Hi friends!

What a week it's been. My new podcast called How I Write launched on Wednesday, and I'm still feeling hungover from all the buzz around it. I'll be releasing one episode a week for the foreseeable future, and I have some big-name guests coming on the show who've never spoken publicly about their writing process.

The show is an Internet-native version of The Paris Review interview series. It's like Chef's Table, but for writers. A trip behind the curtain to see how the world's best writers go about their craft.

This week, I launched with three episodes:

1. Tyler Cowen + Alex Tabarrok, on the story of Marginal Revolution: They started a blog 20 years ago, and now it's the world's largest economics blog. They spoke about how to write every day, translate academic ideas to the masses, and their plan to teach millions of people the basics of supply & demand. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)
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2. Jimmy Soni, on interviewing Elon Musk, writing biographies, and lessons from Peter Thiel: A biography and professional speechwriter. If you want to write serious, research-backed non-fiction or build your writing career while working a full-time job, this episode is for you. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)​
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3. The Cultural Tutor, on how he went from working at McDonalds to 1.5 million Twitter followers: The man started writing online ~15 months ago and has grown into one of the world's fastest growing Twitter accounts. Until now, he's been anonymous. Never showed his face. This is a masterclass in how to write for the Internet, source reading material, and build a writing habit. (Tune in here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple)

Also, if the interview with The Cultural Tutor resonates, join us for a free workshop on September 6th where he'll break down the exact tactics he uses to research, write every day, and pen some of Twitter's most viral threads.

​​Register here​.​

Today's Finds

On Being Known: A pair of haunting pieces about the peculiar emotion of “being known.” The first piece by Tim Kreider talks about an email someone received by accident, an email where they were the object of gossip. It reveals a split between ourselves and the rest of the world. We all see ourselves as special snowflakes. But at the same time, we are “just another person” to almost everyone else. Seeing the way others talk about us when they know we’re not there can be a strange and painful experience. This second piece builds on that idea. Here, the author (who goes by the name of Ava) talks about writing on the Internet. She puts it simply. Being known is a dichotomy. Just about everybody wants to be seen and heard, which motivates us to share our ideas. But being known can have terrible psychological consequences. Why write on the Internet then? This line stood out: “Finding people whom I’ve become close friends with, who really and truly understand me, is worth the embarrassment of sharing. It doesn’t feel good to be vulnerable but it often feels necessary.” There are diminishing returns to being known, too. The purest connections I’ve made on the Internet came in the early days, back when only a few thousand people subscribed to my newsletters.

​Clickbait is Unreasonably Effective: In praise of clickbait. Veritasium, a YouTuber with 14.1 million subscribers, shows how small tweaks in how an idea is framed can have an outsized impact on their popularity. In his case, changing a video title from "Strange Applications of the Magnus Effect" to "Backspin Basketball Flies Off Dam" gave him an extra 10 million views. Titles matter. I recently heard about a dating book that launched with a whimper. But after the author changed the cover and title, it sold 10 million copies. Social media feeds are moving away from showing you content based on who you follow and toward content fed to you by an algorithm. This makes clickbait even more effective and important. The positive version of clickbait is "Legitbait." Yes, it's still bait, but it's not deceptive or sensationalized. If your title is legit, that means you deliver on its promise. If you think that what you create is worth watching or reading, then why wouldn't you make it as enticing as possible?

​The Decline of the Nuclear Family: How many political stalemates are downstream from how the family unit has changed? We've made life better for individuals, but harder on families; better for for adults, but harder on children. Families once stayed together. Now they disperse in search of economic opportunity. Families who used to watch the same television screen in the same room together now consume the world through their own phones in their own rooms. G.K. Chesterton blames capitalism for the decline of the nuclear family, and also increased competition between the sexes. The influence of the employer now triumphs over the influence of the parent. Instead of living close to their families, people migrate to hotbeds of economic opportunity.

​The 11 Laws of Showrunning: An obscure PDF, written in the 70s. It’s written for people in Hollywood but applies to anybody who does unbounded work. My favorite point is how sentences like “I’ll know it when I see it” are a cardinal sin. As a manager, you need to set a clear vision. Preach it day in and day out until it becomes gospel. But do it in a way that ignites the creative spirit in the people around you. For example, the design brief for the original Coca-Cola bottle in 1915 said: “A bottle so distinct that it could be recognized by touch in the dark or when lying broken on the ground.”

​Dwayne Wade's Hall of Fame Speech: One for the heart. Wade's father was clearly hard on him. When Dwayne would cry, his father would push him harder. Sometimes, his father would boost his confidence by letting him win. Sometimes, he'd crush him and call him "Little Dwayne" as a reminder of how much room for he can improve. One story stands out though. After getting kicked out of the game as Dwayne's basketball coach, his dad snuck back into the game to cheer on his son from the sidelines... only to get kicked out a second time — to show his son that he'd never stop showing up for him.