0:00
What I mean by interested is like basically obsessed, like whatever, got Mr.
Search this video
0:00
Beast to work in this little group for five years and talk with a whole team every single day about thumbnail strategy, editing strategy, and just obsess over YouTube so that you know it better than anybody in the world.
0:20
You cannot will your way into that interest. That's a bummer. okay.
0:26
But here's the good news.
0:27
The good news is that as a society, we're so bad at helping people cultivate the things that actually are those innate interests.
0:36
You know, Tyler Kawan is this great line where he says, we're all weird.
0:39
In fact, what's weird is all the puffy that we put on where we try to be normal.
0:43
Like if you look at, you know, you walk into a kid's room, they're all obsessed with something, you know?
0:50
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
0:56
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
1:01
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
1:08
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
1:25
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
1:42
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
1:54
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:56
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
2:01
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
2:09
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
2:18
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
2:26
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
2:29
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
2:32
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops.
2:36
I am the luckiest man on the planet.
2:39
Because if I find somebody I really want to talk to and I think is super interesting, oddly, they agree to come on my podcast. I can't figure this out.
2:48
My guest today is David Perell, who... I knew you before.
2:53
But we'll get to that in a minute.
2:54
You might know him as the writing guy, who has launched the Write Of Passage writing workshop.
3:02
Which has been taken by more than 500 students in 40 countries. Wow.
3:08
You are also the host of the North Star Podcast.
3:11
Which I'm assuming, you're using the poetic use of North Star there.
3:15
But first welcome, David.
3:16
David Perell: Thanks, Jim. I'm super excited.
3:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: As am I.
3:21
So I knew you, you'll recall, when you were just getting started.
3:27
And you actually asked me if I would shoot a little video for you, talking about the value of writing.
3:32
And as you know, you and I are about as close as we can be, about our thoughts about the value of writing.
3:40
But I thought what might be helpful for the maybe one or two people in our audience who don't know who you are, for you to give us the origin story of the superhero creating the Write Of Passage. David Perell: Yeah.
3:55
Well I think there was something else that you did, that I think was particularly impactful.
4:00
Very early on, we were going down to Washington DC.
4:03
And you looked at me and you said, "Hey.
4:05
If there's anything that I can do to help Write Of Passage, just let me know."
4:10
And you said, "You're going to crush it.
4:12
And I'm totally here to help you."
4:14
And I'll just never forget that. So thank you very much. Basically...
4:18
So what I'm really interested in is I think at a philosophical level, how the internet is changing society.
4:24
But then, what do you actually do about that?
4:27
In terms of how you think about careers, how you think about your social life.
4:30
How you think about your intellectual life.
4:32
And really interested in the practical side of what you should do in this internet world that we live in.
4:40
And so, I realized that writing on the internet was this huge opportunity.
4:46
Because, you could share your ideas.
4:48
Which would force you to think better, to refine certain intuitions that you had about the world.
4:54
But then, you could share them with other people.
4:55
And you could attract career opportunities.
4:57
You could make a bunch of friends. That's how we met.
5:00
And this has always felt like some burning secret, that I just needed to share with people.
5:07
And so, that's what I do for a living.
5:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think it's amazing actually in that, that was also an early thesis of mine.
5:15
And I got poo-pooed for talking about it a long time ago.
5:19
Which was, I felt that writing was going to become more, and not less important in an interconnected world.
5:26
And most of the folks who were poo pooing me, were cutting edge tech people who said, "No. You're wrong.
5:34
Voice and video is the future."
5:36
And by the way, not to diminish voice and or video, we are doing both right here. David Perell: Right.
5:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I think...
5:43
I still believe, and I'd like to hear your reasons...
5:47
Because, I know they're good.
5:49
For why you think that this is such a great trade.
5:52
Especially, for younger people to make. David Perell: Yeah. Good question.
5:57
So I think that there's two answers here. The first is...
6:00
I'll start with the less provocative one.
6:02
The first is that writing is the bedrock of all these mediums.
6:07
So if you want to make a video, you write.
6:09
If you want to make a TikTok video, you're going to write that out.
6:11
You want to do some kind of scripted podcast, you're going to be writing.
6:14
Even if you're doing a podcast where it's like this, and you're just riffing on information.
6:20
Jim, your ability to talk about factor investing is so much better, because you've spent hours and hours writing about it.
6:27
Now when you talk about the things that you've already written about, the ideas are going to be structured.
6:32
They're going to flow logically.
6:33
You're going to know where you're going to go.
6:34
So at the beginning of a story, you can move and shape the story for where you're going to end up.
6:41
So that's the un-provocative one.
6:42
The provocative one is just that, smart people read.
6:46
And what I mean by that is if you talk to the movers and shakers in the world, they disproportionately spend a lot of time reading. They're reading books.
6:55
Increasingly, online articles.
6:57
And reading is very dense.
7:00
It's a very efficient way to transfer information.
7:03
And the intellectual rigor that you get when you read something, is generally higher than when you're watching a video. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
7:10
Obviously, I've got some motivated reasoning going on here.
7:14
Because, I couldn't agree more with you.
7:16
But full disclosure, I am a reader.
7:18
I process information much better.
7:21
I'm almost eidetic in the memory for things that I read. David Perell: Mm.
7:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm much less so for conversations, for movies. Things like that.
7:30
But I like your take on it.
7:32
In that, it's a simple...
7:34
I don't even know that, that should be controversial.
7:36
I guess, everything is these things.
7:38
David Perell: I'd call it provocative.
7:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I like provocative better.
7:41
And one of the things that I like...
7:44
And you did a great meme.
7:46
Which was essentially, write to connect the dots.
7:50
That has been near and dear to my heart, since I started doing this at age 18.
7:55
I truly believe that you think you might think something, you think you might know something.
8:02
But unless you take pen to paper, or use a computer to actually write it out, you don't know until you've written it down. David Perell: Yep. Yeah. It's so funny that...
8:15
One of the really funny things about this craft...
8:17
And I don't know if you feel it.
8:19
When people come up to you at parties and they're like, oh my goodness.
8:21
I really enjoyed this GIF that I did.
8:26
Or this piece that you wrote.
8:27
Is when you're making things that have such a long tail, you're just hanging out.
8:33
You're in your office, you're just fooling around.
8:36
I made that little drawing...
8:38
It was probably my seventh or eighth drawing of the night. I was sitting in bed. It was 11:45. Lights off.
8:43
And I'm just fooling around. I was like, oh. I'll just post this.
8:46
And I wake up the next morning, it's got 10,000 likes or something.
8:51
And one of the funniest parts about this craft is how things that to other people seem like, oh my goodness.
8:57
Your thoughts are so true about that.
8:58
I maybe, did that in three minutes. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
9:00
I think that's often the case, having been around a lot of creatives.
9:04
That some of the best work actually comes out of all of the work they did before. David Perell: Yep.
9:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
9:12
And then it coalesces in these things, that feel like 30 minutes.
9:16
I'm always cautious about that, because I collect a lot of art. I know a lot of artists.
9:22
And one of the things that you're being modest about is, you could only do that drawing, in my opinion, because you spent days, weeks, months thinking about that particular type of thing.
9:37
Your portfolio seems to be growing a little bit.
9:41
And I want to talk a bit about that.
9:43
Because one of your things is, find that niche.
9:47
Become a personal monopoly in that niche.
9:51
And yet for example, you’re doing this series with Jonathan Bi. Who actually, I had on.
9:57
Which is very interesting.
9:58
I thought the first one in my conversation with Jonathan, was awesome. You've got your podcast.
10:03
David Perell: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
10:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you also comment on things that I find very interesting, like logo designs.
10:11
You recently put up the Kindle logo design. David Perell: Yeah.
10:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which I love too, by the way.
10:16
David Perell: It's great.
10:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But I... So give...
10:20
Are you intentionally expanding?
10:23
Are we going to start seeing some graphic courses from you?
10:25
Or are we going to start seeing the great lecture series? What do you got cooking?
10:30
David Perell: So I think of writing on the internet, as the prism by which I see all my interests through.
10:41
And so a lot of what I need to do, is go out and experiment with different things.
10:46
So that I can actually speak well about the things that I'm teaching.
10:49
One of the differences between online education and school, traditional education is that when you're an online educator, you're generally... At least, what I do.
11:01
I am both coming up with the curriculum, and teaching the curriculum.
11:04
Your physics teacher didn't figure out the theory of general relativity. That was Einstein.
11:13
And so what they're doing is, they're taking other people's ideas.
11:15
And then, they're communicating them. In no way...
11:18
It's just a different style. It's a different...
11:20
There's different pros and cons.
11:21
But what I need to do Jim, is I need to live the life that I teach.
11:26
So all this to say, I found that when I'm just pursuing my interests, pursuing my curiosities, I achieve two things.
11:33
The first is, I always stumble into these weird nooks and corners of society.
11:38
And I could tell you about one in a second.
11:42
And then also, I've always been very concerned that I was going to be known for writing on the internet, by only writing about writing on the internet.
11:53
The circularity of that, no way.
11:55
I'm not going to live that life.
11:57
So I just published a piece on what it's like to live in Austin.
12:00
I actually am writing about logo design today, and just...
12:03
I'm calling it the great flattening, that is showing up everywhere.
12:07
Where in order to try to reach all these different audiences, and in order to try to globalize what we're doing...
12:14
Basically, a lot of the character's being sucked out of companies, out of people.
12:18
Because when you try to appeal to everybody, you lose your sense of personality a lot of the time.
12:23
And so what I'm trying to do is, I'm trying to explore all these different places.
12:27
And then, see what emerges.
12:28
So let me give you an example.
12:30
Three weeks ago, I went to Disneyland.
12:32
I was like, you know what?
12:34
If we're going to be running a course, and we're going to charge thousands of dollars for it, the hospitality has to be exceptional. So I go to Disneyland.
12:42
And I'm just writing down notes. What do they do well?
12:45
How do they actually think about making a great experience?
12:49
And the answer is that Walt Disney had something called plusing.
12:53
Where what he would ask employees at the park to do is, they would walk around and they would see something.
13:00
And the plus was, how do we make this better?
13:01
How do we make this better?
13:02
It was almost like Kaizen, from the Toyota production system.
13:06
And so, I'm following Walt Disney.
13:07
I'm watching documentaries on him.
13:10
Looking through different books. All these things.
13:13
And then yesterday, I just started thinking, wait.
13:17
What if we had two animated characters that we could use, to teach Write Of Passage?
13:25
We could have persist, and resist.
13:26
Like Mickey and Mini Mouse.
13:28
And then, we could have all these stuffed animals.
13:32
And these little characters, sort of like what Tim Urban does.
13:34
We could sell those animals.
13:35
And then what we would have is, we'd have this intellectual property. This personification. How cool would that be? Oh, wait. Hold on.
13:42
We're actually launching this program for high schoolers.
13:43
They're going to love it.
13:44
How much humor is that going to inject?
13:45
And then, we're actually bringing on a motion designer and a sound engineer.
13:49
So then, we can have different sound fonts that we use in the course. And then I'll have...
13:53
In my new production studio, I'll have a little key pad like what electronic musicians have.
13:59
And I can play different noises.
14:01
So now what we've done is, we've personified the writing process. Wait, hold on.
14:05
Steven Pressfield has this idea of the resistance.
14:07
So I'm going to take that idea, try to get in contact with him.
14:10
Give him a call and say, "Hey.
14:12
What if we got your idea of the resistance...
14:15
Which already, is such a resonant idea.
14:17
And we made a character out of this?"
14:19
And then now, we have resist.
14:21
And then, we make persist. All I'm saying...
14:23
I don't know if that's going to happen. Who knows? That's a crazy idea. It sounds fun.
14:27
But that is why I do what I do.
14:29
Because if I have my blinders on too much, I'm no longer seeing the periphery of my mind.
14:36
And then, I can't be creative. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
14:39
I think that looking through the prism of, okay.
14:43
So what is my primary goal here?
14:46
And in your case, it started out teaching people how to write online.
14:51
You had an excellent reason for why they should do so.
14:55
You charged reasonable prices.
14:58
And that worked out really well.
14:59
I love the idea of extending the brand to merchandise.
15:04
I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense.
15:07
I only worry when I hear about... Well, Ted Talks. Great example, I think. David Perell: Yeah.
15:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So Ted Talks had...
15:16
When I was rolling out of Bear Sterns in 2006. David Perell: Yeah.
15:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The president of my company, his one goal was he wanted to get me a Ted Talk. Because, they were so...
15:27
That was it, back in '06.
15:30
And then they did this...
15:32
In my opinion, just my opinion alone, they did a brand expansion that went too far.
15:40
And then it wasn't just TEDx.
15:42
It was Ted London, Ted New York, et cetera.
15:47
And they diluted their brand so much that even among friends of mine, a Ted Talk is seen as a punchline. David Perell: Yeah.
15:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So are you keeping that kind of thing in mind? As you're...
16:00
Because, I think that there's a lot of different ways you can go from writing.
16:05
I mean after all, writing is the... You said it earlier.
16:10
Writing is the basis of almost anything that you want to do.
16:13
You might want to shoot a video, you might want to give a lecture, et cetera.
16:17
If you haven't written it out, you're only going on pretty thin [gruel] there.
16:24
Do you see anything that maybe could, you'd go, ooh? David Perell: Yeah.
16:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I want to kill that.
16:31
David Perell: I'm very conscious of this.
16:32
So I'll give you a couple of examples.
16:34
And we talk about this all the time internally.
16:36
So first of all, what I always say to the team is, we're the Four Seasons of writing education.
16:41
We are not trying to reach every single person. That is not our goal.
16:44
And then once again, in our core values as a company...
16:48
Which we're always talking about.
16:50
We say, "Students first, second to none."
16:53
And so the way that we think about building products is that, we're going to focus on our students.
17:01
And we're going to be second to none.
17:02
So what we want to do is, we want to have the best possible product.
17:06
And then charge what we need to charge, in order to do that.
17:09
Rather than trying to say, meet a price point. And going down market.
17:13
We really aren't that interested in doing that.
17:15
But the other thing that I think is interesting is in this world, I think a lot of companies have gone a little haywire.
17:23
And I think one of the best things that Amazon ever did was they said, "Customers first."
17:28
And so we took that idea.
17:30
And we say, "Students first."
17:32
Because, a lot of companies are society first.
17:36
Meaning that they're going to focus on all these social issues, above everything else.
17:39
A lot of companies are employees first.
17:41
That the happiness of the employees is number one.
17:44
Look, society's important. Employees are important.
17:47
But for us, the thing that we're always focused on is students.
17:51
And so we can keep a lot of the riff raff and a lot of the distractions out of the company, by just always focusing on students.
17:58
Which is why it's our first core value internally. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
18:02
I think that, that makes a lot of sense.
18:04
So on that note, who have been some of your students?
18:08
Tell me some great stories.
18:09
Tell me some great success stories from your students.
18:11
David Perell: Oh my goodness. So probably...
18:14
So I think that there's two. I think that...
18:16
My favorite one is Ana [Fabrega]. I mean, she... Okay.
18:22
So she signs up for Write Of Passage.
18:25
And she gets buyer's remorse 24 hours later.
18:27
She's like, I don't want to take this.
18:29
And at end she's like, it's too expensive. I want to drop out.
18:32
And I don't know what happened.
18:33
But we sent a really good email back to her to be like, Hey... So she decides to stay.
18:39
And she'd been a teacher in Boston and Panama for the previous six years, in public school education.
18:45
Making $30 000/$40,000 a year.
18:46
And hated the school system.
18:48
And she's super creative.
18:50
And has this intuitive sense of what kids need, what excites them, what bores them like no one I've ever met.
18:57
So she comes in after the first live session.
19:01
She emails me like, keyboard warrior. Oh my goodness.
19:04
I've never been so excited about education.
19:07
And every cohort, there's three to five people who really stand out. They're smart.
19:15
They have a really strong point of view.
19:18
They're charismatic, they're extremely engaged.
19:21
And she hit all of those things. So I called her.
19:25
I said, "Ana, you have an incredible future writing on the internet."
19:30
So she publishes her first article.
19:31
Shares her first newsletter in "Write Of Passage."
19:34
I think six weeks later, she's traveling in the mountains of Columbia.
19:39
And she texts me all caps, you'll never believe what happened.
19:43
And I'm like, what happened?
19:45
She goes, somebody just recognized me. They love my work.
19:49
And I think that there's these moments that happen when you're writing on the internet, where there's somebody who thinks the same way that you do.
19:57
And they reach out to you, they come in contact with you.
20:00
And all of a sudden, the internet begins to feel real.
20:03
And so, I worked with Ana all of the beginning of 2021.
20:10
And basically, we just spoke every single day.
20:13
She built her audience every single day.
20:15
And now, she's just blown up.
20:17
And is probably the, or one of the top five world's leading voices on childhood education.
20:24
And she absolutely deserves it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. I love her.
20:28
I had her as a guest on Infinite Loops. I love her ideas. I love her enthusiasm.
20:33
And she very clearly states the case for why traditional education has gone amiss. But back to graduates.
20:43
Are you seeing any categories emerge for the students who take your course?
20:50
Are we talking about people who want to create and perhaps earn a living off a Substack?
20:56
Are we talking about entrepreneurs who want to start a variety of type companies, and feel they need the written skills?
21:03
Or is it more over the map than that?
21:06
David Perell: So I think of it as three categories.
21:10
I think of it as entrepreneurs.
21:13
So people who have businesses, and they want to grow them.
21:16
Honestly, one of the biggest ones that we've had 20 to 50 students here, financial advisors.
21:22
People who look at Ritholtz, who look at this company called O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
21:27
And the people there, are sharing ideas.
21:29
Learn, build, share, repeat.
21:31
And they're like, hold on. I'm learning. I'm building. But I'm not sharing.
21:36
And they're like, we need to change that.
21:38
And so we have a bunch of people who are in that category.
21:41
So I would call those people, entrepreneurs. The second category...
21:45
And I think that this is probably the biggest category.
21:48
People who are in a job that they're not happy with.
21:51
They're working at a company...
21:51
one of the big four accounting firms.
21:55
They're working for some company, where they don't feel valued.
21:58
They don't feel energized by their work.
21:59
They don't feel that sense of being invigorated.
22:02
And they come across ideas on the internet.
22:04
They're like, you've got to be kidding me.
22:06
Ideas are so interesting.
22:08
I was totally bored by them in school.
22:10
And now, I can make a career by being interested in ideas?
22:12
And I can do work that is actually exciting to me? Okay. So I can write online.
22:18
I can start making opportunities.
22:20
And those people, they come in.
22:21
They see Write Of Passage as a career transition.
22:25
And then the other group are people who see writing just as an end in itself.
22:29
One of my favorite examples is Charlie Bleecker. That's her pen name.
22:33
And she comes in, and she's just destroyed her twenties. She...
22:38
I think credit card debt, doing a bunch of drugs. Sleeping around.
22:44
Living in LA, failed actress. Something like that.
22:48
She's like, I totally messed up my life.
22:52
And I need to write about this.
22:53
So she comes in, and she's trying to write.
22:56
And she just can't do it.
22:59
Because, she's trying to write under her real name.
23:01
And so she's like, you know what?
23:02
I'm going to have a pseudonym.
23:03
And I'm going to call it Charlie Bleecker.
23:05
And I'm just going to be totally unhinged.
23:08
And I'm going to use this as therapy.
23:10
And she says that publishing that article every single week...
23:13
I don't think she's missed a week in three years.
23:15
And she says that, that's done more for her than 10 years’ worth of therapy. And so I... Those are three buckets.
23:21
Entrepreneurs, career change.
23:22
And then, people just want to write for the sake of writing.
23:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Interesting.
23:25
Do you find any older people engaged in this?
23:28
Or is your audience strictly younger people?
23:31
David Perell: So it's not strictly younger people. Most...
23:36
So the biggest age cohort is 30 to 40.
23:38
Now, we have people who...
23:40
We actually have a steward who's an editor.
23:42
One of our editors, last cohort. I think he was 86. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
23:47
David Perell: So we definitely have people who are there.
23:49
And a lot of those people want to write their story. They...
23:53
Jim, there's so many people.
23:55
And you can't relate to this, but I know that you know, people who are like this. Who have...
24:01
They've developed a bunch of knowledge, and they haven't written it down.
24:05
I know that you are somebody who's an advocate for, Hey, share your ideas.
24:10
And you're not just saying that professionally.
24:11
You're saying, "Hey, I'm going to write letters to my kids so that I can actually capture my knowledge, capture the things that I'm thinking about."
24:18
And there's a bunch of people who are in their fifties and sixties, they look back, that had a career, they lived a damn cool life, and they're like, "Wait, I haven't written anything."
24:28
And I think that there's a human urge to create, to capture, and to share.
24:32
And so whether you're sharing just with your family, just with your company, or sharing it online, I mean, that's fine, publish means different things to different people, but the fundamental message of Write a Passage is that for many things, journaling isn't enough.
24:47
Journaling is great, but, in some avenue of your life, you should be sharing ideas in public.
24:56
You don't need to share it with the entire world, you don't even need to share it under your real name.
24:59
Go make a pseudonym, but share your ideas.
25:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree, again.
25:05
Maybe some people will say, "Jim only has people on his podcast that he totally agrees with on everything." That's not true.
25:11
There are many people that I haven't agreed with.
25:13
You had another idea that I liked very much, which was this whole idea of, and this relates to your personal monopoly idea, but specifically you said, find an intellectual niche and demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity.
25:32
And if you do those two things, you point out that the financial rewards for this has never been higher. David Perell: Yeah.
25:41
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Explain that a little bit, yeah. David Perell: Okay.
25:45
So, there's a downside here, and there's an upside here.
25:49
And the downside is, which kind of sucks, I think that way more than 50%, probably 80 to 90% of the things that we're actually interested in, is out of our control.
26:04
It is something that we're born with, and when I say interested in, I don't mean like, I'm interested in taxes because we have revenue coming in and I want to save money on taxes.
26:15
That's just like, I need an answer and I'd like to know about it.
26:18
What I mean by interested is like basically obsessed, like whatever got MrBeast to work in this little group for five years and talk with a whole team every single day about thumbnail strategy, editing strategy, and just obsess over YouTube so that you know it better than anybody in the world, you cannot will your way into that interest. That's a bummer. Okay?
26:44
But here's the good news.
26:45
The good news is that as a society, we're so bad at helping people cultivate the things that actually are those innate interests.
26:54
Tyler Cowen has this great line where he says, "We're all weird."
26:57
In fact, what's weird is all the puffery that we put on, where we try to be normal.
27:01
If you look at, you walk into a kid's room, they're all obsessed with something, you know?
27:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
27:08
David Perell: And it's always something they're a little bit embarrassed about, you know?
27:11
And so what Write a Passage is about, it's about saying, start writing.
27:15
And you're going to try to start writing about the things that you think you're interested in.
27:20
And we basically need to punch you in the face, little left hook, right hook, get you bleeding a little bit, saying "Uh oh, I don't actually have any obsession with these things."
27:30
But, if you continue to write, you're going to start being honest with yourself about the things that you are interested in.
27:37
And once you do that, you now are swimming.
27:40
Okay, now I'm going to sound like some new age person from the sixties.
27:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Hey, Daoist.
27:46
You're sitting with a Daoist here, so, go for it.
27:49
David Perell: You're swimming in the current of your authentic self and you're aligned with that, and I think that when that happens, there is an ability to share, an ability to create, that you just can't get when you're fighting against yourself, because what you want to be interested in is different from what you're actually interested in.
28:06
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's really interesting to me because you're kind of providing a two for service here. Right?
28:14
You're allowing people to learn the skills, because I've always believed that writing is a skill that can be taught. David Perell: Yep.
28:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Which makes me excited about programs like yours, but also, that's another thing, that I work with a lot of younger people sort of as a mentor and one of the things that I continually advise is keep writing to find out what you think.
28:40
Because many people, at least in their first sessions, are like, "Well, I don't know. I don't know."
28:46
And I said, "Well, the easiest way to figure that out is to continue to write and write and write." David Perell: Yeah.
28:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And you kind of started to go down an advice road there, and it will sound to people like we planned it.
28:59
But, what is your advice, other than taking your course, of course, what would your advice be for an aspiring creator?
29:08
And I'm going to throw you a loop in here, and say not necessarily someone who wants to write, you can give those as the main examples, but maybe a video creator, or a podcast creator, et cetera.
29:23
What would be your kind of introductory advice to say, here's what you really have to think about before you make this change? David Perell: Okay.
29:34
So when I was a kid, it's a little random, but there's a reason for this.
29:40
So when I was a kid, I didn't exactly keep the cleanest room, okay?
29:47
I was a little lazy, okay?
29:50
And mom would always be, she wouldn't get too upset, as long as I kept the mess in my room, wasn't an issue.
30:00
But, when people came over to the house, room had to be clean, right?
30:05
We had to put on this facade, so that, "Oh, David, such a well behaved child."
30:11
And my point is, that when you invite people over to your house, your standards are higher, because your level for cleanliness goes up.
30:22
It's the same thing when you share ideas in public.
30:24
When you're just writing ideas down to yourself, you're in your little nook, whatever, you can be lazy, but I'll tell you, once you're sharing ideas and you are subjecting yourself to judgment, and to critique, and to criticism, now you have to sharpen up your ideas, the logic has to be sound.
30:45
Now something that you would just throw out as an offhanded comment that is wrong, but the spirit of it is right, well now you got to think, "Okay, well, is that worth doing?
30:54
Am I actually willing to stand up for myself if people get angry about this?"
30:59
And so what you got to do is engage in this battle of saying something, enough of something that you're going to get attention, because that's what creators are competing for, and at the same time, not being so provocative, which is what a bunch of people do and it's not good for the internet.
31:18
A bunch of people are like, "I'm going to be so provocative," but then they're spreading lies and misinformation, all these sorts of things that aren't good.
31:25
And then on the other side, you want to be sharing your ideas in a way where you can support yourself.
31:31
But the problem is, if you just are sharing cliches, no one's going to read your stuff, and your writing is going to be dry, it's going to be watered down, it's going to be lame, right?
31:41
No one's going to want to read it.
31:42
And so navigating those tensions takes a while, I read my early stuff and it's terrible.
31:47
And I actually, when I was working on, I mean this in the nicest way, but, Patrick's one of the best interviewers in the world right now.
31:55
I listened to his third interview with Jason [inaudible], and as I was doing research on how to be a good interviewer, it wasn't good.
32:03
So even Patrick, who is like so incredible at his craft, he had to learn, he had to improve, and he stuck to publishing weekly.
32:13
And I think that's exactly where you need to be, have some kind of north star, that you're always going for, and then just continue to show up and publish weekly.
32:22
So the person who really inspired me was Casey Neistat, the YouTuber.
32:26
And so I got laid off from a job very early in my career, after like seven months, and I didn't know what to do.
32:32
So I made a YouTube video, four to six minutes long, every single day for 113 days.
32:37
I worked so hard, and at the end of that time, I had 31 subscribers.
32:45
It was an abject failure.
32:47
But what that time taught me to do was how to take an idea from beginning to publish in one day.
32:55
And I'll tell you, when you do that for four months in a row, your ability as a creative begins to change.
33:03
And then every day, every day, you just slowly get better and better.
33:07
And then the other thing I would say, and this is fairly standard advice, but I think it's good, is, dissect the hell out of people who you love, even if they're not in your field.
33:17
So here's what I've been doing, so this album over my left shoulder, this is Nurture by Porter Robinson.
33:22
And this album, right here, is In My Last Life by Andrew Bayer, and really Nurture is the one that's influenced me.
33:30
And so what I do is I sort of try to keep these inspirations all around, and then when I get really into something, I get into it.
33:36
And if it's in another medium, that's fine.
33:39
I just finished an hour and 40 minute documentary on Porter Robinson, because I was so interested in his creative process as a musician, it moved me so deeply.
33:49
And I said to myself, "How can I channel in my writing, what he's channeling in his music?"
33:55
And it took me a year and a half to answer that question.
33:59
But that's what I would encourage people to do, to dive into the work of the people they admire, and to deconstruct it to say, what about their work is giving me this emotion?
34:09
And then try to replicate that in your own craft. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:14
One of the things that I run into quite a bit is fear.
34:19
People have expressed to me, because I actually give somewhat similar advice to yours, in that writing is a must, and then ultimately sharing what you write is a must, because that gets the flywheel going, right?
34:34
And if you want it to go in the right direction, you're going to have to have it go in the wrong direction many times, because you'll think, oh, okay, I get this.
34:44
Do you guys have a specific technique that you mollify people's fear of putting stuff out there?
34:53
Or is it kind of a case by case basis?
34:57
David Perell: So I've got two answers to this.
35:03
The first is that the fear is justified because we live in this world of terrible cancel culture and we've lost the sense of forgiveness, and there are really big downside tail risks to saying what you think in public.
35:21
I'm not here to say otherwise.
35:25
And, unfortunately, I'm now seeing it happen to people that I know well, and it's not fun.
35:30
At the same time, there's really big tail risks to not sharing anything at all.
35:37
Those risks just show up much later in life, and with a kind of regret, the regret of time, that you can't get back.
35:45
The knife of father time really cuts deep.
35:49
And so I think that what you need to do as a creator is balance both of those fears and find a way to push through.
35:56
But now there's certain tactical things that you can do.
35:58
For example, I work with an editor for everything I publish in an article, and what she and I are doing is we're looking through what is the area of the piece, of the ideas, that could get me in trouble?
36:13
Now, often, something that could get me in trouble, we say, " Hell yeah, let's double down on it."
36:19
Other times we say, "Yeah, I didn't think about that very well."
36:22
But I know that I'm going to put ideas out, it's going to bother people. That's fine.
36:28
I had a bunch of people angry at me last week about my piece about Austin. That's part of it.
36:33
And I was actually terrified to publish it on Monday night because I knew that was going to happen.
36:40
And so I think that, what I got from Seth Godden here was actually really helpful, he tells this apocryphal story of a marathon runner.
36:49
The marathon runner is going, going, going, 26.
36:49
2 miles, crosses the finish line, and he wins the race.
36:56
And this little boy comes up to him and goes, "Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Congratulations.
37:03
How do you not get tired?"
37:05
And the marathon runner goes, "What are you talking about? Of course, I'm tired.
37:08
I just know where to put the tired.
37:10
I know how to put the tired somewhere so I can keep going."
37:14
And I think writing online is the same way, that a lot of what you need to do is know where to put your fear.
37:20
And once you can keep typing, knowing that that fear is going to exist and that there's reasons for it to be there, then I think you're in a better place.
37:30
And also you've just got to know that this stuff ebbs and flows.
37:33
The mind, the creative process, it's complex.
37:36
There's some really dark places that you end up going, and ultimately that is a process of growth, and that's why you have the cliche that writing is therapy, it's actually true. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
37:48
And refreshing to hear you say that there isn't some easy prescription or formula to get rid of that fear.
37:56
That's very honest and something I say to people a lot, and they're like, "Oh, so thanks for consoling me."
38:05
But then I use myself as the example and I say, "I've written four books, and I remember."
38:10
I remember when the first one came out, Amazon was brand new, everything internet was brand new, and I was waiting for the first review on Amazon.
38:21
I mean, literally, I was hitting refresh, my wife was like, "You've just got to stop."
38:27
And the first one came, and it was really good, I was like, "Ah, yes."
38:32
Until, of course, the one came that was talking about what an idiot I was, how I didn't know anything about investing, et cetera, and I will admit that I was what? 33 or 34? That stunk.
38:47
David Perell: Of course it did.
38:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so what happened though, in my case, was that, literally by the time I'd gotten to the last book I wrote, if I do read reviews, it's only because a friend has sent it to me and there's something interesting, or a suggestion in that review.
39:07
So for example, I keep all the academic literature, and we got to the composite way of factor building at OSAM, because somebody sent me a critique of my work, and it was done by an academic and he's like, "You'd think O'Shaughnessy would be smart enough to try putting these things together."
39:26
And I'm like, "You know what?
39:28
I would think that I should be that smart too."
39:33
And it was a great suggestion, it turned out to be a really great suggestion, actually.
39:38
So from the point of view of constructive criticism, I love constructive.
39:44
Like, "Oh, I didn't think about that idea."
39:47
Now, it can be offered in a variety of things.
39:49
You can be a real dick, and yet you can also say some things that are very, very constructive when you're building.
39:58
I'm very happy saying, "I don't know."
40:00
I'm very happy saying, "But I'll find out."
40:04
I'm very happy learning from mistakes because error correction is the only way you get better in life, right? David Perell: Yep.
40:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you have no way to correct your errors, you're just going to be a big error.
40:17
You know, you've written, and something that absolutely obsesses me, and we're doing the YouTube series on the great re-shuffle, you have written that the three most important forces working in the world today are technology, knowledge, and networks.
40:36
I'm really interested in networks.
40:40
Don Tapscott has written a bunch about this, and he's very forceful, he's like, "This is not an information age, this is the networked age."
40:54
And the difference between those two is really, really important.
40:59
I mean, to the point where the author Howard Bloom wrote, "It's not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain, it's not even the distribution, however not well distributed, that is, of knowledge, it is the interconnectedness of the world."
41:17
I personally believe, for all of its faults, Twitter is already emerging as the first global intelligence network.
41:25
And so of these three, did you put them in order because that was the order in which you viewed them as important? Or no? David Perell: Hmm.
41:38
Well, speaking of being fallible-ist and critiquing yourself, I'm not sure that I would say those three now. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Huh.
41:46
David Perell: But I think that it's interesting, we can just pretend as if they're true, and I think they're good answers.
41:51
But I want to follow this networked idea.
41:57
Many years ago I had a conversation with the physicist Michael Nielsen, and we were talking about how each century has this defining project that it's going for.
42:12
So we said the 20th century was about curing diseases, the invention of penicillin, preventing smallpox.
42:22
And he was speculating on the 21st century project, and he said that it was global coordination, that that was actually the thing that we're working on, at the most subterranean level, everything sort of works up from that.
42:41
And I think it's an interesting idea to follow because, at a personal level, networks are so useful in terms of the things that you're able to do, the people you come in contact with.
42:55
I mean, the people in your life are basically a leading indicator for everything good and bad that happens to you.
43:00
And I think a lot of the times when you really listen to somebody, and something bad happened, it's downstream from, there was a person who was showing you signals that there was a problem there, and you didn't take those signals.
43:16
Or there was a person something really good happened, or a great person you could have met, and you didn't jump on that opportunity.
43:23
And so, at a personal level, so much flows from networks, networks are these compounding loops.
43:28
Good people lead to more good people, bad people lead to more bad people.
43:33
And I think at the global scale, so much of the way that progress is limited is talented people who aren't able to find their highest use.
43:45
One of the things that we've done in the last, there's a line from Tyler Cowen's new book on talent, where he says something like 30 to 40% of the increase in GDP from the last, I think since the sixties, don't quote me on this, but it's something like this, is from better talent allocation, and we can still do so much better.
44:03
I know you know, I know I know, so many people who are hungry, who are intelligent, who are ambitious and they're just working on the wrong thing.
44:10
They're just bored, and if they were in the right place, they could do so much better.
44:15
And so I think, once again, that comes back to networks, and so I think that at every scale you could see that things are really shifting within networks, and that's why I'm so focused on writing on the internet because that is how you build your network, and all the senses of that work.
44:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, so my position is that the internet is, and I'm stealing this from Matt Clifford, but, the greatest amplifying engine- David Perell: Good.
44:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: In the history of humanity. David Perell: Yep.
44:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And if you understand that, and you understand the leverage it provides for you, and then you understand, I like your idea of considering yourself a citizen of the internet, because you know what?
44:58
It's really a lot easier to change your digital neighborhood than it is to change your physical one. David Perell: Hmm. That's good.
45:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But the point that I have seen, certainly in my own deal with Infinite Loops here, and with an NFT we did.
45:15
So quite literally, none of it could happen, like as little as 10 years ago.
45:21
And COVID, I think, did push this trend to work from anywhere with anyone over the finish line, that might not have happened without the lockdown.
45:31
But basically, my thesis is time, space and geography are collapsing.
45:37
And essentially, it has never been, in my opinion, a time to be a creative.
45:43
Now, creative needs oxygen, they need fuel, they need a catalyst, right?
45:49
So they need organizations that are there for them in terms of helping them make that movie, helping them write that book, et cetera.
45:59
But, like for me at least, this is such an interesting experiment in terms of just the business potential.
46:08
Let's take, is social media good or bad, and put that to the side. David Perell: It's both.
46:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly, my thought as well.
46:17
But, the leverage is inherent in this system, the ability to do business with people you've never met in real life. That's a game changer.
46:31
And this idea where, like everyone I hired at Infinite Loops was proof of work, I didn't care where they went to school. David Perell: Yeah.
46:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What I cared was, wow, they're doing really, really good and interesting things.
46:45
David Perell: We spent a lot of time when I was living in New York talking about the OSAM research project, and the two stories for me are just Jesse Livermore, and that, who was that researcher who was retired and he didn't know what to do with his life and then he started writing?
47:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, our machine learning guy.
47:03
David Perell: Yeah, exactly.
47:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm forgetting his name.
47:05
David Perell: I think that that is this magic, when you find people on your intellectual wavelength, when you're walking around and you're like, "Okay, I'm sort of interested in this."
47:17
And then you find something, somebody who has been thinking about that like you have and all of a sudden it's [inaudible].
47:24
And that's why we're building this product for high schoolers.
47:28
So when I was a kid and I'm mad at the world for the way that my teachers and the people around me sort of treated this.
47:38
I didn't do well in school, but I was always obsessed with things. Airplanes.
47:45
I was in seventh grade reading the Jefferson Flight Manual, which is 750 pages.
47:53
I had that thing memorized and yeah, I couldn't do well in school, but why didn't anyone sit me down and just say, "Dude, you get really into things.
48:05
You need to go follow that."
48:07
Why was I stuck in this world where if I got interested in something, well, I had to do what was on the syllabus.
48:15
I couldn't dive into something because I had other work. I had other homework.
48:19
I have always been somebody who, if it's things that other people are telling me to do and it's not exactly what I'm interested in, I'm just not going to do a good job.
48:29
But if I find the right thing, man, I go crazy.
48:32
I believe that there are 100,000 kids like this in the world right now, who are on the internet, who are obsessed with things and they feel like school isn't working for them.
48:43
I want to get five to 10% of them in right a passage in a community, so that a 16 year old kid from Algeria, and a 15 year old kid from China, and a 17 year old kid from Argentina, they can all come together and they're obsessed with rockets and they can just start talking about that at a really young age.
49:04
I was talking to a 16-year-old girl, two weeks ago. She emailed me.
49:08
She said, "Hey, I saw you launching this program.
49:10
I'd love to work with you."
49:11
I said, "Just hearing you talk about this and it must be hard for you to make friends." She goes, "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you have no idea.
49:24
I've been writing this blog for a couple years now and I haven't told anybody, not even my parents.
49:32
I haven't told anybody except for my best friend, because I'm worried of how people are going to think about me." Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
49:38
David Perell: "What people are going to say about me."
49:41
I'm like, that is such a problem.
49:45
What Write of Passage exists to do is to take those people who feel like losers and dweebs and on the path of nowhere and to give them a place where they can meet the other people.
49:55
Now, instead of trying to suppress those curiosities, to ignite them and then help them find their network and do whatever they're going to do.
50:04
That is the catalyst that I'm devoting my career now to creating for people who are in high school or who are adults.
50:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Obviously, I applaud that.
50:16
It's so funny to me that some of the ... it's weird.
50:20
Some of the greatest fears, fear of public speaking, if you remember Jerry Seinfeld's line.
50:26
He said that, "Man, if you were at a funeral, you'd rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy."
50:32
And so I'm Irish, so that never was a problem for me.
50:37
But when I came up and started building bigger organizations, I found it was a significant problem.
50:45
And so one of the things that I always recommended, I just did it for a person who works for me and she adores it is, and it sounds cheesy, but it's this thing called Toastmaster.
50:55
And you can go and the reason I'm thinking of this is because you can find your ...
50:55
you said you can find your community. David Perell: Yep.
51:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And I think that's really powerful.
51:10
Oftentimes I have found in life that people think, like being afraid to talk in public, people think that they're the only one or hat they have, "Yeah.
51:20
But yeah, they say it's the number one fear, but I don't think those other people.
51:25
Look at all these people talking in real life."
51:28
So they kind of compress themselves down into this downward spiral.
51:33
And then the minute they meet these other people, they see that's vivacious.
51:38
In terms of our idea about the research partners, Patrick's idea, I loved it the minute he told me about it, because he's like, "Let's take all of our resources that cost millions of dollars a year for the data and the cleansing and all that.
51:55
And let's say, "Hey, are there any incredibly bright people out there who might want to use this data?"
52:02
And of course, Jesse Livermore is kind of our star.
52:05
Do you know that he has gotten still ...
52:05
well, obviously we know who he is, but he has received from every big bank on the street, a job offer, binding job offer.
52:20
David Perell: [inaudible].
52:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh yeah.
52:23
I was talking over the other day and I'm like, "Jesse, one of these times, you're going to have to say yes. Right?" But he's very quirky.
52:33
And he's like, "No, I'm never going to say yes."
52:35
He goes, "If I was going to work ..."
52:35
he goes, "I will go on record right now, Jim, if I ever work for any asset management company, it will only be O'Shaunghnessy Asset Management." "Well, thank you." But he wants to ...
52:45
he's a really good example of a super smart guy who comes up with really interesting ideas.
52:56
I even heard from some academics at the University of Chicago saying, "The guy should just submit these.
53:03
We'd give him a PhD in economics." David Perell: Wow.
53:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so that really excites me, because that started happening several years ago. David Perell: Yep.
53:13
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And for me, who've been around and watched these changes happening in real time.
53:18
That was when I kind of got, "Oh, man, this is really, really different." David Perell: Yep.
53:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "This is like when Goldman Sachs will make an offer to somebody they don't know who he is, but they-" David Perell: Of course. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. David Perell: Yeah. Of course.
53:39
Because someone's proof of work is the thing.
53:41
And we now have this ability where you can share it and you can just be creating opportunities for yourself.
53:50
You had this great line three minutes ago.
53:55
It was basically something along the lines of, does anybody else like this exist?
53:59
And I think we're talking about being a citizen of the internet.
54:02
In the physical world, the question is, can I find anybody like this just by going out and trying to network, trying to meet people?
54:11
The answer's almost certainly no, unless you're willing to spend years.
54:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
54:15
David Perell: But does anybody like this exist? The answer is yes.
54:20
To basically anything that you have and writing on the internet is the shortcut to finding that person, because rather than going out in search and you become like an interest seeking missile, you just become a really strong magnet.
54:39
And you're attracting people who are interested in the weird esoteric things that you're interested in. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
54:44
I completely agree with you.
54:46
I am absolutely so taken with this new world and the opportunities that it affords creative people. I think ...
54:54
now, by the way, it's not going to all be good.
54:56
There's going to be a lot of bad stuff too.
54:58
And we'll take a look at some of the potential solutions to that side of it too, because I think we really have to work with both sides.
55:05
But I wanted to get back to another thing you wrote, which I thought really was interesting.
55:11
You're very good at clarifying a message.
55:16
Very good at clarifying, this is my intent, which I think is a gift, because I know a lot of smart people who like their polymaths and they want to, "Oh, we can do that." The shiny syndrome.
55:32
The shiny thing syndrome.
55:34
And so I saw something that you had written and it was kind of like, so Twitter, that's my, "Hey, how are you? I'm Dave." David Perell: Yeah.
55:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: The long form essays, which I see as going against trend.
55:47
I want to talk to you about that separately.
55:49
But then also the way you angel invest.
55:53
The way that I looked at your portfolio and some of the things that you were investing in, I see sitting above it, this rule.
56:04
Is this company that I'm investing in going to make the environment for people becoming citizens of the internet easier?
56:12
If it's a yes, then you're going to see it in your portfolio.
56:16
If it's a no, then you're not. I love that.
56:20
Getting it down to the clarity.
56:22
Let me get back to, hopefully we can come back to the angel investing, because I want to ask about what you kind of see as the future. Long form essays.
56:29
I think it's counterintuitive with all of us with the attention of a hummingbird. Is that wrong?
56:35
David Perell: This is the easiest question ever.
56:38
It's like yeah, if you're trying to appeal to the average person, don't, don't write long form essays.
56:43
But Jim, I'm trying to appeal to you and the people listening to this podcast.
56:48
What I can do is, if I write something that's really compelling, well I can ...
56:48
and it's long form, if people read one long form piece that's distinct and I have something that changes how they see the world, whether it's my piece on Peter Thiel's religion, which is the most popular thing I've written that has people saying, "Okay, I was really interested in this guy.
57:15
A bunch of people say he is a nut and absolutely crazy.
57:18
A bunch of people are like, "Okay, he's the best talent identifier in the world right now." Which is it? What's going on there? Okay.
57:27
But then what I can do is I can simplify, okay, there's Peter Thiel.
57:29
Here's how he sort of writes in Zero to One.
57:31
Then you know about his interest in a meta theory and [inaudible], but actually that flows from the metaphysics of his worldview, which is Christianity. Okay.
57:40
So I'm going to give that to you.
57:41
And now whenever you think about that, you're basically going to have an intellectual hyperlink to perl. com.
57:47
And likewise, if I can have one of my own ideas where for me, or example, I really struggled with commitment.
57:54
So I was hopping around all over the place and I needed something for myself where I was like, what is a term?
58:01
What is a phrase that can convince me to commit to a girlfriend, a city, a business.
58:08
I need one phrase for that.
58:11
And so I came up with this idea called the hugging the X access.
58:14
So now if other people are like, "Okay, I'm hopping around.
58:18
So I'm just hugging the X access."
58:19
Now I give them just a little phrase, a little idea that will stick in their head.
58:25
Look, it takes some words to do that actually effectively.
58:29
But if I can do that, what I'm giving up with long form writing is total reach, total global distribution.
58:36
But what I'm getting is depth and I'll take depth over scale any day of the week.
58:40
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So would I.
58:40
I'm really enjoying a book that Barry Ritholtz recommended to me by Bill Bryson called One Summer America, 1927.
58:49
David Perell: Yeah, 1927.
58:50
I really want to read that. How is it?
58:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's so good. It is so good.
58:55
And he is such a good writer and such a balanced way of looking at things.
59:01
But he's also not afraid to talk about how awful in many respects that period was in American history.
59:09
But I'm on the section right now where he is saying, "Anyone with a pad of paper and a pen and given some time to think about it, they could probably write some names about who was a famous novelist from the 1920s and F.
59:20
Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway and all of that."
59:30
And then he launches into completely the different direction, which is, "However, here's a name you probably have never heard of.
59:39
And his lifetime sales dwarfed all of those other great writers combined."
59:46
And as a reading about this guy, and then the other guy was the guy who came up with Burrows, who came up with Tarzan.
59:55
So Zane Gray was the first, but as I'm reading it, I just started laughing out loud, because yeah, if you want the ultimate reach ...
1:00:01
I had a friend tell me that, But he was talking about the limitations of AB tests and his quip was, "Listen, if you run enough AB tests on anything, you always end up with porn."
1:00:18
So, but I think it's important too and this gets a little dangerous, is sometimes you got to signal who you do not want.
1:00:30
David Perell: Absolutely. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah?
1:00:32
David Perell: A hundred percent.
1:00:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: How do you do that?
1:00:38
David Perell: Well, I think that there's a very simple way, which is just who you reference.
1:00:46
I think that one of the things that you need to think a lot about in writing, and it's not like you do this every single time.
1:00:50
You just, this should be in your operating system, a certain capacity that you have for something you think about, is where do you just assume knowledge? Who do you just assume?
1:01:02
So if I say, "Oh, the [inaudible] guys."
1:01:05
You know that who that is?
1:01:08
And I can say that here, I'm not going to go say that if I'm talking to somebody else who is interested in basketball. Jim O'Shaughnessy: No. Exactly, exactly. Right.
1:01:18
David Perell: So what I've done there is I've basically said, "Okay, there's certain people now listening, like, "Oh, the [inaudible] guys. I know exactly."
1:01:23
There are other people, like, "What was that?"
1:01:25
So now I'm creating and repelling a connection between certain people.
1:01:29
So I think a lot about where do I assume context?
1:01:32
And then the other thing, you got to think jokes and stuff like that.
1:01:36
And you're also doing it.
1:01:39
The more honest you are, the more naturally it happens.
1:01:42
And so I think often you don't even realize that you're doing it, but always by pushing the frontier of honesty and sort of sharpness.
1:01:51
My friend [inaudible] has this great line.
1:01:53
She says a, "Spiky point of view."
1:01:55
If you make that spiky, you end up attracting people, repelling people.
1:01:59
The thing that I think is way overrated is doing this politically.
1:02:02
And what's way underrated is doing this in terms of your interests.
1:02:06
If I'm going to write about ...
1:02:06
for example, right now I'm writing a piece about Paris and my take on Paris.
1:02:15
Okay, it was an amazing place and it's a wonderful place to visit, not a great place to be living now.
1:02:22
They're embracing the past so much that they've actually forgotten about the future in some way.
1:02:27
They're over intellectualizing all these things.
1:02:29
Fine, that puts the vast majority of people asleep.
1:02:32
For some people they're going to be fascinated by that.
1:02:34
And I'm all about that trade.
1:02:35
I'm all about that trade.
1:02:37
And I don't know what it is.
1:02:39
Maybe it's born out of some fear of rejection or something like that, but that is the benefit of the internet to be obscure in the right ways. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. And it's funny.
1:02:47
I seem to recall you had put up this really good guide about how to be good on Twitter.
1:02:52
I teased you in an answer by basically saying, "I do absolutely nothing you recommend." David Perell: Yep.
1:03:00
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think I had a dog going, "I have no idea what I'm doing."
1:03:05
How many people do you think are by the numbers people?
1:03:16
Part of in quotes, I hate the word, but part of my brand is that I hate brands and just tell people to be themselves and be authentic and be distinctive. But how many people ...
1:03:27
do people come to you in your write of passage with this idea that, here's my checklist and these are the prescriptions and I'm going to do this and I'm going to get famous, because I don't think that's the way to get famous. David Perell: Yeah.
1:03:45
So here's how I think of it.
1:03:50
So I recommend checklist, prescriptions, really tactical things that people are just get getting started out.
1:03:57
They don't have a lot of knowledge.
1:04:01
They're just beginning to write.
1:04:03
And I say, "These, you can follow these steps."
1:04:07
You were in the other direction.
1:04:12
You had published a couple books, you had had this career.
1:04:16
And I think that when that's the case, you can actually just focus on the more natural sharing, because first of all, you actually have some credibility that people who are just starting off don't have.
1:04:30
And also you just have more experience.
1:04:32
So, but then fundamentally what I say to every single one of my students, if you are doing exactly what I teach you're doing it wrong.
1:04:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Ah, I love that.
1:04:46
David Perell: Here's why.
1:04:47
Because if you're doing exactly what I taught you, you aren't thinking.
1:04:54
You are at a topical level and you are focused on the tactics. No.
1:05:01
Tactics can get you started, but you need to dive into the depths of principles.
1:05:08
And I don't care what you do.
1:05:09
What I care about is that you understand the principles of what I'm trying to teach.
1:05:13
You can reject the ones that don't apply to you, which will be 60 to 80%.
1:05:18
But the other 20 will fundamentally change you in some way.
1:05:23
Take the things that work for you.
1:05:24
Understand them at such a deep level that you can critique the ones that don't.
1:05:28
You can say yes, and then innovate amongst the things that I've taught you.
1:05:32
And that to me is what a good student is.
1:05:34
Not somebody who just does what I say, but a lot of people do need those tactics do need those prescriptions.
1:05:42
It's like Stephan Curry, if you're watching him play basketball, he's not out there thinking, "Okay, now I'm going to go behind, then through the legs, then do a little finger roll into the basketball hoop."
1:05:52
But my first job was working at a basketball camp and we'd always practice the four dribble, the four dribbles, spin move, through the legs, crossover behind the back.
1:06:01
And it was all so conscious, all these sorts of things.
1:06:04
But it takes a lot of reps in this very drill like mechanical mode, so that then you can be in this fluent and fluid mode, like Steph Curry on a basketball court.
1:06:14
And the problem is a bunch of experts, critique the people who are just doing the drills, because they forgot that at one point they had to go through those drills too, because memory is fickle.
1:06:23
And you just forget about that stuff.
1:06:24
You erase it from your life story. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:06:27
Oh, well, don't even get me going on that.
1:06:30
I have Will Storr coming on and I highly recommend his book, The Status Game.
1:06:34
David Perell: Oh, he's great.
1:06:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: He's amazing. He's amazing.
1:06:37
I love that example, because it happened in my career time and time again.
1:06:43
I would bring new people on as sales people and I would try ...
1:06:43
I would watch them and I would see that they were trying to ape my style.
1:06:54
And the first thing I would say is, "I'm very flattered and everything, but my style is, that's comfortable for me." David Perell: Right.
1:07:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: "You have to develop your style."
1:07:06
So one guy who honestly sucked when he was just trying to emulate me, he was a big sports guy and he changed the entire presentation to make all of his metaphors or analogies sports analogies.
1:07:24
That sang, that totally sang.
1:07:27
And I'm not a big sports guy, but I watched him and I got excited listening, because you could just see the energy and the enthusiasm that he had.
1:07:38
And I just absolutely loved it.
1:07:41
And so I'm really happy to hear you say that you tell your students that.
1:07:47
David Perell: One thing I would say is, so if I'm going to go be an investor, here's what I would do. I would basically do ...
1:07:53
so the Beatles started off as a cover band.
1:07:57
A lot of people don't know this, but they were just covering other songs and they would go play.
1:08:03
And they did that for a long time before they wrote their own music. F.
1:08:06
Scott Fitzgerald, he would ... or no, it was Hunter S. Thompson.
1:08:12
He rewrote paragraphs of Fitzgerald Great Gatsby, so he could feel what it was like to write a great novel.
1:08:19
And I think covers are so underrated.
1:08:21
And so what you can do, is you can basically take something that somebody else has written.
1:08:27
You can rearrange it, maybe try writing sentences through how they write.
1:08:31
So for example, one of the things I do all the time, is I'll be writing and I'll be working on observational writing.
1:08:37
And so what I'll try to say is, how can I become more observant as a writer?
1:08:41
And I'll have on the right, I'll have like a David Foster Wallace paragraph and I’ll try to inject David Foster Wallace into my writing.
1:08:49
Now there's no way in the world that I can write as well as David Foster Wallace, in terms of the things that he's good at.
1:08:56
But by pulling from him, I actually do feel like I become a better writer, because then that gets filtered through who I am.
1:09:05
And I would do the same thing if I was an investor.
1:09:07
What I would do is man, I don't know.
1:09:09
Maybe someone should make this game.
1:09:11
You basically have an investing stock market. Okay. It's like a game.
1:09:15
And so what I can do is we can have, we can get the OSAM data on public and then we can find data on private companies.
1:09:23
And what we can do is we can go out, we can try to invest like Sequoia, put 10% of our budget there.
1:09:29
10% of our budget investing Andrews [inaudible].
1:09:31
10% of our budget learning from Renaissance technologies.
1:09:34
10% of our budget learning from OSAM.
1:09:37
And then what we can do is we can imitate all these different styles.
1:09:40
We could say, "Okay, what works well for me.
1:09:41
Wait, hold on here, factor investing.
1:09:43
Isn't going to work for me because I have huge FOMO.
1:09:46
And once Netflix begins to pump, I want to hop on that."
1:09:50
Okay, well, Jim doesn't have that, because he's a lazy guy who just want to sit on the couch, which actually works really well when the world's going crazy.
1:09:59
The way that you think works well for that.
1:10:02
You and Patrick both have such a calm temperament.
1:10:05
That would never work for me as an investor.
1:10:07
But I actually think that by trying to emulate different investing styles and just having the awareness, the sense of self to say, "Okay, this is what worked for me here. This is what didn't."
1:10:19
I think that when you're getting started, that works really well as a strategy, it's like your cover band thing, but for investing.
1:10:25
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love that reference, because that was, in fact, the entire subject of my first book, Invest Like the Best. David Perell: Exactly.
1:10:34
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I showed readers how they could clone their favorite asset manager by putting their portfolio on a database of stocks, in that case I used the Value Line, and seeing what the most significant deviations were and you could then clone them, so I'm all in favor of learning in as many ways as possible.
1:10:57
I do want to get to the investing aspect, as you look down the road, do you think you're going to be better known as the instructor who had 100,000 students come through your various writing programs, or are you leaning towards this angel investing area?
1:11:18
David Perell: I think that honestly, I got a little bored of angel investing, I like being involved in things, I've started working a lot closer with the companies that I care about.
1:11:29
Also, I'm just really excited about what I'm working on, I want to go all in on that, and I want Write of Passage.
1:11:37
Look, Write of Passage overtly is like, I'm going to teach people to write, actually, there's a deep mission, and I think Josh Wolf says chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.
1:11:47
For me, my chip on the shoulder is I hate the school system, I absolutely despise it, and I think it is vile, I think that the way that we put, especially a certain kind of kid who has a bunch of energy, who just gets excited about things on their own volition, they need to be hands off.
1:12:07
What we've done is we have basically strangled kids from the increase in parenting that you see all over the place with these parents who are so obsessed with their kids, to the way that we've softened up playgrounds all over the place.
1:12:20
Go look up a playground from 1900, they are so different, now look, probably too many kids got injured, that's not my point.
1:12:26
I'm not saying that we need kids on monkey bars that are higher than the Empire State Building, but what I am saying is that the school system stifles a lot of creativity.
1:12:37
I'm not trying to build an education system that works for everybody, because the problem with the education system isn't the system, it's the fact that we only have one system at all.
1:12:48
Who was it, it was like Boris Yeltsin, the USSR President, Prime Minister, I think that was his name, when he walked into the supermarket in Houston, and he was amazed that there were all of these cereals and soft drinks.
1:13:02
That's how the education system should be, the problem with a communist place was there was only one cereal, only one drink, the education system should have all these different brands, all these different styles.
1:13:14
What I'm trying to do, the thing that is really the deep undercurrent here, is trying to come up with a new system of internet native education that fricking rocks, that teaches people how to do whatever it is, so that they can also just have a hell of a good time doing it.
1:13:34
A lot of the reason why I care so much about Write of Passage is that mission, which I've been thinking about now for more than 20 years, because I was like a six year old in first grade and it was immediately clear to me after my parents had to move me out of my first school, that there was something deeply wrong with the education system.
1:13:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have my own beef with the educational system, because I had something like that occur to me, imagine how, even more, going to a Catholic grade school where essentially there was a correct answer machine, as Robert Anton Wilson would say, that was programmed into your head.
1:14:14
I was not a good kid, I was rebellious, so we had this little reading program called SRA, and it was a box of reading material that was supposed to go, I learned later, from the third grade to the eighth grade, and I got done with the whole thing.
1:14:36
David Perell: You did it all.
1:14:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I did it all, and I was really proud of myself, I was like, "Hey, Mrs.
1:14:41
So-and-so, I got the whole thing done."
1:14:46
David Perell: She got mad.
1:14:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Quite literally, oh, she was furious, and she was like, you were not told to do that, and I was like, no, but I loved reading it, I thought this was great.
1:14:59
She goes, "You sit at your desk and make a Christmas tree with your hands while the other children are obeying the rules and doing their assignment."
1:15:13
Just to me, I still remember that, and that happened to me in grade school, and I think that event was what radicalized me.
1:15:22
I went home, and thank God my father understood, and he goes, come here, and he brought me into the library and he brought me over to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
1:15:34
He took out the first volume, handed it to me, and said, start reading this, which I did and I loved.
1:15:46
I still have it here, because it means so much to me, it's completely out of date, but nevertheless, I share your...
1:15:55
Anger is not too hard a word here, we are trying to process people into these homogenized correct answer givers, that's bullshit.
1:16:04
David Perell: I'm trying to do exactly the opposite, I'm doing the opposite, that is the sine qua non of Write of Passage.
1:16:13
It is, you are not supposed to be on this procrustean conveyor belt where you get molded to what the world wants, it is now what the internet did for a bunch of reasons is it inverted things, that what we want to help you do is unlock the weird, unlock the obsessed, and actually be proud of that and create a space where socially, the best kids, the most passionate, the hardest working, they're not shut down.
1:16:43
Everyone made fun of the nerd in fifth grade, everyone made fun of the nerd in high school, what if you could have a place where those kids who were obsessive, who are enthusiastic, who treat knowledge not as some British thing that you need to hoard it so that nobody else knows it and you use it as some social symbol to stand up above everybody else.
1:17:05
No, knowledge is supposed to be shared, it's supposed to be expressed, that's how we add a fire to life.
1:17:10
What we're trying to do is change the poles, the social gravity from having that be weird to having that be cool, and Write of Passage is a project to do that so that we can unlock the parts of us that we're suppressing so often.
1:17:26
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Amen, and I can't help myself, but you referred to Boris Yeltsin, it was actually Khrushchev who came over here and pounded the table with his shoe, he was in the supermarket and he couldn't believe it.
1:17:42
Boris Yeltsin was the first post USSR President of the Russian Federation, sorry I can just be pedantic.
1:17:52
David Perell: Thank you, no, no, no, thank you, got to get that stuff right.
1:17:54
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm running out of my normal time, as always, but I am so intrigued by this idea of yours that I wanted you to explain it to our listeners.
1:18:04
You talk about how to use your iPhone, now as an old, I don't use the iPhone the way you younger people do, so if I have a computer available to me, I don't look at my phone at all.
1:18:17
I don't doom scroll, I don't do all of those, the only time I'm using my phone for internet connection is when I'm in transit.
1:18:28
I've watched all my kids do it, and it's absolutely quite true, my youngest who's a comedian said, dad, you always do this when you're saying you're going to call, she said, my kids are going to do this, which I thought was really interesting.
1:18:43
But here's the idea, and I really do think that this is brilliant, you talk about a space-biased bias versus a time-bias, and this hooks into your Never-Ending Now.
1:19:00
The time bias was something that you realized when you were watching friends yeah on a bus that you were with them, and you realized that everyone was consuming only things that were created in the last 24 hours, that blew my mind when I read that, so take her home for us.
1:19:20
David Perell: I know that you love...
1:19:21
One of the things I love about talking to you is just thinking about where people are watching puppets, not realizing that there's people above who are holding the strings.
1:19:36
My friend Justin, Justin Mares, he has this great little one liner where he says, if you ever need to understand an industry, make sense of who the ideal customer is in that industry.
1:19:48
In healthcare, the ideal customer is somebody who has a chronic disease that has them continuously reliable on the healthcare system, where they're going continually, they have that chronic disease for decades throughout their life, it's not so bad that they die, but it's not so bad that they keep going and show up.
1:20:10
It makes you realize, wait, hold on, a lot of the incentives are aligned with that.
1:20:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes they are.
1:20:16
David Perell: The news industry, what is the ideal customer?
1:20:19
It is not somebody who buys a book once and devours that book and reads it over and over, nope, it's somebody who opens up your newsletter every single morning, who looks at the phone every single day, and who reads your ads so they can print cash.
1:20:35
The puppet masters, what they do very cleverly, and I worked in television as a reporter in college, and this is why I left, because what I thought was total BS was this idea that if you read the news every day, that is how you become informed, what bogus.
1:20:53
Now what comes from that, you have all the people who are injecting information into our minds, what they're doing is they're saying that so we all believe that, so basically this gets into what is the space-bias, what is a time-bias?
1:21:08
I sort of realized this, I was at a party, me and my friend, Nick, we used to throw these parties in New York, and then we're going to a comedy club at night.
1:21:16
I'm sitting in the back in this SUV, and I'm just looking at what everybody in front of me is scrolling, and every single person for that 20 minute car ride from SoHo to the East Village, they only consume stuff that had been made in the last 24 hours, Snapchat stories, Instagram stories, Twitter feeds, Facebook, texts.
1:21:35
I said, geez, you got to be kidding me, and I started realizing, actually, this is indicative of our entire society right now, we used to be in a space-bias.
1:21:45
You live in the 18th century, you walk to your local library, you read your local newspaper, everything is about what's happening in this part of the world.
1:21:56
Books from other parts of the world, those are very rare, the newspaper didn't come out every single day, that was something that really begins around the early 20th century with people like William Randolph Hearst, who really begin to promote this.
1:22:11
It was because you were just consuming based on location, that's your space-bias, now we're in this time-bias.
1:22:17
Now, it doesn't matter where something is created, chances are if you're listening, you're not in Connecticut, you're not in Austin, Texas like myself.
1:22:27
The thing though is you're probably going to consume this within the first two years after we publish it, probably even higher likelihood the first two months, biggest spike will be the first two days.
1:22:36
What's happening is we're living in this Never-Ending Now, this constant rotation of things that we need to keep up with, where the thing, the talk of the day is always changing.
1:22:48
Sometimes it's important, but the vast majority of things that people are saying, you got to know about this, not that important, and we are so stuck in this time-bias that we are not paying attention to the lessons of history, to the wisdom of ages past.
1:23:04
The gravity of the internet leads us towards what's been created in the last 24 hours, and you have to fight that, you have to resist it if you're going to be an intelligent person in this day and age.
1:23:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I applaud that one, when I was doing the research I hadn't seen that one and I'm like, this one is really, really brilliant.
1:23:24
But of course I'm sitting, trying to solve the problem, in terms of...
1:23:29
I've always wanted either a mural or a set of oil paintings done that I call A History of the Ideas of Progress.
1:23:41
Essentially, I was wondering as I was rereading my notes for you and I'm like, maybe I could make those as NFTs and people could buy it, but then we tie them to that particular story.
1:23:56
Because obviously all of these things are generally in the way, way back, like the Magna Carta and what that meant for personal liberty.
1:24:08
I think coming up with a solution to this, the observation is brilliant, but how do we move people backed away from the recency bias, because recency bias, by the way, is wrong for all sorts of reasons.
1:24:26
We are hyperbolic discounters while we invest, and that is why so few people do well, because they let the lizard part of their brain make the choice for them, so I'll be all ears- David Perell: I'll give you a couple things that you can do that I do. What am I not saying?
1:24:47
I am not saying do not consume anything that was created recently, that is not the point.
1:24:53
I'm on Twitter all the time, I am an addicted monkey just like you are, that platform is just designed to make you addicted, but I do certain things.
1:25:05
What I find works really well is book clubs, and focus on old books, actually, my book club is called the Lindy Literary Society, and what we do is we basically don't allow books written in the 21st century, and we say we're all going to team up and do that.
1:25:20
I find that the social benefits really helps, where you get everybody working together, because the problem with old stuff is nobody's talking about it, so you sort of feel socially ostracized a little.
1:25:32
Then the other big thing is when you come across an article, save it to an app called Instapaper, a read-it-later app, and then what you do is you save it there, and then when it's time to read, go open your read-it-later app.
1:25:47
Now choose from the best of all the things that you're doing, and now rather than being reactive in your reading choices, you're being proactive.
1:25:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I actually do, do that, that's a really good- David Perell: If you do that, you at least avoid some of this, but once again, it's like gravity, every time that you fight against gravity, you're fighting entropy.
1:26:08
It is a constant push, but I do think it's important to do, also old documentaries on YouTube, BBC, PBS shows, those are so good.
1:26:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So good, so good.
1:26:22
David Perell: I feel like no one knows this.
1:26:24
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, they're amazing, and I put them up on Twitter all the time.
1:26:27
David Perell: No one clicks on them.
1:26:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Nobody clicks on it, and these are just genius, they are so, so brilliant, and it's interesting...
1:26:39
well, that will be for our next podcast.
1:26:43
If you've listened to us you know that I always have the same closing question, which is, we're making you the Emperor of the world, David, you can't kill anybody and you can't put them in a reeducation camp.
1:26:55
But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magic microphone, and you are going to be able to incept them, and we're talking, when we say them, we mean every human being on the planet.
1:27:09
What you speak into that microphone, they're going to wake up the next morning with those two thoughts or those two things that are going to lead them to actions or activities, and importantly, they are going to think that they thought of it.
1:27:28
What have you got for us?
1:27:31
David Perell: The key thing here is everybody, and I would write out the arguments of the people you disagree with the most.
1:27:48
If the word there is everybody, if you can do that, and you can write their arguments and say them better than they can, I think we'd live in a much better world.
1:27:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Love that one, so that's one, you got another one for me now.
1:28:01
David Perell: Dare I say, just get your body moving, I think that one of the biggest lies for intellectuals right now, is how big the mind-body duality is.
1:28:13
I don't think it's coincidence that the Greeks saw their greatest intellectual heroes as physical warriors as well, I think there's a lot of wisdom to that, and we'd be smart to heed that advice.
1:28:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think those are both great ones, I love the...
1:28:27
that's something that I used to do, was when I really wanted to understand something, because I know I'm usually wrong, and it was something that I disagreed with, I made a practice of doing what you said.
1:28:39
Actually writing the best possible defense of something I didn't agree with, it's really helpful, and it sometimes changes your mind by the way, which is definitely not a bad thing.
1:28:51
David, this has been fantastic, where can people find you?
1:28:54
David Perell: Here's what I would do, based off our Never-Ending Now, go into Google, type in Friday Finds Links Perell, Friday Finds Links Perell.
1:29:04
I have hundreds and hundreds of links there that are waiting for you, and they're about investing, architecture, whatever.
1:29:14
At the top, enter email, you'll get five every week, five links, or just do a control find on some word that interests you and I promise you, you'll find something interesting.
1:29:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it, thank you so much for being on, we'll have you on again to hear about all of your exploits, it sounds like you're doing very, very well, so congratulations.
1:29:33
David Perell: Thanks Jim.