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Brains

Writing Nonfiction with Wait But Why and David Perell

Wed Apr 06 2022

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Writing. I've had a podcast. I do video. I am on we're gonna right now. I'm in so many different creative mediums and there is no medium that helps you think better than the written word because somehow that written word forces you to not lie to yourself and it forces you compared to other platforms. And it also forces you to just think very rigorously about things. And so I think that's sort of the internal reason to do it, but the other reason to do it, and this is where I thought you were gonna go with. I see all these other things on the you know, this is the sort of is the internet saturated point. Tyler Cowen is this great line where he says, you know, it's the weird that's truly not in some sense were all weird. And what I love about the internet, this is why I teach this. It's because when you write on the internet, you realize that a lot of the things that you have your personal obsessions that are super niche, super fringe. We're like, you go out in the world. You, you know, you'll just rave and rant about these things. When you're hanging out with normal people, they're like, shut up, dude. We don't wanna hear about this anymore. We, you know, You talk about this all the time. Somehow on the internet, once you put these ideas out there, you now have this abundance of people who wanna talk about those things. And I think that that both of those things, meeting people thinking better. That's why you start a personal blog. So when it comes to influencing the world, yeah, I think that starting Netflix documentary, build a big YouTube channel. Those are the places to go. But when it comes to meeting people and thinking better, personal blogs are the way to go. David, our our mutual friend Matt Cobach, he said, Writing is a lighthouse for meeting like minded people. And that's what I love. It's actually the extension of this is this ranch threat I I wrote. Which is I wanna go live in the middle of nature, have a whole bunch of acres, have a whole bunch of guest homes, and get awesome folks to come and do, like, writing your treats and whatever without that sort of Kool Aid. And poison. But that's kind of that's kind of the dream is I I want that, that proximity to people who I just find.

Brains

Writing Movies with Eric Kripke (The Boys) and Mark Millar (Kingsman)

Mon Nov 01 2021

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That is like, oh, do you like comic strips from the 19 thirties? Then after Batman makes a ton of money in 1989, like crazy money in 1989, they come back with, oh, kids love our deck like the shadow. And it actually took like to the year 2000 before they think maybe they like comic books and they like, you know, and they like this amazing stuff that we also like. So thank God we're living in this time when the the the heads of the studio just get us, you know. Mhmm. I wanna know what you guys think about the final seasons of Game of Thrones because I felt a little bit let down. Eric, you were talking earlier about subversion, and you're talking about how the first thing you do is you create your characters and understand them, and then you work backwards from there in order to figure out which scenes fit them. Otherwise, they're not going to feel authentic or real. And with Game of Thrones, like, I loved the first 6 seasons or so. I thought the showrunners did an excellent job. But then the final two seasons, it felt like I could see the hand of the author. It felt like the plot demanded, because that's where the show, the showrunners and the writers wanted the show to go. And so I'm curious, you know, what do you, what do you do when you need to reconcile how your characters would normally behave and how you want the plot to go? Well, first, like, all the respect to those guys, because I feel how that reaction to Game of Thrones that season. Yeah. Like, despite my own personal feelings that I may or may not have about it, like, you feel that in your bones because I keep telling people when they're like, did you know The Boys was gonna be a hit? And I'm like, I feel exactly when I'm making it, I feel exactly the same about my hits as I do about my most humiliating failures. And and it's so scary because I they're all the exact feeling of, wow. I had fucking done it. And, you know, I feel

Brains

Talking Money with Anthony Pompliano and Sam Parr

Sat Sep 18 2021

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And I'm basically gonna put everything else in. And, so we had a conversation about it, but the funny part was it was March 12, 2020. Bitcoin fell 50% in a single day. And, like, it fell like 20% in the morning. I was like, ah, nice. Bought some. And it felt like, you know, another bit. I was like, nice. Bought more. When it got down, like, around $4,000, I was fucking curled up on the couch like a little bitch, and I was like, man. Like, I'm about to watch this thing go to 0 right before you know, like, it just Yeah. I mean, it's like extreme volatility. And she looked at me, and she goes, what do you mean? Like, you're all in already. Like, buy more. Oh, psycho. Okay. That's why I said you knew she was the one. Yeah. Like, nothing like just getting, like, taunted by your fiance of, like, how much do you believe? So, I tell her all the time, like, you know, I don't know. Who knows what I would have done if she hadn't been there, but I bought more and it was a great decision, you know, given the fact that it's at, you know, fucking $50,000 today. I, whenever we make decisions, I I I'm like, if it's, like, a a fairly big decision, I, like, discuss it with Sarah, and it's mostly it's kinda the same thing. She's actually probably more aggressive than I am. I don't we I don't I don't I'm not in your world, pump. I don't know much about crypto, but she's like, hey. Let's buy, and she'll say, like, a number. And it's and I think it's a fair amount. And, like, for example, when Ethereum was, like, a1000, she's, like, let's buy, like, a $150,000 worth. And I'm, like, that's nuts. And she's, like, just do it. And we did it, and it's right. I don't know what it is today, but it's up. And, and, actually, she's like, we should have done more. I wanted to do more. And I didn't listen to her, and she she was right. Would you ever turn a 100% of your portfolio over to, to your wife? I would I would definitely. Because yeah. I think I would. Would of course you would. Right? Yeah. I I What I think I would do is I would, I would turn it over, but I would do the same role that she plays for me. Like, I would play for her.

Brains

Armageddon with Everyday Astronaut and Liv Boeree

Sun Aug 01 2021

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Sink because now we're all like, coal workers, you know, like, the United States tried to save all these coal workers. Like, why don't we work on instead of, like, trying to save the coal jobs, get them new jobs in, you know, in different sectors that are growing? Solar and wind are growing like crazy in United States. Why why is there a hesitancy? Who's who's the person behind the, you know, behind the curtain that's like, I will lose my fortune on this? You know? Yeah. I mean, with on the climate change thing, I mean, we have the annoying thing is we have very it's not the perfect solution, far from it, but it's the the best solution on the table that we have right now, and we're doing the exact opposite thing, and that's nuclear power. And it's so frustrating. Yeah. It's a technology we've had for decades. It doesn't it's basically zero carbon, certainly compared to almost everything else. You know, it's it's so it's remarkably clean. Yes. It produces a little bit of nuclear waste, but we have very good ways of storing that, and it's very small comparatively. Oh, and even, like, the ones that failed. Like, even everyone thinks of Chernobyl. Like, that actually only killed, like, directly, like, 8 people or something or some very small handful. It's not like people think it's, like, 1,000 or this whole, like, it's not smaller. And that was the worst thing by far. The worst thing that's, yeah, that's ever happened in nuclear history. It's, like, not even nearly as bad as the average, like, industrial problems at a coal power plant. You know? Right. If that there was that maybe linked. Yeah. That that that statistic is something like, how many you know, nuclear peep power kills 0 people per year Yeah. Over the last, like, 20 years. Coal is killing it's either it's in the it's in the tens of 1,000, but it might be significantly more. The point is it's, like, many thousands of people are dying directly from breathing coal fumes. Right. That's let's look at that. And then on top of that, it's like the the second order effects of coal, like climate change. And yet there's just this insane and I hate to say it. It's coming from mostly from environmental groups, like mistaken. There's good environmental groups and there's bad ones, and the bad ones are so bad because they're so puritanical.

Brains

Writing Books with James Clear and Mark Manson

Sat Jul 17 2021

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And the difference in how those 2 books would have sold, I think, is enormous. And so I think packaging is a really big part of writing a book that sells well and also just writing a book that lands with people well and that they remember. Yeah. One of my favorite examples of packaging is how Morgan, who wrote The Psychology of Money, he took the best performing blog posts from his site. Right? Those with the most traffic, and then he just sandwiched them together as chapters in his book. And so that's how he derisked that people would love the book, because he knew they already loved the posts. Well, it's important. Mark, didn't you do that too? It wasn't the title was previously a blog post. Right? Yeah. I think, honestly, I think well, most of our generation of nonfiction guys do that. Like, you you beta test you beta test ideas. Right now, you're listening to Mark Manson. You know, I've got an idea for a chapter. Would people actually read that chapter? Okay. Well, let me put it in an email newsletter and see how people respond. And then if people don't respond, then it's like, okay. Definitely not writing that chapter. There's really no downside to doing it that way because you you have to write the material anyway if you ever wanna write the book. So you're not wasting your time by writing it, you know, before the book is put together. You get feedback from the audience initially too on the ideas, and so a lot of times they'll poke holes in the argument and strengthen it for the book version so you can figure out what you need to add and layer on. And then you get to build an audience along the way which when the time comes and you actually have the book ready, now you have somebody to, you know, actually share it with. So it's kind of like it's like the first draft of your book is building your audience. So if you already have this this huge audience, you're already blogging, the question that comes to my mind is, like, why even progress to this next step of writing a book? It's a great question. We ask ourselves this all the time. We could be doing it entirely long. Wrong. I don't know. I feel like I'm gonna need to change my business model. I I I've got two answers to that. I've got a I've got a cynical one and and kind of an idealistic one. So here I'll give you the cynical answer first. Money. Like, it's Yeah. You you will make 10 times as much money selling