171 Years of Writing Knowledge in 90 Minutes

Hey what's going on well 2024 was a big year for how I write and I want to make a video where we could revisit the very very best lessons and think about hey what does this mean for for our writing and I'll tell you what struck me about working on the show this year it was the sheer diversity of successful writers and the lesson that I took away is that you can write however you want to write you know we learn in school well you got To write like this you got to write like that

but no no no no there is space in the market for every style every interest every personality type you name it but no matter what you choose you got to be really really good at it so the standard of Excellence is high higher than I ever thought it'd be but the range of possibilities is wider than I'd ever imagined so once again these are my very favorite clips from the year and if You've got that friend and you keep saying to them hey hey hey hey hey you got to listen to How I write you

got to listen to it well this is the episode to share with them you can just say trust me trust me this one will be worth your time and then if they ask why you can just tell them that this episode is like one of those fun little chocolate variety boxes where you can just sample all the different flavors all right well let's [Music] roll let's say that you're going to write a story or what have you or a chapter in a book and and the scene is a young girl is coming downstairs uh it's

approaching dinner time it's the 1960s early 1960s she walks into the kitchen and the mother's uh you know making dinner and um you know this music on the radio and if you said okay take some french guy or German writer and say uh you don't know they haven't they didn't Spend any time in America we want you to write this story this scene and here's you know some life magazines and here's you know Wikipedia pages about America in the 1960s and about Suburbia and you know then you what happen is is you have the risk

that the the writer would write a sentence that says something like you she came down the stairs and went in the kitchen as her mother took uh the bird's eyee uh frozen peas from The Frigid a And uh the Beatles played you know love love me do on the radio it's just a cliche it's just like well it's all yeah and it's he sort of like okay we get it frozen pece frigidere The Beetles it's 1964 everything I expected so you take a step back and say well what instead of that instead of putting in

these landmarks that tell us where we are and what to expect of it whatever what as you say what we already expect ask yourself what would the girl see so Let's say you know she's seven years old or something like that 8 years old when a seven-year-old or eight-year-old comes into the room in 1964 and they see their mother making dinner you know what what would she see and I think that like for me uh if you put yourself in that position the first thing that would really stand out is uh is the the amazing

thing that of what Frozen how frozen peas work which is that uh when you take frozen peas out of the freezer And you open them up you can slide the entire brick of peas out like they they come out like a brick all bound together and if this Frozen was sort of incredible thing When We Were Young that you would see your parent do this and then they would break the the Brick of peas over the pot and you know the child would see this and then inevitably some of the peas would go bouncing across

the counter and you know the kid would go and and would you try a frozen pee at One point you know you without your mother watching you take the Frozen pee and and you're like oh that's what a frozen pea tastes like and some kids would love eating frozen peas and and there's a very specific texture and you know uh Central experience to eating a fro anyway my point being that this is what the child would see right so if you're trying to bring this scene to life from the perspective of the child you wouldn't

mention frigidere and Bird's eye and you know the Beetles it would be this other stuff now we can add make this more interesting in and by saying well let's say and it is from the girl's perspective and this is what she's witnessing let's say that uh earlier that day uh her mother has discovered that uh her husband is cheating on her and she was doing the laundry and she finds a a note in her husband's pocket or you know and and realizes that she's being Cheated on and so the mother is feeling uh vulnerable you

know angry uh frightened you know that her husband might leave her that the family would be broken up um or alternatively let's say that on this day she has cheated on her husband for the first time she goes to take the car to the uh Car Wash and she ends up in the back seat of the car as it's going through the thing with a guy from the car wash and she's feeling sort of dangerous and sexy and excited and Alive you know and all these things are going through now either way when the girl

walks in the room she would not know that this has happened okay and maybe years from now later in the book she's going to discover that that was the day that you fill in the blank mom was cheated on her mom cheated whichever one so when writing that scene uh in addition to the child seeing these little elements like the frozen peas that bring it to life in this Vivid way You'd actually have to write the scene very differently with different language and a different Tempo a different tone depending upon which of the two things

the mother had done earlier that day because although it would not be known to the girl somehow it would have to be evident in the behavior of the mother that the girl senses in the room without even knowing that she senses it so that as they say later when you find it out you could go back and read that section And say it was all there that's what was going on that night you know and that's why this felt a little offer that whatever so as a wrer then you go go into this situation of

of as you say there's this iterative process of of trying to observe accurately and trying to write it carefully but then beginning to build in the layers of the language your word choice and the Poetry of the language to suggest a bigger truth which is not simply what am I witnessing but What is the full emotional content of not only the mother but of everybody in the household and how is it in there in that space and then how is that kind of suggested by the historical context you know that we are middle class or

upper middle class or lower middle class that we're in Ohio versus you know suburb of Los Angeles versus Baltimore all that has to be in there too you know what I mean so through the writing and the rewriting you try to get as much of that Right at the beginning by hearing these elements in advance by sort of picking the the tone and the vocabulary that suits this destination that you're going to bring to life but then you through the editing and the re-editing you refine and make sure that you're getting it closer and closer

to where you want it to be I I'll add something here which is that the way I think about it for myself and I think that all writers approach these things very differently But the way I think about it for myself is that uh I write the first draft for me and for me alone so in the writing of it I'm like whatever I want to imagine uh what whatever whims I have whatever tickles my fancy uh however deep I get into the the fascination what I whatever I think is hilarious um whatever you know

I can go on at length you know as I am doing right now I just let it all whatever happens happens I don't regulate it in Any way and uh but then once the first draft is there and in reasonably good shape I then kind of turn the lens around and I say okay having written this for myself full of of vanities and digressions and and investigations and you know asides and what diversions everything when now I want to think about it not from my perspective but from a reader's perspective and and this is it's

not about you know trying to sell books it's It's that looking at it from the reader perspective is a way of saying what I'm going to complete the the the fulfill the Covenant here do my half of the Covenant when a reader buys my book it means they're going to spend money and then more importantly they're going to spend time consuming the book and so that is an investment by them into my art and so I owe it to them I have certain things that I owe them in exchange for that and one of the

Things I owe them is to ensure that I've taken that initial draft and I've weeded out the redundancies the the things that are cliche the things that are boring the things that have that are only there because they satisfy my whim but actually don't play a role in the story as a whole so the re the editing part for me a large part of that is taking things out being getting it leaner and leaner so that it really is around the the pure economy of the elements that Belong in this story and in the language

that serves this story and then everything else gets pushed out to the side you [Music] know what is a diapy a diacap is a verbal sandwich like that so um in that case it's a horse a horse my kingdom for a horse in Richard theii free at last free at last thank God almighty we're free at last alone alone or all alone alone on a wide wide sea and rhyme the Ancient Mariner it's uh again it's just another formula which can make uh makes a phrase memorable you and you can do it the much shorter

sandwich of just saying Bond James Bond to be or not to be these are such powerful ways of making lines incredibly memorable I mean Bond James Bond is one of the most famous lines in all of his Cinema and yet it's just a guy saying his own name in a slightly odd way but we remember it and to be or not To be is the probably the most famous line in English literature and he could have written that another way he could have said um to be or not would have been the same meaning whether

or not to be and it's just we just absolutely love to hear these lines in film in poetry you know uh game over man game over run forest run Zed's Dead baby Zed's Dead they're all the same formula very very simple to do and yet we those lines stick in our heads and there's an Amazing example of this one i' loved because what one things when I was writing this book uh false memories when when a form is so powerful that it changes your memory there's a bit in uh Wizard of Oz H um where

the uh the Wicked Witch of the West says fly my pretties fly to the flying monkeys and everyone remembers that line I remember that line I've asked a bunch of people they all remember that line from from the movie it's not there what that line Is not in the movie The Wizard of Oz she says at one point fly fly fly fly she never says fly my pretties fly but we all remember that line we all remember it as that because acape is such a powerful figure of rhetoric that we change it basically okay so

this is what you're saying what you're saying is that our minds have memory receptors in certain shapes and what you're doing when you're writing if you want something to be memorable what You can do is there these little rhetorical tactics that we can do to basically shape our words and ideas so that they fit into the slot of the human brain that's exactly it yes that's a very good way of putting it I've been talking about this book for years and I've never thought about it that there we go never said it that well there

were just these things we love to remember burn baby burn Disco Inferno is better than burn baby it's and home Sweet home or Oh Captain My Captain all diapies we're talking about Martin Luther King's I A Dream speech yeah same decade JFK his inauguration speech his speech at Rice University what did John F Kennedy do to be such a memorable speech writer he did kiasmos which is just when you say something and then say it in reverse so t for two and two for T is the most obvious chasmis but he he had so many

in that inauguration speech ask not what Your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind let us never negotiate out of fear but let us never fear to negotiate just astonishing uh how many times he uses it um but you'll also find it in um in uh I think it Kio said with money on my mind and my mind on my money uh it which is the same uh reversal it's just you make humans love symmetry

we love seeing Symmetrical stuff we like the Taj Mahal or St Paul's Cathedral cuz they're absolutely symmetrical and kiasmos is when you make your sentences symmetrical just like that that uh here's what I'm noticing with Kay asmus is I instantly think that's true that is such a good point and there's something about the clarity and the eloquence of a sentence that makes the brain say of course that must be right yeah which is why I mean it's an awful lot of um US presidents Have used C other than JFK um there was uh George George

Bush Jr said if we cannot bring our enemies to Justice we must bring Justice to our enemies and Obama said um to group of veterans he said you stood up for America now America must stand up for you oh that's a great line yeah yeah these are great lines but there there's a formula for them you can use that formula to produce these great lines which will remember stick in the Public imagination for years afterwards do you see people overusing this um no no I don't I seen somebody overusing the figures of rhetoric I me

sometimes you can sometimes you know rhetoric is happening but um you don't really mind it I mean Barack Obama another president did all those speeches with the epistrophe of yes we can at the end of lots of different things in each one yes we can at the end and I mean Winston Churchill his most famous speech is um We will fight them on the beaches we will fight them in the fields we will fight them in the cities we will fight them and just long long list of places and you you know you're being you

know that's rhetorical you know what's happening there that he's starting each sentence with the same words we will fight them um but you don't mind it especially not in a grand situation like that well I call it dopamine culture and it's a culture of distraction and this Is fundamentally different than the past because 20 years ago if I'd had a debate with somebody about the culture the debate would be about art versus entertainment and the art is more demanding it's more rigorous it forces you out of your comfort zone entertainment is something that's more adapted

to what your expectations are it's more formulaic but now we've got a third category you got art you got Entertainment just distraction like people scrolling on videos on their phone video of somebody's pet somebody showed a a photo of their meal or something like that that's not even entertainment right you can't you can't even call that entertainment it's just it's distraction and what we find is that it gives a jolt of dopamine to the brain and the people that designed these social media platforms all of them in the last 12 to 18 months shifted to

these scrolling reeling interfaces now they haven't told you why but the reason why they're doing this is it's addictive if you get an ad doamin hit every 15 seconds it's an addictive process so you stay on your phone they can give you more ads this is no different than what companies do in other product areas I knew some people that worked at a very large potato chip company which I will Not mention by name but they said well Ted you have no idea we worked for years to find exactly how to have a potato chip

said that you ate it and there was a flavor in your mouth and it died in a certain number of second so you had to reach for another potato chip we make these things addictive the goal is to make them addictive because that's how we maximize sales now nobody in Silicon Valley will tell you this but all the Silicon Valley companies with These social media platforms have made similar research I'm sure and they show we have this scrolling uh interface and so people are addicted to distraction this can't be good for the culture now you

know where I come from I come from sort of this Timeless area when I think about something happening in the culture I'm thinking about it in terms of what happened over the last 2 3,000 years sure and so uh the idea that now we've shifted to these quick Dopamine hints is something of great concern to me and once again I will stake my career and my efforts on on something that's more helpful to the culture and more helpful to the society classic example I choose what my values are and then my work has to live

up to those values otherwise I'm not the honest broker so as a writer how do I if I don't like dopamine culture but I kind of feel like I need to be part of dopamine culture I feel like I need to Have a good hook I feel like I need to bring somebody in right away I feel like I need to get right to the point what do I do well here's my advice and other people will tell you differently but I think that it's death to try to chase the culture and I've seen a

bunch of editors over the years who've told me Ted you got to dumb it down it's got to be faster it's got to be quicker people don't want anything that's more challenging what I'll tell you is all Those editors are out of a job now huh the periodicals they work for often have disappeared from the face of the Earth because there's no long-term relationship you can have with a reader like this I had a video of me on somebody else put up on Instagram the other day that got two million views two million views of

me talking but it's just a few seconds and I was I was I was talking to my my wife to I said this got me no readers there there's no TR you Can't engage with this it's it hey it's gratifying for my ego to have reached two million people there but I cannot have any engagement on that platform if I want to engage I can engage with a video like we're doing because we're talking at length of things this will engage with people my writing can engage engage with people if you do something at a

level like this you can engage with them but when you work into the distraction culture all you have is your 10 seconds of Fame enjoy it but you can't build on it so I would tell writers don't chase that be true to your own values there are people that are hungry for something more substantive we saw this in food when I was growing up the big thing were these high-tech foods frozen foods microwave meals canned goods all that we've seen a reaction against instant now Gourmet cooking Healthy Living organic food all these Cuisines the the

hot thing in food Now is organic and natural those things actually are growing faster in the marketplace than the pre-processed stuff I think the same thing will happen with in writing have natural ingredients do it organically be true to Quality if you try to to to chase the tech platforms and this pre-digested stuff you may have a few brief flurries of success but you can't build a career like I have had over decades without the deeper Engagement that that kind of relationship with the reader [Music] requires I think the word storytelling is cliche right now

super cliche and it's overused people don't really Define it it's just like a buzz word at this point but if you define storytelling as creating Stakes is giving people something to root for or to fear and making people want an outcome every good story makes You hope for an outcome you're rooting for something to happen and so how to instill that feeling in people there's actually I think a formula to it and I don't know that formula but I'm trying to get to know it I'm studying it now and I think if you did come

from a literary background then that's the frame that you've always written through I mean I would give you another definition which is the definition you gave earlier that we all have these Holes in our minds and stories are the things that match up most with the holes so that information slots in into memory yeah our receptors are in the shape of stories they're not in the shape of facts or talking points or statistics and that's why by the way a lot of times when you see companies trying to defend themselves they're already losing because an

accusation is usually story whereas the defense is usually statistic so when you think so Look back at here's a here's a story from my DC geopolitics background NATO and free trade the data says that the passage of NATO and free trade is good just good better on a ton of different scores it lifted productivity by this much lifted GDP by this much created this many jobs Etc the det detractors of free trade don't have that but they do have stories and so the detractors will say well look at David he's a father of seven he

lost His job because it got outsourced he's a corn farmer and now he's not farming corn he's at home depressed and that doesn't and shouldn't outweigh the many people whose lives are so much better including yours if you have access to an iPhone now and you wouldn't have before but the accusation will be a story and then the defense be oh but productivity went up by 4% and it's the you know one death is a tragedy thousand deaths is a statistic if you're fighting a story With a statistic you're always losing how much do you

think about framing in terms of the narratives because that's the other thing right once the accuser has the frame so once you're responding you've lost the frame I think that's right yeah the accuser chooses the frame I mean the world of negotiations like an international negotiation if you're trying to hammer out the treaty Whoever has the pen to write the first draft of the treaty is An incredibly powerful position and that's the position you jockey over and so here too if someone else is putting that story out there and you're reacting to it you are

automatically in the losing position because you have to react to their frame and they've set um they've set the [Music] criteria do you take notes during the week that you reflect on or is it just all your head no I'm a huge Note Taker Oh tell me about that there's all these like fancy notebooks in the world yeah you don't want those um you definitely want a spiral notebook because one thing that's important is you can rip Pages out frequently and you also want it to lie like flat and open on the table and if

you like open pages you want them to like you know like be able to lay like this whatever you definitely want to be able to like rip Pages out I'm a big believer of like I take a bunch of notes And then I like clearly like rip them out so I can look at multiple Pages at the same time and I can like crumple them up and throw them on the floor and I'm done like when our house cleaner comes in on like a you know whatever there's just these pile of crumpled papers that I'm

like type my notes in or whatever on the floor you definitely want like a kind of paper that is uh like good to write on which is a feel thing but most paper is terrible to Write on huh um you want uh hard front and back to the notepad so and you also want something that can fit in a pocket I was about to say that I think the uniball micro .5 pen um is the best pen overall but the Muji 36 or 37 in dark blue ink is a very nice pen for other reasons

uh so those are the two I would use but I think this kind of notebook and one of those two pens is the right answer and how many notes you're writing per day on That thing uh I go through one of these like every three two or three weeks oh wow so you're taking a lot of well this you can see how much I've ripped out like this used to have like 100 pages in it so that's how you think about it so you're going to basically take the notebook and then you rip out the

pages you don't have completed notebook I don't have completed notebooks wow what inspired this where does this come from lots of trial and error uh many kinds of Notebooks many pens many different systems this one's really good I don't quite have the words for what you're doing here but it was informed by your process early on so you're talking about the Google Docs and hey we need an anecdote here quick story here but you do something that comedians do very well which is set up the frame tell the story really fast and people think oh

I got to tell a story okay now you need to sit down you need an Audience this captive audience and tell a story for well no no no no no no a story and anecdote it can be one sentence 5 Seconds when you're speaking one sentence when you're writing real quick right back to the point and it creates so much life and connection in the writing well you also I think it's fun to interrupt the Cadence every once in a while so in my TCH talk I'm going I'm going I'm going I'm making a point

about the transfer of Social Security I Stop and I put up a picture of that mob Chic photo of Jeff Bezos and Lawrence s and then you just pause and then you stop everyone's laughing and you just look at it and then you look at the audience and you create creative tension and you stop and they're all like waiting for you to say something and finally you say I just like this slide it has no context or relevance and they laugh and they're like I like this guy I'm gonna now I'm GNA maybe give him

More permission to change my mind right uh if it's authentic being emotional changes the Cadence interrupts the Cadence in a powerful way and they think they listen like wow this guy's this guy is you know maybe he actually believes this so there's all sorts of tricks that are emotionally manipulative putting up a p you know I'll occasionally just throw up a picture of me and my kids that's just emotionally manipulative I know they're Going to like me more and so kind of interrupting the Cadence but but everyone has their own gig I don't I occasionally

like to you know just do something kind of weird and you know the Ted Talk I started with a I'm like what if Ted it was called The Bold and the brilliant was a telen Nolla from Brazil and I'm like you know Malcolm lwell and Bill Gates have a night of hot sex and give birth to Simon cynic that has nothing to do with my talk but I think It's funny and I think people are G to I think people are going to find it interesting from an academic and also be yourself you know try

and bring your elements of your personality that the people close to you know but maybe they don't I'm a profane and vulgar person no kidding it's not an act I'm genuinely profane and vulgar I lose some clients Walmart invited me a few times to speak and after a while they're just like dude you're not only in the Bible Belt you're On the Buckle of the Bible Belt when you start talking about sex and procreating and erectile dysfunction that just is that is really hard down here so to speak and and I get it I'm going

to lose some clients you know the key to being a strong brand is not only who you're for but who you're not for sure you're you know so anyways but that is for me that's genuine and it's a point of differenti ation but occasionally it upsets people and you know I lose Audience sometimes we cover [Music] the story Worthy is amazing book by this like teacher guy who's like the 20time storytelling champion of the moth storytelling I didn't I didn't even know what this thing was but whatever if you're the champion of something I paid

little bit of attention he's got this book and in the book it's basically how to tell better stories I would say you know probably Worth reading the book he's got one thing that I really took which was Stakes so he's like um every great story needs Stakes meaning if the story is intention and obstacle but if you don't make it clear what's at stake for the for the person if they don't get it um then the story is not going to have very not be very compelling so you know when you tell a story let's

say it's the and it doesn't have to be high stakes like it doesn't he's actually very again the Other thing he says is like don't tell like it call like vacation R so it's like don't just tell a story about this great night you had this party cuz like nobody cares nobody wants to hear about your vacation nobody wants to hear about your cool college party you went to like just fundamentally those are bad Stories the second thing is like a great story is not just I was swimming in the ocean and a shark hit

me and then I survived like it doesn't need to be extreme and Again it's actually almost better if it's not um but you still need Stakes so how do you have Stakes even if it's not a shark biting you off and his answer was um the stakes come from the so as long as you believe that that other person was going to feel a certain way then the story has Stakes so for example if I'm trying to impress my mom doing the Brussels sprouts thing embarrassment is what's on the line right like I'm going to

be embarrassed and my ego is Going to take a hit so as long as you believe that that's true for me the story will be entertaining um when it's prop when I actually tell it when it's actually delivered um the other one he says is he goes what is a story story is a 5-second moment of change whoa what do that mean a 5sec so he's like you know uh everything you tell in the story comes to this one moment this five seconds where the character is transformed you know just I use movies Because it's

easier that most people don't have like a big Archive of writing in their head but like we've all watched the same shows and movies every romcom is like some version of the following uh the guy is a player and he's never going to settle down that's the start of the movie or she's a high-powered lawyer who's doing great in her career but never made enough time for love that's always the start of the story there's only romcom right like she was in love They thought she thought they would get happily married he broke her heart

start of the romcom so well guess what the ending of the romcom is going to be always the exact opposite of that if she was the high powerered lawyer who never made time for love she's now going to be in love and she's going to actually quit her job as a lawyer and be like open up a bakery right like that's how the movie is going to end or if he didn't want to settle down and he was a player by the End he's going to be chasing her and he's going to like propose to

her right he's going to want to settle down so spoiler for all ROM comes ever and um it's actually all movies ever die hard Jurassic Park you could do the same exercise watch the opening one minute the end is going to be that character the opposite of his current lifestyle or belief system or habits um you know Scrooge hates Christmas he loves Christmas or whatever it's every movie Every story is the same so the heart of the story is the 5-second moment when they actually made the transformation when they switched and it's usually when they

lost it all when had the Heartbreak when they hit rock bottom when they had no choice but to be brave cuz they were finally cornered like whatever it is right uh you know in Batman when it's like he's in the cave and he's got to get out and nobody's ever made it out I don't know if you remember this part of The Dark Knight or or one of one of the Batman movies and uh the mentor was like only one person's ever got out he's like how did he do it um he's like he didn't

use the rope they like madebe basically he jumped with no safety net and so the 5-second moment of change is the character climbs up the thing takes off the Rope if he doesn't make this jump he's GNA die but actually because he was G because of that makes the leap and actually makes it that's the Transformation moment everything is based all stories you if you don't know what's the 5-second moment of change for the for the main character you don't really have a great story we're just going to break down what it is that you're

doing here I want to start off with how you start both of these into for the say something happened to software can I stop there even go for it let's break this down yes so I wrote That line and I go I know this is going to be good now I know the whole piece is going to be good so for me it had to start with a good line and I like this format of a line so something happened to business software is um the kind of line that injects a question into someone else's

mind without me having to ask a question this is not a question it's a statement yeah something happened to business so so the reader is going to go wait what happened to business Software and so now they're bought in because now they ask themselves a question and they want to get the answer um now this is not a trap it sounds like a trap it's not like manipulative it's just like I love those kinds of lines that lead with a little bit of mystery and make someone want to find out what the hell I'm talking

about so I think that helps lead things in okay so you go right there and you wrote that first you didn't come back and write that later no I wrote that first it's kind of I'm kind of pissed at this point you know what I mean there's an attitude here that I feel and is real and I have something to say about this and so this kind of leads me into that you used to pay for it once install it and run it whether on someone's computer or a server for everyone it felt like you

owned it and you did yes and so now you're saying this what it used to be like yeah and it's coming out hard today most software Is a service not owned but rented and we got to talk about owned and rented and landlords and all that jazz we'll get into that in a second buying it enters you into a Perpetual landlord tenant agreement every month you pay for essentially the same thing that you had last month and if you stop paying the software stops working boom you're evicted is that cheesy I don't know it felt

good I like endings paragraphs with a punch usually and the punches usually Has to be short and it's sort of a summary and it's an answer and it's like a this happened so that's other one it's like you you owned it and you did it's like that sums up everything the next one is like boom you're evicted sort of sums up the the the Dark Side of rental basically yes um so I I that's a formula that I tend to like it's not something I do because I it's a formula it's like it turns out

to be a formula it's it's emergent that's kind of how I like to Write but I don't go there I don't say like I need to do one of those paragraphs with the thing at the end it's just how it comes out for me but when I can sum it up like that I know it's a good par the end of the paragraph to me is what makes it good tell me about the Genesis of landlord tenant where did that come from that was by accident um actually as I was writing this um I'm was

like you know used to own it and so I I like well Now you don't so in my mind I go what's the opposite of owning it's renting now software of service is never really talked about as rental that word is not does not come up it's almost like it's it's buried it's hidden people people don't want to talk about the fact that it's rental software think about like what do you think of when you think of rental things well they're kind of beat up it's kind of you know used whatever you don't use that

term and software but Really it is rental in a sense um and I'm like I'm going to use that because while renting is great in a lot of ways and periods of your life or all the time whatever it is there is a dark side to rental that people have probably run into in their lives so now if I can frame this in a way that someone can can relate to an experience they had renting like the refrigerator doesn't work the landlord never fixed it there's a hole in the wall there's a leak you know

all The landlord stuff all the yeah the bad landlord stories everyone has one somewhere right in college or or wherever they're living now whatever it is so now I can I can sort of personify SAS as a landlord and it kind of is uh and uh it's just a way to establish a little bit of a of a of a personification um here and then I I kind of let that live and let that sink in and then we move on here yeah for nearly two decades the SAS model Benefited landlords handsomely with routine prayers

and payers got to talk about that y to the Church of recurring Revenue yes we got to talk about all that stop there yeah so the payers and prayers thing was something that I struggle I like it but I struggle with it because as you just bounced over it and kind of stumbled I stumbled writing it prayers prayers it's too close but I still went with it because I still like it a lot and it helps of course When you talk about church and whatever so but but I was a little bit worried that people

would stumble over that because it is kind of hard to say um this this actually this sentence actually kind of happened and I'm remember more happened in Reverse where I knew I wanted to use Church of recurring Revenue because I like that line and then um the pay the prayers and payers thing the alliterations it's not quite an alliteration but like that feel Bubbled up from the other statement and I go ah I like I like this now I like this play this is where writing becomes playful for me and then I know it's going

to be good as well has to be playful I think I don't like to get too serious about this stuff and so I'm here I'm like pirs and players and this is fun and I'm ripping on landlords to a certain degree like this is getting fun that we just stop you there real quick one thing that I love about play that I Just realized is when you're playing you can't not be who you really are there's no such thing as play without personality and so I think that what play does is it brings out the

personality that so many people are seeking yeah valuations shot to the moon on the backs of businesses subscribed at luxury prices for commodity services that they had little control over add up your SAS subscriptions last year you should own that by now right I like That sentence right well I well I think that that kind of hits the Boom you should own that by now and that's sort of the third big hit and you did that's the Revelation for me so it's a revelation it's like you're right I should own that by that's what I

wanted to put in someone's head like yeah I've been paying for the subscriptions for years it's kind of the same thing yeah I'm getting new features but it's essentially the same thing These companies have been making tons and tons and tons and tons of money valuations through the moon I should own the ship up you're damn right I should like that's how I wanted I wanted to transfer this feeling into the person at that moment and go you damn right I should I had thought about that but yeah I should you know that kind of

feeling so that's what that was about so now what you do is you have one more line here about SAS and then what you do is You begin to introduce once which is this line of products so tell me about that transition and then why you thought about the structure in this way of talk about the problem do a transition and then talk about once I want to get someone to to nod their head first so if I'm going to get um someone to agree with me later in a sense I kind of want them

to agree with me first so it's kind of like you read the first half of this and you're probably going to go yeah Yeah uh-huh yeah you're nodding I want to find this resonance like I'm nodding you're nodding and now you're open to hearing what I have to say I've described what I feel like is the the reality and now here's what I want to bring to what I what I want to happen next what I what I think is that could be the new reality so that's why that that generally that format works well

for me um I mean I've seen and when you look at great product demos it's the Same way they kind of show a product and this is what's wrong with the product or the the category and like here's our solution it's just kind of a nice way to I think establish a reality get someone to go yeah and then they're open and then you have some fun with Once once once once once but what stands out is the way that you begin that is you say once once upon a time you owned what you paid

for you controlled what you depended on and your privacy and Security were your own business can I stop you there the name once which is this brand once.com that the name came from um writing that once upon a time thinking actually I didn't write thinking Once Upon a Time used to pay for software huh I'm like once is actually Once Upon a Time that's good I like that word it also since we're paying once once and Once Upon a Time like there's this double meaning There which I really liked and um so it the name

of the thing actually came from writing and thinking about how to talk about the thing and then how do you think about now you have the basically five bullet points that you talk about with once so why five bullet points why do you focus on those you say pay one time own forever you say we write the code you get to see it you say we give you the software you get to host it you say simple and straightforward not Enterpris and Bloated and then finally for one fixed price once so those bullets sort of

follow the similar structure where the first half of the sentence is like the previous existence or reality and the second half is like the new the new things I like that pattern I like the bounce I like the Rhythm I like the bounce to me like if something's bouncing it's it's moving I like the movement in the words and the sentence And I think it pulls people through they're short they're Punchy yeah but hey let's go on to the hey letter so this one you open a little differently you say hey everyone I'm Jason Co

here at 37 signals so what are you going for there yeah that that's a good question um when we launched hey which is an email service I launched it initially with a with just this letter this letter is currently on the existing site if you go down to the Bottom of it but initially at hey.com it was just this and um it was just this for a few months so we didn't want to say exactly what we were doing but we kind of wanted to say something about what we were doing and in this case

I felt like it was more of a personal letter that one the the once one is more of a statement this one felt more like a letter like I'm writing it to you and to say Hi here's my name it kind of opens It up in a more personal way um I don't know strategically why I went that route but it just felt like the right thing to do if there's only going to be this it's less aggressive it's more like a love letter to email and so I wanted to open up in a in

a in a happier thing than like a sharp statement one of the things though that does show up in both is has the same structure of things used to be this way we loved how they were then they Became broken and now we're trying to redeem the way the things are for how they should be structurally the same and I think what's important maybe about this if you going to drive anything is like again there's a there is a Formula here but they don't need to be the exact same formulas they're similar formulas like this

one's more of a personal letter um you'll see at the bottom of this one my my avatar is in the bottom of this one one is not on the left hand Side um my email address is on the left hand side it's not on the right hand side like there's some CH some differences but strategically or H not even that structurally it is the same approach to getting a message out there which is to establish how it was or what's wrong with the current and what we're going to do about the the present it then

says email gets a bad rap but it shouldn't emails a treasure It feels great to get an email from someone you care about or a newsletter you enjoy or an update from a service you like that's how email used to feel all the time and this is a feeling that is I want to get across early because most people don't like email but you're like I actually not that I don't like email like if I get an email from my wife like I like that I get an email from an old friend I like that

my uncle who's hundred he sends me an email like I'm look what I see my my mom's Uncle my great uncle uh I'm like this is amazing like I want read this so email is not bad what's become of email is bad but at its core it's still a wonderful thing it's a treasure so yeah I wanted people to go back go yeah I don't hate all email I hate the spam I hate like the the too many things you know emails from people I don't know that's the stuff I don't like but email itself

is actually wonderful just like getting a letter in The mail is wonderful but you also get junk mail do you hate letters right no you kind of like letters wedding invitations are great yeah amazing right yeah but things change uhhuh you started getting stuff you didn't want from people you didn't know you lost control over who could reach you an avalanche of automated emails cluttered everything up and Gmail Outlook Yahoo and apple just let it happen right there's sort of the Alliteration the AA I like this thing uh I like using the same letter start

start words when I'm trying to be really have an impact I feel like it bounces well again so this Avalanche of automated emails Avalanche automated like multiple syllable words together that's what creates the balance I'm thinking about this red ball if I'm doing red balls on syllables is there's a lot of balancing here and I like that I like that effect occasionally you'll see most of my words Are short I don't like a lot of syllables in my stuff but occasionally I want to go for that and then because it's rare you feel it differently

um and so that's where that that goes when you say because it's rare Avalanche of automated like those more rare words like a lot of syllables Avalanche automated that is like a it's like coming ACR it's like going on a walk and coming across like a lizard and you're like that's a Beau I Don't see that very often like that I need to look at that now that's how it feels here that's kind of a weird super weird in allergy but but but but but it's like coming across something you don't see very often so

in the rest of the words it's pretty tight and short and but then there's these occasional things that stand out yeah and I wanted the Avalanche of automated cuz that's how it feels it feels like an avalanche like you're out of control of an Avalanche you're caught in it you can't do anything about it of course it can be tragic this is not that but it's this barrage it's this Force yep that feels like it never stops when it comes to email so I want that's what I want to get at there ain't that right

y also this is something that I think every writer can Implement is whatever your predominant style is if you do the opposite when you want to emphasize something it stand out because it is Distinct and different yes 100% that's agree I agree with that now email feels like a chore rather than a joy something you fall behind on something you clear out not cherish rather than Delight it you deal with it right agree so more than I would like yeah so this this is where I'm taking email away from the things that are Pleasant like

the you know getting an email from a friend hearing from family member whatever like that's you can Envision That these are now hassles M and that's how most people think about email I was like yeah this this is Avalanche of autom stuff all these hassles like yeah this I'm not into email so I'm setting the stage to turn the stage right and flip it around so I want people to go yeah yep again nod their head yeah this sucks I yeah this sucks Sean purri has a line that he shared on this podcast that I

really like where he says all stories are about the 5-second moment of change And what he's saying is that there's something that happens at the beginning and then the end it will be the opposite of what's going on so take your classic romcom right you have somebody who's in state a and they have all these things going on and by the end of the romcom it'll be the opposite they're going to go through a transformation and that's exactly what we're about to see in the next s which is and yet email remains a Wonder so

I think that what you've done Here is you've said this is what's happened with Emil you sort of set up this pain this annoyance this sort of Agony of having to check your email and now what you're about to do is you have that change into sort of the lightness and the sense of possibility yes and the word wonder and then earlier the word treasure so whenever I'm talking about the positive aspects of of email it's like really special positive things they're Enchanted words yes so I I I Know I didn't like go through the

source to find these they just came out but but but they come out in a way where um um they they are the right words for that statement and I I couldn't come up with better ones I really wanted to think of them that way thanks to email people across cultures continents countries cities and communities C's all C's oh I I I here's another one communicate every day it's reliable it's simple boom boom it makes It easy for two humans to share their love and for millions of people to earn a living there you go

there's a lot of yeah rhetoric faor paragraph I'm not surprised at all it feels really good it felt really good it came together I love when I've got a couple C's going and then like I got to find some more and the ones I find aren't contrived another C but they are they it's like I didn't reach too far that was Clever nice convincing yeah so I but but but the thing is is like I didn't reach like sometimes you you you reach for a you know literation or something and it's like that didn't fit

you could tell someone is trying too hard I want to make sure I'm not trying too hard but um that paragraph to me is the is the um the the the the fill the fill someone up with with positivity and like um and and wonder following from the previous you know it's just like it's it's making It's it's cashing in on what I said earlier and now it's filling that word Wonder with these things so good news the Magic's still there it's just obscured buried under a mess of bad habits and neglect some from people

some from machines a lot from email software email deserves a dust off restoration modernized for the way we email today so let me get into some of those so um neglect goes back to an earlier part in that piece where I said like Gmail I Foret like Gmail Apple Yahoo whatever they let it happen right so that's neglect that's that's closing the loop closing the circuit on that um and people aren't going to remember that but I do believe it stays with them in a way where subconsciously there's a closing of a loop there some

from people some from machines a lot from email software that if if you look at comedy writers a lot of the way that jokes are structured is they'll Have the first two things in a list of three that'll be the same and then the third one breaks the pattern right well I love comedy I'm not a comedy writer but I do maybe it's just something that absorbed perhaps but really we're about to make email software so up until this point I've not said what we're going to do I've just said like what it should be

so this is the first time I introduced that like the problem is actually also With email software now I still don't actually get deep into that we're going to make email software necessarily but it's a hint as to what we're about to do with this hey.com thing yeah and with hey we've done just that it's a redo a rethink a simplified potent reintroduction of email a fresh start the way it should be hey is our love letter to email and calendars and we're sending it to you on the web Mac Windows Linux IOS and Android

yes I add a Calendar later because we added a calendar later right um it's funny because that's the one I don't like that in there like it's like it feels tacked I almost stuttered there I was like wait is that calendars yeah I I'm like we added a calendar so I I did add that um but yeah that's that's it I I barely T the whole point of this even though I want to close the loops is and I knew we had like months to go until we released the Thing um I wanted to First

establish that we had this domain hey.com I want to give people reason to go there and go what the hell are these guys about to do that was sort of the idea so there's some Clues but not really and uh and and then um it just feels like it it wraps up and then I want to say like it's going to be everywhere that's what all the platforms basically suggest like this is not like just a small thing it's a big thing we're going all out on It yeah the thing that I learned in the

last 20 minutes or show as we were doing this was how much you like playing around with the rhythm of words right so you said a redo a rethink prayers and payers all the the sort of playing around with words of sort of repti they're Jabs right it's like a boxing match there Jabs but they're friendly I like that I like the B again to me it's About it's it's a it's a it's a bounce it's this bounce I keep saying the word bounce so it's like getting repetitive but that's how it feels and I

I I like that in a piece I like the motion in a piece [Music] I want to show you what what how an ad comes together so I I'm making a course on copyrighting uh this is now I wrote probably for the landing page um probably a little bit too much going on For a billboard but I want to give you the process because it's like there's a lot to it um it's probably about 20 rewrites are you looking at the same thing as me now yes do it so the difference between 1% and 2%

is not just 1% it's 100% I saw this like four years ago on um on Twitter and I I thought it's a great argument for copyrighting um because if you can increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2% that's not too hard like I could do that you Could you could do that it's not too hard for most landing pages you've literally doubled growth so I loved it I was like there's something here that that's the seed of an idea I guess wrote it on the sheet I was like all right maybe I can do

something with this um Luke Sullivan great copyright into we're talking about conflict earlier he just tells me now what Luke Sullivan tells me just draw a line down the middle of the Page and write any two conflicts that come to mind so on the right we got increased landing page conversions from 1% to 2% that was like the idea from the Tweet what's the's what's an obvious conflict there well it's spending twice as much on ads that's like the the parallel of that one or two explain what you mean by conflict how I look at

a conflict is just like it could be red and blue it could be Christianity and Atheism it could be white shirt red Jumper like it doesn't have to be complicated there's three types of enemy if you want to be really technical you got ABC a different approaches different way of solving the same problem B beliefs I believe this you believe this C competitors so that would be apple and Mac what we looked at earlier um here it's a bit of a before and after like I don't take this too seriously honestly just draw a line

and just write stuff that comes to mind that are opposites That are opposites so I had that idea I was like all right we need to set this up a little bit so how can I write a header want to grow twice as fast you got two choices spend twice as much on heads or increase inase land and pag conversions from 1% to 2% now at this point this is why I feel like what what you take in as a rider is so important because a couple years ago uh I I saw this Volkswagen um

ad which I loved how to how to prepare your car for winter Volkswagen ordinary car and with the ordinary car to prepare it for winter you've got to drain the radiator flush furly check rubber hose refill blah blah blah with the Volkswagen all you got to just change the oil I love the layout I love and what they're trying to show is just the Simplicity the ease they're trying to show Simplicity they're trying show ease but again enemy and I actually more than anything I just like how this ad is laid out I love the

layout so I Thought how can I turn what I've got like my seed of an idea into this so I rewrite it again for the for theth time um here I Dro in two placeholder images so I just forget the images but I just thought like I like that that you've got the Volkswagen and the ordinary car image so I wanted two like placeholders just so I could work around that and then I copied the squares the checklist and then I couldn't just have one on the left so I wrote want to grow twice as

Fast you have two choices raise twice the cash hire twice the staff spend twice as much on ads or learn to write and increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2% starting to take a little bit of shape and where are you at now what do you like about this what don't you like about this critique this and just give me a sense of I well at the time David at the time I wrote this I was like you know the stach here I like this but it gets in my in my opinion it Gets

like 200% % better and I think that's a like a lesson like you can like something and you just keep going until you literally can't you bleed the ink dry well also there's a moment in the creative process where you have an idea and then you're like I know that this is going to be good what I have now is fine but you have this inner knowing that what you're going to make is great so long as you live inside of those iterations and I feel like that's where You are right now you got to

you yeah you've got to like I think this is about it's talking about stand like I wouldn't sign this ad off right now I'm just I wasn't happy with it but I just thought I'm going to keep walking down this blind alley to see if it's blind or not and it ended up not being blind so I rewrite it again this time what's missing I thought like look at the volswagen and it has headings so I needed to make this Simpler so want to grow twice as fast you got two choices you got the corporate

way or the copyrighting way set it up like that um and then also I like that there was more boxers on the Volkswagen so I added rais tce the cash hire twice the staff spend twice as much on ads cross both your fingers or learn to write and increase landing page conversion from 1% to 2% now at this point something was like really irritating me uh I could not put this Out with that line being two lines on the right hand side learn to write it increase land and Page conversions from 1% to 2% it

was just too long it was messy so I thought I got to I got to make that one line like by Hook by crook um easy to remove cross out landing page learn to write and increase conversions from 1% to 2% and then I think how can I make that even shorter I can get rid of learn to write and put that as the header that ends up being learn Copyrighting so now I've got learn to write as a header increased conversion from 1% to 2% this creates a problem this is how messy the whole

process is this creates a problem I like parallelism in the headings and the corporate way as option A and learn to write as option b there's no symmetry between them whereas the Corporate Way the copyrighting way that worked so I've created a problem and I've solved a I've solved a problem one forward one back so Then I think all right I need to write something like a similar ilk to learn to write so I just start spit foing Go full Zuckerberg scroll down roll Monopoly dice hidden hope spaghetti at wool these aren't good but I'm

just trying to go go go and what you're just doing is you're getting ideas out without even judging them really it's like the Eder and tap thing from way back you just write one idea without judging it you write another one you get in the dir water out The tap so you just flow in the tap it's clogged up at the start with a little bit of mud a little bit of dirty water but you just flow and after a couple of minutes a couple of rites it will start being clean you just want to

trust it gets clean so I'm just doing that right now spaghetti it will th and I end up with throw money and prey now at this point um I don't know what's good and what's not cuz I've been I've been um I've been riding this now for probably I Know two three hours and I just I don't know I can't I can't work out if it's good or not so I text a few friends going on one thing that's really revealing you just said I've been writing this for 2 to 3 hours but design is

a crucial component of your writing process this is writing design visual with images and visual with words working together in harmony so so I couldn't if I was doing this on a word dog I couldn't I couldn't let I couldn't Do it like this this is a v copy I Jason said this on on on your podcast but copy and design are one of the same like I can't do them differently you did it in figma I did it in figma I never do anything I never do anything which is not on the tool I'm

using ever so if I'm doing the as I said if I do the newsletter I write the newsletter in the newsletter it's weird if I do an ad I'll do it directly into figma if I do a landing page directly and if I do a Billboard I'll get it up amongst all the other Billboards and I'll put it in like where it is I don't like doing stuff not where it is so I'm confused at this point and um I like getting feedback so I sent this to a bunch of people who I you know

respect their taste feedback comes in definitely prefer Go full Zucker over the Corporate Way blah blah blah but the consensus was throw money and prey being the header on the left worked worked best so I settled on that Now I had an idea like what if I do a really long list like Volkswagen because I like the de I like depth it didn't work so I then reverted back at this point it's kind of there um but the last thing I do with most ad is I I try and add a little bit of design

to it little bit more design easiest thing to do here was just bold so back up a second raise twice the cash twice the staff spend twice as much on ads cross both your fingers there's rhythm in those lines The repetition of twice and both I want to pull that out header want to grow twice as fast I highlight twice as fast and I add a little line increase conversions from 1% to 2% that's twice as many just in case anyone didn't understand that the difference between one and two is 100 which is where I

got the whole idea from in the first place finally I got these two illustrations which are just placeholders so I I go on a go on a fiver and I pay someone called Kenia to make me illustration she starts off with this guy praying and a load of a load of um notes foing I gave her the oil ones as references because that was the style and then she gives me this pen and I say to her like I want it to be the same person on both of them so do it you mind doing

it again I think I I paid her a little bit more and she gives me this guy praying but he's smiling and then the second one has got this random like um messy four in a speech bubble Which I I didn't like so I said look Genia throw money and pray these are great I really like them but throw money and prey the guy's pissed at this point like he's an idiot he's throwing money and praying he's he's we don't like this guy and the guy who's writing uh turn that into a typewriter and add

a light bulb um and there you go add one want to grow twice as fast you have two choices throw money and prey raise twice the cash hire twice the staff spend twice as Much on ads cross both your fingers or learn copyrighting increase conversions from 1% to 2% that's twice as many and that's what what I ended up with let me synthesize a few things here so the first thing this is I just realized what I love about the way that you approach this craft it is that you when most people think about copyrighting

they think of it like a fish bait we're going to get the consumer to spend money we're going to trick them That's not what you're doing here what you're doing here this is the art of simple communication this is what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to say something and then in one image I'm trying to capture attention tell Story and there's you've actually made it delightful like this is beautiful in terms of what has happened and that is the way that you approach copyrighting it is the art of simple communication it's like an

art project the way that You do it so this is It's copyrighting is arguing this is just an argument is like what's the best argument for learning copyrighting well you got two choices you could throw money at you know a cliche and hope that it works and it probably won't cuz we've seen aana or you can learn this and you can increase conversions from 1% to 2% also what I like about this is it's not a big claim I'm not being like learn copy rning Be A Millionaire no I'm saying just like you Could improve

conversions from 1% to 2% you can probably that's believable it's not it's it's sincere this ad's really like I believe I believe this I believe it and then there's a few other things that stuck out first of all we started off with that quote from visualized value that you can increase from 1% to 2% so you had this little seed and you said I can do something with that so you started with that and you built and built and built off of that that was Your first piece of inspiration then your second piece of inspiration

was the the Volkswagen ad so now you have these two pieces of inspiration one in terms of the copy one in terms of the visual the way that the information is going to be organized and how it's the hierarchy that is going to show up so both of those things and then what you do is you're designing inigma as much as you're writing inigma so design and writing are working together and what You're doing is you're using both of them to amplify the other and then you're tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until the copy Comes

Alive tells a story that once again one Mississippi two Mississippi instant that's it I was it was um this was probably two days and 25 rewrites and I'm not trying to make out like it's like that's you can do it you can do it there's no right way of doing it but I I rarely get from I can't I Couldn't write that as it as it is on the screen right now you can't just say go write that like the only way in my opinion you can make this out is if you build it up

piece by piece by piece by piece by that's how it worked I believe there should be like a theme there should be like not a moral but this is sort of the lesson this is what the story is getting at this is what holds the whole thing together and So when you have a sense of that then every detail kind of goes back to it every little color every little Sparkle every little thing that's in there is is related to this theme of somebody who's awful of somebody who's a Conor of somebody who's you know

bar barbaric or whatever every detail is sort of like a hologram and has kind of like the the whole of it is embedded in the details um and details are incredibly important so you want to make something Come to life right so you want to talk about the colors you want to you want to use I like a lot of physical cues like people can relate to to to seeing things to giving a very good visual picture they can also relate to the smells to the sounds so creating a very physical environment gets people into

the stories and draws them in and and you want to like if if the character is from the first person which some of my stories Are are from an omniscient narrator inside that person you have little words and cues that put you inside that character you know that this is like their experience from the inside you know these are like little ingredients that go into the stew that kind of make it a good story yes surprise is very important you know to have turning points and like I was going here and now I didn't realize

this is happening you know a relatability where There's some emotion involved that is experiential that everybody can relate to how do you think about the total addressable market for the things that you're writing because you're staying there it's something that everybody can relate to but then you also hear Hey the universal is actually in the particular well you know um we can walk and chew gum at the same Time so that you can do two things at the same time so the details the physical details of the environment make it Sparkle make it come to

life make you feel it make you see it make you smell it make you hear it okay those are the particulars in there but the emotional overtone of it the fact that someone is facing death that they're on the verge of failure that they're dealing with envy that they are somebody who's become grandiose and Is hurting people left we all face those things yeah that that's the the tone of it the overall theme of the story is universal but the details are very particular so in Mastery I talk about Leonard Da Vinci and how his

paintings are so uncanny and weird because they feel like the real life they feel alive and and he does it through detail the details he creates this kind of Timeless sense of being there through the intensity of his focus on details so that that's sort of an example of I want to end with what you call your secret ambition where you say to make things such as reading studying the classics and philosophy something hip so that young people would be inspired to step away from the TV and the internet and challenge their minds why is

that so important to you well um you know I've been Blessed since I'm was young and grew up in a different era in which um books played such a large part of my life they kind of created my imagination they expanded my imagination from a very early age so you've got your own limited life when you're a child and if you don't have parents that are perfect and if you don't come from a lot of money even even if you do come from a lot of money your world is kind of limited and as a

child You're a bit frust frustrated by the fact that you're small and you don't have powers you read a book and you're transported out of your little world you transported into a fantasy world you transported into the real world into other countries into the past and it's like a Magic Carpet right so I remember um when I was a kid I I couldn't fathom this idea that human beings existed 500,000 years ago and what were They like and what their was their world like you look around now we're driving cars we've got you know toaster

talk about the ' 50s and refrigerators and television there were no Teslas back then no how's it possible and it obsessed me and it created my imagination which if I didn't have I wouldn't be able to write books it made my life you know and so I want other People to have that and it's a power that hopefully you develop as a child but because kids are so programmed now and and they don't have the freedom to discover things on their own and everything is fed to them that I think people grow up and they

get kind of cranky and they become kind of desperate because they don't have any inner resources when they're bored ah I'm bored okay let me think about a million years ago let me go get a book about That let me look at the National Geographic let me go to the library right the word that's coming to mind for me is a like an enchanted that you have yeah and the world is enchanting it's just you you you stop thinking of it you don't you're not able to see it anymore and so I remember early on

when the 48 Laws of Power maybe my I don't know how much later after that but I got contacted by this man who was a librarian head librarian at a library in Dade County Florida in a very Urban mostly black neighborhood and he said there were these kids that would come in they found the 48 law of power they're like 10 11 years old and now they're like looking at books about Julius Caesar and Louis the 14th and you know Haley salassi and all the other characters in the book that I written about they got

excited by history so um history seems like something that's So dead to us but it's the most exciting Adventure you can ever imagine you know people thought differently than we do now they had different Customs their clothes were all weird they're like exotic animals and yet they're human and yet they have the same relatable emotions that we have and to enter those worlds is mindblowing right so I wanted to make history exciting for people particularly for young people to kind of make them realize that it's not just a Bunch of dead facts it's exciting and

it also teaches you incredible lessons about the present what would you say here about the excitement of writing and the excitement of The Craft of writing and what you've discovered there well you know sometimes you know when I was younger I would write sometimes if I was drunk I drugs or none of that I would just write man I was I was so high it was great it was Fantastic then I would read it the next day oh this is crap or I would read it 10 years later go this is total nonsense okay so

my point is when you're most excited you're probably writing your worst crap huh right and sometimes you can you can get that feeling of excitement and things will be good and and will click but nine times out of 10 it leads you into bad places because you start writing without Thinking and you think it's great and you and to me personally the true writing comes in the editing now some people aren't like that so I can only really speak for myself but if you're going into writing because you think it's a high boy if you

got it you're in the wrong field it is lonely it can be very boring it can be very frustrating and then when it's over man you feel Fantastic um so when I finish a book or I finish a chapter at this point I have a really great feeling but it doesn't last that long but when the book's finished now I can look back I could die tomorrow which could happen to anybody I don't it's fine I got what I I expressed what I wanted to do I don't have this feeling like I wasted my my

life and that feeling is very very strong and very powerful and so accomplishing a book and writing it well and getting it Done and realizing despite the kind of dumbness in our culture writers are still revered for a reason because it's something very ancient and because we all use language and to talk and communicate but people who actually are able to do that in in a written form there's a revered element of it there's something kind of divine or saintly or Godlike about it so writers are revered so if you put the time and you

write a Book it's going to be painful it may take you a year for me it takes several years but you've you've done it people will look at you differently you'll have a you'll look at yourself differently it'll last for for years and years and years hopefully and so the rewards come at some point but they're not they're never immediate sometimes in the process of writing you feel excited you feel wow this is great those aren't you can't be motivated by that because There's so few and far between it would often be eye opening to

my students when I would come into class and I'd say you know you're because you're speakers of English you have a kind of builtin bilingualism they say what do you mean by that I say for historical reasons you have the possibility of drawing on two completely Different histories and origins of words in order to create registral and color effects are you talking about Latin and Anglo-Saxon yeah absolutely so if if if you say I live in a mansion right or if you say I live in a house why does one sound more expensive than the

other right I mean back all the way at the beginning they were the same thing Ma and you know our English house were the same things but you know be Because the Normans came over to England and conquered the local English people and set themselves up in court the the the latinate through French uh words got a higher socioeconomic register ah right and and so immediately the words you use talk about your class Y and when my students would make this realization it was like wow I've got some power that I didn't have before I

maybe I could hear it in my ear when Somebody's being snoody or somebody's trying to establish their street cred but now that I know the actual rules for making that work my ear becomes better right and uh the difference between freedom and liberty becomes more audible right right um so that's the word level considerations for voice the other consideration is the sentence level so and I I would try to teach this it's a very complicated question because English grammar is not trivial and but it's immensely flexible and you can create all kinds of different pet

effects and color Effects by uh by using the flexible syntax and grammar of English but I I would say how can I how can I teach to my students where they don't have to go back to this subject that they hated when they were in sixth grade but they could get the meat and potatoes of it and and I was thinking can I do 80% % of the work with 80% of The effect with 20% of the grammar you know sure and so I boil it down to saying think about sentences as belonging basically to

one of three classes so the the Harden soul of sentence call it a predication is the is the main subject and the main verb every sentence has these now you might have an implied main subject and maybe an imperative verb where you know give me that would be an example right give the the predication is you give me That so the subject drops away and you just have the the command uh but every sentence is built around that Cel if you can find on the page or in your ear that kernel then you can build

the sentence in the way that allows the sentence to recreate emotionally pratically the mental state that the speaker is in or that the narrator wants You to be in in that that the sentence start to participate in the affect of the thing that it's describing right so if I start with my predication and I put in a lot of other modifiers that creates a certain kind of syntax mhm he pointed the gun at his friend right there's a there's a kind of front-loaded shock to that right yeah you know or the gun exploded and uh

a whiff of smoke uh Exited the barrel you know these are clauses that have the action up front you know the the main subject main verb get delivered like that and then we see the consequences of those things now that's a very different thing than delaying the predication after a lot of modifiers so if you if if you want to put the reader into entirely opposite mental state you could say way back uh across the yard uh near the fence where a tiny Brook ran along a A an old hedge R she hid right and

of course by having these modifiers first the readers in this suspenseful State yeah I was like what are you going to say what are you going to say what are you going to say and the she doesn't appear until the very end so she is hidden from the reader in the sentence oh wow I did not catch that right yeah in the same way that she's she's hidden in the physical spin I did Not catch that you have to wait for her wait for oh there she is right now the Third Way would be to

split that predication down the middle and basically start with your subject and put a bunch of stuff in the middle and then a verb you know and and you can do this for all kinds of reasons too you can create suspense with that you can create comedy with it right uh it's probably the rarest form if you count the sentences In an average novel most of them are going to be in the first uh species you know where the where the subject and verb are pretty upfront um a smaller number are going to be this

delayed predication and maybe the smallest I I don't know I'd like to do that experiment sometimes and actually get the data but my my intuition is that splitting the predication is the rarest but it has a very powerful and you know not only it The effect in itself can create these different forms of delay or suspense or or Intrigue but using it inside a paragraph when you've just had three sentences of you know uh of trailing sentence in a row suddenly stopping and changing that changing it up it's like a a key change inic mus

or going to a different [Music] chord tell me about your just communication lessons that you've Learned from Peter teal he is so distinct in the way that he communicates I know you've spent a lot of time with him especially early in your career he is an amazing Communicator uh and one thing that he does super well is he comes up with these uh like very evocative very short statements that really stick in your brain and I don't know I don't know to do that I don't really know anybody else who does That like he does

but it's uh he has like very interesting things to say and very interesting ways to say them and most people you're lucky to get one or the other he is like a very rare combination of both it's super impressive what do you think contributes to that he thinks about the world in this sort of like deeply unconstrained way he has you know I mean the first thing anybody would say about him is he is a truly brilliant original Thinker and that's just rare there's a boundlessness about your thinking that really stands out like I feel

like you have that same sort of lack of constraint I think he's he's more of a like here is this totally here is a totally different view on something that no one else has ever expressed and now sounds like obviously at least interesting and often obviously correct and I think my view of the world is Often more like can we just do more like we have this like vector can we push on it harder is that like the David dor sense of like everything is possible that's not limited by the constraints of physics yeah and

also that there's not enough people don't to tie back to Peter um I remember sometime someone asked like a long time ago someone asked him what was your biggest investing mistake ever and Everybody expected him to say something like well I invested in this company but all this money and it blew up and he said the biggest mistake I don't know if was B or C but biggest mistake ever let's say was not invested in the series via Facebook and that is the kind of mistake I try not to make so I'm like a big

believer and find what is working and like go aggressively after it ideas are such a power law and it's about finding That core thing and just doubling tripling down on that yeah I think that the really good ideas are rare and when you find one you should quadruple down on it and should be the only thing you push on you know you should only push on a few of these things in writing in business whatever I I I really I really really believe in this principle and I mean I think this is why like all

business almost all business books are terrible right there's like three good Ideas and 300 pages and what a reader wants is three good ideas in one page yeah did Paul teach you anything specifically about writing yeah mostly just by reading his essays I think like many other people my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from Reading PG's essays he's like an unbelievable writer and that was a topic of like great interest to me and many other people um I think a whole generation of us like copied PG in all Of these

ways uh and so although he was never like let me teach you a class on right I and others clearly took a lot of inspiration because I think he just does it in a style that resonates so much Clarity Precision density yeah like if you go read average Business book versus pgsa it's like they're both business writing but other than that they're like different species there's no posture he says interesting stuff he Says it clearly he doesn't waste your time nothing feels fake mhm pitching coming up with put the story How does writing factor into

that uh again I think of like writing as a tool to think more clearly or to get to the essence of something and then hopefully when you're in a pitch meeting for your startup or whatever you've already figured out how to get that down to the clear essence of it um and if you can it's really dramatically different To be on the other side of the pitch if the person has like gotten their thinking clear ahead of time or not it's also a bonus if they're a clear communicator and and I and I can like

think of a few examples of people who I think are exceptionally clear thinkers and horrible communicators but it's rare like I had to sit here earlier as you were talking about that and think um and so if someone can get their thinking clear Before a pitch then they can get across to you what they're trying to do and there are a lot of people who can do this without writing but I often find that writing is is really is really helpful and I often find that there are these ideas that I think I'm super clear

on and then I try to make myself write it down write down like a onepage summary and I was like oh I didn't really understand that in the first place