How To Master Storytelling

38:25A little anecdote like that, I think will like make that more real of what was the moments where you said, if you said I wasn't doing so well, that it really hit home for you, you know, something like that. Let me just wrap everything we've spoken about into what I'm gathering is it's the rom-com. I got my beginning. I got my end. I want a perfect yin yang between them. Okay. Then what I want is I want to build up to those five seconds of change. So I want one emotion lead up to that change. That is the moment of tension where something pivots. Then I get to the end. There is the opposite. And then what I want to do is intention and outcome.

39:04Obstacle. Intention and obstacle. Thank you. So my intention is I want to be good. I want to be good at my job. I want to be valued. I want to be respected. Actually, I could even bring it into like, I want to be a worthy human being. And I'm in my first job and I'm like, dude, you have no skills. So I have that. And I'm like, my job is about being a writer. And my boss thinks that I'm not very good. So none of my obstacles. So that's sort of what I'm getting from you. right yes exactly you you nailed it um now let's go to the five second because what you said was basically some version of you're like the beginning was pretty good and the ending was pretty good uh the middle you were like so then i got laid off and so then i started thinking about well i want to improve my writing sounds like an arbitrary epiphany maybe there was a mentor that told you something or maybe you read something online that inspired you or maybe you had a long talk with yourself on a long walk one night and you were like you know what screw this right probably a moment when you decided actually i'm going to get good at this that's usually a very important part of every story it was like what triggered the turnaround um so you want to know that and then you want to explain that part um and then you basically were like and then i got better and then everything was great and it's like whoa what do you fast forwarded the montage too fast like what triggered the turnaround and then what'd you actually go do um and not like in a long specifics but like what's the first thing you started to do to get momentum and then what was like maybe some resistance you felt that you overcame because like you know the pixar rules for storytelling i don't know if you've seen this 22 yeah the most important one i don't know what the 22 say but i remember one which was um something like the hero doesn't have to win um the audience loves the hero because of the way they try and that was really important to me i was Like, oh, that's right.

40:48Every underdog story is lovable because of how hard they try. And if somebody just tries something and immediately it works, that's not a very good story. And you're not very like, you don't feel good for them. So you got to say what you tried, what resistance you felt, and then how you overcame that resistance. It doesn't have to be a long thing, but you want to make it feel real. And the last thing I'm kind of emphasizing to you that I think anybody can do in their storytelling is you're not saying what happened. You're zooming into moments to explain how you felt with ideally some relatable visual or audio like moment.

41:25So it's like, I remember he said this to me and I'll never forget these three words. He said, you know, like whatever, some some sentence or I remember looking around. And, you know, there was nobody else there. like Tony Robbins I'm a big Tony Robbins fan he does an amazing job telling his story and he's like I remember sitting in my apartment I looked in the bathroom and I was doing I had because I used to do dishes in the bathtub because my dishwasher didn't work so I'd soap up the bathtub all he's trying to say is I'm a loser I was a loser now I'm super successful why because I'm Tony Robbins and I figured it out and you can too but first he has to convince you that he used to be a loser otherwise the whole Tony Robbins shtick doesn't work so he's like how do I convince somebody I'm a loser I could say that I wasn't doing too well or I could say that I used to have to wash my dishes in a bathtub because that paints a picture of a loser he's like I remember I was sitting and he says I was sitting in my apartment and I didn't have any furniture because I didn't have any money so I just had this one chair like I didn't have a sofa I had a hard chair that I used to sit on he's like it was just a chair he's like and I remember the song was playing that was like there's some song where he's like I don't have a friend or something like that it's only me in my chair and he's like dude that's me it's just me in the stupid chair.

42:36And he's like, so I went for a run. And he's like, even though I hadn't run in years, I was overweight. I went for a run. And even when my lungs were burning, I was like, no, you may be a loser at all things in life, but you're not going to lose this run. And he tells a story and it's kind of inspiring when you're hearing this. And he's just zoomed into one moment that's visual, that's audio, that's a feeling. And he's convinced you of that before state so that the after has some impact. The two things that I'm getting there is first you can tell a story. A story is not a record of what happened.

43:07Absolutely. It is not you saying this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened. It is almost this. It's a transformation. It's a, oh, interesting. Story is just a change. The world is one way and then it was another way. I was one way and then I was another way. My company was failing and then it was succeeding. All a story is is just change. You only want to include the what happened so much as it explains how that change came to be. Yeah, it's not just a timeline of events. And then you're also really cuing into emotion. Yeah. How about? That's what people respond to. In my writing course, I used to teach this one thing that I was like, you want to work backwards from the emotion.

43:53I learned this from a guy who used to be my, I don't know, intern or something like that. We hired him when he was 20 years old, Steve Bartlett. Today, a lot of people know Steve Bartlett. He's got a big podcast called Diary of CEO. He's built a company. He's done a bunch of things on Dragon's Den. He's a famous guy now. I met Steve when I was 20. Or when he was 20. I was 25, maybe. And he flew from the UK. He lived in our office. He slept in our office. And he wanted to work with us. And we worked together for, I don't know, nine months or a year or something like that. And Steve was awesome in a bunch of ways.

44:26and he was obviously just like a 21 year old in a bunch of other ways. But the awesome thing I remember was he was like, he told me something. He goes, I just think about what is Jenny in her bedroom going to think when she sees this? I go, who's Jenny? Who's Jenny? What are we talking about? He's like, oh, like if we're making a piece of content that's going to go on social media, social media is Jenny in her bed laying down, just scrolling, just swiping. And she's like, basically, this has to make Jenny like stop, think something and share this with their friends otherwise it's going nowhere there was no point in writing this thing or doing this thing because it created no reaction from the person they're just gonna keep swiping the world is full of infinite content we only stop at things that we have some reaction to and um so i stored that away and then i heard the same idea from another person this is how you know a good good idea the buzzfeed guy goes everything we do at buzzfeed is about Debbie at her desk.

45:22I'm like, Jenny in her bedroom, Debbie at her desk. What's going on here? He goes, the most powerful network in the world is the bored at work network. He goes, BuzzFeed was growing like crazy at the time. He's like, BuzzFeed basically taps into, if someone's bored at work and they just want to have a distraction for five minutes, we want to make a piece of content that will distract them and get them to forward it to a bunch of other people who are also bored at work. And that's the whole network, is the bored at work network. All right, second time I heard the idea. Then I heard the idea a third time.

45:51This guy, Chris Quigley, he ran an advertising agency that would make videos go viral. And at the time I was like, going viral is like a lottery ticket. Like, how do you do a viral video? I don't know. It's just like something amazing must happen. So I go, what's your hit rate on virality? Like one out of 100, two out of 100? He goes, no, like eight out of 10. I go, eight out of 10? And he's like, yeah, look, he showed me their views. I was like, how do you do this? He's like, well, you know, over time, the more viral videos you make, you have like a base of an audience. But he's like, that just gets you like some people will see it.

46:21But how viral it goes is how much they share it. He goes, so what we do is we work backwards from an emotion. He goes, the only things people will share is things that are LOL, WTF, OMG, AWW. He like all the acronyms for all the emotions. So like, oh my God, wow. Like, ha ha ha. Like if it doesn't do that, nobody will share it. So he goes, we first start with, this is the desired reaction we have. Then we'll write a script or write a blog post or whatever. And then we'll go check. Do we think that's going to create this reaction to somebody? No? All right, let's juice it up. How do we make it more funny?

46:56How do we make it more outraging? How do we make it more endearing and heartwarming? Like whatever those are. And so once I heard that three times, I was like, okay, I get it. I need to create a reaction out of the average person just in their bedroom or at their desk. and I need to start with the emotion, my target emotion, and then work backwards from that. Write the thing that will create that emotion. Yeah, it's funny because when you write, you're like, okay, I'm publishing this on the internet. A bunch of people are going to read it, get a big audience. And so you think of, hey, there's all these people.

47:27But actually, you're just writing to Debbie in her bedroom or Sally at her desk, you know, and people consume your content alone. And when you're writing, you are writing to one person in one place at one moment in time. And you have to remember that because the nature of the connection that you're trying to make is different. And to double down on that idea in a lot of our media environment, especially with a platform like Twitter, when you scroll Twitter, like you're on the throne, you're on the bus, you're waiting in line, you're, you know, your friend's seven minutes late. You're like, come on, where are the fuck are you?

48:01I'm trying to, reservations coming up. And you're just sort of browsing, browsing, browser and your brain's only like halfway on. And if you can really first understand your own state when you're in that environment and then write to the person who's in that state, now you have a very keen sense of who is this person and you're writing for one person, even though if you're looking, you're seeing, hey, 119 ,000 impressions. Those are not 119 ,000 people at once like a football game. There are 119 ,000 individual people at 119 ,000 individual instances in time and if you think like that you communicate very differently yes perfectly said you're writing to one person at one moment in time that's i think a very good point and the other uh thing that this reminded me of is do you know this person miss excel have you seen this person yeah yeah so she um for anybody who doesn't know she's basically like an excel influencer for lack of a better word um she basically teaches people excel tricks but the reason she got popular she went on tiktok she started dancing while like putting an excel trick on the screen or a tip on the screen weird combo but it works I was reading some interview with her and they were like how do you create your content like what's what's your process I was like I'm curious what her process is and she goes uh I don't she's like it's kind of weird she's like um most people if you say what's the process and they're like consistency like wake up at a certain time start right away you gotta write every day you gotta post in a certain time you gotta do all these things she's like i don't do any of that she goes i literally first like just changed my own energy she's like i work i she's like i'm kind of woo woo in that way but like i basically get myself into a peak state of mind like i get myself into a certain mood and a certain state of mind where i feel magnetic i feel charismatic i feel energetic i feel it's just like it's like it's like it's literally like a science called energetics she's like i work on my energy and two things happen One, ideas start coming to me much faster than if I sat down and said, what are some ideas?

49:56I need to post some content today. And so she's like, I just worked with something to say, I let ideas come to me, an idea will hit. And as soon as it hits, she's like, I run to my phone, hit record, and I just do it. She goes, because I believe all content is just energy transferred through the phone. It's my energy shifting to you, my emotion, how I feel about this. If I feel excited about this insight that I have or excited about this tip that I have, I want to get you excited about that tip too. And the best way to do that is for me to be there first. And I think this is a very underrated thing for writers because most writers, they're not performers.

50:29All performers know this. No athlete goes on the field without being warmed up and being hyped up. No stage performer goes on stage just kind of cold and low energy. But almost every writer starts cold and low energy and just sits there somewhat miserably. And there's even some weird glory from like this like, I don't know, this like pain, that's martyrship of like how you need to be as a writer. I think that's all stupid. I think it's very similar to performing in any other way. I think you should get yourself into a great state of mind and then have that energy and then sit down and write and let it flow and let that energy rip through you so that the other person who reads it is going to feel the same excitement you have about the insight or feel the same excitement you have about this plan or whatever it is.

51:15You want that to come with it. And a lot of times when people write, they have this idea. They're away from the computer. Like they're at the bar with their friends. They're on a walk with somebody else. They're at Thanksgiving dinner. They're like, man, you know, Auntie Diana, she has no idea what's going on in the world. That woman was crazy. And you're so annoyed at like 11 p.m. at Thanksgiving. And then you try to write like three days later. And the problem is they're not capturing the energy that Miss Excel is capturing before she does the videos. And people end up writing in such a sober state that their writing ends up being boring and sterile.

51:48100%. The thing I said at the beginning of this podcast where it was like, I look for things that I think are important that other people don't practice, overlook, or be too embarrassed to say they're working on. This is an exact example of them, of one of those. Nobody wants to work on their state, their energy. Miss Excel does. She's like, I'm going to make myself magnetic before I make content. Oh, I like that. That's pretty cool. I don't even know what that means. That sounds provocative, right? Like, okay, it's better than whatever the hell I'm feeling when I sit down to write. okay that's a new standard for me i'm gonna do that and so um i think most people would probably in their heart believe that this is true that if you kind of got your energy right before you did the thing it'll probably turn out better nobody's gonna do it which is the best part it's the arbitrage it's a less talented person like me could do really well wait hold on here snap the podcast so like what so what should i do next time i sit down to write how does this actually work where am I going to dance, do some jumping jacks?

52:46Yes, exactly. That's exactly right. So state change is three things. Number one, radical change in your physiology. So you can sprint, you can do push-ups, you can dance, you can do 20 air squats, you can dump your face into cold water, whatever it is, it's the fastest way to change how you feel is a radical change in your physiology. That's the first thing. So do that. That's the very first thing. I have a friend who's a professional poker player. He does the same thing. He goes, poker players are like notoriously degenerates. Like you're literally sitting there in a casino, which is like the worst air pumped in environment.

53:19There's no windows. And you're around other degenerates all day. People are smoking. It's bad. He's like a monk. And during a tournament in the breaks, he goes in the parking lot and he does wind sprints. He's not doing it to be a better runner. He's not doing it to increase his VO2 max. He's doing it because he wants to make a better decision when he gets back to the table. He knows he makes better decisions when he changes his state. And that's part of his edge. why he's been a european like you know poker champion a tour champion or uh you know several years so first thing is a change in your your um your state the second thing is a change in your focus so what are you even focused on um like you know the way i imagine is i have this laser beam of focus i don't know if this is true but it's what i've convinced myself which is if i just turn my attention to this i will crush this this will be amazing if i if i put 100 my focus on this podcast right now oh this podcast didn't stand a chance and the only limit to me is just where i'm pointing the beam and if i'm trying to point in five different places or whatever that's gonna be a problem this also works with like if you have to write something and there's a deadline if your focus is on the deadline it's the wrong place to focus right if your focus is on you know um your uh how hard it is for you to do something if you're focused on how hard it is it's not a good place to focus like you need to focus on the thing you want um so you know don't focus on the wall where you're like trying not to crash like turn right because it focus on where you're turning and then the last one is basically your story so what's the story you tell yourself um we all have some story that we tell ourselves and if you improve the story you'll change the state of mind that you have so i go into the store if i go into this podcast right now and my story is um i'm just i'm doing a favor to david i'm just doing this oh man like you know i had to drive an hour to come here and you know this means i'm not going to be able to do this thing and whatever that's the wrong story obviously i'm not going to perform very well i'm not going to be in a peak state right whereas if my story was there was going to be someone who was this one person one person who's listening to this podcast and they're going to hear one thing that i say one story and they're going to be like wow i can't unhear that that was amazing and that person's going to go and do amazing things that they're going to write me a letter one day and be like dude that podcast you did changed my life i'm going to approach this podcast differently right The different words will come out of my mouth if my story about what's happening is different.

55:38So similarly, if you want to basically change your state, physiology first, focus second, story third. Nice. One of the moments I had around story that I thought was really revealing was I work with a coach and we were talking about my writing and I was in a slump. I was down. What's a writing slump? What does that mean? I wasn't feeling it. And I just wasn't proud of the stuff that I was doing. And I couldn't get inspired.

56:13And he said, well, what is it that you want? And I said, well, you know, I used to write these pieces, these long form pieces that I was really proud of. You know what I want? I want to be a creative force. I want to be a creative force. That's what I'm going for. And I sit down to write. I'm like, I want to be a creative force. that's what I'm all about. And he's like, hold on, hold on, hold on. Stop, stop the train. You said you used to be a good writer and you would get in a great flow. What did you do back then that you don't do now? I was like, huh.

56:51Actually, it's pretty simple. I find an idea that was interesting. I would try to figure out that idea for myself. And then I'd figure out for myself and I'd say, well, then I got to share this with other people. And I just do that over and over and over again. And I never stopped. That's all I did. And that's all I focused on. He's like, hold on. What you're saying is now you're focused on being a creative force. That's your story. That's not working for you. Let's get back to finding an interesting idea. not judging the interestingness, figuring it out for yourself and then sharing it with others.

57:28Ever since that, no more slump. Right. All that was, was a change in my story. Yes, amazing. That's amazing. And I think, you know, the other part of what you said there, which is letting curiosity be the guide, the driver, sounds very simple, but all great ideas are actually quite simple. That's the beauty of them. You know, there's a, I think there's a profound um benefit of revisiting simple ideas and then saying am I doing those um I don't look for new ideas as much as I look for ideas I've already heard that I haven't fully actualized yet and you know that's one um you've read like Paul Graham wrote this essay um great work I assume you've read that one yeah I recently I read it two nights ago so good for the first time He wrote it like a year ago and it was like 13 ,000 words.

58:19So I was like, I'm not doing that. It's too long. Well, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So I'm ready to, I'm thinking about what I want to work on right now. How do I want to do this? And I went back to that. And in that, he has this great line. He goes, if I had to boil down all great work into one word, it would be curiosity. And he says another thing, which is curiosity drives a level of excitement. It goes on excitement. Excitement is really a great indicator. He goes, excitement is the engine and the rudder of the boat. It's the engine and that excitement is motivating. It's a driver to get you to go do things, but it's also the rudder.

58:52It also can point you in the right direction. If you don't know which path to choose, just choose the one that's most exciting. Just keep following that and that will lead you to the right place. Excitement is the engine and the rudder, I think is a really powerful idea. And every time I've drifted away from that, like you did, like I start with that, good things happen. And then I'm like, ooh, now ambition is the driver or doing something that sounds cool or important or money is the driver. And then like all the bad things happen. And I'm like, shit, why aren't these working? And it's like, well, because you stopped doing the working formula, which was leading to all these great things because you thought you needed to like, you know, you thought you need to do something different.

59:32And so many people are like, oh, I hate writing. And most of the time, it's that they associate writing with doing things that they don't want to do. And then when they think about, well, it's time to write, they subconsciously don't allow them to write about the thing that they're the most curious about or excited to write about. Because in school. That's not what you get to do. Yeah. No one's excited about the average school paper. Maybe one or two things, but people just aren't trained to think like that. One of the things that I need to reconcile with you and try to sort of figure out, because I've got two Sean ideas, and we need to figure out how they sort of come together, is this line that you have, if you're in your head, you're dead.

1:00:16Love that line. So good. At the same time, you are always deconstructing things. You find something that you like, and you're like, hold on, what's going on here? Let me try to break it down. Okay, I'm actually going to go check out this book, go talk to this expert, try to figure out what's going on. so how is it that you are deconstructing thinking being fairly analytical but at the same time not getting in your head those things feel like polar opposites to me yeah two things when i read something yesterday uh this is like mini book online that was called i think it's called like a technique for a technique for coming up with new ideas it's some old book um and in it it said this thing he goes the uh the most valuable traits you can have sound like opposites when you know if you pair them together so he goes you know uh imagine an entrepreneur who is both visionary and detail-oriented that's a that's a steve jobs for example like steve jobs is famous for being a visionary he he doesn't ask the consumer what they want they just want faster horses he you know they want a car actually right that's how he events you know the iphone and it figures out what to do but he's insanely detail oriented where he's like what does the inside of the box look like and they're like dude steve nobody's gonna look at this he's like i'm gonna look at this i will know what's inside the box it needs to be beautiful at that level of detail pixel level detail um same thing for all things right uh i consider myself a creative person i'm also highly analytical with data sounds like opposites um and so there are many things where the exact opposite if paired together creates a like one plus one equals three type of reaction.

1:01:57And they're often presented as false choices. You're either this type of person or you're this type of person. Screw that. Be the type of person you want, which sometimes means having both gears and knowing when to go into which gear. When do I need to be creative? When do I need to be analytical? When do I need to be hard-charging entrepreneur? When do I need to be silly, playful dad, you know, paint my nails, whatever, right? Like I have to have these gears to have the life I want. Similarly, you want to be in your head at the times it makes sense to be in your head. The brain is a valuable tool.

1:02:26It just cannot be the master. So the, you know, I need to be in my head when it's about, maybe it's analysis. Maybe it's, oh, I'm feeling fear. I need to actually use logic and ask myself, is this fear even true? And what's the probability of that? And if that happened, how would I handle a little i guess i would just do this and i guess it's not so scary after all so usually um if the problem is emotion you can solve it with emotion if the problem is logic you can solve it with logic and so i try to use them at the right times the if you're in your head you're dead is basically a as more of a life philosophy than it is a work philosophy which is people who kind of go around life not feeling a whole lot and not being present in the moment they're in their head about stuff they're missing life and that's a problem, you know, more so than a writing tactic.

1:03:16Have you ever seen that advice from Ray Bradbury where he says, don't think? You ever seen this? So I heard that, what you said here, and it immediately reminded me. He says, I have a sign and my typewriter says, don't think. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. He's like, I'm trying to surprise myself at the keyboard. And the only way to surprise myself is once I'm in my head, I can't do that. And I think that a lot of writing a first draft is like this. You're trying to get outside of that part of your brain that judges, that condemns, that says, no, no, no, it's not good enough. And just put stuff onto the page.

1:03:50And you know that you're doing it well when what you're doing is like, whoa, where did that come from? Where did that come from? Where did that come from? And then the question is, how do you engineer yourself to do that? For me, if I'm sitting and typing, can't do it. My ideas, that for me is where I do editing. The thing that was game changing for me was voice transcription getting really good because now i can stand and talk talk and walk outside walk and talk just blab blab blab blab half of austin definitely thinks i'm some sort of like crazy psychopath kind of guy but you know what it's made my writing better and a bunch of people i work with they're like how do you just bang out first draft so fast i'm like because i don't sit and type like everybody else does i just go for a walk yeah i think that's a that's a great point i think you need to figure out a way to engineer that for yourself so you can consistently have it um i think everybody's got a different version of how to do it what you said reminded me of something though you go um you're talking about don't think uh i think this is a a very useful troubleshooting tool so when you're stuck many ways to get unstuck and one way to get unstuck like i said radical change in something physical you do i mean that's a good tactic music is a good way to get unstuck too um but in general a philosophy for how to get unstuck is you're if you're stuck in the specifics go general meaning if you're stuck in the logistics of how something is going to happen it's not quite adding up what you got to do is not just keep trying to do this you can just zoom right out go super general all right super general what am i trying to do here i'm trying to do this super general um if i had all the superpowers in the world well how would i do this right super general is just like um you know uh who's somebody who's done this before or super general okay i don't know exactly what type of thing I want to write?

1:05:34What inspires me? Right? The way to get out of these sometimes is to go general, to go. And so even if like, don't think it's hard because it's very hard to turn off the brain, but it's not so hard to redirect the brain. And so redirecting it, I think is a useful tool. You can redirect it towards, I'm going to go rock climbing, I'm going to go exercise. That'll take my brain off of it. It can also be, I'm stuck in the muck here and I need to just zoom out and that's it. Or if I'm stuck in the general, so for example, sometimes I'm stuck in the general of like, what do I want to be in life? And like, you know, what do I want to do?

1:06:03And who am I? And all this stuff. Specific. What's the best idea you heard in the last two days? Like, if you were going to write about that, what would it be? Or like, what's the most interesting phone call I've had? You know, then you go specific because you're stuck in the general. So it's a very useful thing to do is just like to get unstuck. No, if you're stuck in the specifics, go general. If you're stuck in the general, go specific. And you'll redirect the brain. I want to switch over to talk about voice. You're really good at putting your voice onto the page and you do something very specific that I'm not sure how consciously you do this, but you're so good at getting inside the head of a reader to understand, all right, how are they feeling about this at the moment?

1:06:48And basically, you said it earlier, breaking the fourth wall. And then by doing that, building trust and connection. And then it creates this friendly casualness as if we're having a conversation that, my goodness, that is levels away from what most writers are able to do. Have you ever read the Boron Letters? Years ago. Okay. So this is a must read. Yeah. Copywriting. Copywriting. I'm surprised you don't have them like printed out of your pocket. They're that good. so the boron letters are this amazing thing by this uh like kind of renowned copywriter gary halpert i think uh writing to his son and he's in jail so the writer is now in jail and he's writing to his son uh bond i think um is his name and so it's like a series of 23 letters and um i put them they're hard to find too it's really annoying they're hard there's like one blogs i put it i hosted them on my blog now um because i was like this is this crazy that so valuable and so hard to find so anyways um he posted he wrote these letters and he just wrote it again to one person he's like i'm writing to my son but obviously these were kind of like general principles of life and copywriting and marketing and teaching he's trying to teach him everything he knows uh but the but because of the way he wrote it with such a casual like like warm relationship like he's not even just writing to one person he's writing to his son and because he's writing to his son he's like and this dear bond is where things get interesting or he's like you're probably wondering dad why do you say this we're gonna get to that but first a little detour and he just started writing so differently that i was like oh i like this style this is just like has a swag to it that uh that is just like appealing to me um so i started stealing that basically i was like oh i'm gonna write like that i'm gonna write like i'm writing to one person and that one person is like my little young grasshopper it's like this is my kid or it's my my little cousin or it's me when i was younger it's like uh i know what you're thinking blah blah blah but mama mia you're wrong right i'll just like try to like try to just make it fun and interesting as if it's written to one one one person that has like a warm relationship somebody that's kind of like i want to be the sensei and they that's how i write in those where it's like a master teacher relationship and other times it's the opposite it's um i'm the beginner and I know that other people are more knowledgeable about this and I'll be like, and I just will be open about that.

1:09:10I'll be like, so being the idiot that I am, I decided I was going to do these three things. I knew there was probably a better way to do this. You probably know four better ways yourself. You're probably staring at it right now, wondering how could this guy be so dumb? Well, the answer is blah, blah, blah, right? And I'll try to say it like that because I'm just trying to make it where I'm trying to imagine what is the reader thinking at this? What would I think if I was them? And then I try to address that in the moment because it's very frustrating to me when, like imagine if you ask somebody this question, you're like, how did you do it?

1:09:42And they're like, I just did this. And you're listening to a podcast. And then that podcast host doesn't ask them like, wait, wait, wait, what do you mean? It just worked. Like how, or what do you mean he gave you a million dollars? Why did he give you a million dollars? Right? Like it's the most frustrating experience in the world when that doesn't get addressed. So in writing, I try to do that too. I try to just call out the thing I would be wondering about, or I would be skeptical of, or I would be excited about in that moment. I just try to include it in the dialogue. One of the things that we talk about all the time in Write a Passage, one of my core principles, is imitate, then innovate.

1:10:15And it's exactly what you did there. So I asked you a question, and you said, okay, have you ever heard of this thing? Well, Gary Halbert does this very well. And then what you did was you deconstructed exactly how he does it. And then you said, you found a general principle of his work. So you said, he's not just writing for one person, he's writing to his son. And then the implications of that are this, this, this, and this. And the roadmap that you took to give me that answer, I think is very revealing of how you think about writing, where you start somewhere, you deconstruct, and then you say, how does that show up in my own world?

1:10:51And then you try to build up a generalizable principle that then you can use for your toolkit whenever you're typing yourself yes that's exactly right i think that is a great thing for anybody to try to do if you want to get better at something that's that's the way yeah by the way i randomly just thought of the best example of framing from way earlier while you were talking which is kind of how the brain works the brain relaxes and something comes to it um have you seen the dave chappelle thing called unforgiven have you seen this on youtube no all right so do you remember a while back uh dave chapelle was in a feud with um i think it was netflix and he was like um the chapelle show was put on netflix and he wasn't getting any royalties so like it's his name it's his face it's all his life's work and not only was he not getting paid for it he had had a big falling out with the creators of the chapelle show where like he ended up quitting right when they the story what the time was they offered him 50 million dollars he said no and he went to africa and became a crackhead instead that was like the rumors like Dave Chappelle's a crackhead now and he's in Africa.

1:11:55And it was like, and he later, he was like, no, I just said, no, I have to be a crackhead in Africa. I went home. Like, what are you talking about? So anyways, here's the objective. His objective was he wanted people to boycott the show. How do you get people to boycott the show? You got to, if you want to drive people to take action, you got to be smart with how you're going to like, how you're going to persuade them through the written word. Or in his case, he wrote it first and then he performed it on stage. and what he did was instead of talking about netflix or talking about his show or saying go boycott my show please he started a reframed the problem in a totally different way that i thought was brilliant he just changed the frame completely so he tells the story he goes um i remember i was 14 years old first time i ever did comedy i was 14 years old i go to this comedy club and i tell this joke and he's like i'm gonna admit it i was good right away comedy came naturally to me i'm not one of those people who's like it took me a decade he's like honestly i was good and i was 14 15 or 15 years old i think and he's like i was underage but i was good and he's like i came backstage and there's a guy who's been doing this for 20 years and they were like hey kid you did pretty good man that was that was good and was like one guy came to me was like hey man i like that joke i had this big audition coming up for this tv show or something like for this other thing you mind if I use that joke?

1:13:15And he's like, even as a kid, I'm 15, this guy's, you know, bigger, older. I looked up to this guy. He's like, I didn't want to do it. Cause I was like, my joke's all I got. I got no money. All I have as a comedian is my jokes. He's like, but this guy was kind of asking, I felt uncomfortable. He said he just needed it for this audition. So I was like, all right, man, like, sure. You can use the joke for the audition. The guy's like, all right, later i go to the club i'm about to perform that guy's before me he tells my joke and the joke kills he's like i was pissed and he's like i didn't know what to do he's like afterwards i went up to the guy again i'm a 15 year old kid i'm like he basically is framing it as i'm this powerless kid and this guy's taking advantage of me and he goes i told him i said hey man you said you were just going to use it for that thing like i i don't want that i want my joke back and um i I think maybe he had given him a hundred bucks or something like that.

1:14:07And, uh, and the guy's like, the guy kind of roughed him up. He grabbed him. And he was like, I was just asking to be nice. You know, I could just take it. And he's like, I was scared. I didn't know what to do. I let that guy take my joke. Okay. So that's the, he's like, I'm gonna tell you another story. He tells a story about later on, he's in New York and he's, uh, he's like, I got a date with this Jamaican girl. He's like, fine girl. Yeah. Banging on. I couldn't wait to go on this date, but I didn't have any money. I'm still a struggling comedian, but now I'm older. I'm 22, 24, something like that.

1:14:39He's like, and I walk around New York and I see these guys doing like that three card money where they like, you know, that game and I'm watching it and guy puts down a hundred bucks, moves the thing around. I know it's over here. He guesses the wrong one. He loses. He shows it's over there. Next thing I go, same thing, puts down 20 bucks. Uh, I know it's over there. He picks over here. He loses. I'm like, God, I could do this. So I step up, I put all a bucks down. I said, I'm going to double this. I'll take my girl out tonight. I know the ball's over here. I say that one. Ball's over there. He's like, what the hell just happened?

1:15:13He's like, I was pissed. I lost a hundred bucks. I have this date tonight. He's like, so I stuck around and I watched and I realized those tourists, they didn't leave. They were still here and they did it again. He's like, oh, they hustled me. Like those guys are in on it together. They pretended not to know where it was and i was the mark who came up and said oh i figured this out they got me and then somebody else uh came up and they were about to make the same mistake and i told him don't do it they're all in on it and the guy goes oh okay and he leaves he's like the guy roughs him up again and he goes hey man uh he goes i don't care what you think he's like never get between a man and his next meal he's like you just took money out of my pocket this is my job this is my livelihood and taking away a man's livelihood is the equivalent of killing him.

1:15:59He tells him that. Okay, cool. Then he finally gets to the Netflix story and he basically weaves together those parts from before. He's like, they didn't ask me if they could put it on Netflix. They didn't ask me to, you know, basically like, they didn't ask for anything. They just took my name, took my face, took all my content. They just took it. He's like, and then the second thing was, the people would say, well, you signed the contract, Dave. He's like, I was a 21-year-old kid. hired lawyers to read these contracts uh they told me everything i said hey you can use this forever in perpetuity in all parts of the universe and they're like it's standard dave don't worry about this is standard hollywood stuff don't don't worry about it so he's like so i signed it later on i realized those guys all go out to dinner every week the lawyers on my side their side they're all in on it this is just like the three card money that's how hollywood is i was the mark so yeah i signed it but whatever and he got the whole audience on his side by like making this argument by using these two stories i think it is the most brilliant like example of of pr or like a written story that i have ever seen the way by the end of that thing you're like i will delete netflix if they don't take the show off and it's exactly what happened people saw that that video on youtube it went super viral because it was so well done um people boycotted netflix they took it off uh and they netflix said we don't have to do this day but we voluntarily will do this like we were also moved by your story.

1:17:21We're not going to put Chappelle Shaw up there unless you say we can do it. Even though contractually, we have the rights to do whatever we want. We're going to honor the non-contract here. I thought that was the power of like, you know, reframing, not like, oh, I'm getting screwed. I want money to like a more universal, you know, you're getting picked on by the man. You're getting screwed by people who are all in on it. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. That's yes. You should go watch this thing. It's amazing. Yeah. All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story.

1:17:51Let me tell you that the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes. And then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury. And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money.

1:18:18I can pay invoices. I can reimburse the team all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to Mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N8, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. I want to talk about distribution. So one of the things that we're working on at Rite of Passage is what I want to figure out is I want to figure out how to take anybody, people who don't write all the time, don't really have an audience, they've just published something really good.

1:18:54Say that you are an absolute expert in the distribution of San Pellegrino waters from the little town in Italy, where they package it, what's the story of the label, all that sort of stuff. And you are like, this is how the sparkling water boom came. And I'm going to tell the story of how it begins in a little town in italy with san pellegrino one okay you have this expert he she never written online they write something it's awesome and i want to help them distribute it they come to me they say what do i do how should i talk them through that i think distribution is built over time i don't think that's something you can do from day one right like uh it's kind of back to that hundred videos thing from earlier.

1:19:40If you're going to write online, there is sort of a beachhead moment you have to create. You have to create a trusted audience over time and you have to know that the distribution is earned. That's why distribution is so valuable because it's hard to replicate. So for example, my buddy Jason used to say this thing. He goes, oh, I have the one, two, three rule of interestingness. What does that mean? He goes, tell me one thing that's interesting, right? You tell me one thing that's interesting about San Pellegrino, I'll say, that's interesting. Tell me two things that's interesting. I'll be like, those were interesting.

1:20:12That's two interesting things. You tell me three interesting things, I'll say you're interesting. And this is just like a general philosophy I think you should have with writing. It's like, you don't deserve that like trusted follow or relationship. I tell you and three is a small number. Really, on the internet, it might be like 20 things. You might have to tell somebody 20 interesting things before they're like, this guy is interesting. I can't wait to get his next one. And you just have to build that up like you have to build you have to consistently be telling somebody something interesting um multiple times for you to earn that that you know channel between them where they're now going to be receiving your content or they'll be willing to vouch for you and spread you to another person not just on the merits of the one thing but because you are interesting and you consistently share interesting things and then when groups of people think you're interesting it's even more powerful right because then another person comes in and just says oh everybody thinks this guy's interesting cool i'll follow right like which is why the more twitter followers you get the more you're gonna get right uh and it's actually not a bug people get mad about that like the rich get richer um it's not a bad thing it's actually a useful mental shortcut the people who have earned a following are probably likely worth following with some exceptions but it is a useful hack versus i have to individually vet every account to figure out who i want to follow that's the slow way like i'm going to follow the people that other people follow that is it sounds just like, oh, you're just being a part of the herd mentality or group think or whatever.

1:21:38But there's a reason it exists. There's like a evolutionary advantage to doing it too, which is it saves you a lot of time of having to individually vet every person. So I would say to that person who wants that distribution, it's cool. That's one interesting thing. Let's do 20. And, you know, start with your friends, start with your friends and family, start with some group chats, start with some, you know, maybe you have to push the wheel a little bit, you know, send it to some people who might find that interesting that you know of with a personalized message of why you think they might find that interesting.

1:22:05Yeah, you're going to have to do some of that hustle at the beginning to get the word out. But you should also not have some expectations that just because you said one interesting thing, it deserves to be spread everywhere. This is not really how it works. Right. On Twitter itself, you have built a huge audience without writing that many things. And you've had a few things that are just absolutely cranked. What do you think that you understand about that platform and communicating there that other people are missing well i'll say this i think it what i did worked on twitter so basically i i remember i was at 20 000 followers which is a lot in general but i was like i'm gonna get to 100 now i'm at 400 so i like oh i way overshot that goal um 400 000 followers but most i'd say the generic best practice is be consistent and uh define what your niche is and then talk about stuff in that niche.

1:23:03I don't really do that. So I would say I defy that, but I don't think that's what helped. I think I almost won in spite of doing that. I think if I had been more consistent and I had defined my niche, I would be at a million followers instead of 400 ,000. So let me put that out there. Even though I didn't follow the best practices, I don't think the right takeaway is those are the wrong. I think the right takeaway is it would have been even bigger had I followed those. The one thing I did get right was I knew when everybody's attention was on a certain subject, I had an interesting take. It's not my writing so much as it is the thinking.

1:23:37I'm sure, I haven't listed all your interviews, but I am sure one of the most common themes is that great writing is just great thinking. Clear writing is just clear thinking. Writing helps you think better and better thinking helps you write better. They're so tightly intertwined that the unhelpful but true advice is, I think I had an interesting thought to say and i said it at the right time when people were paying attention to that subject and then thirdly i wrote it in an interesting way that helped the spread of it i wrote some thread about the metaverse that went super viral and i don't think it's because of how i wrote it i think it's because the thought in it was genuinely a good thought uh like i remember at the time facebook had just rebranded to meta and zuck went on little x friedman podcast i was like yeah i read this really interesting thing on twitter blah blah it's like he wasn't saying it because my prose was great or my grammar was great or my hook was great he read it because he thought the core idea underlying idea was unique and interesting um and i think that's more what to strive for is like you're building up these two skill sets having unique and interesting things to say being good at packaging ideas two distinct skill sets you can't do only one and not the other or it'll reveal itself to be pretty sharp if you just have interesting things to say and crappy packaging you don't get very far if you have great packaging but mundane things to say people get very fatigued of it.

1:24:55It doesn't really work. One of the ways that I like to judge a writer is like, if I, like as a measure, when I read their stuff is like, how good is this person at building a connection with their readers? So some writers, like let's take chat GPT. Chat GPT is like a zero, right? It can be super informative, right? It's, you learn a lot, but you're not actually building any sort of emotional connection. Same thing with Wikipedia, right? And then there's other people like you. I think this is something that you're very intentional about. And I think that for the average word that you have, there is like a real connection that is built.

1:25:34And I think that you're really focused on that because of your goals as a creator. And how do you go about doing that writing so that it's not going to be just this one and done, but so there's actually going to be like a glue of like, Sean, like, I like this guy, want to consume his stuff. And And actually, I want to consume myself every single day. When you say connection, what do you mean by that? You mean trust? Do you mean likability? What do you mean? I think what I mean is an indispensability from that creator. So I did the lamest thing ever once. I hired a consultant who was an expert at personal branding.

1:26:12I paid a sky five grand. That feels like, almost feels like you're not even being serious. I framed it as the lamest thing ever. I'm aware how lame it was. And it's not like I was like, oh, I want to change my image or whatever. But I was like, well, truth be told, if I am a creator, that means I am kind of an individual brand. Okay, so what? And this person worked with all these people. So I was like, all right, let's do this. It goes back to the theme of what is something that is super important. What's something that's valuable that other people either overlook or actually would be embarrassed to do?

1:26:48Totally. and your boy's not embarrassed so i'll do it right so i hired this guy and um i stood out and we talk and i'm like okay i learned a bunch of things from them one of the things he taught me was he goes people will follow you to the ends of the earth if you are giving them a feeling that they can't get anywhere else more consistently than anybody else is going to give it to them so what does that mean he basically was like think of yourself as a little shopify store and you're only skew your You're a merchant. Got him. Your merchant, your only skew is basically one, how somebody feels after they consume your content.

1:27:27So for example, I used to love TED, TED back in the TED Talks. I remember TED Talks used to be the shit. They were so good. People make fun of them or whatever. 2014. Yeah, like 2012, 2014. TED Talks were the shit. Or even before that, I was in college when they were cool. So why do I like a TED Talk? even the sound the music of the the whoosh out of a ted talk or the intro saw the sound and the way that it looked it was like this like training like pablo pablovian training of like you're gonna hear one really cool idea in 18 minutes you're gonna walk away feeling inspired inspired about the world in some way inspired to either go do something inspired that the world is improving in some way inspired to make a change whatever and ted is a merchant of inspiration and so i thought about that i was like oh yeah that's right i i listen to these comedy podcasts why because i get this feeling that i'm hanging out with my like my friends my funny friends but like they're not my friends they're just comedians that hang out but that's why i think comedy podcasts are so popular because they can consistently give somebody the feeling of camaraderie bullshitting with your boys without you ever having to like actually be funny have funny friends and go hang out right and so like you're getting that without the cost amazing and um so anyways but this is why like you know we got acquired by twitch people watch twitch people watch other people play video games because you get the feeling of playing a video game without having to actually sit down and buy a system buy the game get good at the game play the game you get the same rush watching this guy try to win just by watching it's kind of amazing so once i realized that i was like oh okay this guy's right you know what i gotta do is pick what feeling i want people to have and then i gotta deliver all i gotta focus on is delivering that to them more consistently than anybody else is going to give it to them if i do that all my personal brain dreams will come true um you know so that was the the big takeaway that was the lesson i had there so when you say it seems like you're intentional about it that's what it that's the underlying thing that it is is picking up front what am i trying to deliver what's the what's that feeling and then consistently be like, all right, how could I do that?

1:29:36What's a story I could tell? What's a framework I could give them? What's a nugget I could give them that would do that for them? It seems like, I want to talk about editing, and it seems like your thing is that you're really good at writing first drafts, and actually you're not like a, you don't seem like somebody who's like an eighth revision, I'm going to put this away for, you know, six years kind of guy with editing. You seem like you're pretty off the cuff. You're sort of like Miss Excel. What does the emotion I want to have? I would guess then you sit down you write it then you go away for a few hours you know maybe going to walk come back look at it ship it off right so for you let's bring together emotion editing how do you edit for the sort of emotion that you're talking about there um okay first thing I learned was from Sam Parr he as a principal I think he came on your show too which is the walk away uh so you first you you do the shitty draft you dump it and I kind of knew editing was important and the mistake I used to make is I'd edit right away that's a terrible idea don't do that so you first do your research and your thinking you dump your you do a quick brain dump and you got to walk away so you you read it well the last thing I do I read what I wrote and then I'm gonna like forget about it so I then will go do stuff so I will go work out I'll go play with my kids I'll go for a walk and I'm not trying to think about it at all I know I'll come back to that later.

1:31:00And I know it sucks today. I'm going to go, I'm going to edit it later and make it great. I'm certain of that, but I don't consciously think about it. And then I come back to it. Usually let's say four hours, six hours, eight hours, 24 hours later. And I'll read the thing and immediately I'll be like, Oh, this bad, bad change this. Oh, why don't I talk about this instead? Or I wanted it to have this takeaway. I don't think it has that right now. All right. Where would I punch that up? Like I wouldn't have wrote this if I didn't think it had the potential to give you that. Cause I was a very intentional upfront thinking this will do it.

1:31:30It's not coming through where, uh, and the analogy I'll use is like, imagine our rivers flowing. So, um, there's a useful analogy because I think a lot of people are like, there's nothing there and make it happen. Another story you could tell yourself is it's a river. The water wants to flow. My ideas are excellent. People are going to love this. They want to consume this and my ideas are worth consuming, but there's some rocks in the river that are blocking the flow. What are the rocks? All I got to do, if I just simply remove those, the water will flow. Nice. It was a more empowering thing for me versus like, I got to make this good.

1:32:04It's bad. I got to create good. It's like, no, I kind of assume if I got to the point of writing something, it's going to be like, there's something good in it. I just got to remove the suck out of it, right? Pixar uses that analogy too. They say, all movies we make start with suck. And our only job is to just remove the suck with every draft. So they do another revision, say, what sucks about it now well it sucks that the main character's not that likable because blah blah blah so then they remove that suck and they come back again that's kind of the same mindset so i'll just look at it after after i come back and i'll say is this doing what i wanted to do i think this is dope does this do what i want it to do and if not what are the rocks i can remove what's the suck i can remove from this this part's boring this intro is doesn't really hint at what's going to what's to come this ending is just kind of like so yeah that's it that's the idea i don't have a good ending okay so then i'll just find that area and i'll just try to fix that cool how about with humor what have you learned about writing with humor are you formulaic about that have you studied it that's where i'm looking now like i'm starting to to pay attention um what i've learned so far i'll tell you what i've learned so far as like a white belt in the humor game it's just uh you know you don't want it to be humor is the sauce it's not the entree so some people are writing something to be funny like it's this is meant to make you laugh usually that's not me usually it's i'm trying to get a point across but i'm gonna make you laugh along the way which will make this more enjoyable for you to consume so it's the sauce on the on the meal but it's not the meat it's not the protein of the of the of the thing which is good depressurizes it it's like oh it doesn't apply a little bit here um that's the first part second part is all humor is just surprise so um every joke is a setup and a punchline but the punchline if you see the punchline coming it's not very funny so humorous surprise means i have to set it up in a way where you don't anticipate this is what i'm going to say and the contrast of what you thought i was going to say and what i actually said is what makes you laugh so you just kind of have to look for those moments where there's a bit of an expect you set up an expectation and then you subvert the expectation jerry seinfeld article in the new york times here's how he starts it i knew this was going to come in clutch and it just came in handy.

1:34:19He goes, when I got my first apartment in Manhattan in the hot summer of 1976, there was no pooper scooper law and the streets were covered in dog crap. I signed the rental agreement, stepped outside and my car had been towed. Despite this, I still thought this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life. You know, sets it up, pooper scooper, funny word yeah what's going on there and i think that maybe we can go into funny words because it is interesting how certain words have a much higher propensity to be funny than other ones right if he had said there was no law around cleaning up your dog's extrament that that now is very pooper scooper is like jovial funny right exactly and then he goes and goes sort of takes him to this other time period you're thinking about poop but then he goes my car had been towed And you're like, oh my goodness, this sounds terrible.

1:35:11And then you said surprise, which is why I thought about that. He goes, despite this, I still thought this is the greatest place I've ever been in my life. And this is in like this ode to New York City. Theo Vaughn is super. That's exactly who I was thinking about. He's super popular right now. So good. And he's been great. I followed him since like the real world days, basically road rules days. And so he's, if you just listen to him talk, his brain just does something different. His brain is like almost wired different. That was my initial story. but I was like, I bet you could practice Theo Vaughn-ing a little bit.

1:35:41Because what Theo does, if you've never seen him, it's not going to make any sense. But if you've seen him, this will make all the sense in the world, which is that Theo Vaughn will basically improvise. He has no idea what he's going to say, but he improvises and uses random language or he'll make up a story that is totally not true, but it's kind of believable when he keeps a deadpan face when he's doing it. You can kind of practice that. And so, yeah, I think, you know, practicing is obviously the best way to do it. Well, that's a big one. Let's follow this made up language, coming up with words, things that other people hadn't thought of.

1:36:16And how do you go about doing that? Like, it's a fun little thing to play around with. One of the things that I did is I liked the thinking through the juxtaposition. So I wrote a piece about how I fell in love with the Bible. And I was like, it needs some little bit of humor in it because it's, you know, it's the bible right it's it's it's this it activates a part of your brain where you're like okay this is exactly right bible should actually just say that should be the whole thing exactly so it activates that i was like i need something that's funny so i was like okay what is the emotional state that somebody's in i was like working on it i was like serious you know you think of almost like this fancy library and then i'm like i would do my bible studies at a Schlotzky's parking lot in a strip mall in the hill country.

1:37:05And now you just get this juxtaposition. I'm not sure it was like that funny, but I think that it adds so much life to the piece. And I always try to think of like, if I'm trying to be funny or create suspense, what is the emotional state that the reader's in for most of this piece? And then let me just like we were saying, like, sprinkle a little bit of Tabasco sauce of the opposite. Yes. Yes, that's exactly right. And I think, you know, an exercise you can do is, so like a Theovan exercise is basically he takes a thing. So let's say it's the Bible. So it's the Bible, but what a Theovan humor, like kind of lane he does is he'll, he'll call the Bible something else.

1:37:41That's kind of funny. Like he'll be like, uh, you know, he'd be like, man, that Jesus is binder. And it'll be like, it's the Bible, but now he calls it Jesus. Then he'll do another one. And he'll be like, he's like that old, you know, like the old Himalayan diary. And it's like, what what are you saying like he just keeps coming up with different ways to say the bible or he'll just be like you know that that big brown behavior book and like he'll just keep going and like i've never done this before but like you could try that so you could just take anything and be like i'm gonna come up with six like i'm just gonna keep going and it's so hard to do like just now when i was doing i don't know i was like why the hell are you trying to do this live on a podcast but that's how you get better right so you know doing that is it trains your brain in a very different way of thinking than we are used to.

1:38:25And that pays off because again, common traits uncommonly together is very, very valuable. You don't need to be the funniest, nor do you need to be the smartest. If you're pretty smart and you're kind of funny, you're like the best, you know? And so that's, that's my whole strategy was basically to do that. I was like, I know I'm not funny enough to be a comedian, but I'm funnier than the average smart guy. and I'm smarter than the average guy. So it's like pretty smart, kind of funny. That's a good combo. Well, it's funny because I went to church last weekend and I was with a friend. And basically, after the service, she was like, man, that was a really good sermon.

1:39:08And I was like, well, what do you like about the pastor? And she was like, hmm. And, you know, he does a really good job of talking about very serious sort of like weighty things, but then layering in tons of humor. Right. So like he was talking about he was talking about, you know, you could have said good people go to the light and they're focused on moral values and integrity and bad people move to the darkness and they run away from, you know, righteousness and stuff. and you're like, okay, that's not right. And he goes, at any moment, you can either be a cockroach or a moth. Right. And I grew up in South Carolina and, you know, you go into the pantry sometimes and there's some cockroaches on the ground and like, you want to step on those things, but those things fly and they go all over the place and like, they'll start eating your Ritz crackers.

1:40:03I swear those cockroaches are so big, they can practically pick up the babies and they'll take him to cockroach land or wherever, right? And cockroaches, they run away from the light. And then you have your moths and the moths, they go to the light. And then he like weaves these cockroaches and the moths throughout the entire sermon. So you're getting this like chuckle, but then through the chuckle, it's like creating this avenue for like extreme depth. And somehow it's in the juxtaposition of those two things that the sermon ends up really hitting. And the humor like lowers your defenses on like needing to be a super, you know, perfect person and all that.

1:40:38And it's like, okay, we can have some fun here. But then the fun actually allows us to then get to the depth. And that's framing, right? He framed it differently. Same principle framed differently. All of a sudden more accessible, more fun, more, more entertaining, more memorable. And memorability is, is massively underrated. You know, what's the point of having the good ideas if nobody remembers them right like you know part of your job a responsibility if you actually have something worth worth remembering is to take the time and effort to package it in a way that is going to be catchy and memorable um my buddy trevor who's my roommate in college he um he made his whole career doing one thing he basically reads what white papers which are like scientific journals they're the most like boring like read the abstract read the whole study whatever people It's crazy.

1:41:26The scientists spend their whole life working on this thing and then they package it in the dullest format possible. With pride, because that's like a high status. High status for them. It's like it's so boring that only another person who's dedicated their life to this would possibly read this. Which means that none of the insights take it to the real world until somebody comes in and builds that bridge. So he built that bridge. He would go learn something. he'd read this and he'd go talk to the scientists like some you know somebody's been doing this for 50 years and you know the number of people who follow them and listen to them is like you know 35 and then my buddy started writing a blog and newsletter that eventually youtube and he built like a hundred thousand person email list about a really like dry subject which is like uh you know growth mindset uh which is like how it applies into the classrooms and stuff like that and so he the way he did it was the same type of frame he's like imagine two tigers one tiger grew up in the zoo um and you know a tiger that grows up in the zoo you know and he does he'll teach this to like third graders or he'll teach it to the new york yankees uh you know ceos of companies or you know kids basically he does the same speech both of them because it's so easy to easy to understand so memorable he's like tiger that grows up in the in the zoo has a life been easy or hard pretty easy right do they fight for their own food or is it given to them it's given to them okay cool jungle tiger jungle tigers life hard right lots of adversity they have to fight for their own food they know how to survive blah blah if you take a um jungle tiger and you put it in the zoo what happens like it'll get bored it's like if you take a zoo tiger you put in the jungle what happens like dead like it doesn't know how to survive and he's basically like you want to be a jungle tiger right like and how do you do that well you have to get out of your comfort zone the zoo where everything is easy and handed to you and so when you reach those moments where you're out of your comfort zone, say to yourself, like, this is my juggle tiger.

1:43:20I got to juggle tiger this right now, because I have to put myself out of my comfort zone to do this. He gave them a language to remember a whole set of principles that were all previously packaged in very boring scientific terms. You know, one of the things that I'm noticing from you, like, I always think, okay, I'm doing these interviews, like, how is my writing process going to change? And one of the biggest things I've picked up is, I don't need to learn from writers at all. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go study comedians and I'm going to be more deliberate about finding communicators who I really like and then trying to say, what are they doing?

1:43:55And then bring that into my writing. And then also, I think that you really see a fluidity between mediums, that talking, writing, humor, storytelling, these things can all sort of play together. And they're sort of like paint colors where, yeah, you can have, you know, you have the white paint, the black paint, the blue paint, the green paint, but then you can also have like a, you can begin to mix them together and then you can get all these different colors. And that maybe we shouldn't be thinking about writing as like all these separate lanes. Actually, for a lot of the different skills that you want to learn to make yourself a better writer, don't even study writers.

1:44:25The best people for that might be in a totally far off field. Yeah, yeah. You nailed it. Good job. You synthesized it very, very well. I do think it's a good strategy to basically pick and choose from adjacent fields because you're going to do something different than you're only looking in your own lane. it becomes very it's why everything becomes the same because we all look at the same things we all study the same things and so like you know i was hanging out with mr beast and he said the same thing i was like what youtube channels do you like he's like i don't really watch youtube that much anymore i'm like you're the number one youtuber in the world you like literally even breathe youtube he's like yeah my channel but then i was like so where do you learn from he's like well right now we think that one thing we're weak at is character development so we study shows tv shows and movies that are good at character development or uh whatever and then he's like trying to steal from other areas than he's like everybody else if you're just on youtube looking at other youtubers you'll just become lost in a just sea of sameness and um i think that's a useful tip for people to take on i want to end here if you know you built a newsletter called milk road and you had to train another writer to write in your voice and you believe that learning to write is actually teachable so when you're teaching other people to write what were some of the things that you focus on uh yeah so we taught the teaching was important because i didn't want that we had to send the email out every morning at like 6 a.m i was like i'm not doing that like good i'm not good with consistency anyways i don't wake up that early uh i know that no matter how fun this is that i will hate doing by like day 30 so from day one i was like i'm not gonna write this but it's gonna be in my voice and style how do you do that hired a guy who's never written before and i sat him down and i was like um first my business partner i was like you write this and i was the editor i was i was his editor for 30 days i said cool now you're the editor now you gotta hire a writer we hired a guy who'd never written before um in any professional capacity or even blogged i don't i don't think he had a blog either uh but i told him and basically what we did was we took off one thing that helped is the newsletter was a consistent format so it wasn't like 10 different formats it was one format and i broke down why we write it the way we write it line by line our opening line at milk road was always like good morning this is the milk road the you know and we would say what we do and then we would say in a funny and then we would add we'd tag it with a joke so we would say we are the number one source for figure out what happened in crypto yesterday um think of us like um think of us like a toaster strudel a fresh tasty sweet for you and a treat for you in the mornings and then parentheses we tag the joke again and we would just be like what the f happened to toast or strudels anyways kids these days they're missing out right and it's like we would tag that we would always tag the joke and we'd be like we are uh gm we're the we're the milk road we are um we give you exactly everything you need to know about crypto in the morning and nothing that you don't need to know.

1:47:25And then we would say, we would tag it, but be like, I would say something like, reading this newsletter is the second best feeling in the world. The first best, of course, is when you're in a car, you roll down the window and you start doing that cool dolphin thing with your hands, right? Like some relatable, funny thing that's just like, puts you in a good mood. And we were like, can we get you to smile? And can we get you to be like, I love these guys. Can we give you a reason to open this? That's not based on the Bitcoin price. It was another way of thinking about it. And so I started training.

1:47:55I was like, the first line, this is what we do. Here's why we're doing it. And here's 10 examples of doing it good. And then he was like, cool, got it. I can pattern match to that. The other thing that we did was he was doing the school thing where he's like, he thought he had to be a different guy. Like, ooh, maybe I need to be a really sophisticated, do sophisticated analysis. Or I need to do kind of like people think when they write, they need to do something outside of themselves. the whole point of writing is to take you and just push it out and so don't try to create this fake thing that you think other people might want just take you and push it out and so for example he would talk about subjects and the writing was fine but the subject was boring so i was like dude why'd you pick this he's like i don't know i felt like you know it was in the news people needed to know about i was like did you care about this no not really and i was like would you have ever like texted me or slack a slack message me or send me a voice note being like dude did you hear about this this thing's awesome or this is crazy did you hear about this this is really interesting he's like no i would never say that i'm like cool why are we telling why are we telling 200 000 people about this if you wouldn't tell me and so what i made him do i was like every morning i want you to send a voice note send a voice memo and just tell me the news before you write anything just be like oh yeah everybody on twitter is freaking out because they're worried about this uh thing that happened or um the price is up today because of because there's rumors about this right now and what that means is that if that happened then this would happen so he would just say it to me and it was such a good filter because he could stop himself if he was going to tell me something that was boring and he would catch himself like i would never say this to somebody it's boring to me and it'll be boring to you so it filtered out the subject beautifully so like those are the two big things was showing him what we do in like giving him a sample and then saying here's what good looks like here's 10 more examples of good um and then secondly installing that one step of like don't do that imposter thing where you start talking about shit that you're not even that interested in because guess what nobody else interested in it like and the filter for that was send me a voice memo if it's not interesting in the voice memo it's definitely not gonna be interesting in low text why do you think that dolphin thing is so funny it is hilarious relatable and like you know it's it's not even that's funny it's just like funny that we put again it's unexpected like why are you writing this um you know everybody says we're the best we said we're the second best thing in the world so you're immediately like what's first best first best and then i can't say a serious thing i have to say an unserious thing so i'm like the first best thing is this feeling because we all know this feeling is great like you know that feeling it's an amazing feeling and so um we just knew like okay things like that are surprising likable funny you can do them in one line so it's not like you have to like set up a long story or joke.

1:50:38It was very useful. It was very efficient as a mechanism there. Sweet. That was good fun. Thanks, man. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

1:51:01All right. This episode is brought to you by Mercury. They are the finance platform of choice for over 200 ,000 companies. Shouldn't be surprised because I use it myself for not one, not two, but I have eight different Mercury accounts. I have seven for different companies that I'm a part of. And then I have my own personal account because now they have personal banking, which is a really cool feature. I highly, highly recommend it. Like I said, I use it myself. And the reason why is because the way that Mercury works is beautiful. It's very intuitive. And you could tell that it's actually made by a startup founder.

1:51:28It's an entrepreneur. You could tell it's made by somebody who used other banking products in the past and didn't like all the different rough edges and annoyances and decided to actually fix it himself. And really, any type of entrepreneur you are, let's say you're an agency, well, one of the things every agency has to do is be able to send invoices, easily create them, send them to customers, and stay current on your balances with all your customers. Well, you can do that inside Mercury. And so I think that Mercury is great. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

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