171 Years of Writing Advice in 90 Minutes | How I Write

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 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. 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 gotta listen to how I write. You gotta 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 roll. Let's say that You're going to write a story or what have you or a chapter in a book. And the scene is a young girl is coming downstairs. It's approaching dinner time. It's the 1960s, early 1960s. She walks into the kitchen and the mother's making dinner and there's music on the radio. And if you said, OK, take some French guy or German writer and say,

You don't know. 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. then what would happen is you have the risk that the writer would write a sentence that says something like, she came down the stairs and went in the kitchen as her mother took the bird's eye frozen peas from the Frigidaire.

And 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 these sort of like, okay, we get it. Frozen Peas, Frigidaire, the Beatles. It's 1964. Everything I expected. Yes. 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, whatever, 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, eight 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 would she see? And I think that, like, for me... if you put yourself in that position, the first thing that would really stand out is the amazing thing of how frozen peas work, which is that...

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 come out like a brick, all bound together. It was sort of an incredible thing when we were young that you would see your parent do this, and then they would break. the brick of peas over the pot and the other 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 we

You try a frozen pea at one point. Without your mother watching, you take the frozen pea and you're like, oh, that's what a frozen pea tastes like. And some kids would love eating frozen peas. And there's a very specific texture and central experience to eating a frozen pea.

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 Frigidaire and Birdseye and, you know, the Beatles. It would be this other stuff. Now... We can make this more interesting 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 earlier that day, her mother has discovered that her husband is cheating on her.

And she was doing the laundry, and she finds a note in her husband's pocket and realizes that she's being cheated on. And so the mother is feeling vulnerable, angry. frightened you know that her husband might leave her that the family would be broken up 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 car wash.

And she ends up in the backseat of the car as it's going through the thing with the 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 on. Now, either way. When the girl walks in the room, she would not know that this has happened. 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 cheating on her. Mom cheated. Whichever one.

So when writing that scene, 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. And that's why this felt a little off or whatever. So as a writer, then you go into this situation of, as you say, there's this iterative process of... of trying to observe accurately, 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 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 that. and make sure that you're getting it closer and closer to where you want it to be. 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...

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. whatever whims I have, whatever tickles my fancy, however deep I get into the fascination, whatever I think is hilarious, 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. 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 vanities and digressions and investigations and, you know, asides and diversions and everything. Now, I want to...

Think about it, not from my perspective, but from a reader's perspective. And it's not about, you know, trying to sell books. It's that looking at it from the reader's perspective is a way of saying, I'm going to... 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 things that are cliche, the things that are boring, the things that are... only there because they satisfy my whim, but actually don't play a role in the story as a whole. So the editing part for me, a large portion of that is taking things out, being getting leaner and leaner so that it really is around.

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 know. What is a diacopy? A diacopy is a verbal sandwich like that. So in that case, it's a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse in Richard III. Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty.

free at last, alone, alone, or all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Again, it's just another formula which can make... makes a phrase memorable. And you can do 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 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... probably the most famous line in English literature. And he could have written that another way. He could have said, to be or not, would have been the same meaning, whether or not to be.

And we just absolutely love to hear these lines in films, in poetry. Game over, man, game over. Run, Forrest, run. Zed's dead, baby, Zed's dead. They're all the same formula. Very, very simple to do. And yet those lines stick in our heads. I mean, there's an amazing example of this, one I've loved because one of the things when I was writing this book, False memories. When a form is so powerful that it changes your memory, there's a bit in...

Wizard of Oz, where 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 Diakopé is such a powerful figure of rhetoric that we change it in our memories. 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's 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. 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. Home, sweet home. Oh, captain, my captain. All diacopies. We're talking about...

Martin Luther King's I Have 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 speechwriter. He did chiasmus, 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 chiasmus, 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 how many times he uses it. But you'll also find it in, I think, Coolio said, with money on my mind and my mind on my money, which is the same reversal.

Humans love symmetry. We love seeing symmetrical stuff. We like the Taj Mahal or St. Paul's Cathedral because they're absolutely symmetrical. And chiasmus is when you make your sentences symmetrical, just like that. Here's what I'm noticing with... chiasmus 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 US presidents have used Caspers, other than JFK. There was George... Bush Jr. said, if we cannot bring our enemies to justice, we must bring justice to our enemies. And Obama said to a group of veterans, he said, you stood up for America. Now America must stand up for you. Oh, that's a great line.

Yeah, these are great lines, but 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've never seen somebody overusing the figures of rhetoric. I mean, sometimes you can... Sometimes you know rhetoric is happening, but you don't...

really minded. 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. Winston Churchill, his most famous speech is, 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 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. 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 got art you got entertainment just distraction like people scrolling on videos on their phone Video of somebody's pet or somebody showed a photo of their meal or something either. That's not even entertainment

You can't even call that entertainment. It's just a distraction. And what we find is that it gives a jolt of dopamine to the brain. And the people that design 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 in a dopamine 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 seconds. 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 the social media platforms have made similar research, I'm sure. And they show we have this scrolling 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 2,000, 3,000 years. Sure. And so 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 something that's more helpful to the culture and more helpful to 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 deaths to try to chase the culture. And I've seen a bunch of editors over the years who've told me, Ted, you've 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. The periodicals they worked for often had 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 2 million views. 2 million views of me talking. But it's just a few seconds. And I was talking to my wife today. I said, this got me no readers. There's no trend. You can't engage with this.

Hey, it's gratifying for my ego to have reached 2 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 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 it now. Gourmet cooking, healthy living, organic food, all these cuisines, 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 in writing. Have natural ingredients. Do it organically. Be true to quality. If you try 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 requires. I think the word storytelling is super cliche and it's overused. People don't really define it as just like a buzzword at this point. But if you define storytelling as creating stakes, as 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 that 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 to 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 a story, whereas the defense is usually a statistic. So look back at, here's a story from my D.C. 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 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.

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 will be, oh, but productivity went up by 4%. And it's the, you know, one death is a tragedy, a 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're automatically in the losing position because you have to react to their frame and they've set the criteria.

Do you take notes during the week that you reflect on or is it just on your head? No, I'm a huge note taker. Oh, tell me about that. There's all these fancy notebooks in the world. You don't want those. 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. And you also want something that can fit in a pocket. I was about to say that. I think the Uniball Micro 0.5 pen is the best pen overall. But the Muji 0.3... 6 or .37 in dark blue ink is a very nice pen for other reasons. 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... That goes through one of these like every

Three, two or three weeks. Oh, wow. So you're taking a lot of. Well, you can see how much I've ripped out. Like this used to have like 100 pages. So that's how you think about it. So you're going to basically take the notebook and then you rip out the pages. Pretty much. And you don't have completed notebooks. I don't have completed notebooks. Wow.

What inspired this? Where does this come from? Lots of trial and error. 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 a while. No, no, no, no, no. A story, an anecdote, it can be one sentence, five 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 TED 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 Sanchez. And then you just pause. And then you stop. And 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. Now I'm going to maybe give him more permission to change my mind. Right? 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 is, this guy is, you know, maybe he actually believes this shit.

So there's all sorts of tricks that are emotionally manipulative. I'll occasionally just throw up a picture of me and my kids. It's just emotionally manipulative. I know they're going to like me more. 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 like what if

Ted, it was called The Bold and the Brilliant, was a telenovela from Brazil. And Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Gates have a night of hot sex and give birth to Simon Sinek. That has nothing to do with my talk. But I think it's funny. And I think people are going to... I think people are going to find it interesting from an academic and also be yourself.

you know try and bring your elements 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 is really hard down here.

so to speak. And I get it. I'm going to lose some clients. 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 differentiation but occasionally it upsets people and you know i i lose audience sometimes

Storyworthy is an amazing book by this teacher guy who's like the 20-time storytelling champion of the moth storytelling. I didn't even know what this thing was. But whatever. If you're the champion of something, I paid a 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, 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 person if they don't get it, then the story's not going to 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 he the other thing he says is like don't tell like it calls like vacation romps so it's like don't just tell a story about this great night you had this party because 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 bit me and I survived. Like, it doesn't need to be extreme. And again,

It's actually almost better if it's not. 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 the stakes come from the emotion. 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 proper, 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 five second moment of change. Whoa. What does that mean? A five second. So he's like, you know, uh,

everything that 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 rom-com is like some version of the following. The guy's 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 two rom-coms, right? She was in love. She thought they would get happily married. He broke her heart. Start of the rom-com. Well, guess what the ending of the rom-com is going to be? Always the exact opposite of that. If she was the... high-powered 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's 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-coms 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.

you know, Scrooge hates Christmas. He loves Christmas or whatever. Every movie, every story is the same. So the heart of the story is the five second moment when they actually made the transformation, when they switched. And it's usually when they lost it all, when they had the heartbreak, when they hit rock bottom, when they had no choice but to be brave because they were finally cornered, like whatever it is, right? 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 one of the Batman movies. And the mentor was like, only one person's ever got out. He's like, how did he do it? He's like, he didn't use the rope.

Basically, he jumped with no safety net. And so the five-second moment of change is the character climbs up the thing, takes off the rope. If he doesn't make this jump, he's going to die. But actually, because of that, makes the leap and actually... makes it that's the transformation moment everything is based all stories yeah if you don't know what's the five 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, which is you jump right into the problem. So... for the once you say something happened to business 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 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 i'm in business so so the reader's gonna go wait what happened to business software and so now they're bought in because now they ask themselves a question they want to get the answer

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 on. No, I wrote that first. It's kind of, I'm kind of pissed at this point. You know what I mean? Yes. 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 is what it used to be like. Yeah. And it's coming out hard. But 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 it's an answer and it's like a this happened so that's the other one it's like 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 dark side of rental basically yes um so 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 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 paragraph. 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, actually.

As I was writing this, I was like, you know, used to own it. And so I go like, well, now you don't. So in my mind, I go, what's the opposite of owning? It's renting. Now, software as a service is never really talked about as rental.

That word does not come up. It's almost like it's buried. It's hidden. 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 in software, but really it is rental in a sense. 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 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 oh yeah the bad landlord stories everyone has one somewhere right in college or wherever they're living now whatever it is so

Now I can sort of personify Sass as a landlord. And it kind of is. And it's just a way to establish a little bit of a personification. here. And then I kind of let that live and let that sink in. And then we move on here. Yeah. For nearly two decades, the SaaS model benefited landlords handsomely.

with routine prayers and payers. Yep. Gotta talk about that. Yep. To the church of recurring revenue. Yes. We gotta talk about all that. Can we go there right now? Yeah. So the payers and prayers thing was something that I struggle, I like it.

But I struggled 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 I was a little bit worried that people would stumble over that because it is kind of hard to say. This sentence actually kind of happened, and I'm remembering right more, happened in reverse.

where i knew i wanted to use church of recurring revenue because i liked that line and then um the payer 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 payers and players and this is fun. And I'm ripping on landlords to a certain degree. Like this is getting fun. Let me 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 sass subscriptions last year you should own that shit by now right i like that sentence right Well, I think that that kind of hits that boom. You should own that shit 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 shit. 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. 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 hadn't 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 sass. 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 nod their head first so if i'm gonna 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 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 generally that format works well for me. I mean, I've seen-

When you look at great product demos, it's the same way. They kind of show a product. This is what's wrong with the product or 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 of course 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 yes 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 enterprisey and bloated. And then finally, for one fixed price once. So those bullets sort of follow a 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 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'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 yeah 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. 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. 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 happier thing than like a sharp statement. One of the things though that... does show up in both is that it has the same structure of things used to be this way we loved how they were yes then they became broken and now we're trying to redeem the way that things are for how they should be

structurally the same and i think what's important maybe about this if you're 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 avatar is in the bottom of this one. The other one is not on the left-hand side. My email address is on the left-hand side. It's not on the right-hand side.

There's some differences, but strategically or 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 present. It then says email gets a bad rap, but it shouldn't. Email is 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, actually, it's not that I don't like email. If I get an email from my wife, I like that. If I get an email from an old friend, I like that. My uncle, who's 100, he sends me an email. When I see my mom's uncle, my great uncle, I'm like...

This is amazing. I want to 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. Yeah, I don't hate all email. I hate the spam. I hate like 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?

No, you kind of like letters. Wedding invitations are great. Yeah, amazing, right? Yeah. But things changed. 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 I like using the same letter to 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 bounce. I'm thinking about this red ball. If I'm doing red balls on syllables, there's a lot of bouncing 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. And so that's where that goes. Would 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 across it's like going on a walk and coming across like a lizard and you're like that's a beautiful i don't see that very often like that i'm gonna look at that now

That's how it feels here. That's kind of a weird, super weird analogy. 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. And I wanted the avalanche of automated because 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.

It's this barrage. It's this force that feels like it never stops when it comes to email. So that's what I want to get at there. Ain't that right? Yep. 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'll stand out because it is distinct and different. Yes, 100%. That's great. 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 in 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 a family member, whatever. Like that's, you can envision that. These are now.

hassles and that's how most people think about email i was like yeah this this is avalanche of automating 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. Yeah, this sucks. Sean Puri has a line that he shared on this podcast that I really like where he says, all stories are about the five 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 rom-com, right? You have somebody who's in state A.

And they have all these things going on. And by the end of the rom-com, 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 session. 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 email. 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 lateness 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 email, it's like really special positive. They're enchanted words. Yes. So I didn't like go through the source to find these. They just came out. But they come out in a way where they are the right words for that statement. And 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 seas all seas oh i i i caught that here's another one right communicate every day yeah 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 rhetoric that you're playing around with.

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 gotta 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. But the thing is, I didn't reach. Sometimes you reach for alliteration 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 that paragraph to me is the fill someone up with... with positivity and like um and and wonder following from the previous you know it's like it's it's making 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, a restoration modernized for the way we email today. So let me get into some of those. So neglect goes back to an earlier part in that piece where I said like.

gmail i forget 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 the loop there. Some from people, some from machines, a lot from email software. That, 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 i've absorbed perhaps

But really, we're about to make email software. So up until this point, I have 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 added 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'm like, we added a calendar. So I did add that. But yeah, that's, that's it. I barely talk. The whole point of this. even though I want to close the loops, and I knew we had like months to go until we released the thing. 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 so 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 these sort of playing around with words of sort of this repetition. They're jabs. Right. It's like a boxing match. There's jabs, but they're friendly. I like that. I like the, again, to me, it's about, 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 like that in a piece. I like the motion in a piece. I want to show you how an ad comes together. So I'm making a course on copywriting. This is an ad I wrote, probably for the landing page. 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. It's probably about 20 rewrites.

Are you looking at the same thing as me? Yes, sir. Let's do it. So the difference between 1% and 2% is not just 1%. It's 100%. I saw this like four years ago on Twitter. And I thought it was a great argument for copywriting. Because if you can increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2%, that's not too hard. Like, I could do that. 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's the seed of an idea. I just wrote it on the sheet. I was like, all right, maybe I can do something with this. Luke Sullivan, great copywriting tip. We were 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 go increase line and page conversions from 1% to 2%. That was like the idea from the tweet. What's an obvious conflict there? Well, it's spending twice as much on ads. That's like the parallel of that. One or two. Explain what you mean by conflict. How I look at 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've 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 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've got two choices. Spend twice as much on ads or increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2%. Now at this point...

This is why I feel like what you take in as a ride is so important because a couple of years ago, I saw this Volkswagen ad, which I loved. 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 thoroughly, check rubber hose, refill, blah, blah, blah. With the Volkswagen, all you've got to do is change the oil.

I love the layout. I love what they're trying to show, just the simplicity, the ease. They're trying to show simplicity. They're trying to show ease. But again, enemy. And I actually, more than anything, I just like how this ad's 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 umpteenth time.

Here I drop in two placeholder images. So just forget the images. But I guess I like that you've got the Volkswagen and the ordinary car image. So I wanted two 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... Well, at the time, David, at the time I wrote this, I was like, you know, there's something here. I like this. But it gets...

In my opinion, it gets like 200% better. And I think that's 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.

I think this isn't talking about standards. I wouldn't sign this ad off. Right now, 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 you look at the Volkswagen and it has headings So I needed to make this simpler. So I want to grow twice as fast. You've got two choices You got the corporate way or the copywriting way set it up like that And then also, I liked that there was more boxes on the Volkswagen. So I added, raise twice the cash, hire twice the staff, spend twice as much on ads, cross both your fingers.

or learn to write and increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2%. Now, at this point, something was, like, really irritating me. I could not put this out with that line being two lines. on the right-hand side, learn to write and increase landing page conversions from 1% to 2%. It was just too long. It was messy. So I thought I got to make that one line, like by hook or by crook. 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 copywriting. So now I've got to learn to write. as a header, increase conversions 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 copywriting way, that worked. So I've created a problem and I've solved a problem. One forward, one back. So then I think, all right, I need to write something. There's like a similar ilk to learn to write. So I just start spitballing, go full Zuckerberg, scroll down, roll Monopoly dice, Hidden Hope, Spaghetti at Wall. 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 Ed Sheeran tap thing. Yeah. From way back. You just write one idea without judging it. You write another one, you're getting the dirty water out the tap. So you'll 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 float. And after a couple of minutes, a couple of rewrites, it will start being clean. You just want to trust it gets clean. So I'm just doing that right now. Spaghetti at wool. And I end up with throw money and pray. Now, at this point...

I don't know what's good and what's not. Because I've been writing this now for probably two, three hours. And I just, I don't know. I can't work out if it's good or not. So I text a few friends. Go on. One thing that's... Really revealing. You just said I've been writing this for two to three 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.

If I was doing this on a Word doc, I couldn't do it like this. Jason said this on your podcast, but copy and design are one of the same. 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 zuckerberg over the corporate way blah blah blah but the consensus was throw money and pray being the header on the left worked worked best so i settle on that

Now, I had an idea, like, what if I do a really long list, like Volkswagen, because I like depth. It didn't work, so I then reverted back. At this point, it's kind of there. The last thing I do with most ads is I try and add a little bit of design to it, a little bit more design. Easiest thing to do here was just bold.

Back up a second. Raise twice the cash, hire 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 1 and 2 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 go on a fiver and I pay someone called Kenzia to make me illustrations. She starts off with this guy praying and a load of...

notes falling. 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. Like, do you mind doing it again? I think I paid her a little bit more. And then she gives me this guy praying, but he's smiling.

And then the second one has got this random messy four in a speech bubble, which I didn't like. So I said, look, Kenzie, throw money and pray. These are great. I really like them. But throw money and pray. 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 pray. Raise twice the cash. Hire twice the staff. Spend twice as much on ads. Cross both your fingers. Or learn copywriting. Increase conversions from 1% to 2%. That's twice as many.

And that's 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 when most people think about copywriting, 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 a story, and you've actually made it delightful. This is beautiful in terms of what has happened.

And that is the way that you approach copywriting. It is the art of simple communication. It's like an art project the way that you do it. So this is, copywriting is arguing. This is just an argument. It's like, what's the best argument for learning copywriting? Well, you've got two choices. You could throw money at a cliche and hope that it works, and it probably won't because we've seen Asana.

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 copyright and be a millionaire. No, I'm saying just like you can improve conversions from 1% to 2%. You can probably, that's believable. It's sincere. 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 C 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 in Figma.

as much as you're writing in Figma. 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. 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 rarely get from I can't I couldn't write that as it is on the screen right now. You can't just say, go write that. 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 piece. 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 related to this theme of somebody who's awful.

of somebody who's a conorist of somebody who's you know a 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 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 use, I like a lot of physical cues.

Like, people can relate 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 the characters from the first person which some of my stories are or from an omniscient narrator inside that person You have little words and cues that put you inside that character. 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, now I didn't realize that 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 standing 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... 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, right. We all face those things. Yeah. That's the tone of it, the overall.

theme of the story is universal, but the details are very particular. So in Mastery, I talk about Leonardo da Vinci and how his paintings are so uncanny and weird because... They feel like they're real life. They feel alive. 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's sort of an example. I want to end with what you call your secret ambition.

where he said 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, you know, I've been blessed since I was young and grew up in a different era in which 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 if you do come from a lot of money, your world is kind of limited. And as a child, you're a bit 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're transported into a fantasy world. You're transported into the real world, into other countries, into the past. And it's like a magic carpet ride. So I remember... When I was a kid, I couldn't fathom this idea that human beings existed.

500,000 years ago. And what were they like? And what was their world like? You look around now, we're driving cars. We've got, you know, toasters. We're talking 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 they don't have the freedom to discover things on their own. And everything is fed to them. But 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 uh

Like an enchantedness that you have. Yeah. And the world is enchanting. It's just you stop thinking of it. You're not able to see it anymore. And so I remember... Early on when the 48 Laws of Power, maybe 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 Laws of Power. They're like 10, 11 years old. And now they're like... looking at books about Julius Caesar and Louis XIV and, you know, Haile Selassie and all the other characters in the book that I had written about, they got excited by history. So...

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 mind blowing, 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... hear 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 or I had drugs or none of that, I would just write. Man, 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 ago 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 get that feeling of excitement and things will be good and will click. But nine times out of ten...

it leads you into bad places because you start writing without thinking and you think it's great. 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, 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. 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. It's fine. I expressed what I wanted to do.

I don't have this feeling like I wasted 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 dumbed-downness in our culture. Writers are still revered for a reason, because it's something very ancient.

and because we all use language to talk and communicate, but people who actually are able to do that in a written form, there's a revered element of it. There's something kind of divine or saintly. 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 got you've done it people will look at you differently

You'll look at yourself differently. It'll last for years and years and years, hopefully. And so the rewards come at some point, but they're never immediate. Sometimes... in the process of writing you feel excited you feel wow this is great but 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, because you're speakers of English, you have a kind of built-in bilingualism. They say, what do you mean by that? They 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 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. Maison and, you know, our English house were the same things. But, you know, because the Normans... came over to England and conquered the local English people and set themselves up in court, the Latinate through French words.

got a higher socioeconomic register. Right. And so immediately, the words you use talk about your class. Yep. And... When my students would make this realization, it was like, wow, I've got some power that I didn't have before. Maybe I could hear it in my ear when somebody's being snooty 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 the difference between freedom...

And liberty becomes more audible. Right. Right. So that's the word level considerations for voice. The other consideration is. the sentence level. So, and I would try to teach this. It's a very complicated question because English grammar is not trivial, but it's immensely flexible.

And you can create all kinds of different palette effects and color effects by using the flexible syntax and grammar of English. But I... I would say, how can I teach it 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 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 heart and soul of sentence, call it predication, 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 kernel 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, prosodically, the mental state that the speaker is in, or that the narrator wants you to be in, in that the sentence starts 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. Mm-hmm. He pointed the gun at his friend, right? There's a kind of front-loaded shock to that, right? Yeah. You know, or the gun exploded. And...

A whiff of smoke exited the barrel, you know. These are clauses that have the action up front. You know, 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 want to put the reader into an entirely opposite mental state, you could say... Way back across the yard, near the fence, where a tiny brook ran along an old hedgerow, she hid.

right and of course by having these modifiers first the reader is in this suspenseful state yeah i was like what are you gonna say what are you gonna say what are you gonna say and that 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 hidden in the physical spin. I did not catch that. Wait for it, wait for it. Oh, there she is.

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. And you can do this for all kinds of reasons, too. You can create suspense with that. You can create comedy with it, right? 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 up front um a smaller number are going to be this delayed predication and maybe the smallest I don't know. I'd like to do that experiment sometime and actually get the data. But my intuition is that splitting the predication is the rarest, but it has a very powerful... And, you know, not only...

the effect in itself can create these different forms of delay or suspense or intrigue. But using it inside a paragraph, when you've just had three sentences of, you know, a trailing sentence in a row, suddenly stopping and changing that, changing it up is like a key change in music or going to a different chord. Tell me about your...

just communication lessons that you've learned from Peter Thiel. 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's an amazing communicator. 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 how to do that i don't really know anybody else who does that like he does but it's uh

He has 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 a very rare combination of both. It's super impressive. What do you think contributes to that? He thinks about the world in this deeply unconstrained way. The first thing anybody would say about him is he is a truly brilliant original thinker.

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 Dortch 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 investor 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 it was B or C, but the biggest mistake ever, let's say, was not investing in the Series B of Facebook. And that is the kind of mistake I try not to make. So I'm like a big believer in 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 and business whatever 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 in 300 pages. And what a reader wants is three good ideas in one page. Yeah. Did Paul Graham 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 how to write 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 posturing. He says interesting stuff. He says it clearly. He doesn't waste your time. Nothing feels fake.

pitching coming up with 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 and if you can

It's really dramatically different to be on the other side of a pitch if the person has gotten their thinking clear ahead of time or not. It's also a bonus if they're a clear communicator. 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.

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 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 one page summary. And I was like, oh, I didn't really understand that in the first place.