David Perell

"The Writing Guy" | Christian | Host: How I Write Podcast | I tweet about writing, beauty, and architecture | My writing:

[David Perell @david_perell]

Michael Pollan explained his entire writing process to me in 70 minutes. Afterwards, he said: "Man, I just gave you a whole semester's worth of lessons in a single conversation."

Timestamps:
0:48 Does coffee make you more creative?
3:37 Do drugs make you creative?
10:45 How psychedelics shape your thinking
12:57 Journaling
16:29 Michael's routine
18:55 Writing a 1st draft
20:34 Why write in the first person?
26:09 The Cow Story
34:08 Balancing stories and facts
39:02 Metaphors are a cheat code
42:48 Finding good questions
51:25 Reading novels
55:40 How Michael does research
1:01:43 What makes a good character?
1:08:35 Art expands consciousness
1:11:05 Michael's top writing lessons

You'll find the full conversation below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

There are two types of consciousness, and you lose one as you grow up.

1) Spotlight consciousness: "an adult skill of putting on blinders and focusing on something, which we learn in school, and we need to do to have success doing anything."

2) Lantern consciousness: "something young children have... they take in information from all 360 degrees. They're not focused, but they're mastering the world, and they're actually getting more sensory information than we are."

"To write, you need that focused concentration. That spotlight."

@michaelpollan

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

If you don't grapple with an idea, it won't change you. And if you're not changed by an idea, you're no better than a chatbot.

It's time to get weird. And the weird is going offline and into archives, or sitting with a text for an uncomfortably long period of time.

Ezra Klein made this exact point in my conversation with him:

"What you are doing is spending time grappling with the text, making connections. When you spend seven hours reading a book, your mind spends seven hours with the topic.

ChatGPT can summarize it for you, in addition to all this stuff you just will not have read, but you didn't have the engagement.

What knowledge is supposed to do is change you. And it changes you because you make connections to it."

[David Perell @david_perell]

@mspringut @culturaltutor At least the lamp posts are nice

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

"99% of psychedelic epiphanies are stupid or banal, or not really gonna help you."

Michael Pollan wrote extensively about psychedelics in How to Change Your Mind. He describes his own experience and what he learned:

"I had an experience where the plants around me were cautious. They were returning my gaze. They were benevolent, but just very present and wanting to engage.

Then, I went down this long deep rabbit hole looking at plant intelligence and plant consciousness and found scientists who actually believe plants have some kind of sentience. It became an important part of a book I wrote. So in that sense, it was an inspiration.

The way to go is to treat these epiphanies as hypotheses and see if you can find other ways of knowing that will support that idea."

@michaelpollan

[David Perell @david_perell]

Here's the full episode on YouTube

https://t.co/MVnqMGTYdZ

[David Perell @david_perell]

Michael Pollan explained his entire writing process to me in 70 minutes. Afterwards, he said: "Man, I just gave you a whole semester's worth of lessons in a single conversation."

Timestamps:
0:48 Does coffee make you more creative?
3:37 Do drugs make you creative?
10:45 How psychedelics shape your thinking
12:57 Journaling
16:29 Michael's routine
18:55 Writing a 1st draft
20:34 Why write in the first person?
26:09 The Cow Story
34:08 Balancing stories and facts
39:02 Metaphors are a cheat code
42:48 Finding good questions
51:25 Reading novels
55:40 How Michael does research
1:01:43 What makes a good character?
1:08:35 Art expands consciousness
1:11:05 Michael's top writing lessons

You'll find the full conversation below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube, or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

[David Perell @david_perell]

Links...

Apple: https://t.co/LFDlUPxK8O

Spotify: https://t.co/LrW35q53fD

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Manifestos spark revolutions. Amor Towles explains their power:

"My love of manifestos began as a college student, because manifestos are written for college students. For 19-year-olds. Historically, countries with a large population of 19-year-olds are at risk of revolution.

It turns on every light. It stimulates every electrical nerve.

What was interesting, reading those first manifestos, Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, the Communist Manifesto, is the assurance. It's the idea of taking language and tying it towards action.

This is about the world right now. The way you look at things is wrong, and this is right. There's this great sense of urgency.

It doesn't slow itself down. It doesn't bog itself down on examples. It's pushing forward at all times, to the next idea and the next idea and the next idea. So there's like seven declarations in 14 sentences."

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

We still talk about the ending of Game of Thrones.

Long after we forget everything else about a story, we remember how it ended.

Adrian Tchaikovsky on why the ending is the most important part of anything you write:

"It's the bit your readers are left with. If the ending doesn't work, that's what they take away. It needs to be the very logical result of what's gone before, but also a surprise."

Tchaikovsky has written more than 60 books. He has never once planned an ending:

"The motion of the book to that point takes me where it needs to go. It's the only ending the book can at that point have. I'm not imposing it in any way."

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

If you outsource your thinking to AI, you're operating on a flawed model of how learning works.

— Ezra Klein

[David Perell @david_perell]

@PerellClips Here's the full interview

https://t.co/h5whqiq5rR

[David Perell @david_perell]

Ezra Klein is one of the Internet’s most influential journalists. We talked about the state of the media and why he doesn’t write with AI.

Some lessons:

1. Conversations are where you explore ideas. Writing is where you make them rigorous.

2. Sometimes you don't need to develop your taste, but have more faith in the taste you already have.

3. Some writers fade into the background to capture objective truth. Others (like Hunter S. Thompson) crank up their personalities and become the story itself.

4. Beware of reading summaries instead of the actual book. It's more dangerous to think you've read something that you haven't than to not read it at all.

5. Writers who outsource their learning to AI operate on a flawed model of how the mind works. They think people can download information like you see in "The Matrix" but that's not how people learn.

6. So how do people learn then? They need to grapple with information. And that takes time.

7. People will say that books should be articles and articles should be tweets, but the truth is that a lot of information should actually be longer. There are ideas you can only explore when you let them breathe, and sometimes that means a 300 page book.

8. Do the work that others skip: Good journalists are the ones who actually read things like the Congressional Budget Office report instead of skimming the summary.

9. Say it straight: Journalism doesn’t need rhetoric. It needs clarity. And directness. Say what you're trying to say without embellishment or jazz fingers.

10. Vox’s cautionary tale: Ezra co-founded Vox, which did some of the best journalism in the world during the 2010s. But their business model was unsustainable because they were yoked to advertising, and the idea that competing on platforms like Facebook would convert scale into revenue. The problem is that the platforms took the money. When they did, Vox (and other media startups like BuzzFeed) weren’t able to keep their top talent and stay at the frontier.

11. Why has the New York Times business been so resilient? They built a digital bundle. Games, cooking apps, and sites like Wirecutter fund their journalism. This is how journalism always worked. In the age of print newspapers, international bureaus were funded by classified ads that told you there was a sale at the mall.

I've shared the full conversation with @ezraklein below. If you'd rather watch on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Why do so many artists do their best work at the beginning of their career?

Ezra Klein says it comes down to purity of vision.

He says: "My taste is intuitive to me. Why does something spark for me and something else doesn't? I don't think I can quite tell you.

Part of the honing process was coming to trust things I already felt. I think my judgment was good when I started Vox, but I didn't trust it. And I wish I had trusted it more.

So part of taste is not always its development, but your faith in it.

You think about a lot of writers. Sometimes their most vivid, vibrant work is at the beginning. Often, the first thing you do is the most yours. After that, the audience is in your head, the editors are in your head, living up to yourself is in your head."

@ezraklein

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Bad dialogue kills good stories. Anne Lamott shares notes on dialogue and the one dead simple way to avoid cringy conversations on the page:

"Now it's just the voice memo on your phone. If you read your dialogue aloud, you'll cringe when you hear sentences that ring false, sounding like someone who had ample time to rewrite them beforehand."

I prefer patches of dialogue with only quotation marks, without constant 'he said, she said' attributions, which would be a drag.

I should know who is speaking through the verbs within the dialogue itself and the rhythm of their speech.

You can make dialogue interesting without trying too hard. At the end of your soliloquy, someone says 'Good to know,' and you burst out laughing. Or they look at you blankly and say 'Whatever.' Or 'No problem.'"

[Jack Raines @Jack_Raines]

I have to ring a buzzer to get mouthwash at CVS

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Adrian Tchaikovsky wrote a novel about a dog that commits war crimes.

It's told from the point of view of Rex, a bioengineered military dog who is a good boy. A good boy that kills children.

"At the beginning, Rex is a good dog because he's doing what he's told, and that's the measure of being a good dog.

It becomes readily apparent that what Rex is doing is war crimes. He's absolutely killing civilians and children. Rex is such an amiable, likable character who just thinks he's being a good dog."

The reader watches a good dog commit atrocities because he doesn't know any better.

Every atrocity in history was carried out by a Rex. Someone who thought they were being a good dog.

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

"I'm allergic to the word content.

We have reduced creative work, cultural matter to what we call content, which presumes a container. And the container is advertising. This is what carries the modern Internet.

The course the web has taken has been towards reducing human beings to eyeballs, and writing to content.

There's been a shallowing of cultural material as the Internet has moved more and more toward clickbait and listicles and 'ten ways to.'

I'm not moving away from it on moral grounds. I'm just moving away from it as a human being who doesn't find it compelling."

– Maria Popova

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Elon Musk is so famous you'd think you've heard it all.

So when @jimmysoni interviewed him, he opened with the one question that humanizes him.

Jimmy asked about Greg Kouri, a close friend and early investor in Elon's first company, Zip2. Greg died at a very young age:

"I said, Elon, I want to begin our interview a little bit differently. I had read about this gentleman that had helped you early on in your life. I found his widow, and we talked. Can you talk about him?

There's a pause. And he goes, 'Oh my god.' He gave me this minute long meditation on Greg and their friendship and everything that it meant to him. Nobody's talking to him about Greg Kouri.

The human beings that I interview, they have lives that exist outside of the very narrow frame of reference that we see them for. What's the thing that they never get talked about that reveals something about their character?"

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Your favorite shows, movies, songs, books, even comedy specials, are all a product of distillation. Cutting away the mediocre until only the best survives.

Tim Urban explains:

"I'll research for three hours and get seven minutes of dopamine hits.

That's part of why we like to read. Someone out there has done a lot of work to bring us the best.

The stand up comedian is the ultimate example. When you're seeing an HBO special, you're seeing the best of the best of the best of funny moments they've had. It's not that they're the most brilliant person.

Their craft is distilling the funniest insights of their decade into this hour for you."

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

"There has to be a ship-to-yap ratio."

Elon Musk can tweet 100 times an hour and nobody cares:

"No one thinks that the companies are being neglected. The companies are shipping.

There are some founders where nothing substantive seems to be coming out of the company other than words. They're shipping blogs, they're shipping tweets, but where's the product?

If the ratio is off, it's a huge red flag."

–@lulumeservey

SpaceX just IPO'd at a $1.7 trillion valuation.

@elonmusk

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

A great nonfiction writer is like a dog that keeps bringing you a dead bird to your doorstep.

Ezra Klein explains:

"The most important thing in nonfiction writing is having the thing you're trying to communicate and having done the work to have something worth communicating.

Trying to hide that in embellishment and ornamentation is a terrible habit.

You're like a dog who keeps running up to the back door, dropping something, like a dead bird, or a bird, or something. That is exactly what I do.

At the core, what I do is try to go out, get you something, and bring it back to you. Writing is just a vehicle for doing this?"