Inside the Mind of a Newsletter Mogul (Sam Parr Interview)

you don't have to think clearly necessarily to be a good speaker but you have to think clearly in order to be a great writer how did you figure out how to write viral articles I was like well hold on a minute let me do this math if I get a million people to subscribe to my newsletter and I email them every day I bet you I could make like $2 million a month doing that that changed my life make it concrete make it Visual and like make a promise at the top and then there's like subcategories so like women who want to sleep with werewolves yeah that's like a thing uh yeah it's a thing tell me about the writing so the vision the copy talking to customers taking notes how did you write the

vision so usually what I do is I steal from a lot of stuff and I mash it together yeah um and so I like branding and I like words words are very important to me every word has to serve a purpose and so I'm a big fan of like

um uh 1980s and 1970s Wall Street Journal in New York Times as ads like the internet existed when they would buy a full magazine or like their own newspaper or newspaper they would buy out these full ads and I love like old Porsche ads Rolex so like Rolex had this beautiful campaign years ago where it says like the men who what was it the men who create the world wear Rolex and they would do like an ad with like Dwight Eisenhower wearing a Rolex or some ship captain in the in the Navy and I was fascinated by that type of like sophistication and I was also fascinated by cheekiness so like the ability I'm obsessed with this idea of how to be professional yet informal and so Rolex is a good example of that it's a fancy watch but it's meant for diving and sports you know what I mean and so I'm really fascinated how can I be like cheeky and fun but also professional and Elite and so I took uh British racing

green that's one of my favorite colors it's the color of a lot of old Jaguars and old Triumph Motorcycles and then I like was trying to craft the phrasing and the copy on the website to be uh like Felix Dennis who wrote This Book how to get rich um it's almost like Richard Branson and Mick Jagger had a baby like he founded Maxim yeah Maxim magazine and so I wanted like a professional and Elite but a um like fun and so I would just what I would do is I would get on the phone and usually what I do where I do Zoom I like will say phrases phrases that I like and I'll look at the reaction just like a comedian of the audience and i' like that one didn't hit okay I got to change my phrasing a little bit and I would like use a different phrasing and like for example I would say like the word business group therapy and like someone I like their eyebrows moved I'm like oh gotcha okay that's the phrase

that I got to keep with and then I would try all these other phrases and it wouldn't hit so I would just like constantly talk to people to see the reaction and then that helped me make the copy in the website but um I'm really good at collo copal copy you know like um um there's like a bunch of different types of copy but like a lot of people call me a copywriter but that's like when I think copyright I think of like direct marketing so if you go to like a website like mle fool yeah you'll see 3,000 words of copy and they're trying to sell you on something and what they do is almost like ux and or like building an app they're actually building an app but they're doing it with copy but instead of building an app they're convincing you to like fall down the sliber slope and buy something and there's like Frameworks to do that I do colloquial copy which is almost like designing a website on Photoshop and

making it look good yeah and uh that's what I'm good at and so I know how to like write words to make people feel a certain way you know Harry

yeah so he texted me this week he said copy is like food how it looks is as important as how it tastes and I thought that was just money that when you're talking about Photoshop the copy's got to look good and I think a good copywriter is almost like vertically integrated with design well you yeah exactly the whole thing has I call it texture your your landing pages need texture they need to feel and read a certain way and so if you give me a blank piece of paper and I could just I could write something and probably get someone to buy but it's a lot better if I can do both yeah uh and so uh I think copy is more important than design I can if I can have I can have really bad design and not achieve My outcome I could have really good design and Achieve My outcome but if I had both it's ideal I like that point about

talking to people one of the things that I've really noticed is that good CEOs are slogan years and I see this in I'll sit down with really high level CEOs and I kind of get to know them and so I have dinner with them once twice three times four times the average person if you become friends with them they tell you different stories all the time good CEOs tell you the same story over and over and over again time and time and again and what I'm noticing is they're doing exactly what you're saying they're telling the same story and they're just tweaking a word here tweaking a word there and they're so in love with their project that they see every social interaction as a chance to test out their pitch well it's propaganda is what it is totally so like I I like read a

new history book every week yeah and like when you read about great cult leaders even great normal leaders US presidents or Hitler they like it's repetitive and you like it's propaganda is what it is it's manipulation yes hopefully you're manipulating people to do good things but in some regard it's it's bad things but I love like reading about how people manipulate one another with words and one of the common threads is you have to repeat constantly you say the same stuff over and over and over again and you have to use memorable phrasing yeah so like at Hampton we a confidentiality oath so you have to like you can't talk about what is happening in Hampton because that ruins the the uh people wanting to share and so we were thinking about words and um we were thinking about like what we could what we could say and we had this like sentence that said it and it not memorable and we're like nothing no one

knowwhere H uh let's just say nothing no or nothing no one nobody you know like just that that we just use those three words instead and like just don't talk anything to anyone yep you know what I mean um and so like I like phrasing like that that makes things memorable because the words actually matter because if it's not memorable no one will do it totally the line that I have been thinking about for years is that in the human mind the way that we process spoken information is that repetition is indistinguishable from truth and that there's something about the human brain that when it hears something over and over again it just bu into it yeah and there's like phrases that people say that they don't Mak sense but because there's such good phrases you just do it and it changes your behavior for example my biggest pet peeve there's this phrase called when people say I might as well so someone will be in line for something

and they don't even want the thing that they're in line for and they say I've been in line for an hour it's going to be another 3 hours I might as well just keep waiting like you might as well not like you like you shouldn't wait like if you don't want it bail but because that phrase is so good like you use that you use that phrase to like keep waiting in line you know what I mean yeah like it's that's always fascinating me where there's like phrases that makes that that that are good sounding but it's like no you might as well not you might as well bail you're using that phrase wrong you know what I mean yeah like and that's always been fascinating to me so as you're doing you read a book a week

and you're really interested in these Thrillers and these big history books and how has that influenced your writing so uh I read a lot of that stuff because I feel like I'm a soft person and it's fun to like you're not well it's fun to like read about like a shipwreck it's funny it's the second time you said that today really well the first time you said that was I was soft the second time is I need to prove to myself that I was a good onene which is actually pulling from the same threat I'm all it's always motivated by some high school girlfriend who DP me you or who made fun of me like it's all a big rudge to like get back of people who made fun of me or to prove to my father that I'm good enough but uh like I like reading about like um books of like where people suffer extreme hardship and it makes me feel better about what I'm going through so that's one of the reasons why I like that like Lewis and

Clark like baller Z of joa just having this baby and strap it it on her and walk it across unknown country for two years like yeah she could do that I could do this stupid blog post you know what I mean so that's why I like reading that stuff I mean these are great storytellers so there has to be

something there right take a book like American Kingpin I know you love that I love americ Kingpin so um what I what really fascinated me is how they can describe indepth scenery and feelings with simple language so for example Ernest Hemingway well or or like some of these great authors that I love are like JD Salinger like these like people like if you read catcher and the Ry like it's like a pretty interesting book in that it's like impacted America but like there'll be a sentence like he was sad it just says he was sad yeah and like it's I'm always fascinated about how you can use Simple language and simple sentences and short sentences but it be in depth so like I do you do you ever use that website Hemingway app yeah of course so

if you go and put in Hemingway or um some of like these Great American Authors they write like a fifth grade reading level yeah and like I'm always it's really cool how you can like create something that uh is a bit in depth or has a lot of meaning to it with simple language and so that's one of my big takeaways I also uh just the research they do so um what's the guy who wrote uh Hamilton uh L Miranda oh no he wrote the the play yeah he wrote Titan he wrote Titan or what's this guy Carl Robert Carl Robert Carol car like every sentence has a purpose and it required him to go and research it and I think that that intentionality and that like rigor is very very inspiring I remember in the Titan biography he describes the way that Rockefeller wore a tie when he was like 12 years old and I just I remember just being at my house in Brooklyn at the time and I was just like that is such insan insane research it was

amazing right it's just like a crazy flex but I think about this a lot when I'm talking to R passage students talking to new writers whatever it is what people will try to do is they'll try to like on their personal website or in their writing they'll try to flex they'll be like I'm the chief marketing officer at this place or I've been doing this for like seven years it's like don't write any of that yeah just write in a way where you can have a series of words a sentence an observation that shows me your experience I don't want to see it explicitly I want it all to be implicit and when I see the Tha description and Titan I'm like okay now I can trust this guy it's cool right way more than the bibliography at the end of the book and you know I'll tell you fun this is could to be a good clip for you I'll tell you a funny story so I like

American King pinned and here's what so Ross brick orbite he was the guy who created Silk Road they sold like2 billion dollar worth of drugs in two or three years it was like the eBay of drugs and murder you could like hire someone to do crazy I knew him before he got busted in San Francisco in San Francisco I went to a party and I was flirting with this girl and he bust in the door and he's tall and he's good-looking and he was like pretty charming and he stole this girl I was with but I was like not even mad because I was like it's a good-looking guy I don't blame you and this was like 10 years ago or 14 years ago and um I just like said a handful of words to him and and friended him on Facebook and turns out he lived down the street from me in Glen Park in San Francisco on I get home one day on like a Tuesday and there was uh on the news and there was something like going on down in our little village

in our little neighborhood I was like what the hell's going on and I see the headline the founder of Silk Road Ross o was arrested at this Library Five Doors Down from my house and I'm like oh my God I knew that guy I knew him and I went and took all the pictures I had them in Facebook and took them down and saved them and then I read the book American Kingpin and Nick Bilton yeah uh he uh did such a good job of explaining Glenn Park and when rth got arrested he did he's like this Bakery was here I was like yeah I know that that's the Brazilian Bakery I know that one and he explained all this perfectly he goes the wind was blowing this way and his shadow was to his left and I like researched like Nick how' the hell do you know this stuff and he like wrote an interview where he's like I looked at the weather uh I looked at like where the like wind was blowing I saw Facebook photos of Ross and I saw that like he was facing

this way and he and also Ross was like writing in his diary daily about what was happening I read all of that and I baked it into the story and I was like that was so beautiful I felt like I was there he did such a good job and in fact I I was in that neighborhood and he did such an effective job of doing it and so it's just amazing how much like rigor goes into that totally so Caro has a few things so when Robert Caro was first writing his biographies of Lyndon

B Johnson what he wanted to do was Interview the people in the Hill Country actually right out by your Airbnb his lbj's place just short of Fredericksburg and he would go out and wouldn't get good information so he was living in New York at the time and he said to his wife we're moving to the Hill Country so they lived there for two or three years and the thing that Carol would always say is make me see the scene make me see the scene make me see the scene so what I did was I went to Caro's Ranch and I brought the first Carol you and I was in his childhood home and I was reading the book in my right hand and looking at the rep rendition of the house actually on his Ranch and just looking at how car described things but I think that's the work you actually move there you do these interviews they take forever and the other thing that I think is really interesting from an interview perspective that I learned from Jimmy

Sony who just wrote the founders guest on this podcast is so many of the best interview anecdotes come from people who are outside of the main stage when you think of the founders you think of David tax you think of Peter teal you think of Keith R boy you think of Elon Musk in terms of the history of PayPal he said no a lot of the best insights come came from the guy who interned there the guy who worked there for two and a half months had one interaction with Elon and because they're not media trained or something there's an honesty and a purity to their observations I also think that a lot of these biographers or people writing non-fiction books I have no proof of this I think some of them I wouldn't say they've lie but I think think what like they don't let the truth sometimes get in the way of a good story like for example I'm reading this book about the Korean War okay and this guy is like

writing about this Soldier and he's like uh and as he CL closed the door he thought about X Y and Z and it's like well that that was 70 years ago you don't remember what you were thinking as you close that door more more likely than not but it's not a lie to say he thought because he probably thought about that another time or he probably like told this guy you know what I mean but you don't let like you're like well but I could weave that into the story it's so what I kind of learn what I kind of learned was like reading a lot of these books is um you can kind of like like for example if I'm telling you a story where I'm like yeah I was driving to the driving to my car and the guy next to me was telling me the story and we were just laughing well he didn't tell you there was three other people in the back of the car was also chiming in it's like just leave those people out you know what I mean you you don't bring

that into the story yeah and so like when you're writing like an interesting story or like uh you can pick kind of certain parts and every once in while you could fudge a little bit of it it's like look it doesn't matter like that that's not a mean thing but I can

make that to make a more cohesive story I think that's what a lot of them do yeah um but I don't know if that's a fact tell me about the these early days of the hustle so I want to hear the Genesis of your interest in copywriting I want to talk about the pen names and I want to hear how did you figure out how to write viral articles you told this one story about a news article that you saw you realized it wasn't very good there was something in the news article that he had made a bunch of money or something he said wait hold on let's bring that that yeah they missing yeah so tell me about this yeah so I started the hustle because I um was always interested in sales like I always wanted to like convince a girl to like me like in high school or like convince someone to like me or or or learn how to get voted class president whatever were you class person no but it didn't work uh I was still learning um but I I had a I

opened up a hot dog stand in college and I was like all right I'm going to use this to like sell hot dogs whatever and then I was like this is exhausting How can I like sell to like more people and not have to work all the time and that's when I learned about copyrighting I took Neville madora was now my best friend I took his course did you know him at the time no no wait you took his course then he became like your best friend now he lives I took his course and then I cold emailed him and I said I'm going to hosted an event in San Francisco I'm going to take care of your accommodation fly up here I'll pay for it and it was really just like 10 of my friends and we each paid like $10 to pay for his $300 flight or something like that and he stayed at my couch in my house in San Francisco and we became best friends and so that's how it worked uh so yeah so he then he was the best man in my wedding

um so thank you and so I um I like learned about copywriting and then I read the biography of Ted Turner that's the guy who started CNNN yeah he's he was a wild guy and he was like from the south I'm from Missouri I was living in Tennessee but he created this like New York Media company and I was like I'm an outsider I love news I like content what can I do and so I was like let's just what if we Blended this copywriting with like some type of Journalism and we created a a a way that I can make money with content because I love content I love news and so I started I started a Blog and the problem with the blog is that it was like impossible to get people to continually come back to your website like it was really hard like BuzzFeed let's say they have 100 million uniques a month they have to get you know whatever 100 million divided by 30 to come every single day yeah but then I started learning about email and at the

time no one took it seriously it was mostly like people who did newsletters was like the mly fool but then like other like not other but different scam scammy Shady like affiliate sites what

year was this I got interested in it in 2014 okay um I started the company 2016 but I was playing with email in 2014 yeah and I was like well but hold on a minute let me do this math if I get a

million people to subscribe to my newsletter and I email them every day although they're not different people if I get a 50% open rate so a million time 30 if I email them every day that's uh 30 million people 50% open rate that's 15 million people 15 million people a month I bet you I could make like $2 million a month doing that as opposed to getting them to come to my website constantly and so I pitched a bunch of people this idea and they were like no that's nonsense that won't work and like the founder of a big company um he is the CEO of I'll tell you after the CEO of a large like digital media company he was like that's man that's never going to make any money and I'm like man do the math if you're on your phone who cares if you're on Chrome Safari or in your email app if I have your attention you're going to come like I'm the ad will work and I can you can read my content it's going to

work and so I just launched this thing and the hustle and I created a Blog in order to get email subscribers to the the newsletter and so so that was your One Core metric email Subs yeah it it

was opens so how many people opened up my newsletter every single day cool and so the hustle now we're at close to 4 million subscribers so 4 time 30 the math doesn't exactly add up like that but let's say that's 120 million uh people a month uh not unique people but like reads a month and I'm like that's like the same I mean that's a lot of people that's a lot of reads um the math is just there and you only need like three people to run that um and so I just did that math and I was like I think this could work and so in order to make it popular I think in the first

year we got 150,000 subscribers year 2 500 year 3 1 million year four when we sold it 1.7 and the first 150,000 just came through blogging cuz I knew how to blog and I knew how to get people would come to a website and I would go to like

different subreddits that I thought so my whole strategy was go to where the people who you want already are and siphon them off and so now there's Twitter but back then I didn't use Twitter but they're on Reddit and so they' be like on this subreddit called self-publishing for some reason a lot of self-publishing publishing people my content was the hustle it was business news and it was for mostly uh Young Folks which is mostly young men who would read it 70 60% young men and I this P the self-publishing subreddit I

thought that might be where some of our people are so I'm like what content would get popular in that subreddit and so I knew a guy who was kind of a SLE ball at the time where he was making 60 Grand a month and basically what he would do is find books on how to sleep with women and like take all like the interesting topics from it and like merge it into his own book and then put like a sexy title on it and then like get fake reviews for it and then that would like go to the the top of the Kindle rankings that he would make money huh and I was like that I think that's crazy that you're doing that I'm going to write a story about it so I wrote a story about it and then the next week I said to top it off I'm going to become a bestseller I'm going to prove that this is nonsense that this is that you can do this and you shouldn't trust everything you read on the internet and so we found

out that uh romance novels had the RO most liquidity meaning the most amount of new books and the most amount of buyers yep and then there's like subcategories so like women who want to sleep with werewolves yeah that's like a thing uh yeah it's a thing well look at the movie uh that movie that came out 50 Shades of Gray well no there's some other movie with a guy named Taylor what's it called where he's I don't know there's like vampires they're like vampires this is all news to me it's like hot vampires who turn into werewolves that type of thing uh is to me uh anyway there was another like category of like hot military guys you know like if you're like a hot marine or in steel and then me and my old life yeah and so we made it like a a werewolf who become like a

Navy SEAL and slept with women or something like that and we put like some crazy title on it or some crazy uh this was a book that you published yeah so what we did was we plagiarized another book so I just found another book that was popular and I just took the I took the content I barely changed it and it got approved through Kindle and we put a sexy title on and then we went and got a bunch of fake reviews and we were number one in our category what yeah I had no idea yeah and then the um publisher Harley Quinn was like threatening to sue us the second week we launched the company uh because they go you plagiarize and we're like look guys we're actually trying to help you we're not making fun of romance novels we're just trying to prove that Amazon is kind of like NE being negligent here and letting like people do crazy stuff and that you shouldn't trust everyone just cuz hey they're a best seller like it's

and we're actually helping you and they're like we get it just take it down and so anyway I published those two blog posts and we got like a million people to our website because I posted them on that subreddit and we viral there which went viral in this other place which viral in this other place and I would do that every month and so another one was like soilent soilent like Slim Fast for nerds okay my publication I'm a nerd it's like nerd that's a good colloquialism Slim Fast for nerds that is a great example what you're talking about yeah exactly and so um I lived on we had a guy live on soent for 30 days and we like posted it in the subreddit of soilent and so just doing those crazy things over and over and over again we got 150,000 subscribers in one year and our popup would say oh wait no no no the popup well while you're here the hustle is actually uh like a daily newsletter and we write these crazy blog

posts every once in a while if you want our newsletter sign up and if you don't like it we'll vill you a dollar that was like the the that's what the copy said that's so good yeah yeah because that's how people would chatter in a bar yeah it's like yo not another pop up oh come on if you don't like it throw your throw your dollar well it's a attention interest desire action so that's like what's that so so uh that's just a framework I follow it's a it's it's I

didn't make it up it's an old thing so attention grab someone's attention interest get them interested make them desire it by uh telling them facts and how it's going to solve their problem get them to act so for example if I'm going to tell you to drink more water because it's good for you you maybe will do it or maybe you won't do it but let's say you're trying to gain muscle I say look have you ever seen those big beef cakes at the gym who walk around with gallons of jugs of water that's an attention getting like story you see the reason they're doing that is because water builds muscles 30% faster than not drinking water this is fake obviously I'm making this up and then the desire is like so if you drink like eight gallons of water a day uh you're going to get bigger muscles at a 30% faster rate you're going to feel better in this way and your skin is going to look great so all you have to do is drink bar water

and specifically eight junks a day like that's how I would convince you to drink water yep you know what I mean yep and so I would and then at the bottom buy water buy our water for the action exactly cool and so that's like Ada is like a way to like grab people's attention who are new so transactional traffic and to get them to act and so I would do that with the popups and I would do that with like the footer uh you know at the bottom of an article you got to imagine someone's flow they're

there you got to get their attention yeah so you just I would do that constantly and that's how we get subscribers I heard that you're onboarding email for the hustle was sick yeah so that's another thing with a lot of websites there's this part that I call the Forgotten text so when you sign up to a newsletter the thank you page after you sign up is typically like your very generic yeah cuz you're just and you installed some software and just thanks check your email totally and so I'm like we got to make that special but that was like the welcome email 9 out of 10 times before at least before we started it was just like some generic like thanks for subscribing click here to confirm instead I was like no that's forgotten text we got to use that and so I wrote this like really good in-depth email where I was like uh what just just happened was magic you see as you entered your email a little bell went

off in our office and when we heard that Bell we went crazy I just saw my head of operations Cara she just ran outside and hugged a guy and another and another employee John is now doing 15 push-ups because he's so excited he had to work off some energy and then this other person is going to do this other thing wait I got to go stop them they're going to get in trouble but hey before I leave I just want to say I really appreciate you for signing up you're going to get your first email tomorrow and it means a lot to me that you're here like I would do things like that and at the time our brand was like a little broy so like we could get away with being a little obnoxious but that was like the whole trick was like the Forgotten text it always has to be good you just said at the time one of the best piece of advice I've ever gotten from you is when you

want to research how another company does copy don't look at what they're doing now go to the internet archive and see what they did in the early days that's so good you got to go to web archive because because it's kind of like if you're a 13-year-old kid and you want to be a pro basketball player don't exactly look at LeBron today go and look at what workouts he did when he was 13 yeah go and look at what stats he was doing so you can track your way up there you know it's not exactly fair to compare yourself to the final version right and so what I like to do is whenever I'm researching a company or trying to get ideas for how they phrased or positioned their product you go to web archive and you what I tend to do is I find news articles in the was Journal Tech crunch wherever where I'm like all right they're at they just in this article they announc series a or they announc uh that they're at this much

revenue or they announc that they're expanding this product offering to this other thing I'm like all right cool let's see what the phrasing was three months before that because if they raised that funding round they're not that means things are working let's look at what things were when they were nothing and they had to make it work yeah not where they have all these other offerings and they're going broad let's see figure out exactly how it started or for example uh you could figure out like what type of culture the company had like were they zany were they like what what because often times when you're starting a new company you're like well Shopify does this and it's all professional and polish and it's like okay yeah but everyone knows Shopify let's see what they did when they had to stick out do you know what I mean yep so yeah web archiv is like the best thing ever I think a really good example this

is morning Brew morning Brew had that amazing homepage click your enter email it was so simple and now if you were to say hey morning Brew they've done really well they sold on you're to go on their home homepage it no longer has that we did that too or I'm not part of it anymore the hustle did that too and it's so stupid here's what happens adding complexity because you have I think the I don't know how many employees the hustle has a lot morning probably has two or 300 it's because people who didn't start it and didn't look at the numbers early on say well gq.com has an open homepage where we can click around the Articles or this website has an open page no one has just a plain email inbo like an email inbox and they're like yeah but that thing worked really well well but all these like committees are like well but they do this they do that

they do this you like yeah but this worked and so anyway it's like a committee making the decision not necessarily like looking at the numbers and figuring out what's right and you just copy other people I like this meta strategy for starting media companies to look at a space and then counter position against New York media so Ben Thompson does this against something like in gadget New York media had a very standard way of talking about tech Ben Thompson comes in and says we're going to analyze the business bus model of tech there are all these sorts of standard ways and there are many media companies especially over the last decade that really were saying hey New York media does this we're going to do that and we're be able to reach people because it won't be so sterile and sort of in the homogeneous Circle joke yeah I mean bar is a good example ESPN you're wearing suits you're behind a desk you

make some jokes but it's everything's like pretty uh above the line and they're like H yeah we're going to appeal to like a little bit of the lower common denominator a bunch of like you know Pizza Bros just sit around you know

what I'm saying and it works and so yeah I think you can look at what whatever's working and go the opposite telling about this book that you brought elements of eloquence why' you bring this you brought one book tell me about it I just started reading this or I I I I read a lot of it and I'm going through so you you were talking about copyrighting and so I'm obsessed with phrasing yeah you ever listen to Scott Galloway yeah he's beautiful at phrasing I like people like that or Felix Dennis this author of how to get rich tell me about Galloway what does he do so well so he I don't think of him as a great Frasier I think of him is really good at other things so what am I missing he's lyrical he's like a rapper when he when he talks you know like the rhythm is wonderful yes and I really like good Rhythm because that's another way that you Captivate people's attention so like when to leave space is when to talk

really low but then when to get loud you know like like people who like have that Rhythm he's also funny and he's funny yeah watch his L2 videos he would come out with these one this one video every Mercy No Malice it was great and he would but he would use these phrases like he would call Amazon Microsoft I forget the other he' call him the four horsemen yes and like he would like talk like really slow like this but then he would like make us like but who anyway who cares about those losers but anyway like he would like make these like he like had this beautiful phrasing so I love phrasing same with um Felix Dennis yeah so like he would he like he would write his phrasing will be beautiful like he'll say things like so why am I here sitting writing this book you may ask because it's fun like you know what I mean like he'll just like he'll talk to the reader in a really nice way and ask himself questions and I really enjoy

that so I was with dares sha do you know who dares is CTO of HubSpot yeah darash darash is kind of my hero so darash is this guy really good writer you know very good writer you know he signed up for write a passage and I was super excited I was like yes did he attend could be in the course I don't remember but I bet you he did so here's here's why happened was I called him and I was like or or no I emailed him I said hey you want to hop on a call and he basically responds not really with an emot but with an article about why he doesn't do any meetings and I just I was like that's badass man like you had this in an article and it was funny because if he had sent me that I would have been like maybe got offended or something like that but the fact that it's in an art an article for posterity it doesn't feel personal I was like I respect it dmes is awesome so dmes had a previous company that he started

and he got a little bit of money and then for some reason he wanted to go get his PhD or what did he get his his MBA at MIT and while there he met a guy named Brian and they had this idea for a company and and dares goes all right I'll put up the first 500k for the business but and I'll be the CTO but no one can report to me and that was the rule and that company ended up being HubSpot and now it's worth like $30 billion he's very likely a multi-billionaire oh I didn't know that yeah yeah it's publicly traded so any given day it's worth wor between 20 and $30 billion he's also very prolific and successful angel investor so he's worth billions of dollars um and he told me uh I get dinner with him every once in a while because he bought my company and so I become friendly with him he told me he goes um copyrighting is the most underused or undervalued uh asset in

business and so I wanted to get really good at it and so we studies it and he reads a lot about it and he told me to do read this book and the reason he told me to read this book among for a bunch of different reasons was he gives a know every year at inbound his conference and he was like I read in a book that like to be to be funny being funny helps people remember like what point you have to make and so this guy dares he's an engineer and so he goes so what I did was I took HubSpot I took a 100 employees at HubSpot I broke them down into like sets of 10 and I delivered this speech that I have to 10 different groups and before I did this I built this plugin on Zoom that would count how many times they laughed and when they laughed when I spoke and in this book that I read you want to get a laugh every 90 seconds or something like that and he goes so I honed it in and I looked at my software I'm like all

right I didn't get a laugh for 2 minutes here this time it was three minutes all right I got to put a joke here got to put a joke here and he honed this in and that's how he did it and that was his goal two years ago was to get laughs every like 90 seconds something like that this year he said he goes my goal was to um save more memorable phrases but I didn't know how to do that and he goes I bought this book and it helped me come up with memorable phrases because this book it's called what is it called the elements of eloquence it's basically different tools to make things more memorable to make phrasing more memorable and this is what he used to make his phrases more memorable and so I wanted to learn about it and so I've got a few interesting ones so uh I know that you're like into the Bible now you said you're recently converted and so uh there's a few phrases in here that I thought were cool

have you ever heard of a you said you knew this but you don't remember the words and these words are hard to pronounce so excuse me if I screwed up but a a polyon I don't know what the things are and how they relate to what they are but when you say them I'll be like oh I probably know that so all right so this one is when um you say the same word or close to the same word in the same sentence but this but that word means two different things okay so here's a Biblical one so this is from the Our Father forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us so trespass twice and so that's like an interesting way to PHA uh to phrase that that I love another one is um in the Bible there's tons of these but it's called an antithesis so it's like you say one thing and then you say something that is like the complete opposite of it so here let me find a good example those who can do do those who can't teach so

you're you're trying to like explain like something and so you say this thing and then that thing would ask not what you can do for your country but what your country can do for you would that be antithesis yeah or uh and some of them like blend but like another one would be like um we choose to go to the Moon not because it's easy but because it's hard exactly that's one not because it's easy but because it's hard yeah so instead of just saying like uh we're doing this because it's hard you say not because it's easy but because it's hard right and that's like really good phrase there there's a ton in the Bible where it's like to everything is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven a time to be born a time to die a time to plant a time to pluck A Time to Kill a time to heal so like these like these phrasings are really fascinating wonder if Eminem read that book oh maybe and

here here's one more there's another one where it's called a I have to fight it it's called Uh I think it's called a mer merism merism and it's like um this one's when you use words for Words sake so for example if I wanted to get the attention of a room you just say everyone instead you say ladies and gentlemen or uh when you're getting married uh uh in uh in health or in sickness you could just say all the time right in health or in sickness or like uh instead of saying he ate everything you say like uh or you say Hook Line and Sinker he ate he ate the fish and the hook line Sinker it means he ate a lot well what I like about this is it flies in the face of remove everything unnecessary exactly and that's something I believed in for a long time and then I realized your writing needs to have some soul and you and the phrases like that give soul to it you know like one small one small step for man a giant lead for mankind

yep like though like that's very that's a very memorable phrase that was planned no he didn't mean to say that he he meant to say uh so there was a a there was static in the in the when he was speaking so they couldn't entirely understand what he said but I think he said one small step for a man a giant leap for mankind yeah and so they that a got removed but it so much better one all set for man that's everyone versus him and so uh but then but that's that's an example of another thing I said man and Mankind yeah and so uh anyway I like those types of phrasings I I I think that they're really fascinating how cool is it that for such a definitive moment in human history the technology glitched to dial up the Poetry so much yeah it it worked out beautifully and and I think that's happened a lot of times there's been like a lot of phrases that like people uh didn't say one thing but over the

years it's like become a thing there's a story I bring this up whenever students

will ask me about imposter syndrome and they'll say oh you know I have imposter syndrome and how can I get rid of it and I go you'll never get rid of it and it's something that you're just G to have to deal with and there's a story where Neil Gaiman the fiction writer he goes to a party and there's all these bigname people there and Neil Armstrong basically says I have such bad impostor syndrome there's people here who build businesses they want Olympic goals they've written great books all I did was go where I was told and if Neil Armstrong has impostor syndrome then you will have impostor syndrome by way that's a great line I just went where I was told I like that uh but yeah that's interesting love that story because it just like it's just really the knife in the stomach of impostor syndrome to me yeah it it definitely doesn't go away and I've been fortunate to have those like meetings

with daresh and these people at hustle con and like literally billionaires people worth1 billion dollar definitely doesn't go away tell me about the

combination of headline first two sentences that you really focused on at the hustle so in the world of social media but even not social media you don't if it's just a magazine n you know let's say you have um a 1% click through rate that means that if a uh 100 people see your headline only one actually click it there's a world where you can change 1% to 10% so um a lot of writers at the hustle originally they would write these amazing articles but their headlines sucked and I'm like dude what's that what's that phrase the tree falls in the woods and no one's there there to hear like I'm like dude no one no one's going to read this that you just worked all this work on you got to spend time on the headline because you can change 1% to 10% pretty easily uh once you kind of Master an art of like headlines and then in the world of your phone say similar I mean Tic Tac didn't exist when we started but this is pretty obvious

that you have to grab someone's attention right away and so I need the headline so like on Facebook for example the way your eyes go are headlined description picture like that's usually the story that you're telling yourself or like the that's like the order that you're going like that first of all I try to think in headlines Ju Just like uh so like if I have a good idea of her story I think like what would the YouTube title be yeah or not necessarily because I care about the clicks but because that just helps me like frame it you know like what's my hook but then the the opening line is just is just as important because I got to grab their attention because I usually the way it works is a lot of people say something's too long and I and my opinion of that is like no that it's not that that article was too long it's that your slope wasn't slippery enough you know what I mean like you got to get someone

to fall down that and you have to craft it early on because once someone starts reading they're more likely to read through the whole thing do you know what I mean and so you you got to make that slope really slippery to get them to fall down otherwise it's worthless that you spent all this time working on this thing Lord of the Rings is who knows how long when you watch all the movies people do Mar marathons in a day you have comedians who do these great stand-up sets that are an hour and a half you have Rogan the most popular podcast in the world the super hours yeah the idea that we're moving to short attention spans I don't think is quite right I think that adjacent it's like we're moving to Shorter patient spans or something like that that people want payoffs faster and faster almost with what you were saying about daresh like in a comedy sketch that's really good it's an hour and half but you're getting

a payoff every 60 to 90 seconds just like what was going on in that speech yeah and I mostly don't believe in like changing of trends like I've read Robert Green has this book called human nature and he tells a story about how like some of the earliest writing on walls was a generation complaining about the

generation after them that they were lazy it's like that will always exist you know what I mean and people will always be impatient like it's always been the same so like uh if you read a lot of history you're like oh hey people nowadays are complaining about World War III and they thought the Korean war was going to be World War I like Churchill said World War I is about to happen wow yeah like people always think that like one thing is going to happen I mean so anyway my point being is like I don't really believe too much in like Trends uh like that human nature is almost always the same one of the pieces of advice that I really like though that I think I'm going to implement is either write a piece that's less than 500 words or write a piece that's more than 2,000 words and that in the middle it just doesn't work like it's funny when I think of the most popular things I've written they are

things like the never- ending now certain tweets that are just these short pieces super distilled literally like a screenshot or I wrote Peter Teal's religion I wrote a piece called what the hell is going on in 2017 or 2018 that just went absolutely viral and I think of those is like these definitive takes someone's going to sit down maybe make a cup of Joe and actually read it very intentionally or just hey click it open it read it hey that was pretty good ship it off to someone is sort of in the flow of the day today and there's something weird about that middle that generally isn't as good yeah and we found that with the hustle so that's kind of where that idea came from was like we would write these Sunday stories that would go viral all the time we had this guy worked for us named Zach Crockett most people have never heard of him but you definitely have seen his work because he would go every Sunday we'd write

something it would get 5 million views or 2 million views like constantly and he was a he he made hits we always just say no deep Cuts hits only he just he wrote hits you know he was like the Lady Gaga of Internet writing he just like pumped the out he went an indie band and um what what we found was like either things that are long defined as 2,000 or more or things that were short

that is kind of like people want one of the other um and they serve to different purposes and anything in between was a little bit uh no man's land how did you craft a team you had staff you had Zach you had Trung all of these writers who individually have a sense of distinctiveness a Vibe a personality but then get them to write for the hustle in a way that was consistent with the brand but also not in a way that was procrasti where you were yeah I mean basically morphing them and shaping them to where they lost their Essence we I think I don't know how many people we had hired over the years 50 or 100 what we sold we had 30 or 40 people and of those like 30 or 40 or 50 people I feel like 30 of them are like popular in the newsletter space now or own like a agency or own like a newsletter company or own or are like prominent writers and so one of I take a lot of Pride that we found what I always

say is I'm going to buy her stock early before the market finds out yeah and so we got really good at that so trong was like not a writer Trung was he worked at an analytics company I don't even know what he was doing uh Steph was a product manager I don't even know at top tail like she wasn't like um and so and Zach one of our best writers he worked at a uh he was just a blogger um and so I would just like find people who had good headlines or who could uh like trunk didn't have a Twitter when he started working for us but I would do a few things one I would search for people who are writing for fun so that's what Steph was doing she had a personal blog and she had one headline that convinced me that she was great it was to be great just be good consistently yes so I saw that and I dm' her I go that's an amazing headline you want to interview for a job as a uh doing whatever I forget what her role was but uh that's

why I found her with trun and Zach I knew they would be good because I could usually what I look for is I call it the bottom fourth of a resume so what you studied if you played Sports things that you put at the very bottom and I asked you about that and and if you could tell me a story about it and entertain me that gives me proof that you are an interesting person and you have an interesting opinion and you might be a good writer and then what we did was we would take our email our daily email and we would ask them just to rewrite it by hand for a few weeks just to understand our voice and then we just said all right get after it so that you hinged a lot on that bottom fourth what they did making sure that hey they have some interesting opinions and yeah like if you spent like $200,000 on College and you can't entertain me on like your favorite class you're a loser and I don't want to be around you like that's

my philosophy which and the other thing was are you still pretty big on these real work tasks yeah like I believe in

copy work that's how I learned how to write tell me about that so copy work is uh I think I originally read about it in the Ben Franklin biography so Ben Franklin used to use it and then Hunter Hunter Thompson wrote every sentence of the Great Gatsby so we could feel what it was like to write a great novel yeah that's badass it's badass like Jud appow did that with comedy and SNL scripts and so I wrot out this thing called copy work about basically up until like the 1920s or 1930s this is typically how we taught children how to write and when you think about an instrument uh we're really good at learning instruments so like if I want to teach you how to play the piano I'll teach you a little bit about how to read music but I could even teach you not to read music and I could just be like look copy me do exactly this and then you play Jingle Bells and then you play Happy Birthday and then

you play a more complicated song but you're copying other people's work and then you're like all right I want to like learn like rock and roll so I'm going to learn how to play like Nirvana and then Green Day then I'm gonna like combine all this boom I've got my own thing now yeah that's the best way to learn how to play an instrument my opinion it's also the best way to learn how to write but we don't do that and so what I did was I spent months just locked in a room doing this thing called copy hour where for an hour to a day I would just take the best sales letters of all time and I would copy it by hand and you have to do it with a pen and paper not typing it I do it with pen and paper and then I would like learn the texture of the writing and I would see the uh the patterns of like great writing even writing that I didn't want to emulate but I'm going to steal that from you steal that from you and I'm

going to create my own voice um and I do that with writing and I think that's the

best way to learn in my opinion what was a habit that you did for doing that what you do an hour day for six months or something yeah and I still do it like right before I got to write something if uh if I have to write I'll take like a book that I like and I'll just spend like just 10 minutes just really yeah like Anthony Bourdain for example he's a really great essayist and um he had some like good just like passages in his books and I always thought that um I thought that he approached the keyboard with boldness and I appreciated that and so I would just be like all right I'm feeling a little weak today I need let's get bold and I would I'll copy his stuff boldness that's a big theme in the kind of writing that you got big tattoo right here and it says uh the the hustle I go we're a pirate ship and every subscriber we get is a

little bit of win in our sales and I have bold Fast Fun BFF tattooed here because I believe that's my kind of my motto for business is bold Fast Fun bold Fast Fun okay you're coaching me David writing is sterile it lacks boldness what do I do like you have to give me a topic let's talk about R of Passage like okay so the homepage for r a passage I want to have like right now we have you were made for more and Harry dry was looking at he's like it can be better one of the things that he always says make it falsifiable make it concrete make it Visual and like make a promise at the top was one of the big things that he was saying and I just I even feel like what what I would do if I was you is I would go through your testimonials or your reviews and find a line of inspiration so like it could be as simple as like a a crazy claim like give us 90 days and will I I would have to think but like we'll like turn you

into like the greatest writer you'll ever be or something like that this is exactly what what Harry recommended when he sent me these loom video feedbacks and he said you have this thing towards the bottom of your page that's super bold and it's out there what's the line 38 people from our last cohort called it lifechanging that's a great one and we had that all the way at the bottom he's like what are you doing yeah that's a good one life changing is a good one so like like some type of promise with a number typically does well uh and then like a sub headline that it further explains it yeah so like what what would you say your headline was or your H1 or your title is You Were Made for More yeah I would make that like an age3 yeah like that would be to get you to continue scrolling well one of the things I found with boldness is I find that sometimes when I open a computer it's like I'm in work mode or

something I'm a little scared or timid but then if I'm just texting friends or or if I'm in conversation with somebody and I'm sort of feeling a little hype then I'll say bold things and then what really helps me is to have friends say hey that's good like last night I had a friend say write that down and I was like yes and so I feel like boldness is something that I can't consciously cultivate but when I'm feeling relaxed and calm or little energetic and sort of in the flow that's for me when boldness comes out well then that's why I do copy work because that gets me in the the mode and typically what I find the the good comes out into editing nine out of 10 times you write something and like the first five paragraphs just delete it yeah and then that's where it starts you know after you're like five in you got to get that crap out of the way and it's pretty normal I think you have that David Ogie book on there what

did he say I'm a I'm a lousy writer but I'm a worldclass editor or something like that exactly uh typically that's how it works you got to get the crap out the way you know it's like you're warm up and then your real workout is in the editing yeah fast fun talk to me about those uh I just believe in speed I believe in momentum I think when you start business or when you start any project if you don't start right away

and you if you don't put some Stakes on it you're screwed meaning if you say if you're fat and you're like I feel fat and disgusting and horrible all right well post a shirtless picture online and say in 60 days I'm going to look better and I'm going to post another picture in 60 days and do it right now you have that idea do it right now I like I firmly believe in like putting your back against the wall and there has to be Stakes on so what I like to do is like if I think of something I'm going to like immediately put it out in the world so I feel pressured and I force myself to do it or I'm going to put some money on the line to where I have to do it so that's where fast comes in I'm a big believer in that what I do with my writing is if I'm at a dinner I won't walk into my house until I've written out something that was an epiphany while I was sitting down but the best thing I do is I have the GPT for voice

transcription and it's so good I mean it so much better than Siri and I just open up my phone every day for something and I just say it while I'm out on a walk I say it right when I have the idea and I never let the momentum the fire the Roar of an epiphany and never let that flame die I do it right now and I think what you could even do is have like a personal blog that you don't even share with anyone and you just put it out there so you're like that's on the internet like it's it exists maybe I'm not sharing it but I know it exists and so I feel pressured into like doing that now yep um which I have I have like a Blog that no one knows about but like it gets like 100 people a day who somehow find it through search and I just like I put that out there and it's like I'm on the hook I so that kind of makes me feel on the hook so that's where being fastest and then I just like Adventure and fun I don't know I just I love being

a and getting into Adventures so what Riders Inspire fun for you embody that I like Felix Dennis because he talks about like some serious topics in a fun way uh I mean how to get rich was like the best I don't read business books but I used to and that's the best one I've ever read hands down well who are some other fun writers um my friend Neville madora like whenever I read his work I'm just happier because I feel like I'm having a good time reading his stuff um who else is a fun writer I don't think there's that many that like I don't know who do you think I think Mike salana is hilarious I don't he's just a Twitter guy right yeah I mean he's so funny like he just has such a voice about him that's my favorite thing about his writing I just feel like he just injects you with just this shot of energy and it's funny like I just love the mix of fun and funny like even now when I'm reviewing our team's copy or writing

something for sales or for something that a student will read I'm just like did this make me smile did it make you smile as a writer I read something this morning it was like that was written under some kind of fear I don't know what it was but like that was written with your back against the wall or something that was not written from a place of love and the Flames of passion do you read history at all not as much now do you know about MLK's assassination no I love assassinations I read a lot about them so like there's only been four presidents who have been assassinated you know who do you know they are hold on Lincoln yeah JFK easy hold on Lincoln JFK who are the other two Garfield he was assass a something like 90 days in would have never got that and then uh McKinley when so I've read all about the about their ass I just love assassinations it's like a fun Thriller I love it because there's

a beginning and the middle and end yeah um and so I recently I read this great book called Hellbound it's or hellbent Hellbound it's about the assassination of MLK and so basically this guy James

oay he was racist and he was crazy and he assassinated MLK and then he got away and a lot of people don't know this you know where they arrested him they arrested him in England so this like 90 days after he did it so he basically um shot MLK got in his car drove off and they they didn't even see him and he drove all the way up to Canada where he got a fake passport made and then he flew to Portugal and then to England and then on his way to the uh to back to Spain or to Spain he was in the British English airport and he gave his passport to the guy he put it into his pocket and now as he's walking off the security guard was like dude you have is that a second passport that's coming out of your pocket and he was like oh it's uh they spelled my name wrong so I had to get and they're like hold on man come here what is this come here here and they they're like you have two passports dude this is Shady come in

here we got to talk to you and that's how they caught him that's crazy it was crazy so he almost got away he was on his way to he was on his way to Africa because there was like this racist government and they're like they're going to welcome me Wide Open Arms he almost totally got away and that book it's like 300 pages I like read the whole thing and they did such a good job of like capturing my attention have you ever read Shan ton uh endurance Shan ton oh what shant Trum okay so shant Trump fiction book and I read no fiction so recommending a fiction book this is like I'm recommending a fiction book and I was with a friend and I was at his cabin One Summer and he was like hey I know you don't read fiction I have a 90 a 900 page fiction book you have to read it I'm like there's no way that I'm going to read this book he reads me the first page and I was hooked and I read the whole thing

and it's this guy Gregory David Roberts and it's like half fiction half non-fiction and he basically is a convict from Australia he escapes from prison and he goes on these wild adventures In India with women and drugs and crime and all of that but it is so well written and we're talking about fun like what the kind of writing I love is writing that's so descriptive that it almost makes me laugh David Foster Wallace does this and Gregory David Roberts do it and you read it and it almost is more real than real like usually if you're reading about something it's less real because there's less information content but if someone's really descriptive they're like it's like reality on enhanced mode and this book has it and what's so interesting is I love the book and apple made a TV show about it and I hate the TV show it's just it has none of thec magic Gregory David Roberts has none of the of the lyrical Magic and it was

funny like me not liking the TV show made me realize just how much I like the

writing in the book some of the sentences will just they'll just knock that do you use good reads no you you don't know what that is do you no I mean I know what it is is on by Amazon you know what's funny about good reads the reviews for a book on Goodreads are consistently more negative than they are on Amazon and they're so much more interesting they're and they're really negative it's because I'm a big good raids power user it's because the it's almost like early Yelp where you somehow think they're like a food critic when it's like dude you're in and out like uh like so people Rel leave these long reviews and they're way more pesimistic and so everything that has above a 4.2 on good reads is considered like world class yeah so I get most of my stuff on good reads and I track it all on there um and so I like it because everyone's really negative so tell me more about how you use it well I've got like a list

of like so I'm going to go and add David uh GRE David Roberts yeah I'm going to go add that to my good re Sean teron and um that will be on my like my list and then at the end of the week when I finish whatever I'm on now I'll just like what am I in the mood for and I'll just like click it and get and buy it and that's usually how I I track everything but I Goodreads is my favorite place to get book reviews they also have wonderful lists so anyone can make a list of like and then others will vote up something in the list so it's like my favorite era to read about is um like uh 1880 to like 1920 in America oh so much happened then yeah there's a lot happened it was post Civil War so we were rebuilding things regulation didn't exist and so you get bar yeah you these like crazy stories of like monopolies of like uh the SEC wasn't real so um we were still getting out of slavery so like racism's a huge issue and so you

get these fantastic like riveting stories of like bad men and so that's my favorite era to read about and uh they'll be like the best books about the Gilded Age and so there's like a whole section just for that you know who yeah and so like I I love that era that's my favorite era so tell me about your reading like how does that work you do a book a week and you run a company you have a giant podcast you got super

social you got a bunch going on in your life how do you do that I'm not that social okay I'm not that social uh I don't drink I don't go to bars so I'm like I'm a loser uh I exercise a lot and that's about it uh so I read my book in the evening time is like it's there is no benefit in there other than it entertains me and so um a 300 to page books book is between six and eight hours of reading and so you read way faster than I do that's not that fast I read very slowly I don't read fast I'm not a fast reader I'm very average I read very few pages and then I just think and think and think on it like I have totally stopped trying to read a lot like I just read very little and then read dive into it like I don't remember the last time like if you were to say six to 400 page book like at this point it would just take me so long I just can't actually read for that long in the first place well so I from like 10:30 to 11:30 or

10:30 to midnight I'm just reading like a history book and you don't actually need to read every word of it like sometimes you'll like mistakenly like skip a name and you're like I can figure it out as I go so that's why you could do that fast and so I do that at night on my Kindle and I'll highlight stuff that I think is cool and then I'll just like and then I'll write a blog post or write like a Google doc just kind of outlining some of the cool stuff that happened just so I remember it and then during the daytime I'll try to take half an hour to an hour and I'll read something that I think can enrich me so like I'm really fascinated with um Burkshire so basically Hampton's going well and we have some money and I'm like how do we reinvest this and so I'm reading um a book that's like a complete history of all the Acquisitions of Burkshire hathway which is Warren Buffett's company and it goes and so

I'll just sit down for like half an hour during the day and I actually sit at a desk and I'll try to like uh like take notes and like how does that apply to me and that one I'll go real slow and so that's typically what I do is like um

during the day it's like an enrichment thing at night I uh I only do what's entertaining how did you write the company vision for Hampton how did you think through that one thing that I screwed up at my other companies was I was pretty good at writing about what we stood for and I was really bad at writing what we're against huh and so I did a good job of like so for example that's back to boldness there's a real bold component in that yeah and I'll give you an example so like Hampton has a masculine brand and it's not because we prefer men over women we don't we I don't care if it's all women but I want to I want to attract people who are aggressive about growth business growth emotional growth things like that and today they'll be like well that's too masculine and I'm like no it's it's it's good masculine I I like that and so like I'm not going to like try to I don't care about pleasing that type of

person mhm or um well this seems really exclusive and not inclusive people will say I'm like yeah yeah it is uh it's not for everyone uh and you have to be of a certain caliber to come um so like I I I think like knowing like what you are and what what you aren't is actually as important and so I didn't really do that as good so like at the hustle I would hire people who would call themselves artists cuz I like art and I think that those types of people are cool but then I was like dude but you're just too slow so like you take too long so like you know what I mean like I didn't do a good enough job of understanding what I stood against I think it's either at the British library or the British museum you can see the Magna Carta and it's from you know the 10th 11th Century 12 12:15 there we go and is that right I think it's 12:15 I don't know junah 12:15 that's impressive if you got that right I for some reason

that's the one fact that I ever remembered nice so I think that it's it's very cool when you see institutions countries that where they're founding document becomes this orbiting right I loveo and I was looking at a Greek translation of the word aragos recently and as one does as one does and the variety of meanings is so good the first is author source and origin that's one way to interpret it the second is Pioneer founder and the third is ruler Prince and and which those are very different very different but I think that that author source and origin Pioneer founder ruler Prince would all be in the same thing and the way that it relates to writing is I see a lot of writing as bringing those things together you are this founder You Are An Origin point for a lot of ideas a seed and then if it goes well you become a ruler and a prince and I think that there is something very deep with starting a company yeah there's

something very deep in that Ed ology from 2,000 years ago that reveals something about what writing can be that only the written word can do the spoken word can't do that but the written word one paragraph like you said and the way that it's locked in stone as the Magna Carta is it has this gravitas this weight that gives it a propulsion to actually go make change in the world there's this uh you're watch South Park yeah of course there's this episode where Cartman starts a crackbaby NBA basketball league which is ridiculous and some person's try to negotiate with him and he invents the league and he and he's like look ma'am that's against the rules I'm sorry I can't do that and she goes what can't you change the rules she's like look ma I don't make the rules I just think them up and write them down and I was like that's the greatest thing ever so like so like that's kind of like a company where it's like look

the rules are This and like an employeer or a customer is like can't you change the rules like look I don't make up the rules look I just think them up and write them down okay I don't I can't do that that the rules are the rules totally so I think that that's like interesting where um I think it's super fascinating I always think I think about the Constitution a lot because like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson were in their like early 20s when they wrote this thing and I'm like that's wild that almost 300 years later we like fight over what's the interpretation yeah it's like it's pretty amazing and they very purposely chose words and it's really fascinating that someone could be that young and like be wise enough to like pick those certain rul you know life liberty and the pursuit of happiness it's like look we didn't say you have to be happy you can pursue it you know what I mean and like it's always fascinating

uh like the words they chose and how we're still like fighting in between but we're still fighting in between the lines to figure out what it means and I think that that's like really effective well this is why if someone were to say hey what is one piece of Creer advice do you have like one thing I would say is whenever you can be the person who writes if you want to have influence do it because it isn't that what you write exactly that will happen but the person who sets the frame has an invisible power over how a society functions how a community functions and just like you're

saying the founders of the Constitution set the frame they set the Overton window that now we're battling against but that is like this invisible grain that has such influence over how people live and it forces you to think so like I hate presentations I prefer narrative written things so like have do you have any friends that work at Amazon no so you know what they do right the six page well now it's way longer so I've got friends and they like it's like 40 page memo we got to write but I think that's beautiful CU because um I think Stephen King said this in writing on his book on on writing what did he say he said um you don't have to think clearly necessarily to be a good speaker but you have to think clearly in order to be a great writer and like in that writing you will become a clear thinker like you can't when you write you actually have to think things through and so I love like having people write

SI down because it forces you you're forced to be logistical and like think about what are you actually saying and how is this going to be implemented versus a presentation you can yeah it's funny Paul Graham did this interview with Tyler Cowen and the most I'm coming at this from a place of insane respect for Paul Graham the most revealing thing is Paul Graham's ideas aren't super well formed out in the interview and he's almost a shell of himself and what's so revealing is what Paul Graham does is he will spend a month or two in an idea and that's how long it takes for him to find the bottomless pit and if you talk to people who've gone through IC they'll say he's so helpful because he's in the sandbox of things that he's written about but the Tyler to interview he's asking about like British housing policy yeah he's one of my favorite writers too so good his essays are very good and he's pretty

funny when he writes uh he has like some type of like simple fifth grade like Hemingway yeah and he he he like he has cute phrases like schlep work schle schle Rock talks about that a lot yeah he has a very memorable phrasing goofy he's somebody who's smiling he's having a good time when he writes that was fun it was good I think we went over a lot of stuff hopefully the people liked it that was good thanks for coming on man I appreciate it I think this is going to be a big thing I'm excited to see how all this is paid off me too what your work