeah, the isolation thing is real. And I have this theory just about the ability to have a happy day.

The more houses you collect, the planes you collect, the businesses you own, the odds that one thing isn't going massively wrong, that a jet ski is the problem of the day means the ability to get to, like, call it peak happiness or just happy. You're just limiting the odds that you can ever get there.

You wake up thinking there's always a problem at one of your five homes. Your planes are broken down, your pilots are sick, and you stack all these little layers in your life—we'll call them jet skis. One of your jet skis is always broken. It's not bringing you happiness anyway. And it's just making the ability to ever get to a place where you could—I call it happiness or just being someone who doesn't weigh much on their soldiers—seem like a burden.

It almost becomes impossible, and all rich people do it. It's practically an American thing, but maybe it's not. It happens worldwide, but you see it all the time.

David Perrell: Yeah. And the other thing I've learned, which has surprised me, is that people have said, Hey, don't put your stock in things.

I love things, but I've come to learn what they are. What do I love? I like two kinds of things. The first are things that I make. So, in things like this studio, I can pour my heart and soul into them and express myself sincerely. This studio brings me incredible satisfaction and joy because it feels like an expression of me.

The other thing is that I like craftsmanship. I love going where I can pick up and purchase something beautifully done. And that's correlated with brands, but it's not brands. If I can wear something, I can own a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.

It brings me absolute satisfaction. And the risk here is that you hear these things say, Oh, like I thought, Oh, so don't like buying things like not putting any stock in things. And it's like, you will need more than 99 per cent of stuff junk to satisfy you. But what are the few things that really will?

And that's almost underrated in the culture right now. 

Chris Powers: I like the things you make because this studio is badass, every room. All right. Two more. The Internet traps us in a never-ending world now. Let's go.

David Perrell: Yeah, this is a big one. It is one of the topics that I'm excited about.

One of our biggest mistakes with the Internet was creating such a recency bias. Google, recent search results; you open up Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Reddit, whatever it is, it's all about what's been shared recently. And it's ridiculous. We've created an incentive structure for people to shatter and blab constantly and make things repeatedly to get people on this treadmill of new content creation.

And I think it's terrible. The way that information should be organized and filtered is much closer to a library. It should be sorted by ranking relevance, which is topic times quality. So you're interested in something, whatever it is, and you're on the Internet, your phone should say, what time of day is it?

It would help if you put in some queries. What am I interested in right now? And then the Internet morphs to now you're in that section of the library, and it's not sorted by recency. It is wild to me that we have the greatest minds in our pockets, from Plato to Nietzsche to Tolstoy; we can access them for free.

And yet, what do we do when we open up our phones? We look at what our friends are posting. What was published recently? What was just shared in the news? This thing, that thing, this thing, that thing. And we're just trying to stay on this treadmill of being informed. And it is making us stupider.

It's making us less happy, taking us away from wisdom, and it's terrible. 

Chris Powers: If you don't know his thoughts, you do now.

David Perrell: That one always gets me on my high horse. It's such a little thing that it would radically change our psychological experience.

Chris Powers: I have not considered it that way, but you're right. 

David Perrell: I mean, the quality of life, when you get to the end, the quality of your life is the collective sum of what you've paid attention to.

The gravity of the Internet determines what we pay attention to. We're paying attention to this constant recency bias, which is garbage. It's junk. It's not just the garbage; there's so much good stuff right there, and we don't promote it. 

Chris Powers: It's as if you got on Twitter yesterday, and it was a tragedy. It was, it should not have happened, and it's terrible that it happened, but you would have spent most of your day thinking about a bridge in Baltimore, right?

You only get so many days on earth. That day, you went to a bridge in Baltimore that you knew nothing about the day before. You won't think about it the day after, but that's what you think about for those few hours. And you have no choice unless you don't get on the Internet, which might be a better answer.

David Perrell: And here's the thing. We've said, let's make people informed and being informed is fine, but the opportunity cost of being informed is a loss of wisdom. And I would so much rather have. Wiser people are more than well-informed people. 

Chris Powers: Well, then, I said two more, but I'm going to add this.

And then off, you were talking about some of the best minds in our pocket for free. How is AI going to impact all this? And you did a podcast about how you used it to write and went off the never-ending question: Does AI make things better? Does it make things worse? Like, do you have an answer? You've thought about how it'll impact writing and things of that nature.

David Perrell: Yeah. So, I'll give you a look at the doomers with AI. So I'll give you a natural white pill. One of the nice things about AI is that you can write custom instructions. And so I specifically have.

Do not give me any sources after 1970, and that's how I would like to do it. 

Chris Powers: We were way smarter before 1970. 

David Perrell: We had higher information quality before the 2010s, but many things broke in the 2010s. Looking at many charts and graphs of mass media and shared things, something weird happened between 2012 and 2014.

The 2016 presidential election just broke people's brains. So, those four years hurt the mainstream media environment. And it's not that we were way more intelligent than I learned this from immortals in our How I Write episode, which is one of my favourite episodes. He said that history could be better at knowing what recently created things are quality.

There's a lot of noise there. History is exceptionally good at filtering—old things, discarding junk, and keeping the good stuff. So, a mother's wisdom gets filtered through father time. And then, what ends up at the bottom of that filter is your sort of gold. You just get rid of the food, the fool's gold.

The reason I have done 50 years is not that we used to be more innovative. It's that now I've had father time working for me. And so it's left at the bottom is the fruit. 

Chris Powers: All right. Last one. Find your shiny dime. 

David Perrell: Yes, that's what a writer is saying here. I have a shiny diamond studio, one dime. What trips people up when they write is that they don't know what. Their core idea is what the main thing is that they're trying to say. And not this dime, but a dime is shiny, it's tiny, and you look at it, and it goes, Ooh.

Once you find that shiny dime—half the size of a nickel but twice as valuable—and know your piece's central idea, you write better. So often, people struggle to write because they don't know the central message.

So how do you find it? I like to do the 60 20 10 exercise. Please take what you're trying to say and speak it out loud for 60 seconds. Then you've said it, and then do it again; now you have 20 seconds, and then do it again, now you have 10 seconds. Something about the brain and how we speak is that we're good at compressing ideas in a way that the fingertips aren't.

We need help compressing ideas in writing, which is easier when speaking. And that's it. I always tell right-of-passage students that you must find your shiny dime. You have to find yourself, and once you start thinking through what is my shiny dime, what is the core thing, like for example, atomic habits, the shiny dime is atomic means three things:

An atom is tiny.

It is the building block of a system.

An atom is mighty, so atomic habits, two words, three meanings, habits, you have it all there, and he's so clear that we'll use it.

You will do the small things that lead to transformative results and build systems—and it's just in those two words. You stay focused when you have clarity and can communicate what you're doing. When writing, you automatically have a sharp razor, allowing you to know what needs to be included and, more importantly, what doesn't.

The most significant mistake writers must correct is writing about too much. They write about too much because they don't know what they're trying to say, which you should be able to distil in one sentence. 

Chris Powers: David, thank you. 

David Perrell: That was fun, man. Thanks for driving down.

Chris Powers: I appreciate it. That was great.