The best time to write about an idea is when it first strikes you. I want to find something that grips me that day because then the stakes are high. It's like, I know if I don't write this today, I'm never going to write it. So it's now or never. What's going to make me roar? That's what I want to get to when you feel that way. You could stay up all my life. And I think you're almost willing to because you know if you don't write it down now, the inspiration might leave you tomorrow.
You know, Shane, one of the things that I find to be so interesting about you is that you're incredibly disciplined in your output and incredibly undisciplined in your schedule and your inputs. Yeah. Maybe what can I say? It's quarter to 11 now. So it's a little bit early for me. No normal effort to get up about four or five in the afternoon. You texted me yesterday at 4.37 pm. Hey, man, sup. I just woke up. Yeah. So I probably missed
the good day a couple of days ago. But I think when you've gone to thread to do every day, but when that's the only thing you've got to do, I mean, that's what I believe, awake it. The one thing that's certain in my life, writing on Twitter, is that I have to write a thread. And when you've got one objective, one single objective, every other concern, consideration has to fade. That's not always a good thing. And me means you miss dinners
and meetings. It means there's a strain on your personal life, your relationship, your friends, family, partner. And the result is that, as you said, you're not disciplined hour by hour, but you're disciplined day by day because the work gets done. Right? Yeah, we did these. I like the way I feel is it's over if I don't get it done. I'm going to
die. The game is up. It's time to shake hands. They had a good run and go out. Unless I get that thread done, I mean, it probably sounds a little bit silly, treating a thread on Twitter with such importance, but you know, you've got to pick something. In my case, it happens to be threads. We'll see what that is in the future. We live in this culture of hyper optimization. Yeah. And you are hyper unoptimized. You're
basically nocturnal. You smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. And you do all of these things that no productivity guru would ever say, if you do that, you will write well. But that's what you do. That's how you live and you get the work done. And you just say, you know what? If I get the work done every day, literally nothing else matters. And you're, we'll talk about this throughout today's episode, but your heart and your mind are so connected
to that goal of the work that everything else just kind of doesn't matter. Yeah. It's hard for me to really talk of this because it's just the way I think about the world. I was shocked when I was, you know, I started meeting people online and talking about they want to know, what's your writing routine? What's my writing routine? I'd have a routine. I'd just write and they say, well, you know, you're on Twitter, I say, do you use Tweedeck?
That's the thing, right? Yeah. And then I kind of covered all of the ones that called. And I'm like, which means what are these websites? Now, oh, you know, and you sort of, I understand that you can sort of pre-write a thread and then you schedule it using some external, I mean, all this is completely foreign to me. And I was shocked by the idea that they would do that. You know, and they're like, oh, do you plan ahead? Do you sort of write
seven threads? And then your work is done for the week. And I was shocked by that. But then they shocked when I say, no, no, no, I have to write, I write it every day. I just, I just open Twitter, you know, of my laptop, Twitter.com, press a blow tweet and start writing.
So with all this, yeah, there's productivity stuff. Look, I don't want to knock anybody who says, you know, it's good to get a burly to work out, you know, have a coffee, 90 minutes after waking up and drink a certain concoction of water and salt with them and have them to pass in it or something. That's fair enough. If it works for you, I can't tell anybody not to do that. No, I'm sort of skeptical of the idea of advice anyway, but it comes
to writing. I don't really like writing advice. I think some extent you've got to, you've got to just kind of go at it and see and find your own way there. But all that being said, what I will say is, if you want to write, I mean, it's great. If you need to write, nothing will stop you. I know a amount of productivity hacks will get you closer to being there. You know, if you work up and there's something you have to write down, that extra,
you know, Jim, I don't go to Jim, I don't know. So that extra pull up, that extra bench press, that extra, you know, that helps you keep track of your sleep and your meditation and that extra note taking method, that's not going to get you over the line to write what you need to write, like either do it or you don't. And that's why I may be tripped on the word want. I don't know if I want to do this, but I can't help that. I can't avoid
it. There's a scene in Rocky IV where Rocky is training for battle or for a fight and there's Drago and Drago has all the science, all the tools, all the fancy thing. And Rocky has nothing. He's just a guy from the streets. And Rocky just wants it so bad that he's going to get it done. And it doesn't matter what he has or doesn't have, what routine he's committed to or hasn't committed to. He just has the compulsion and the force of
will and the discipline, the dedication to get it done. Yeah, but it's you. I mean, we use word processors now or laptops. It's you and proverbially the paper and the pen. And for me, to some extent, there would be a caveat here, but to some extent, it's like all this other stuff, all this, all this productivity stuff is just getting in between
you and the paper. It's almost like excuses. It's like if I just get my day right, if I just wake up the right time, if I just get my schedule right, I just organize the whole of my life properly, then I'll write something good. That's all noises. It's this, this destruction and it's getting in the way of you and nothing in front of you, which is a blank piece of paper waiting to receive the ink. You even have a crappy laptop. It's
still that crappy, but it's crappy by comparison with what some people use. I guess I'm a fairly low tech guy, but again, because it seems to me to be a destruction. I mean, you kind of take just on the thing. A lot of people say, I won't try. I just can't find the time. I can't visit. But the point is, every action expresses a priority. This is one, in fact, a lot like every time you do something, it's because you chose to do that thing rather
than something else. And the say, I don't have the time to write means you don't want to write because if you really wanted to, if you really felt like you had to, I think you would find the type that there's an hour. There's a half an hour in your day waiting for you to find it within yourself to actually sit down on your laptop and write. I mean, how many, how many minutes a day do we spend, and post on our phones? I mean, that's obviously
example. But you can cook it. Why don't you write instead of eating tonight if you want to write that badly? And this maybe sounds a little bit extreme, but I can't think of it any other way. I've probably written every day of my life. See, this I was 10 years old. I mean, I missed some days, you know, when we used to go camping, whatever, although
I would still usually take a notebook and scribble things, something's down. And at that point, when you've been doing it every day for 10 or 15 years, it becomes, there's some breakable habit. What do you enjoy about it? Is it the writing of getting something out of your head and seeing the words on paper is that the refinement, is it looking back on what you have written and saying, wow, I'm proud of that. What is it? It only very
rarely do I look back at something I wrote and think, well, that's pretty good. I'm proud of that. I sort of have this line I say to people, which is that my aim is to write one good sentence every day. If all right, one good sentence has been a good day. But in terms of what do I enjoy about it? I don't even know if I would use the word enjoy. There was a certain element that said, oh, you enjoy figuring something out. You enjoy
and I'll have put a few words there together quite nicely. I'll add the cadence of that paragraph. I'm happy with the way I've expressed these ideas, but enjoyment isn't the right. enjoyment is sort of too, is an element of it, but the word doesn't have enough weight. You know, it's like, I don't want to compare myself to an artist. I recognise that I'm only writing on Twitter this far, but of course, Twitter, to me, is like my work with a thread
is sort of something that's happened on the side. It's sort of a coincidence. I'd be writing even if I didn't have a Twitter account. I've always been writing. It's a half to do this. It's a being pulled by it's by something. I think there's a certain childish join doing it. I think there has to be. There's a great thing about Jokovic and Jeremy, a Giffan
he made this brilliant poem where he's almost unfair. Jokovic, no doubt Jokovic, obviously he lost his alchemy recently, but let's say at least statistically the greatest men's tennis player of all time. He just loves hitting the tennis ball. I mean, that just seems unfair, right? But he compares that to Agacy. And Agacy was ranked number one, but Agacy, in the beginning of his biography, he says, I hate tennis. And
his father basically made him play tennis and he basically grinded his way. But what I think is interesting is yes, he did well, but he also ended up having a drug addiction and basically shooting up meth after he became number one. Yeah. And basically have this huge fall. And I think it's what Jeremy says is one of the tragedies of the world that maybe it's just someone like Jokovic who just loves playing tennis. And for him being
aligned with, hey, I just love doing this. I feel compelled to do it. That that person ultimately wins more than the person who hates it and grits their teeth and shows up anyway. Yes, this is true. And then which is why I, I suppose I have, there's a certain,
I said, almost childish delight in writing. And that's the enjoyment side. Like it's just great fun putting words on a page and seeing what happens and just throwing them together, throwing sentences, like taking an idea, the, the, the, the, the, this is the part I enjoy about writing is the part when you're least constrained when something strikes me, you know, sort of the other day, this, this idea struck me for a play. And it's a little
bit matter. It's a little bit ridiculous. But it was like, what if I had a play, which was about a play, about a play, about a film, about a play, but then this is all actually in in somebody's mind as a having a dream. But then that's actually all this is also in a book that no less is writing that is then in the mind of a sculpt, that you're on a sculptor statue and sort of infinitely receding. And I started writing this play.
I mean, I'm never going to finish it. I just thought it sounded great. And I just sort of furiously typing, you know, the dialogue and then the ideas and a few, a few stage directions. And that was delightful. Then I was just having fun. Like then I can think a few things, more enjoyable than that. Wait, when you're not worrying about why or what or who or what or how something strikes you when you go. Yeah. That's the fun of writing. It's funny.
I think that one of the things that when I'm with right of passage students that we always have to get people to is the difference between what your heart wants you to write and what your mind thinks that you want to write. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What you want to write versus what you think that you should want to write. And I can't tell you how many people don't write poorly, can't build a writing habit because they're stuck doing what they're supposed
to do instead of what's actually true to them. I mean, write as block is a real thing. Think, you know, but the biggest cause of writer's block, it isn't actually write as block. It's just that you're not writing what you're supposed to be writing, which is a scenario. But if I'm like David, are you a soccer fan? Particularly or not? No, like you. No, you'd be a baby if I told you like, David, I'll you to rhyme in essay about why lean on messy is
better than Christiano Ronaldo. You just go sit there and like, Google some stuff and you're not going to write anything. But if you were to say, right, a piece about Paul, I've been reading the book of Acts. And then also yesterday, I bought a biography of Paul. And so as long as I have the permission to bring that into my own personal experience, then it can sort of roar. And that's a word that I think a lot about. Like what's going
to make me roar? You know, like when you're in a conversation, you're, you were someone at the bar and you're going around and there's not a lot of energy in the conversation. Then all of a sudden, somebody says something. Everyone sits at me and all of a sudden, people start chirping. People are into it. They're passionate. They're saying something from their core. That's what I want to get to. But there's something beastly and almost
liony about that where it's ripping out of you and you're outside of your mind. And I feel like for me, that's when the best first drafts come because it's like my prefrontal cortex shuts off. Yeah. Yeah. And this goes back to productivity thing. Because when you're feeling like that, it doesn't matter what you've eaten or how much you've slept or any of that crap. When you're feeling that way, that I'll be beastly, like a beast.
It's a very, very potent word. When you feel that way, all of that stuff doesn't matter. And with that thrust, you could stare up all night riding. And I think you're almost willing to because you know if you don't ride it down now, the inspiration might leave you in tomorrow. So we're just on another point, which is maybe tangential, but which comes to riding every day. You mentioned that the non-discipline, discipline thing is because
I don't tend to plan what I'm riding. You know, if I have an idea, I'll note it down, which is one of the few pieces of advice, which I think was pretty good. There I can't even remember where I saw it, but someone was like, if you have an idea, make sure you ride it down straight away because you think you'll remember it and you won't. And that was pretty good advice. And so I've got a list of things I want to write about, but
the trouble with that advice is the biggest problem with it. There's the best time I find for I to write about an idea is when it first strikes you. So the best time for you to write that thing is today, basically, because you were a month and you looked forgotten why it was interesting to you. So you know, I have a list of, it's just on a word document.
It's just a list of potential threads. But most, I'll write that like I'll have two or three ideas a day and know them down, but I rarely consult it anymore because I look back and I think, oh, that's not really interesting to me right now. I can't remember why this was worth potentially worth running the thread about. What I do is I wake up and I want to find something that grips me that day because then the stakes are high. It's like I
know if I don't write this today, I'm never going to write it. So it's now or never. And you know, I don't know if that sounds artificial, but it certainly feels real to me. And I think with writing, when you increase the stakes, I can't say you're writing gets better. I hope it does. It certainly makes you more productive, right? If the stakes, it's true in all walks of life, the lower the stakes, the less you care, the higher the
stakes, the more you have to do. And we come back again, have to must compulsion. Tell me about this idea of the daily practice. I think that there's a lot of people who would say, the greats don't do it every day. Look at Bach. Look at Bach. And you've spoken about what Bach did. Yeah. And how that's inspired you. There were a couple of points there. First of all, on what on the greats, right? I mean, the first thing I'd say is the greats exist, but no two greats are the same. They all
have different habits. Some of them, you know, I mean, James Joyce, I've not read much of his work, but there's a famous story about how he would write 15, 15 words a day. That's at least some apocryphal story, which I find hard to believe because his books are pretty long. And then there are other writers who would just write thousands of words that would be a Bach. What's wonderful about Bach is we all, he's like the founder, the
dominating, even more so than Mozart or Beethoven as I understand. So Bach, what did he do? Was he sort of, you know, spending months and weeks on end, preparing his work, deliberating being careful? No, no, he was in the thick of it. So he was at the church of St. Thomas Leibzig, I think, and how he was employed there. Like he was a chapel, the cappellmist. He was his job to write a new piece of music every week to be performed in church. I meant
to play it on the organ. Like, you know, like he's working full-timey, producing music every single week. Flipside, of course, is Wagner, you know, or Brahms. It took Brahms 24 years or something to write his first symphony, took Wagner over 20 years to write the rings cycle. Both of them, of course, are these immense successes which change the course of music history forever. So there's no single way. And I guess that's
pretty important as well as far as writing goes. I have some friends who write incredibly slowly, incredibly slowly. I've one friend who writes poetry, takes him weeks to write one line. It's good poetry. But I'm not, I'm not like that. Sometimes I wish I was like that. Sometimes I wish I could be the slow, meticulous, scrupulous, that I've just
slowly chiseling away. But for good or for bad, I'm just a prayer to bring, I actually know, I don't prefer, I can't help but bring hurricane to it and just write until I'm so tired. There's something deep here. You have no choice. And I think that one of the biggest problems that writers have, and it's indicative of, I think, one of the big problems in society is that people are not comfortable surrendering to their nature.
Being at themselves and saying, this is who I am. This is who I actually am. And they're stuck being the person that their mind wants them to be rather than the person that they actually are. My bet is that if you were taking writing classes, you would not be sitting in the class saying, oh, I'm going to go out first, well, spend some time drinking a espresso and just walking around literally doing nothing. I mean, I, I've spent some time
with you. You just walk and you just sort of, you just sort of strut and you just think and you're just totally lost in your mind. And all of a sudden, it just starts pouring out of you. And that's just what I admire about you is the way that you have just said, this is what my nature is. And I'm going to be aligned with it. And I'm not even going to judge that. I'm just going to surrender to it. Yeah. I think that's probably a fairly perceptive point. And I suspect in the 21st century,
it's harder than ever to have the time and the space to surrender to something. This is this is why I advocate for writing letters, handwritten letters. I don't do it all the time. And I've done it in the past. And, you know, the world is better for instant communication, I suppose, on the whole. But what we've lost is what it means to write a letter. If I'm writing a letter to you, David, I'm, I'm slightly my room. I've got a sheet of paper and
a pen. There's no possibility of an immediate response. I've got to tell him everything about how I am, what I'm doing. When I ask him out, he is, I'll explain myself. And suddenly, you can't hide from yourself anymore. You can't hide from yourself when all these other distractions are gone. And I hope that makes sense. And that's why, yeah, I try and, well, I don't, try is wrong. But, but perhaps sometimes I do make sure that I have
enough hours in the day to do nothing, to do absolutely nothing. And what I mean by this is, you know, there's a lot of them sort of, uh, practiced doing nothing nowadays. Um, meditation yoga. This stuff is great. You know, I've done a bit of yoga. I enjoy stretching. You get to have some good downward facing down. Yeah, no, I'm mind, I'm actually, I'm a fairly flexible chap. I suppose it's the art of zoning out in some sense, because
people ask me, oh, where do you get your ideas from? Tell us, find me very weird questions. It's, it's, uh, or, you know, how do you make these connections? And I, I don't know, but I think it's because if you read a load of stuff, just read and really, really read. And then spend five hours doing nothing, literally nothing, as we've said, walking around on the streets, just, just looking at the floor, seeing what you see. Um, your brain will
do the work for you. It's a remarkable machine. We have here. And, and the more you, the more you use it, like when you're using actively doom scrolling, it can't do that finger. It ticks along and just figures things out in itself. I mean, this machine is so powerful. We don't even understand a single thing about it, basically. I'd go a step further. You
go a step further. I think it's something outside of us. I think it is something beyond, far beyond the intellect, whether you want to call it the hand of God, whether you want to call it the universe, I see creativity more and more as a pattern of listening, rather than doing. And as a sense of awareness and connection. Yeah. No, I love this idea. I love this idea. I love this idea. I love this idea. I love this idea. I do. You turn
yourself into a conduit. Boom. Right. We're rather than you being sort of the source, rather than you being the thing from which it flows. It's like if you use it, tune your is and your mind and your eyes. Things will just come to you and then you transmit that onto the onto the page. I had a moment yesterday. A friend asked me a question and we've been grappling with something on Monday. He texted me and said, Hey, I think I have an answer.
And I saw it and I was like, No, that's not right. I think it's this. And then he goes, freaking love that. There we go. And it was one of those things where I had this huge epiphany about the relationship between people, fear and thought and how all that plays together to create sanctification. And I just been wrestling with this on Monday. And by Thursday, it all came clear to me in one sentence, one idea. And I did no work in
order to discover that. How did that happen? How can I tap more into that? Some of the threads that I've written on Twitter that have done the best were in ones that I they're just started typing. They just started typing and then it just sort of happened. And then the example I'll give is we made it to come this from a different angle later on is the danger of minimalist design. You know, there's a reddit. I just wrote it and
it got half a million likes on Twitter. The thread heard around the world. Yes. Which was and I had about, you know, 15,000 followers on Twitter at the time and that one really boosts. It just gave me the, you know, the critical mass to take off. And you know, looking back, I would probably rewrite every word of it. And my opinions have changed. I've learned more. But the point is it happened. It took me five minutes to write it, probably.
And normally you're afraid to take me anywhere between two hours and 12 hours. That one was just like this. But that that that five minutes of writing was the result of probably 10 years of thinking and then reflects my observations. And then which is this point about being a conduit, right? And then this and I mean, the hand of God, whatever one chooses to call it, you observe and you listen and you think and you reflect. Eventually without doing any
work without you actually, it'll just come out of you. You know, you look at David Foster Wallace, I live in Austin and at the University of Texas, there are his archives and you can go and you can see that he wrote by hand so he would write and write and write. And there's been things that have been said about writing by hand. There's a special connection that you have to your writing,
all these sorts of things. Well, one of the biggest things that I think you get in writing by hand, that you don't get with writing on the computer is the delete key is too available on the computer. And I've been wondering why people actually why I have more personality, more voice when I speak versus when I write. And I think that the delete key hurts me that when I speak, there is no delete key. The words have left my mouth and that's how handwriting is. But when I write, I can say,
I didn't like that. I'm going to bring it back and rewrite it. And there's a homogenization of keyboard writing that isn't true for handwriting. I love that. That's, I've not heard that before, but that's a fascinating idea. I mean, that's that's sort of, so the retool thing is I like about it. First of all, I love these stories about how little bits of technology completely change a world in ways you don't expect by just by having a backspace. They just change the way we think
and the way we speak and talk and the way we write and the choose butterfly effect. But also, yeah, that's probably true if you're writing by hand, you know, if you look at sort of drafts of novels from the past, you know, they're just all scrolled out notes and the margins, lines, all over the place corrections. And it's certainly, it's not just, it's a different type of writing. It's not just writing, it's not like writing with two different kinds of pens, like writing on
laptop or throwing with hand, or perhaps two different ways to write. But the truth is, when it comes to my stuff, I do, I've always, you know, I was raised typing, oh, at school, we wrote by hand. But I think typing appeals to me because of the speed of which you can do it, right? Because you can write quicker by typing than you can by hand, and I'm a volume writer rather than a precision. I mean, I just said that and I always type by keyboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is something that comes
out in a handwritten letter that I think special. I want to jump into your story. Sure. In a little bit more than a year, you've gone from basically flipping burgers and McDonald's to a million and a half Twitter followers. Yeah, this is certainly a long way from McDonald's being here. There's a short story, there's a long story. I'll give the short story first because and it's just one line. The thing that changed is that I started writing online.
And of course, I know with Brad, I've passed just what you do and I'm not really saying this to sort of, you know, to blow smoke will be backside. Rather, I mean, this was before I even made. But it's true. The thing I changed was I started writing online. That's the short story. The slightly longer story is that so what do we know? It's 2024. No, it's 2023. It's 2023. So in 2022, let's rewind the clock 14 months April of 2022. I'm working in McDonald's.
The reason I'm working there is because I need money. I need the job. If you need money, what do you do? You apply for a job or you just do whatever you can. I need to spend my rent. I say, you know, I owed all my friends money. I didn't have any money. So I needed a job. I applied to pizza, her and Tesco and McDonald's and they all rejected me apart from McDonald's. There's I suppose, you know, people I will she and what the hell, you know, why do you just,
you know, you have a law degree? Why don't you go and become a lawyer? I think it's because I knew I didn't want to commit to a career. So I also just, I didn't want to be a lawyer. I don't only get in the office and start, you know, drawing up contracts or all that. I just want money. I'll do some simple honest work. Working in McDonald's. I've been writing every day my whole life. I've got about, you know, three or four unpublished novels, which I've tried to get published in the
past, you know, wanted. And I've got hundreds of thousands of words of just of all sorts on my laptop. Plays, poetry, drama, essays, articles, philosophical dialogues, whatever I was writing journals, I used to keep a very detailed journal. And you know, my dream, let's say, it always being to be a writer. Of course, I think I've since learned that if you write, then you're a writer. Doesn't matter whether you're a publishing novelist or everyone that you have a big audience,
if you write, then you're a writer. But I wanted to be a published writer. I think what had happened is that I got complacent. I'd started to believe that eventually something would happen. And so, I'd started to believe that someday someone was going to knock on my door and say, hey, she and we heard, you know, you're a diamond in the rusts. Why don't we give you, you know,
£50,000 to write a book for us? I didn't, you know, that's, I didn't actually believe that, but I've become complacent, the point in which I thought life would just hand me what I wanted. So I quit my job in McDonald's. And I applied to film school, because I love cinema. Maybe one might, maybe my oldest passion is cinema, maybe. I applied to film school. I also applied to join the British Army, which is something I'm also passionate of. People were quite shocked when
I told them, but it was a very serious choice. And well, film school rejected me. The army accepted me. And then my friend, my very good friend, Harry Dry. He was going to Tenorief on holiday for two weeks. And he invited me. He said, Joe, come. And I was like, well, I can't. I don't have any money. Anyway, so that, you know, my, my, my mother born me the plane tickets for my birthday. So I go fly to Tenorief and back. And we were staying there for free because it was Harry's brother's
friend's apartment. So it's like I quit my job and somehow the world had conspired to give me a chance. He was like, okay, quit your job. And I hear it two weeks to change everything. So the first thing I did was I thought, okay, the priority was making money. I'm not going to sort of tend that I really wanted to, that I wanted to change the world or, or I didn't even think I was going to get an audience on, I just wanted to make some money. So film school, army,
it also started writing. I read a few articles for this website called Listverse. It's like top 10. It's like top 10 most interesting tables or something. Just some crap like that. They pay you $100 for an article. I also like measure counts on five. You know, five of the website and upwork was like, oh, I'll edit your essays for you, whatever. And then I also thought, okay, well, my friend said to me, a good way to make money is tutoring. You know, I've got a friend
who makes 50 quid an hour tutoring. That sounds great. You know, I love to, I like talking to people. I like talking stuff. So I'm going to try and start tutoring. I didn't want to tutor maths or English or anything. I have a law degree. I'm going to try and tutor law. So I post on about 150 Facebook groups. I mean, like, does anyone want to law a tutoring? Obviously, obviously, no one says yes. So I said, okay, what can I do? What can I do that special? I thought, maybe I
can tutor people, you know, a lot of parents want their kids to be well rounded. A lot of adults want to be well rounded. So maybe I can tutor people about the things that don't teach in the school. A bit more art, architecture, history, in a more general sense. I thought this could be it. So I committed to it. I made a website and I had a website offering tutoring, cultural tutoring. And then my friend said, and I posted online about this as well in various forums and got no
traffic. My friend said, well, why don't you start a Twitter account? This was Harry. This was Harry. He said, started Twitter account to drive traffic to your tutoring business as he kept calling it. Whereas I struggle to believe that I'll ever run a business. But anyway, I made a Twitter account. And for the name of it, I chose the cultural tutor because that was literally what I was doing. I mean, people asked me whether the name comes from and it didn't come from
a position of believing that I had this knowledge to impart. I mean, I was literally offering cultural tutoring as a, in order to make a bit of money. Call the cultural tutor and start writing on Twitter. And I kind of enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing threads. And it became clear very, very quickly that no one was interested in my tutoring. But people did kind of like what I was writing. And I think by the time we left Tenorees, which is where we were, which is two weeks,
I had a thousand followers on Twitter and I sucked off the tutoring. I was like, I'm going to grow this Twitter platform. Harry said, start a newsletter. And then maybe monetize a newsletter. That's how you make money. I said, okay, I'm going to go for it. The money's going to have to wait. But let's go for it. Talk about some of the work that you did early on. So you would write a thread and then you would reach out to at least 20 different accounts. What would you say? What was that
early distribution process like for you? It was brutally, it was, um, writer thread. And I see in the early days, I used to write like two or three threads a day. Is that right? Look at it. Just the, the, the, well, the beauty of beginning something new is that there's just, there's, there's a simplicity to it. And you don't second guess. You don't think should or shims. I, you just, what feels right? You do it. So I would write a three threads a day and,
you know, I was like, just do one. I was like, no, I want to write three. And then what I would do is the way I'd build up my first few hundred followers, what was literally, let me begin with, you just follow a bunch of people, random people who follow accounts that, and then hope for some followers back, get your friends to follow you. You've got 10 or 15 followers that way. You'd start tweeting in the early days, your threads maybe get one or two likes. Um,
just keep the process going. I was, I was always trying to follow people online. I'd go search for a, for like a thread about something I've written about as well that are doing quite well but from a different account and then, then, then follow that person and hopefully they follow me back.
And then eventually you start to get three or four likes on the thread. And then every time you upload a new one, you, I messaged everyone individually who'd ever liked to retweet at any of my threads being like, hey, I've just done a new thread, by the way, you might like this as well. Um, and so on and so forth. And then I messaged some bigger accounts, people with 2000 followers, people with 5,000, 10,000, mainly just asking for advice. And some of them very kindly
followed me, retweeted like, but this is really grinding, grinding it out. I remember it was like, one night I'd written this thread and I got one in the morning and I stayed up till four. So when three hours just messaging people, um, doing your dog's body work and it's not glamorous, it's not fun. But when the motivation, the motivation was X, it was like, I don't have any money. Like, the, the, the, it's still or die, it's still a die like if I want to go back to working
on my dolls, then I can give it. But if I want to do something from a make a bit of money, um, make it living. I mean, that was, I suppose, the main inspiration, the main motivation, the main motivator. Who else throughout history has had this sort of motivation where they've needed to make money and have written something great because of it. It's every writer or every artist who's ever lived, right? The trouble with artists is other in some sense useless
and they have to find a way to make money. And if you want to make money, usually being an artist is not the right way to do it. So there's a Thursday afternoon and I remember it distinctly because you started in May. So this would have been mid June 2022. And I'm on the phone with a guy on our team at writer passage and you would just hit a hundred thousand. And I saw that. And I was in love with your work. I was like, I've scrolled. I mean, in terms of how many miles my thumb has
scrolled in my life, you know, I've scrolled hundreds of miles. I just, and I said, this is one of the best people I found. And you had just said a hundred thousand and to launch that you're going to a paid newsletter to finally make your money. And I remember seeing this and saying, that's a horrible idea. That's a terrible idea because you were growing so fast and I was worried that you were going to get so obsessed with the paid newsletter that you were going to constrain your growth.
And so I was sitting there. I was in my apartment and I was like, I don't know who this guy is. He's a statue account. Who knows what continent he lives on? I need to get in touch with him so that I can tell him to not watch the subscription newsletter. As fate would have it, Harry Dry, who you spoke about earlier, he responded to that Twitter thread with a photo of you and Tenerife. It was an old film photo. And it was unclear. It was unpolished. And it was his crappy phone. That's what it was.
So his photo, his phone photo was so bad that it looked like a film photo, right? And it says, proud of you, brother. And I'm like, okay, so I WhatsApp Harry. I'm like, who is this guy? You need to put me in touch with him. And we get on the phone. And I was just going to basically fund you to just to just keep writing. And I was like, I got to convince this guy to do it. We started talking and then you said, Hey, you know, I'm interested. It was funny because to your
bread and sawpoint, you said, I can live on about 25,000 pounds a year. And I just need enough money to move out of my parents' place and get my own apartment. And we ended up giving you a little bit more than that. And then you were sort of off to the races. Yeah, no, that was um, I mean, I remember the week. I was at home. I was with my mother. And yeah, I just after six weeks, I'd hit 100,000 followers. So it was wonderfully quick. I mean, the early days of any project,
always sort of take on the slow of these Halcyon days. And it's certainly looking back you felt like that because everything is so simple and a race 200,000. I was getting fit for the army, you know, running every day and stuff. And here 100,000 followers. And to mark 100,000, launch a newsletter and then we get the call. Or Harry tells me there's a guy who wants to speak to you. Um, and I'm what a moment. I remember I would be spoke on the phone. I went outside on the streets
because I like to I can't sit still on the phone. I have to walk around on one. Well, it's funny even for this part. You're like, we'd have to sit down for a few hours to record this. You're like, ah, can I walk around? I was like, no, no, no, you're not sitting there. I'm going to try and stay in the chair. Um, and, and what a moment. I mean, in terms of what any writer wants. Imagine somebody saying to I'm going to pay you to write. And I'm not going to pay to write anything in particular.
I'm not going to ask you to do anything for me. I'm just going to give you enough money to live on. And all I ask is are you right every day? So that's what you gave to me. And it was, um, yeah, we're looking back one of the best days of my life because after six weeks of, of, sort of killing myself to do this thing. Um, you know, writing thread every day on Twitter, do a far harder things to do in the world than that. Um, and writing is what I love is what I kind
of help are doing. So I'm very looking at regard. But from a certain point of view, it's not easy to do one every single day. No matter how you're feeling, how well you are, what you've got planned, what have you want to do. And then for that to, to, to happen, the, the, the moment when we spoken the phone and you said, yeah, I'm going to pay you. It is like, it doesn't get any, it does not get any better than this. So that was, um, yeah, a stroke of look. It's funny. We've,
we've had a lot of conversations since we started. And the only thing I've said is just Twitter thread every day, focus on email and don't do other things. And you know, we're talking about a point of view. And that has been my point of view. My point of view has been if you can really grow this Twitter account to where you've grown it and have this newsletter of a couple to 100,000 people, you are just going to be set for whatever it is that you want to do for the
first able future. And I think that one of the things that frankly, a lot of the mistakes I've made in my career, I really didn't want you to make. And I became very distracted and I lost side of the eight ball. And I got distracted by the glitz and all the different things that came. And I think that you learn these lessons for a reason, but some of my regrets, which really sting me, are losing track of my essence as a creative. And I didn't want to watch you do that.
Because I'm now facing some of the consequences of having, of having lost that. And just trying to get back into it. That's hard. I suspect it is where it sounds quite scary to me that thought losing your essence as a creative as a writer. It was good advice to give me to just and also give you give me the money, give me my bread and salt, you gave me, you commissioned me in some
sense to you and my patrons still are. Of course. And I think that does it say the proof is in the pudding and looking back, it's kind of worked out because if I continued with that paid newsletter, then my attention would have been diverted. I would probably stop running a thread every day. I really talked about Instagram. There were some really early people who reached out, say, hey, let's do this. Exactly. And I mean, what I always said to you is everyone's underestimating your
worth who's reaching out to you. Yes, you did. You told me that. You told me that and that was very much appreciated. But I think there is an important broad point here as well, which comes to narrowing your focus, right? It's doing one thing well. It's being the best in the world at one thing. And I suppose, yeah, in a different, there's a different world in which my head gets turned by this offer. Somebody wants to work with me. It happened. People immediately were like,
hey, do you want to do X, Y and Z? Do you want to stop its YouTube account with me? Do you want to get offers? And I probably had a photo. You said we that short video. You said, hey, what do you think? I was at the Union Station and watching it to DC, watching this video. And I think I said you it's fine. But I think it's a distraction. Yeah, precisely. And there's another world in which my head gets turned. And I'm doing this other thing. I look at me, you're having
a good time. But I probably don't have X number of followers on Twitter that I do now. And that's the value of doing one thing and doing it well. And I suppose, there's a writer in terms of whatever rise and advice I might give is, is, is, is, if you go to be a finisher as well. It was funny. We were together and someone must have recommended something reset. Hey, read this ass. It's great ass. 10, 15 years ago. And you were just like, okay.
But I really try not to read anything written in the last 50 years. Yeah. Why? There's a few reasons for it. One of them, I mean, I'll just go straight down the bar with the simplest, the simplest reason of all, the simplest reason not to read something published in the last 50 years is because that's what everyone else is reading. The only books are people read. The most people read are books published in the last heart. Not even if it's in the last six years.
And last, the last two years, right? You know, I'm not disparaging these authors. They've done incredibly well for themselves. And, and, and, you know, I've no doubt their books are filled with marvels and wonderful, wonderful things. But the rest of the world is reading them. And it's a simple fact of life that that if you consume, you read what everyone else is reading, then the likelihood that you will write what they are writing and the, and worst of all, think what they are thinking
is, let's say, increased. It's not certain. But if all, if we all read the same books, we all think the same things, right? So if all you do is read something different, if rather than reading the Tomic habits, you know, is the first one that comes to mind as one of these books, which is like everywhere, you know, right? If we're rather than reading the Tomic habits, you go and read, I don't know, Boeufius, the consolation of philosophy, just one example.
Then your output is going to be different. And if you're, I mean, it all sounds a little bit calculated and it's, it's not really calculated on my part, but it's just, it's just the fact. If you want to stand out as a writer, if you want to find your voice, have a voice, be distinctive, all the things that would say writers should have them, should want. Then just by reading something different, you will achieve that. I mean, that, that, that,
that's one reason why I try and avoid it. And also, I just think it's impossible. The quality filter is, I mean, it's something, I think you should just read it whatever you want and decide for yourself if it's good. But problem is, we're not alive for very long. Like 180, 200 million different books in the world, the different books. You could read any of them. You could read any book you want from the world. Tomorrow you could start reading any
book that's ever been written with, with a few caveats. So you, you can read any book, but you can't read every book. So you've got to choose which books you read. And therefore it matters, or you read. You can only read so many books in lifetime. I mean, part of me thinks would be better off picking one book and never reading another book and just getting to that one book very well. Unfortunately, that's not the case. So you have to choose. And if a book, let's say,
I mentioned Boifius, that was basically a bestseller for about 1,200 years. And if a book has been held in such a regard for over a thousand years, it's not unreasonable to assume that it has something of real value in it. And at the very least, even if the book itself is got awful, the fact it's been read for so long means it has had an immense amount of influence. And by reading that book, you'll understand so much more about the world regardless of the quality of that book
itself. So, so you have a choice, really. Whose recommendation do you take? The recommendation of the readers of the New York Times or whatever the New York Times, I don't even have a calculator of New York Times specialties or father time. Right, right. Yeah, father time is the best recommendation. There is a thousand years, 50 generations of the greatest minds in the world, or whoever happens to be buying books. Well, we've moved from a space bias to a time bias
in terms of our relationship to information. So if you go back to 1617th, 18th century and you're in Southern England or you're in Austin, Texas and you walk into a bookstore as people with a read a library, what you find is it is very geographically constrained. So the books in Austin are from Austin, the books in Southern England are from Southern England or the surrounding area, but they're from many different time periods. There's some stuff that's going to be 50 years old,
some stuff that's going to be 100 years old. But now if you take how people consume information, so that was the space bias. Now we're in a time bias and the time bias is if you open up your Twitter account, you'll see information from anywhere. Your first few tweets will be India, China, from Australia, United States, from England, Germany, we've all over the world, but everything was created right now. And so it used to be that if you wanted to get new ideas, what would you do?
You'd get on a ship and you'd go to another continent and you'd find new ideas. Now if you want to find new ideas, the frontier, the geographical frontier is gone. So what do you do? You go back in history. And when you do that, it's the equivalent of traveling through space. 300 years ago, now you travel through time. I love the way you describe this and there's a few things to say here. I mean, the first thing, there's a pretty in line from Chilsa, which I can't
remember. And it's something like all, it is about how all the new ideas that men have, all the new ideas come from the treasure troves of old books. Some of the chores have said something like this. And I was back in the 14th century. So 700 years ago, guys saying the same thing, you're saying, which is kind of, again, speaks to the truth of it, perhaps. But yeah, this thing, you've spoken about this before very eloquently and written about it
very well, which is the 24 hour content. The never ending now. The never ending now. It's really quite, quite terrifying. The internet actually does have all this stuff on it. I mean, you know, I think of what it was like in the past. If you get an old book, I mean, in Venice, we've got quite a lot of old books around us here. If you look at the care with which they're bound and the care with which they're treated and looked after, that's because books
are incredibly valuable. And now the internet, we have all the books that have ever existed. These are things which the people, our ancestors, the writers, people from the past from all around the world, they could have dreamed of it. I mean, think of any writer from, I mean, like Erasmus, he's one of my, oh, there we go. Erasmus, one of my heroes. What would he have made of the internet? You know, every book ever written for free. I mean, you know, you have to be able to, before the internet,
born to pass that. Every book ever written. I mean, what a wealth of knowledge. So about you this, your board of army, Lord Byron, yes, 1812. Holy crap. So I was in a London 1812, 1812. So it was still alive at that point. Yeah. So here, so this is for you. You can open it up. And you can see the pages have been, I mean, they look like they've been through a fire or something. 1812. And then there's a note here from 1850. Wow. And I know you really like him. So,
no, I wanted to give that to you. Oh, it's child's, how old's pilgrimage. I love school. Thanks. Yeah. That's incredibly full-fledged kind. See, the problem is when you give me books, I immediately get lost in them. See, this is, whether they're back to the point, this book is 200 years old, warning 200 years old, warning to a falling only 200 years old precisely. So this is a beautiful copy of Byron. You can also get a copy of Byron in the book shop for probably less than the cost of a coffee.
I'm just going to put this on the table then for now, although I may have looked through a late one and find something for you. I keep mentioning Beweetheus. And the reason I love this example is because I remember buying the copy of the constellation philosophy for £1 from a charity shop for £1. The wisdom contained in that book, the knowledge that is shaped the history of the world, all right? And the book study for very long is that 100 pages long,
for £1.00. For less than the cost of a coffee. For the cost of 1.30 of a coffee, you can read the book and access the wisdom that has shaped the world history for a thousand years. And do you do that? Do you spend £1 on that? Or do you, you know, watch, watch, score on Instagram and you're just watch, you know, interesting or funny videos. Or did you know videos? This kind of thing. Oh, you're trying to like, improve as a writer? Is that
something that you think about? Well, I want, I want to get better. There's no doubt about that. You're Leonardo DaVinci and there is no books here of his treaties. Well, in his pravenor books, he wrote a load of advice for young painters. And then his heir Francesca Meltsy, Colleague-Collated DaVinci's notes, takes it and publishes this scattered advice in a treaty called on-painting. Wonderful. Everyone should read it. Well, not everyone. If you'd care
to, it's certainly worth reading. Certainly worth reading what one of the greatest minds in history has to say. And again, available for free online. Anyway, one thing he says in his treaties, it's addressed to young painters, but this is true if I think anybody in any field. He says, um, the your judgment must always exceed the work. What he means by that is, um, every time you've done something, you must always believe that it's not as good as it could
have been. So your judgment of your judgment, your idea of what you want to achieve, must always be greater than the thing you've actually done. He says as soon as you think, oh, I'm happy with myself. I've done really well there. I've done that so much better than I thought I could have done. As soon as you do that, then you become complacent and you're losing. I said, I'm certainly never particularly happy with anything ever written. My first thought,
so say with threads, I mean, thread is strange because it's hard to edit them. Like an essay, you could take a week over an essay, let's say you can write to edit it, come back, redraft. When you're writing one for the day, it's very hard to edit it, you know, because normally the best way to edit is to write and at least sleep on it. But the first thing I think whatever I send out any work is, wow, that could have been so much better. I want to improve to the extent that it's
conscious. I don't know if it is. I don't think I sort of, I never practice, if I make sense. You know, I never, I don't know if you can practice. I mean, I suppose in as much as writing, and then writing and writing and then deleting and rewriting and editing, that is a practicing. But I always want to get better, I always want to get better, I'm never happy. I'm always trying, I want to make every sentence better than the previous one. And there are some technical things
I focus on. Sometimes I won't be happy with the way I'm using syntax. I think this is just really awkward, ugly syntax. And I will zone in on a particular thing and maybe when I'm writing the next paragraph of something in the newsletter on Twitter, okay, let's just get some good, solid syntax here. Well, the sentences are getting too long, sentences are getting too short,
less proof of the word choice a bit. If you were to take all those things, word choice, log sense, short sense, syntax and describe it in one word, what are you trying to go for? Part of me wants to say truth, but that perhaps doesn't quite cover it because I suppose one word answer is very difficult. And if I had to come one word, it would be truth. But or, and truth, obviously, it's kind of like authenticity, I suppose, as well. It's kind of like
voice, but I don't think you can aim to write with your voice. You've got to pick something to write about and your voice will emerge hopefully when you're writing about it, but I think it's got to be truth. It's got to be truth. I don't know what else I could say to that. But of course, you know, I'm not even sure if I aim for character or to write colourfully. I'm sort of just holding that direction. Although, you can turn it down. Sometimes I like, no, I need to be very
clear, keep it simple. Don't add in too many sub clauses. Well, we live in a time that is obsessed with originality. And I think you can see this in modern art, most visibly. How much of modern art is trying to shock people to try to do something that's never been done before? And I think I bought into that a lot and I was talking to... Well, really? Yeah, absolutely. Toolfalt. And let's talk to a friend and he was saying,
well, you know, you're not a very original guy. You're just a guy who's really going to curate things and you curate and then you bring them together and you like to take things, synthesize them, mold them, reshape them, and then share it with the world in a fundamentally new way. But you're not a very original guy. And I was shook. I was shook. How do I think about this? And I think that look, some of what I'm saying here is probably a kind of hope for the person who I wish I was
and not the person who I actually am. Because I do love curating things. And I started thinking about that. I love traveling and curating aesthetics and styles and people. And then one thing I've been thinking about this goes back to your notion of truth. One of the things that I've been getting from the Christian writers is that what they're trying to do is actually the very opposite of originality. They're trying to reveal something about what the nature of the world through God that
has always existed. And they're actually trying to go back to what's always been true rather than to go forward to something. And I find that there's something very compelling about that. Riders can't think about what the public want or their readers want. But I think as soon as you start writing for your readers, many writers have succeeded doing this. Of course they have. But you should have the greats. What it means to be great. If you want to be
the right, I think you've got to write for yourself. Like forget what other people want. I don't want to. And with my work on Twitter, this is true, I think as well. I mean, some of what I write is popular. But I'm my number one audience member. I'm writing this stuff because I want to learn about it because I want to figure it out. I'm writing about art because I want to understand art and I want to apply art to to to to this context of the other. You know, I read a thread about why
we were tired. I come to say, hey, wearing a tie. I was like, why am I wearing a tie? I want to know that. I read a thread about it. But it's as I wanted to know. And I think writers have to, you know, it's sort of, we're in the CF strange bit where we're maybe maybe we're more
narcissistic than ever before in the 21st century. But also self-interest. You know more than me, I mean, to tell me with your young writers, your students, rather, you know, what, are they self-interested enough when I look at writers who are up and coming, they want it. They both haven't tapped into the basic stuff around copywriting, around writing in great hook and all that. And then there's another side of you're trying to write something that you don't
actually want to write. You're trying to do the thing that you think is going to make you successful and not the thing that you're innately drawn towards. You're not writing for yourself. And it shows in your writing. The problem with people who only write for themselves is they don't do the work to take an idea from like a seven out of 10 to a 10 out of 10 to really refine to really sharpen. I found in my life when I talk to those people, they almost get bored of the idea and they move
on from it before it gets good. I mean, there's a reason David Fossilal, so I adore. There's a reason he writes four, five, six versions of his book. Sure, but Byron, he just dashed it off. Now is that? I mean, not completely, but like, since he compared to, so you got Byron, Shelley and Keats, they're like the three great romantic poets from Britain. Like Keats and Shelley, technically, in terms of prosody and rhythm and meter, they're way better than Byron. Like Byron
is often a bit, he's a bit shoddy when it comes to slap dash. Yeah, this slap dash, right? But there was so much of vigor in Byron's writing that even to this day, he is still the most popular, the most beloved. He wields the greatest sort of influence and then of the more. And I think I have something to do with the fact that, you know, it's almost maybe
it was like a graph theory. It's like, let's just say passion versus technical quality. And like, you know, I suppose, take Shakespeare, you know, maybe he's up here, he's the one who matches, he's got all the passion, all the technical quality. And I don't know if I fall on that graph, but I just, you know, this redrafting, redrafting, editing, editing, editing, I'm also not the biggest, I'm not as, maybe this is to my detriment, but I can only tell you how I write and I'm not much of a,
I'm not the biggest editor or redrefter. Let me just ask you straight up. Yeah. You have five years to write the best thing you could possibly write. What's your approach? That's a tricky question. I mean, you hear a two potential approaches. One is I wait four years and 51 weeks and then I give myself a week and I write it in a week. That's one option. That's option A. Option B is, guess what I write now and over the course of five years create something
extraordinary. I mean, I do kind of love the idea of spending five years on a single project and it made my, somebody said, I can imagine it going either one of two ways. I was going to end up as this sort of one and a half million word long, you know, sort of in search of lost time, NEM is a robler, the virus and of a book. Oh, it's just one line. You spend five years working on one line. How good does that sound? Well, it's funny. I think that if you look at rappers, you can kind
of see both work. You hear about Jay Z. Jay Z just walks into the room, play the beat, listens, mumbles, struts around, fills it out and then all of a sudden just comes out with a crazy verse and then you have people on the other side, you have M and M. M and M works from nine to five and he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and he writes, and he writes five PM no matter what he's doing, closes a book done with my work, but he's always writing. He's always writing.
But he treats it like a day job and then you have people like Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick is writing, writing, trying to make it better and better working on different drafts. What he does is he steps away from the craft for a while. You have Kanye, three beats a day for five years. So there you're getting volume, just constantly working on his beats, constantly working on his beats. And so maybe the theme of this conversation is it all can work.
I think that is certainly the theme of this. Yeah, we seem to approaching and this is what I do, which is why I'm just I'm not skeptical of writing advice, but the point is, imagine you have a set of writing rules. There are hundreds of them. If everyone follows the same rights and rules all right in the same way, and what will be the bloody point in that? The point is we don't want to, you got to write. So it would be if part A of the theme is everything works. Okay. What does
I mean? How do you apply that to an individual? What's the conclusion? And again, I think it comes down to the fact that you can't hide from the page. You can't hide from the pen, the paper, and you in a room locked in there. And that's anyway, you're going to find out what works.
You know, you get to know what kind of writer you are, whether you're the nine to five guy, whether you're, you know, the wake up at four in the morning guy, you're the staple night guy, whether you're the biren or the keats or the Shirley, is by doing it is an, and I wish you was more exciting or interesting, but there's no, there's no other way to put it than just sit down and try and write and do it every day. And then you can learn all these other things. You're worried about
all these other details, all these other, oh, I don't know. You've got to make it. And then this is why I also advocate writing and solitude. I'm not a fan of writing in cafes or libraries. I think you've got to be on your own. That's certainly my view of it. Other people may disagree, but for me, it's got to be you in that room locked in there with no choice, with no option. I mean, this is the funny thing. So, so when I'm running a thread, I actually sort of try and
avoid writing the thread for as long as I can. What do you think your median time of writing is? There's no, there's none, there's none. No, but like I feel like if you were to average out your writing, I feel like the time, what time in the day, are you over the last year and a half been most likely to be writing? I would guess it's probably like two forty five a.m. Yeah, yeah, definitely. It's definitely early hours of the morning. I always end up going on an
cternal. I can't help it. I think it's because it's dark and it's quiet and no one can bother you. That's what it must be like. Because I hate, I just, you know, emails call me emails. As you know, I don't, I don't like emails or what some messages. Well, you're a big conversation cafe guy, right? You just go talk to me. Yeah, yeah. I just talked. Why do you like doing it? Yeah. Maybe just to do how I was raised. And there's a certain simple delight in talking,
talking to people. I'll wander around. I'll go to bookshop. Do anything. I've void writing, avoid it, avoid it. I don't know. It's almost like every day I'm hoping the day will come where I manage to not write. And I can be funny, freeze from this thing. And I can just go and not be a writer than every day and I'm stuck there, you know. It's time. And I can't help it. Well, David Senra asks, what would you keep doing if somebody paid you a billion dollars to not
do it? What would you still do? And you just gave your answer. I'm praying for some day. I'll find the day where I don't write. And I still can't find it. Yes, precisely. Tell me about what you learned from Harry about writing hooks. It was quite hard skill to learn. I'm not a sound by guy. I'm not a hook guy. When I'm talking or writing, I'm not somebody who tends to give you one sort of snappy little sentence that sums it all up. And I've said this before, but one thing I noticed on
Twitter, their Twitter is this incredible platform. It's a, it's a, it's all the most remarkable inventions of the last century. Maybe we won't go into that out, but the bonnets, I noticed something. There were a lot of brilliant people on Twitter writing this fascinating stuff about history, art, architecture, whatever. But there was such, there was so into their circle and there was such, let's say, dull writers. And I loved, I loved dry dull writers. I love it. The only people
reading these tweets were people already interested in that topic. You know, it's like, hey, today we're going to do a deep dive on how architecture changed, and 16th century in Italy, after the founding of a Jesuits and based on what, you know, Ignatius, a son Ignatius Llorola, a set of x. And you know, it's like, to me, that sounds thrilling. But but to average, Twitter user, the question, like we just got them, why would I read that? You don't even notice it.
But I noticed on Twitter as well, you've got these people who were just shilling, they just shilled, they're saying, like, here are 15 tips to make you richer, whatever. I don't know, and it's just, it's just, just complete crap about, about, about, about, waiting, waiting up at particular times and routines and mindsets and methods. And look, I'm sure a lot of the self-optimization stuff is good, but I think a lot of it is, is, is patent. Try. But they were getting engagement,
offer scale, they were getting 50, 60, 70, 80, 100,000 likes and millions of readers. And I was going on here, like, the really valuable, interesting, meaningful stuff, no one's reading, but everyone's reading, they said that I was like, it's nothing to do with the content itself, it's just the way these guys have, they figured out how to write hooks that everyone wants to read, they figured out how to write a head, as I use paper, how do you write a headline? It's the title of a book.
A lot of books have sold millions of copies just because they had a great title. I suspect, I suspect. So what I did was I tried to learn the lessons from these self-optimization people and apply it to history and art. And Harry, our good friend who's, as one anonymous Twitter user described in the best copywriter in the world, he held me in this regard because he's really good at, you know, he's telling me, tighten up too much, I don't want to read it. He, you know, we'll give
you an example, one of Harry's best lines. And it's so simple, that's why it's so good, it's just make it falsifiable. And it's just a known fact that this is much more interesting to people and appeals to them much more strongly. So, so, and I, you know, I tried to apply this, that's one example of something I would apply to, to the threads of a history and art. So, rather than this is, you know, the famous picture, the great wave of, of Kanagawa, it's by
Hawksite, yeah, of course. Everyone, of course, assumes it's a painting, sort of painting, it's a print, it's a book, a print, and there's loads of copies of it around the world. So, rather than being like, oh, you've all seen the great wave of Kanagawa before, it's one of the world's greatest paintings. Here's a deep dive into it. That's just okay, before the world's greatest
painting, so what? But I wrote this thread, I was like, it's not actually a painting, dot, dot, what's in the, I can't remember the words exactly, the point is I'm making this claim, which is other true or false, I'm making a specific claim about the great wave of soft Kanagawa.
And, and I, this one example, and I think maybe what helped to drive some of the engagement is that I rather ruthlessly applied some, some simple copywriting and learn from, from you, and learn from these self-optimization gurus as well, who we would trick in people into reading nonsense. I have hopefully tricked them into reading slightly less,
yes, as a serious nonsense. Like another way to think about it is I think that it's really easy to be a consumer of somebody who's doing something at a very high level, and to say, hey, they just got up there, and it just poured out of them, and I'll give you an example. So, comedy show. And the comedian did a good job with the, with the bit, and I said, hey, how many times did you rehearse the average joke? And he said about a thousand.
So, I'm sitting there and I'm saying, this stuff is just pouring out of them. Is that what happens, I ask him? He says, no, no, the art of comedy is you're working on your timing, you're working on delivery, you are working on making it seem like you're not working, and I think there's something beautiful about the unnaturalness of naturalness. I like that, and it's reassuring in a way. I think because you look at these grates, and you think,
I can't do that. You're like, you're looking, if there's no way I could ever speaking about writing, write anything, anywhere near as good as that. But obviously they put it, you're seeing the end point of decades of practice. You think a Tarantino movie doesn't require any editing? Precisely. I like that point about editing. Yeah, every film requires editing. Robert Kero just came out with a documentary about his relationship with his editor, Gottlieb. They never hung out.
They got roaring fights, and they didn't particularly like each other. And I think one of the big lessons of the documentary is that that's a good thing. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's very edifying indeed. And this is the art of editing. There's two things going on. So Rick Rubin, music producer, Kanye was talking about him, and he said, Rick's not a producer. He's a reducer. Yeah, nice.
Taken away the stuff that doesn't need to be there. But the problem is if you only do that as an editor, then you strip somebody of their personality, of their essence, sort of like what we were talking about with the typewriter. So the other mark of a good editor is an enhancer. Where you look at something, whether it's the voice of the writing or a point that there's an embryo of that point, a seed of something special in there. Well, I, I, I struggle. I mean,
that sounds good to me, but I, I struggle to work with editors. I sort of, you know, I, as I said, I'm, I tend to run a lot. And then as soon as someone's lost meddling with something, I've written, I get extremely defensive. Even when I must begrudgingly admit that I write, I find it very hard to hand it over to other people. I really struggle with the solitude of writing. And so I've made it social. And so there's a few things that I do. The first is most of my ideas, 90
percent of them just come from something I say in conversation. And then I write them down. So even as we've been having this conversation, I've written down a few things that I said that are new ideas to me that I'm like, okay, now I want to go right about that. The second thing is once I find an idea, if I'm struggling with it, I'm trying to work through it, I spend a lot of time just talking through the ideas. And it's interesting if you talk to entrepreneurs of how they're going
to describe their company, their core vision, a story that they're trying to tell. What they're doing is they're constantly working on it at dinners and conversations with people. And you spend enough time with them. I referend to Austin, very wealthy entrepreneur. And I've heard him tell the same stories 20, 30 times. I can complete his sentences that I could say, I know exactly what
this is going to be. And all this to say that for me, the process of refinement is very verbal, whereas for other people, it's just write the sentence, rewrite the sentence, rewrite the sentence. Something about editing needs to be a social experience. No, no, I don't disagree with that. In fact, one of, it's not the only way. There's no, and far from me to try and attempt to say that there's a single way to do anything, but one way is, and one time honored and tested way to get better,
is to talk to people. I say it all the time, there's no coincidence that whenever you pick a grey writer from the past, or a grey artist, or whatever it is, there happened more often than not the part of a circle of writers and artists. Is it a coincidence that, you know, in Florence in the 15th century, all the artists all knew each other? You know, when Michael Angel I would finish David, statue, and he was too heavy to lift up to the top of Florence Cathedral where it
was supposed to go, the city council, they convened a meeting to decide where it should go. And, you know, Leonardo's on the special committee and so Sandra Baudicelli, you know, all these guys knew each other. That's not a coincidence. Byron, Keats and Shelley, they all knew each other. You know, they've got many famous circles of Bloomsbury group in Paris in the 1920s, all these writers
who knew each other. Because when you have these conversations, especially with other people who are, you know, more than you, who are better than you, let's say, it raises the bar, and you learn, and for that reason, I suppose one thing, any writer might wish to pursue, it's a circle of people. So when you can talk to, somebody who when you've spoken to them, you can away immediately wanting to open your laptop, open your note pattern and start writing.
I always think of the story of Tolkien and CS, Lily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think you're saying half, half of the puzzle of why these people, it seems so often they work in community, the greats, and you're talking about raising the bar. And I think the other one is just encouragement. You get down on yourself. Oh, yeah. And Tolkien was a bit of a weird guy. Most people don't write imaginary languages from scratch.
And these good friends are CS Lewis. And CS Lewis is sort of poke and fun at him. It's clon, clon, clon, clon. Let me see what you're writing. Let me see what you're writing. He's working on this fantasy story. And Tolkien's like, no, no, I'm not going to show you CS Lewis sort of insists that he can read with Tolkien's reader. And CS Lewis goes home for the night, comes back the next day and basically says to Tolkien, it was the best night of writing I've had in years.
You got to get this published. And it was because of that word of encouragement that Tolkien decides to get this range little hobby pet project published. And in the intro to arguably the best fantasy novel, the 20th century, Lord of the Rings, he thanks CS Lewis for giving him the encouragement to write that. Well, there's nothing more I can't tell that. It's all there. So something I hate. There are many things I hate. When people describe writing as a hobby,
like it can be a hobby, sure, not to be. Not for many people, it is a hobby. But I think if you take writing seriously, if you really are a writer, then it's not a hobby. Well, you said something really interesting. We were sitting down, we're at dinner, and we're talking about strategy. And you just sort of had this moment where you said, I just care about the work. And I just try to do great writing. And everything else just kind of feels superfluous to me. I'm just going to
focus on writing really good stuff. And it was such a moment of clarity hearing that from you. For you, it was just right, great threats. Mr. Beast, biggest YouTuber in the world says, make great videos. Yeah. Yeah. And there's something pure and very right about that. Well, I suddenly hope so. And I suppose if there is some advice I would give to a writer, beyond this take it seriously stuff is the one I would most confidently give
to you. Is there anything about the right thing? Don't think of anything else. That was fun.