David Perell - Unpacking the mind of The Writing Guy!

Hello, welcome everybody. Thanks for tuning in for the second episode of the Undefeated Underdogs podcast. I'm your host, Sharad. Today is a special day for me because I have the amazing guest, David Perell, the writing guy. I'm delighted to have you, David. And where should I start? Like, I've been following for a while. People know on the internet, everybody knows you pretty much. But let me give you a brief intro for people who don't know. David is a founder, writer, podcaster, and an educator. His course, Rite of Passage, helped many people break the writer's block. and become— turned them into amazing writers themselves. David accumulated a community of 350,000+ Twitter following, and he hosts this incredible podcast called The North Star, which I'm a big fan of. I've heard many episodes, and David is a big proponent of internet in general and the creator economy. David, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. It means a lot.

Yeah, happy to be here. I think you're doing a lot of the things that really excite me about life on the internet and life right now.

Absolutely. And I have to tell you this, you are one of the reasons why I started writing on Twitter. I used to be a lurker back then, like 3, 4 years ago. Right. And I used to like just consume a lot of content, but once I saw you tweeting these threads and it really inspired me and to keep it really short and authentic. So I do have a lot of topics to cover. I have prepared my notes here, but right off the bat, I want to just cover the first question, which is about community building and about rite of passage. You've launched a lot of cohorts before cohorts become actually a thing. It's been a while. And my question is, how did you saw the power of community and how important is it played the role in Rite of Passage, at least in the early days?

Yeah. Community is extremely important, but I hate that word. I think that what you want to think through is how do you get a lot of like-minded people together in the same space and then align them towards a shared vision? So, let's go through all 3 of those. a lot of like-minded people, then align them, shared vision. So, what you want to do is think of whatever it is that you're creating like a magnet. And everybody knows that magnets attract, but they also repel. And actually, being able to repel people is just as important. And I think that this is one of the things that I'm continually learning about building communities, what a community is fundamentally when it's strong when it works is you have a bunch of people in the same place who say, wow, I can't believe that there are so many other people like me in the same space. I thought people like me didn't exist. The more powerful that sentence is, the stronger your community will be. It's really just that simple. You bring them all together, then you give them a chance to engage. One of the things that we think through is a chance to engage, not just as, hey, let's just pop on Zoom, let's have conversations. But actually you align them. You get everybody working together on their writing. You get people editing each other's ideas and you get them collaborating. You get them working towards something. And I think it's no coincidence that if you look at the Navy SEALs or something, you see really strong friendships that are forged from an experience like that. Mm-hmm. Because when you have people who come together, who work towards a common vision, struggle, grind towards a common purpose, yeah, it's hard. But that's when you make your best friends.

It's very interesting what you said. And a lot of people, at least in my experience, they misunderstand community building and they just think through in the lens of results and not a sense of belonging. Like how you mentioned, it's about bringing these like-minded folks and building these friendships more importantly than anything else. And eventually all the business needs or everything else falls into place. I want to understand, like, so you've been in this business for a while. You saw like a lot of communities, you're part of a lot of communities, you've built communities before. What's one prediction, you know, you have in the community space? Where do you think it's going or taking us towards?

I mean, I don't know if this is a prediction, but this is definitely something that I believe that a lot of community builders don't. You have to be working on something together. Like, you can't just have a community that brings people in to have conversations. I mean, if you even look at a church, like, the way that they build community is by doing hard things together, by doing meaningful things together. Mm-hmm. Community service, charity, coming together for a Bible study where they're really thinking through what does this mean and doing the hard work together. And that is where communities begin in effort. And a lot of the world right now is built on frictionlessness. And if you actually add friction, if you create effort that people are called to do, your ability to create communities goes way up.

That's a very interesting point. I love that. You're a big proponent of the internet in general, and you've mentioned many times that you're a citizen of the internet. And I'm just curious why people should be part of the whole phenomenon, at least in your lens. Why do you think everyone should be a citizen of the internet?

I mean, I don't think you have a choice. I mean, unless you drop out of society and you go move to a farm, Then I think that you're necessarily a citizen of the internet. If you're listening to this podcast, you've downloaded this through the internet, and you are carrying around a supercomputer in your phone that gives you access to every other person who is connected to that supercomputer. And the information that you share can move at the speed of light if it's connected to a Wi-Fi connection. And There's something miraculous about that. And so, if you take the premise that you don't have a choice, that we're all citizens of the internet, then what you start thinking through is, how do I make the internet work for me and use the internet as a tool so that the internet can serve you rather than you serving the internet? And people who are passive consumers, who are just sitting there scrolling their phones, being mindless about the entire situation, They are serving the internet. People who are creating, who are making opportunities happen, who are sharing their ideas, the internet begins to serve them. And so, a lot of my work is about asking this question of how can the internet serve you? And the way that you do that, one of the ways is by sharing ideas, by putting stuff out into the world, and then attracting some of the like-minded people that we were talking about earlier.

And in your experience, you write, you basically podcast, you teach, and you basically revolve your— you treat yourself as a creator, right? And in your own words, you just said internet rewards people who build personal monopolies in a way. And my curiosity is when you do such journey, it's really difficult to pinpoint on one thing. Do you suggest people to focus on, at least when they get started, hey, focus on writing, nail it down and move towards the next thing? How did you do? Because you've evolved over the time and you've kind of conquered a lot of things. In your experience, what tips or advice you give for the other set of people who are just consuming and just wanna like, you know, dive into the world of creators?

Well, I think that when you think about personal monopolies, everybody goes through some kind of hourglass, I like to call it. So generally what happens is you start off and you don't know what you wanna write about. You're looking all over the place. And by exploring, by writing, by thinking, or by experiencing the world, you begin to get some clarity on what it is that you're interested in. And then you end up in this distinct place where you tend to be more of a specialist. Yeah. And you tend to write about one thing, tend to focus on one thing. And I found that once people succeed at that, they tend to want to diverge again. And I think that that first stage is really important. And I think it's the locus of what you're asking about. And I think that everybody goes through that convergence period into finding something. The question is, are you writing before you've done that convergence or are you writing after You've done that convergence. I have a student, her name is Ana Lorena Fabrega, and she has a personal monopoly in the childhood education space. Wow. She's one of the world's biggest names for childhood education. And so, she comes to me in Rite of Passage. I call her week 2, week 3, and I say, Ana, you have a lot of potential here. And, she had been, as a kid, she'd gone to 8, 10 schools or something like that. She had taught in Boston, in the country of Panama. And she had seen that there were all of these problems with the education system that she wanted to fix. So she hadn't written, but she had spent so long and gone to so many different schools that she could see that there was an opportunity here. So that was somebody who had done a lot of that convergence away from the computer. Right. And then there are other people like Michael Ashcroft, one of my students, who came in and said, Hey, I just don't even know what I want to figure out. This personal monopoly idea is stressing me out because I'm not actually ready to converge like that. And so, what he did was he calls himself an archaeologist as opposed to an architect. That an architect, they do top-down planning. They come up with blueprints. And yeah, there might be some changes here and there, but the archaeologists, they sniff. They follow their intuition. They end up somewhere interesting and then they go dig down and they say, ha, ha, ha, what's here? And that's what Michael was doing. He was writing about all these sorts of things. And it was only through the process of writing that he discovered his personal monopoly, which he has now, which is being known as the guy who teaches the Alexander Technique, which is a way of thinking about breathing and cognitive awareness. And he's now trying to build a personal monopoly around the Alexander Technique.

So in a way you're suggesting just start doing things, take action, and eventually you end up building your own monopoly, identifying, discovering these new endeavors or new horizons you explore by just doing it in a way, right? That's great advice. And I feel like a lot of people, they just don't have the courage to take action. But they have a lot of ideas, they have incredible thoughts, they just want to put into action, right? So that's an amazing segue. I just want to also cover one of the important, which I personally like, which I think applies to other areas as well, not just for writing, which is you give a 3-step framework for people to write. One is write in abundance. Write from a conversation and write in public. I'm curious, before, you know, you go deeper into those 3, what's the basic level or habit zero people should form to even think about on top of, like, you know, all 3? Like, where should they start, especially in terms of writing?

As you go about your week, capture the best ideas that you read and the best ideas that you come up with. Then have conversations throughout the week and see what epiphanies you're having. When you have an epiphany, write it down and share it with other people. Get feedback. Figure out what from that idea was good, what needs to be improved. Do that 150 times and you'll be a good writer.

It's that simple, right? Like it's all about reps. So putting reps—

I mean, it's kind of just that simple. Like that's what it is, right? You capture ideas so that you have an abundance when you sit down to start writing, write from abundance. You're having conversations. As you're developing ideas. That's what comedians do all the time. Mm-hmm. What are they doing? They have these little bits, they're testing them out. I mean, I lived with a comedian when I was in college and he did standup and every night we'd just hang out and he would just try on little bits. He'd say, ah, is that funny? Is that funny? And then if a bit resonates, then he's doubling down on it. What doesn't work, he's sort of tweaking and refining. And this is what all comedians do. You know, Chris Rock, When you see him on the Netflix show, he's, he's crushing it. But Chris Rock gets there by going to standup clubs around the country, doing 40, 50, 60 shows in these little clubs. And every single time he's refining what he's doing, make it a little bit better, tweak this, change the timing there, fix that.

Mm-hmm.

And I had a friend in town who went to go see Rogan I think 5 or 6 times in 2 weeks. And Rogan's doing the same thing. 85% of the bit stays the same. And what he's doing is that Joe Rogan authenticity that comes through in his standup actually is really refined. And so that's what we're doing as writers, where by the time we've published something, It's gone through all these different filters, all this different dialogue, and then we've ended up with something of quality at the end. And then the final thing is write in public. Like, actually go share your ideas. Don't just hoard them, keep them to yourself. No, journaling is not enough here. If you want to create opportunities, there's good reasons to journal, absolutely.

Right.

But if you want to create opportunities, you got to be sharing your ideas with other people. You got to have other people who say, wow. What this person is sharing, what they're hitting on is something I need to hear, something I resonate with. And if you do that, you make friends, you get career opportunities, and over time you build a body of work and those ideas become your intellectual portfolio.

So in a way, I think every creator should go on a tour. like how comedians go on a tour. You know, in a show I recently saw, a show called Hacks, I loved it. You know, Barbara, the comedian, she wants to like perfect her material by going to these cities and hop on these, you know, stages. So I want to like cover 2 things there. One is you have to be incredibly patient when you do these iterations. Right. And comedians have a different set of process because they really perform in front of an audience, even though they have these nightclubs or wherever they do, like 10 people, 20 people audience. How about creators? Because when they write and— or a YouTuber, take an example, they create this thing inside this 4 by 4 box. What do you suggest for them? How do they keep up with that patience and have that long game methodology of playing long game and, okay, I'll get there? There are 2 things that can happen. One is they dilute themselves because they're not doing or putting it out because they're iterating, tinkering. And number 2, they spend like so much time just with one article, for example, or one specific video, they don't get to another one. They don't get to taste another flavor. How do you solve that patience and that iteration problem?

Yeah. Well, I think that people who are already good writers, I have no problem with them spending a lot of time on a piece. No problem with that. For people who are new and don't write very well, that's a trap.

Hmm.

And that's the trap of perfectionism. It's not a surprise that Casey Neistat's vlog became way better after he published episode number 500 in 500 days. He became a much better filmmaker by making something every day. And that was one of my big inspirations. And so if you are struggling with the path of consistency and you know that this is gonna be a long road that's gonna require patience, the best thing you can do is find friends to do it with. Those friends, they can be your editors, they can be your conversation partners. And as you write on the internet, the people who are gonna reach out to you will astonish you in terms of how much they share your intellectual curiosity versus the average person in your life.

Hmm.

The average person in your life, Auntie Sue, Uncle Mike, lady that you're talking to at the bar, they don't care about ideas. And if you care about ideas, what ends up happening is you have this internal world Where you're thinking about ideas, you go home at night, you're watching a YouTube video with this lecture, it's blowing your mind. You listen to a podcast and you're like, oh my goodness, you're so excited. Then you go talk to one of your friends and they're like,

right,

who cares?

Hmm.

And it's demoralizing, it's debilitating. And what happens when you write on the internet is you find other people who get as excited about Those ideas as you do, and it's sort of like running actually. You know, if you go for a run with a friend, it's actually a lot easier to run farther than it is when you're by yourself. I was going out for a run last night, and we were almost back, and my friend started walking. I said, "No, no, no, no, no! Do not walk. I don't care how slowly you run, but you got to keep running." And both of us can push each other. Because we're there together. Whereas often when you're alone, you can talk yourself into laziness.

I think that's why people should do things in public for public. It's because you get this instant feedback loop and you're kind of being accountable for a set of people. It can be a friend, it can be like a stranger who we just met on Twitter. Who slide into your DMs saying, "Hey, good work." I think that level of encouragement is really important, and I I I just love what you said about finding that accountability partners and tag tag along with them to do this instead of you, you know, doing a solo journey, which can be depressing, and you don't see that that kind of like enthusiasm in by yourself. I love that. I mean, in a way, it's kind of like you're playing a single-player game in a multiplayer universe. You kind of want to be authentic to yourself, but you have to surround yourself with people who play the same game. And so, I personally love that. Yesterday, I tweeted out saying that, what should I ask David Perel? And you said, you You dropped 3 questions. I want to cover a couple of them. One is how obsession is such an undervalued trait, especially in schools. What do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, I think this is how I felt. So, I was really obsessed with things as a kid. And when I was growing up, we found this program called Flying Eagles. Flying Eagles, Young Eagles, one of those. And you used to be able to just go flying every weekend and you could pilot an airplane. So, I was in 6th and 7th grade and I was doing this. And then, I had this book, this Jeppesen Pilot's Manual that was 8 pounds. And if I hit you on the head with that thing, you get a concussion. And it is a huge book. I'm in 6th grade and I'm reading this in my room alone. And I have these magazines, Airlines of the World, Airports of the World, and I know everything about every single airplane. And I didn't tell anybody about this. No one knew. I'm flying airplanes in 7th grade. I'm 12 years old and nobody knows. I won't tell my friends. I won't tell anybody. I'm making up lies and excuses so that I can go into my own little world without my friends mocking and making fun of me. And I got terrible grades and I Wish that somebody had said, hey, what you have is actually a gift. You're really into something. Mm-hmm. And you might not actually be really into what we're teaching right now. Like, when I give you a syllabus, a curriculum at the beginning of the semester, yeah, you're probably— that's gonna be hard for you. You're not gonna be great at following directions. That's gonna be hard for you. Your grades are gonna suffer because of that. But it was only because my dad, My dad saw that obsession was a gift. Whenever I had a passion, we didn't do birthday presents. We didn't do presents around the holidays. That wasn't a big thing. But whenever I was obsessed with something, whenever I really had a passion, I was allowed to go follow that with reckless abandon. And I think that as a society, we need to look at people who are obsessed and actually help them, give them another system where they can have a more self-directed approach to learning. The problem with the education system isn't the education system. It is the fact that there's only one education system in the first place. There shouldn't be a system. There should be hundreds of different ways to learn, to educate yourself. But it's become so homogeneous and it's become— do you know the story of the Bed of Procrustes?

Yeah, I haven't heard.

So, it's an ancient Greek tale and there's a guy named Procrustes and he's got this bed and he basically kidnaps these people and has to make them fit into the bed. But the bed doesn't change size. Instead, what he does is he cuts off their, their legs or stretches them out so that they can fit into the bed. And it's a great analogy for the education system. We have a bed.

Mm-hmm.

You're going to show up at 8, you're going to leave at 3, you're going to do these standardized tests. And then what we do is we take every person Regardless of interest, geography, or personality type, and we put them through the same system. And by doing that, we squash obsession when obsession is the very essence of the spirited people who go on to change the world.

I would also add, like, do you think alongside with obsession, Schools also kill another thing called curiosity, and they just force you to do things according to their system, which you just mentioned, right? In a way that these kids— even take my example, I was forced to read and study software engineering when I had no interest whatsoever because of the society that stressed out my parents and whatnot. When you see— and I really like the way you're projecting it, which is, you know, when you see a kid obsessed with a thing, you just have to give the freedom for him or her to explore that obsession and convert into action and eventually convert into a career by itself. What is something that you suggest that schools should do? Or just in general, like, you know, you kind of run a school by yourself, Rite of Passage School. You know, another cohort is coming, by the way. So for listeners, definitely go sign up. You know, it's coming in, I think, 1 or 2 weeks, I guess. What's something you're doing different that schools should have done long before at Rite of Passage?

In school, the administrators set the goal, and then the teachers ask their kids to set realistic expectations. We should do the opposite. The kids should set the goal, and the teachers should raise the kids' ambitions. Now, I'm not saying that every single second of school should be self-directed. No, there's good reasons to learn math. There's good reasons to learn grammar. There's good reasons to learn language. And a lot of times, that stuff isn't fun. That's right. But what I believe is that we can teach those things way faster than we ordinarily do. And if you don't believe me, go walk into a public school classroom right now and you'll see the The astonishing lack of engagement that we have. We're not using a lot of the tools and techniques that we've known worked for 5 decades now, 50 years, half a century. Things like mastery learning. Saul Kahn really popularized this idea in a book called The One World Schoolhouse. But mastery learning is the simplest idea. It is that you progress based off of knowledge instead of time. So right now, when do you go to the next grade? When you finish a year.

Right.

So when you're 12 to 13, 13 to 14, you— like, it doesn't need to work like that. Like, you could go to the next grade once you just know what the person in the previous grade should do. So like, take a bunch of 9th graders. They're struggling with math. Send them all back to 4th grade math. Every single one of them. Wait, that's crazy. No, just get them to crush 4th grade math, then 5th grade math, then 6th grade math, 7th, 8th, then they're right back at 9th grade math. If they actually know what they're doing, they should be able to get there in 3 weeks. But I bet you that they don't. I bet you it's actually going to take them a while. Right. There's this thing from like elementary algebra that actually they never picked up on, which is now hurting them once they get to calculus. There's all this sort of stuff. And the problem is that we advance kids before they're ready to be advanced. And then also, because everyone has to move at the same pace, the kids who are advanced, they get suppressed. And so this is why I say that kids should set their own goals in terms of what they want to achieve. Don't just focus on math. No. Maybe take a kid who loves baseball and try to work with them to study. Why is it That when a great pitcher moves their arm in this way, the ball actually changes with spin. What are all the different mechanics? How does that influence the eye? What is the physics of the way that a slider versus a curveball versus a fastball moves off the bat differently? Why is it that once you want to spin the ball, now the ball goes slower? What's going on there? Like, I don't know those answers, but those are super interesting. That makes me more excited to learn math than, hey, you just got to go learn algebra. And so if we can think through, okay, what are the projects that these kids are excited about? Where can now we allow them to set their own goals? And now once they've set their own goals, let's raise their ambitions. And then for things that we know well and we can use mastery learning for, let's not allow them to advance until they actually know the material. And I think that if we do that, for a kid like myself, we'll have a much better society. Mm-hmm. And I don't care if we want to keep the existing system for people who like it, great. I'm just trying to say that system doesn't work for every single kid, but right now every public school is basically the same.

It's very interesting. I feel, I don't know, it's a prediction or something, but eventually, like how Rite of Passage is becoming a school for writers, and I think people are not going to go to Stanford or Harvard or like these big schools with systems. They just like find schools like rite of passage. And I feel we need more teachers like yourself who believe in action-oriented frameworks instead of system-oriented frameworks, which are like, you know, which you explained. I love that. You know, I wish I had that kind of education. Because what I'm doing right now, which is community building, building products for people, if I were given an opportunity like 15 years back when I was just a kid, a lot would have changed. So, you know, for people who are listening, just do things, be obsessed. That's what David's, you know, kind of reiterating as well. Find that curiosity angle and double down on that. I want to cover the last thing before I jump onto a segment. which I call Rapid Fire 5, which is a fun thing. One of your— I love your articles, David. Your essays are amazing. I've pinpointed so many, bookmarked so many, and referred back to so many. But one particular essay I really refer back and back again is Imitate Then Innovate.

Yeah.

So in a way, you're in that article, in that essay, you suggest people to copy people to find your own tone and to find your own voice, your flavor, so that you can execute your path, build your own path and explore. I'm curious, when did you discover that for yourself? At what point, what is your key inflection point? You said, you know what, let's not innovate. Let's try to imitate and then find my voice. And number 2 is, it can become judgmental for some people who think that they're imitating someone, they're not creating on their own. How do you handle that? 2 questions.

Well, I think we're always imitating. I mean, I, in high school, was training to play college golf, and every time I would meet with my coach, we would look at the golf swings of professional players, and I would try to do certain things Like that person. And that's standard. I mean, if you listen to Tiger Woods talk about the golf swing, he can imitate everyone's swing. I mean, in golf, it's just naturally going through your head. Mm-hmm. What do I like about this swing? How can I incorporate it into mine? If I do, what's gonna break? What's actually gonna work better? And it's the same thing in writing. That when you start, there are certain things that everyone needs to know, certain things around grammar and stuff like that. But later on, you begin to think about, like, what is my voice? Who do I want to be on the page? What is my— what is the thing I'm trying to express? And it's this felt sense. And the best way to do that isn't to try to articulate whatever that thing is. It's to look at a book, look at a writer, look at an essay, and say, there's something in this that's moving me, that's stirring my soul, and incorporate that into your own writing. For me, that's people like Gregory David Roberts. I just bought Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, trying to think through, okay, what is going on with this writing? Why does it excite me so much? Then I'm always looking at different genres. I love electronic music and I'm always looking at electronic music saying, if that's where huge production values are going in society, what can I bring from electronic music into the way that I teach a writing course? Because people are investing half a billion dollars— I'm making that number up— half a billion dollars into the production for electronic music. Hmm. Why shouldn't I look at that and say, hey, this little thing that this artist did, why can't I bring that into the way I teach? And so that's what I mean by imitate then innovate, often through the synthesis of different inspirations. By crossing genres, you can do really well. Shelby Foote. Shelby Foote was one of the great Civil War historians. And if you look at his copy of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, like a 3,000-page novel. He's read it 9 times, and it's annotated like the guy has just spent his entire life scribbling on the pages of these books. And what he's doing, the reason he could write great nonfiction narrative about the Civil War, was because he learned so intently About what Proust was doing in his novels. That's imitate, then innovate.

You've touched an amazing point knowingly or not knowingly, which is in order to— instead of saying you're imitating someone, you're kind of getting curious how they're doing and just replicating it. So in a way,

Construction and reconstruction.

Exactly. Like, you're getting curious about their moves. Take golf. I'm not a golfer, but I'm assuming, you know, I play ping pong. So I'm assuming I can connect the dots there. So kind of how they swing the bat, how long they are taking the bat. I don't know if I call it bat or not, but basically the thing and the club. How forceful your coach is hitting the ball and the angle. These are curious thoughts. And when you convert into yourself, it can be imitation, but you're just being very curious and deconstructing it and constructing yourself. In that path, you find your own voice. And I love that. I've imitated a lot of folks, you know, And when I design a website for myself or like for others, I kind of like look for inspiration and literally do it. And I find my own voice, you know, and these podcasts are the same way. I'm finding my own voice while copying others. So there is no harm in copying others. I think I do have a lot of questions, David, but, you know, but I know we have limited time. But I want to quickly dive into this thing called Rapid Fire 5. I'm going to ask 5 fun questions. Would love to hear your thoughts. So, let's go. Who's your favorite student from Rite of Passage?

My favorite student?

Favorite student.

I mean, Ana Lorena Fábregas is one of my best friends in the world. I'm writing the foreword to her book. Nice. She's— I'm really glad that she's a student. That's who comes to mind. And yeah, I mean, I just— a lot of the time that we've spent together has just been awesome, and I'm super proud of how fast that she's grown.

Yeah, I follow her. I'm looking forward to her book. She's the founder of Synthesis, an amazing school itself.

Chief evangelist. Yeah. And I'm an investor in Synthesis, right? Like, that's what I mean. It's so cool. I'm an advisor, an investor, and yeah, one of my favorites.

What is one book you recommend in your sleep? Like, just like all-time favorite.

For me, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan was game-changing. I think that McLuhan Understood what the internet was going to do to society before he even knew what the internet was. And it was because he understood what digital technologies did to humanity in the way that they created a global village. His books are hard. So, if you want something a little easier, I recommend Human is Media by Aubrey Marashenko. Came out in 2009, 2010, still very prescient.

Nice. Definitely going to check it out. You're a podcaster. You've done a million podcast episodes. Who's your dream guest you want to invite in future, or you've already did one, if you may call out?

I think Matthew McConaughey. Greenlights is an awesome book, and I'd really like to have him in the studio.

Yeah, I love Matthew McConaughey's— it's not a podcast per se, I don't remember it, but he did an amazing session with Gary Vee. I loved his way of thinking, turning yellow lights and red lights into green lights. Yeah,

he's also just so cool. He's just cool, right?

Yeah, who doesn't want him? If I wish, you know, I want him on this podcast. Another interesting question I feel like a lot of people might have asked you personally or on Twitter, are you writing a book or do you have plans to write a book? If yes, what would that be?

Yeah, I'll definitely write a few books. I want to write a book about my writing method. Probably publish it in 3 or 4 years. And then I'd also really like to write a book about how I think about teaching and how education needs to change. And then I'd love to write a book as Write of Passage becomes more successful about how we work. I think that there's a lot that we're beginning to figure out about how remote work should be. In-person work is synchronous, remote work— Mm-hmm. And it happens by talking, synchronous and by talking. remote work is asynchronous and it happens by writing a lot more. And thinking through what that looks like is also a book I'd like to write in the future.

Nice. Definitely looking forward for that moment. I've learned a ton, I think. Last question. You write this newsletter called Monday Musings and you have a column which I'm actually particularly very interested, which is Photo of the Week. I just scrolled down to see who you're meeting, what place you've visited. What's your favorite photo by far?

Yeah, there's a photo that my friend Mariana took when we were living in Mexico, and she was a roommate, the wife of one of my best buddies, and she took this really cool photo of me sitting and drawing. with this lamp over me and it's my Twitter profile picture or the background image. And I just love that photo.

It kind of resembles the Steve Jobs-esque, you know, the Macintosh days photo. Yeah, I saw that too. Yeah. Love that. Well, you know, I want to end this on a high note here. Thank you so much, David. I really appreciate your time. You know, it was good chatting with you and, you know, I've learned a ton and looking forward to learn more. from your writings, your tweets, your threads. And yeah, and last thing, Rite of Passage cohort is coming in the next couple of weeks. Are you going to take it? I will. I plan to do it for a long time. I think after talking to you, might as well take it. I'm kind of like a big fan of short-form writing. I write threads. tweets, never thought of long form. So definitely want to be part of the cohort. But yeah, do you have any message for listeners who wants on the edge or wants to take the rite of passage?

I mean, just look at the reviews and the case studies, what people say about the program and yeah, just look it up on Google and see what people say. And then if you're interested in following me, just search Friday Finds Links into Google, Friday Finds Links, David Perell, and you'll see there's a giant list, like 50,000 words worth of links and my summaries of those links. And check that out. And at the top you'll see a little email subscribe. And if you wanna put in your email, I'll send you 5 every Friday.

Awesome. Yeah, I'm going to add all these as part of show notes. But yeah, it's been great talking to you, David. We're right on time. And thank you so much.

Thank you.