# Writing, Religion, and Walt Disney with David Perell

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIBGu2GWwrA
Duration: 53 min
Language: English
Words: 9586
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/YIBGu2GWwrA

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[0:00] one of my favorite people on the show David perrell someone I've been following on the internet and I basically I think I cold reached out to you and I was just like what you're doing is amazing and you're the founder of rite of passage and I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about the business why you started it maybe some of the economics around it where you want to take it and just sort of dissect it all over the next hour or so yeah of course I could do it yeah tell us a story about rite of passage what it is maybe just a little

[0:39] high level yeah so and so I hated school I was a terrible student and did very poorly and I was uh kicking and screaming kid I was super unhappy for the first 20 years of my life and a lot of it was I felt like I was in a prison called school every day and I grew up thinking I can do better I can do better in terms of how a classroom environment is run but also I felt like I was gonna amount to nothing I felt like an idiot I felt stupid I felt dumb I didn't see how I was going to be able to contribute and that created a lot of

[1:17] nihilism and negativity in my own mind which was really hard and after college I took a course called building a second brain by Thiago Forte and I was just like wow this is this is the future cohort based live great economics and I saw how the internet was going to change the had changed the economics of Education forever we're going to go from teachers teaching at minimum 15 at most 40 students at a time to now teaching thousands hundreds of thousands and that the internet was going to fundamentally change how we thought about education and so after taking Billy a second brain about a year later I called Thiago

[1:58] and I said hey can you help me start read a passage he said yes and we did what he was doing for building a second brain we applied that to online writing to the active creation and it's been going ever since so did you did you know Thiago or you basically just took his course got to know him and then he became your business partner mostly the second I just really admired Thiago I still do and I was like wow this guy understands something about information capture something about sort of the creative process something about online education that I would really like to learn from and the man and his

[2:39] system just radically transformed my life and so I reached out to him I remember we had lunch in San Francisco and I called them on a rainy day in New York City December 7th 2018 and he in a five-minute conversation said sure um I'm happy to do it and at the time I had very little money and right around then I got a 20 000 Grant from Tyler Cowan's Merchant Ventures program took that twenty thousand dollars hired a Hollywood film crew flew them down to Mexico City we made these seven video modules and in 10 days came up with all the concepts that would eventually form the Bedrock of rite of

[3:20] passage and here we are now that reminds me I just read the the book about Summit Series and how it got started so Summit Series you know started off as sort of an invite only get together of entrepreneurs and creatives um and it got bigger every single year and it was started by these like at the time like 21 year olds and they ended up getting like these crazy people to the events like you know I think Bill Clinton played sacks at one of the events like if that happens like you know you've made it and then they ended up buying a uh mountain in Utah like they bought

[3:56] something called Powder Mountain which you know for their events and to actually create a permanent community and it's the whole story of how uh you know they had no money and they basically put all their money into these events and like you know it's the typical startup story which is like you know you you have this intuition that it's gonna work out but you don't really you're not really sure so it sounds like you had a little bit of that like you took the twenty thousand dollars you're like I'm gonna take this bet uh I hope it works out but could you talk a little bit more of how you were

[4:32] feeling at that time like did you feel like oh my God if I spend all this money and it doesn't work out and you know this is this is it I had nothing to lose I had nothing to lose I mean I'm a born entrepreneur there's no working for anybody else my dad was an entrepreneur I grew up under that and my dad always made me believe that I could do it there was no other option it was just an option of whether I'm gonna do it now whether I'm gonna do it later and I remember I knew very early on that having an online audience

[5:02] especially around ideas and something that you know about the world is super valuable I remember after I got laid off from my job my first and only job I called my dad and I said hey I'm gonna go build an audience and I have the worst plan for two years the best plan for ten and I think that was totally right that was one half a decade ago and those first two years were brutal and I think over a 10-year time Horizon it's gonna turn out really well but there's no other option for me man this is what I do and and shouldn't that be the advice for

[5:33] like most 20 somethings like have a bad two-year plan but a great 10-year plan I think in some ways yeah one of the issues with people in their 20s is they end up doing these stupid jobs where they go work in the soulless corporate environments where they you know quotes get paid to learn and sometimes that's true don't get me wrong sometimes that is very true but the majority of people I know who justify what they're doing with hey I'm learning a lot it's okay I don't like it that much but I'm learning a lot most of them are having a lot of the ambition and a lot of the agencies

[6:10] sucked out of them and I actually think that's quite tragic um I don't use those words lightly I think that your 20s or a time of peak creativity you have less to lose than at other moments in your life and of course all these things are person dependent but on a cohort basis people in their young 20s should should be taking risks they should be trying to be ambitious and the other thing that people their young 20s don't know is that everyone is willing to help you when you're young I interviewed 150 people on my podcast and I would just parade around New York City with

[6:45] microphones and audio equipment over my arm got it stolen one time and I would just interview different people and I learned so much doing that I just felt like every person I reached out to was super helpful and I just learned and I learned and I learned and to this day I've just surrounded myself with people who've done it before who are smarter than me who give me really honest feedback who can help me navigate the the trials and tribulations of life when you're in your 20s if you make a mistake unless you're Elizabeth Holmes you know you're getting you're getting a a pardon you know when you get when you become in

[7:23] your 30s and 40s and you're making mistakes it's it's not as easy you know when you make a mistake because people are like well you should have known better like you've been in the game yeah and I think it you know really matters what kinds of mistakes you're making right like don't be making mistakes that are legal mistakes and breaking the law and stuff like that but yeah go take a risk and go out and and and and try to like come up with with with something that you see in the world that is unique to you I was talking to a to a friend from college three or four

[7:53] years younger than me and he called me up and he said he said hey I really want to start a company and we started talking about it and I said hey your ambition is like an eight or a nine but your knowledge about what you want to do is like a two or a three and I think that this is very common you have a lot of people who they want to either be seen as entrepreneurs or they have a genuine desire to make something of their lives but they don't have their requisite knowledge the differentiated perspective on how the world is where the world is

[8:25] going and you have to build that you build that through expertise by reading by talking to people by doing stuff and just by constantly taking all of these small bets you know I think a lot of the mistakes that people make is they take a way too big bet too fast um where now you know naseem's lab always says just keep surviving just keep surviving and you don't want to do that what I did was I worked in a lot of like sort of a portfolio of small bats really inspired by Naseem celebs anti-fragile which changed my life when I read that but then once I found the

[9:01] thing I really went all in and committed like people are like oh so like what do you want to do after this like you know write a passage or you just teach your course like what do you actually really want to do I'm like no this is it this is what I'm doing I'm building a great education company like this is what I believe in this is what I made to do and I feel destined to be building this this company and I'm now along for the ride and I'm fully committed so I sort of started off with trying all these different things and once I found the

[9:31] thing I'm just like hey I'm all in yeah what makes you so committed the world needs this writing education sucks education is terrible it's super expensive teachers get paid very little it's not excited for the kids none of the learning science that has come out in the last 70 to 80 years has actually been implemented people aren't legitimately using the internet to advance themselves in more structured ways there's a lot of people use the internet to sort of teach themselves but these cohort based styles of learning which is really how we've always learned that are very true to how human psychology functions talking to other people going through these classes with

[10:13] others I mean it's just right for the taking and I'm like it's so clear to me that it can be better so who else should build it but me you know it's like I see it and I think it was Alan K who said the best way to predict the Futures to invent it and I hear that quote I'm like that's exactly what I'm gonna do for education yeah I think a lot of people when they think about writing they're really overwhelmed and they're like I have nothing to write about and that's not true I mean if they if you had nothing to write about you

[10:43] wouldn't talk um you know I think what people need to keep in mind is that when you write and I've been writing for 15 years on the internet when you write it really does attract a lot of opportunities just this morning I saw a literally a world leader or a manga world leader tweet something and I saw that her DMS were open so I dm'd her about it and then she responded it's like here it is like I'm a guy who's literally recording this from literally a closet like I'm staring at my clothes and I'm on the internet and I'm connected to this person who's probably

[11:28] in this Parliament building you know super super powerful person and it's only because I had built this audience on Twitter and she followed me for multiple years that she respects my opinion and she wanted my perspective on something that only happens in an Internet connected World which we're in and in a place where there's social products that are conducive to words spreading and this has only happened in the last 15 to 20 years where now anyone can produce and share content for free it's only really happened over the last five years and my perspective and maybe you disagree but once Twitter changed their home feed to be more

[12:13] algorithmic based it allowed people like me people like you to create content and if a lot of people like that content or even a few people just started sharing it with more and more and more and more people and it allowed us to gain audiences relatively quick in the same way that Tick Tock is designed for people to go viral and because of that people like us have been building audiences and words have been the format to do it um previously I felt like words had been very similar to how podcasting is podcast Discovery is notoriously difficult it's notoriously hard to start a podcast unless you have

[12:57] an audience already start a podcast disseminate it distribute it get it seen get it listened hundreds of thousands thousands even hundreds of times and it's because the platforms don't lend themselves well to shareability do you agree with that or not yeah totally and I would just add sub stack in here I think sub stack has done a lot of the same things that Twitter's had and especially now substack is doing a great job of recommending newsletters that's what people need help with distribution it used to be that anyone could start their own blog but those blogs wouldn't get read and now if you're writing on sub stack

[13:37] if you're writing on Twitter and your stuff is good it'll be seen and it'll be seen by people who you wouldn't be able to meet in real life and that is something worth taking advantage of and right of passage is a five-week program where people learn exactly how to step into this world and put it to use for them it's about 6 35 a.m here and I'm just about to have my ag1 by athletic greens it's this powder that I look forward to having every single day I put it in about 10 ounces of water it contains vitamins and probiotics and Whole Food Source ingredients that really uh gets

[14:25] my energy up my recovery up and my focus up and I look forward to it really really every single day just like how I have my morning coffee I love having my my morning AG one so for listeners to the Pod I think you might like ag-1 too so athletic greens is offering a one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five of these free travel packs with your first free purchase all you have to do is go to athleticgreens.com slash wih and and claim it I hope you enjoy it as much as I do I'm curious about like the business and economics behind rite of passage like

[15:12] I'm I'm sure that it's a fulfilling Mission and you love coming to work every day because it's just it's in your blood and I can see it but like you could be doing anything you could be starting a venture-backed startup raising hundreds of millions of dollars like I'm sure that you're looking at this and looking at this being like Oh there's also a big Financial opportunity as well so can you talk a little bit about that it scales like it scales very well it doesn't scale like a software company but it scales incredibly well and I think that there's a few ways to think of it so I'll talk about right of

[15:43] passage and then I'll talk about other schools and how they're thinking about it so if you take traditional education you at most could only have 40 students and like that's it most and then you're still doing lecture formats and if you look at the science of lecture attention people retain almost nothing like when people are just sitting there and listening it's almost nothing now the teacher is also responsible for grading they're also responsible for coming up with the content they're also responsible for exercises for assignments and doing all of that I have a whole team to help me out and I can do that because I have good profit margins in my

[16:19] business so right now we have five week program 438 students from 41 countries I have 38 people who are helping me run this in some capacity I have a full-time team of editors so that every single piece of writing gets editing within 24 hours I have a full-time team of mentors so that whatever it is within the world of writing that you're interested in whether it's the psychology of writing whether it's how to be vulnerable in your writing whether it's how do I distribute my writing whatever it is there's a different Mentor who's gone through the course who does this well who's writing consistently who basically

[16:48] teaches their own mini course within rite of passage then I have a full-time team an operations team a course design team and that way because we have so many students and every student pays you know quite a hefty fee you know you can't get in the course for less than four thousand dollars though we do offer scholarships because of that we you know we're we're we're doing fairly well every cohort and we can then provide a bunch more attention that someone in in person can provide we're just counter positioning and competing along different vectors this is a classic thing in business and it's a classic disruption type thing new

[17:28] use case comes along they're over serving their audiences in some ways we come in Meet customers where they're at but the new Technology's moving faster and what one of the big Theses I'm saying is look at all of the Technologies around me that I basically have the shadow Workforce that's working full-time to make my product better I have the team at Zoom that is working to constantly improve that product this week they added screen sharing for breakout rooms now if I were to build that in my own company that would cost me half a million dollars Zoom just does it with a quick software update and

[18:03] that's the end of it I maybe pay a thousand dollars a year for Zoom to be doing that we have Circle that's our community back end circles improving at a crazy rate a crazy rate it's gotten so much faster for Community Management's gotten so much better their DMS their 101 DMS are really good if we were trying to develop that in-house it'd be really hard and so basically we have the Winds of technology that are working with us we have scale that's working with us and we can also be reaching the scale of the internet so if I try to run if I try to run Reddit passage in Austin Texas where

[18:35] I live well how many people are going to take it so I'll tell you I think we have 31 alums in history who live in Austin Texas so we have fewer alums than would fill your average classroom in person not only that that 31 like if you threw something you know IRL they might be like oh you know I have something at that time or I can't make it it's like you know rush hour or something like that but now we have people from 41 countries and I remember I was in college I was sitting in my bed and I was reading Ben Thompson and he wrote people will always

[19:10] underestimate the scale of the internet because and what you can do is you can build super Niche products because a small percentage of a giant number is still a giant number and that's how the internet works you can go into these niches you can build something for those kinds of people in no way am I trying to build the writing education platform to solve all education platforms we're much more like cereal there's 30 different kinds of cereal when you go to the supermarket there's Lucky Charms there's Fruit Loops there's Frosted Flakes there's all the healthy stuff we are one brand of cereal we're not for everybody

[19:42] and it's working you know I I could tell you because I I've when I interview someone that's graduated right of passage like to me that's better than working at Google or graduating Stanford whatever's in the water in that course is working and and it sounds like from a business perspective like you're a humble guy so I'll say there for you like you're generating millions of dollars of Revenue via this business it's profitable and you know you don't have to rely on VCS to keep the lights on and you know you're doing what you love you know I just had recently uh Natalie Ellis on the show I don't know if you

[20:20] know Natalie she also lives in Austin and Natalie runs a business called boss babe and boss babe is basically you know the framework for how I think about community-based products is you know you have audience at the top so how do you attract the audience you take that audience you actually turn it into an owned audience maybe that's an email or something like that then you move that into a community so maybe you use something like Circle and then you take those people and you move them into a product that they're gonna love and she's really mastered this whole idea where she has this audience called

[20:57] boss babe which is for female entrepreneurs she has a community and courses and master classes that people can take and then she has products that she also sells like digital assets and stuff like that and she told us she's making like six million dollars in Revenue which is incredible within the framework of that I know I'm putting you on the spot but like you know do you think of your business like that like generating you know attracting a lot of attention at the top bringing them through funnels taking them through the product you know because we have a lot of people listening to this that are building

[21:32] their own businesses um so anything you can share that would be helpful yet the most important thing is to be sending out a unique signal into the world that is the most important thing it's going to become more important to be differentiated as artificial intelligence and gpt3 gbt4 as they begin to do a lot of writing for people you're gonna need to have a unique voice and I always think of it like radio frequencies the way that the internet works is everyone's tuning in to different frequencies and you have different radio stations you got your radio station for learning radio stations for comedy radio stations for

[22:05] entertainment but on the internet those are social accounts and the more unique your station and what you're saying you get uniqueness and you get strong signal you get strong single signal with Clarity and you get uniqueness just by being differentiated having a different perspective on the world and then people find your station and if they like the content then they want more and so what we do is the community of rite of passage the course is now it's like a live event so you like the band you've been listening to their stuff on Spotify and radio and stuff like that now you go to the live event you have all these die

[22:42] hards and write a passage just like our Coachella where people come in there's all of these things you can't possibly do anything or everything but then you can come in you can do two Mentor groups here you can write these five essays and then for the next time the curriculum is going to change and this this and that way and then you go to different Mentor groups and now you've thought about these things for four months and so now you're gonna have a different experience I ran into a guy named Zach last week one of the co-founders of cabin the Creator Dao and him and Jonathan Hillis

[23:11] they met right of passage and started the Dow together I think that Dao is worth 38 million dollars now and they met each other in right of passage and I said Zach you know it's crazy because it was a Saturday we're doing a live writing thing so we're chat and then I ran into him on the streets in Austin 90 minutes later I said Zach like what what what has you back in Reddit passage and he's like you know it's the people and and and having these conversations but having it be directed towards some kind of output and I'm like dude remind me how many times you've taken right of

[23:38] passage he's like this is my fifth time through the course and I think that that's what it's about it's about bringing these people together and I always think of Camp man I I used to go to this Camp called Skylake and the big status symbol was they had these white shirts a little bit of green on them and then they had a like a pine tree on them and for every year that you came back you would get another pine tree on the back and so I was like a two three four pine tree kind of guy but I remember there's this guy named Jason and Jason

[24:07] had 11 pine trees and he was the coolest guy was like the coolest thing to have 11 pine trees and that's how we think about right of passage I'm sort of obsessed with how do you create culture you don't do it through rules you don't do it through laws you don't do it through guidelines you do it by taking people who represent that culture and sort of promoting them showing them off their shout outs showing them off their leadership positions and then having them do things because humans are very imitative there's this great video that I like to share on Twitter where there's this guy he's at a music music festival

[24:39] at the Gorge Amphitheater and he's sort of dancing alone he's got like the speaker system he's totally alone and everyone's looking at him he's like what the hell are you doing and then somebody else joins and then the two of them are dancing I was like you guys are total weirdos and then you look 45 seconds later and there's like 150 people dancing because that's how humans work the first person to do something weird the second person do something weird the third person a little less weird and all of a sudden they've started a trend there's 150 people and I'm always about how do we create culture in that way

[25:08] instead of these very concrete verbal laws rules and customs yeah I think that's a that's a really good point like when I'm creating communities I'm often looking I'm often starting with very little rules and seeing how people are adapting and doing things and then being like okay how do I double down on that behavior so okay for example I just launched this me and my team launches freedom in uh nft project called the pencil case project and I started to notice that noticing that people started calling themselves pencil heads and I was just like okay that's funny and then I started writing in the tweets pencil heads like hey pencil heads like

[25:50] how you how's everyone doing and people just went crazy and that's this that's the sort of thing that you know when you think about a community like what is it it's like shared identity shared language shared rituals it comes from very much deeply rooted in religion um in lots of ways and I've I've heard you actually talk about religion before on other podcasts you know I know you're a student of religion but could you talk a little bit about maybe some similarities that you see with what you're building a rite of passage and interestingly enough how religion is structured yeah it's funny that you talk about the

[26:29] the similarities I never have them be similar so I'm just gonna go on the religious tangent of why I think that this is important and then we can sort of horse you and sort of try to connect these two things I haven't really thought about that before um but so I'm secular I grew up Jewish and I had this realization that the Bible is the core text of Western civilization and the more that you look at it you realize that the moral framework that we have whether you're atheist secular or Christian Jewish it is all within this judeo-christian tradition and even the most atheist of westerners actually have

[27:09] a quite Christian moral framework and you see this in the Constitution right we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal it's not self-evident at all that that's the case that sort of Builds on John Locke's ideas and that then goes back to the Bible and I realized that when I I was basically swimming in Christian Waters and I didn't understand the Bible so every week I do a Bible study with the teacher every Sunday morning for two hours and I'm deeply obsessed with learning what the Bible says going through it and then I also work with a Chabad Rabbi in town so

[27:54] I can get a different perspective and you know part of this is my own Journey to Find Faith and part of this is my my own interest in just feeling like in order to be an educated Westerner you need to understand these things so this is a huge part of my life I have a piece called the book you need to read which is about the Bible and why you're Christian which goes through this logic just step by step and I think that a lot of what it's given me an appreciation for is what writing does a lot of people say I'm spiritual but not religious I think I'm closer to

[28:27] religious but not spiritual and I like the aspects of religion where it says this is how the world works and I think that it's just fascinating to try to understand these different perspectives the implications of them what follows from them and I spent a lot of time thinking about this so now getting into your question about community you know I suspect that there's a lot to learn about the early growth of of of religion right like you have Saul who's traveling to Spain who then becomes Paul and he's totally against Christianity then he has this Revelation with Christ and all of a sudden he becomes a major

[29:05] evangelist for the Christian faith and I think a lot happens there right like you're doggedly against something then you become doggly for it then you have the 12 disciples and they're sort of going off saying these unpopular truths I suspect there's a lot about community building that we can learn from those stories but for me they're very separate and I'm very uh certain to not tie too much economic motive to my study of Religion because I just I sort of want them to be separate yeah to me to me they're similar um from my perspective because when I look at religion I see you know every

[29:42] great Community okay you know every great religion has a cortex a Bible of some sort every Community has a cortex of some sort you know every religion has short-term and long-term incentives like for example going to heaven um and every Community has short-term and long-term incentives you know and I can go on and on about that I think you know even when you give the example of the 12 disciples the 12 disciples are not too dissimilar from the example you explain at the Gorge like where you had that one guy dancing and then it became two and then four and eight and twelve like that could be the story of a

[30:20] religion in the making yep but I understand why you're separating church and state the separation of church and capitalism exactly exactly I mean you know we live in the US as the state is is a capitalistic state so um you're in Texas and I'm in Florida so but yeah I think uh I find it interesting that you are going you know going deeper into religion because it is in a lot of ways unpopular like an R like group am I am I misstepping by saying that I feel like an R kind of crew of people like I don't know a lot of people posting and writing

[31:02] about religion and going deep and and kind of having a a pastor over here and a rabbi over there yeah I mean I like I think that's ridiculous you know I think that I looked at a lot of the secular and atheist perspectives on and I say this is someone who's not religious but I just looked at a lot of people around me and I would ask why are you not religious and their answers for why they're not religious I thought was very shallow when I looked at the average person and I said hey I don't know what my answer is but whether I'm religious or not I

[31:37] better have a good answer for why I think that the different perspective is false you know it's Charlie Bunger saying hey you should understand the other side's opinion better than they do what they think better than they do and for me I don't care what Christians do I care what the Bible says and that's what I want to focus on and I want to know this stuff well because I think that that's what it means to be an educated Westerner I think that this is a core thing and I think a lot more people should be learning about it not to be religious but because it's important to

[32:10] know the Bible because so much of your life if you live in the west this book The Bible the Old and New Testament influences your life each and every day and understanding that moral framework how the stories that are told influence the Constitution and the laws of the countries that you live in I think it's an important thing to know so I spent a long time doing it yeah I think you know I love that and I love that you're not afraid to say it and I love that you nerd out about it one of the interesting things about religion for me is just how stories

[32:43] based it is yep and you know you can just look at religion I know you don't look at it this way but you can just look at religion based on like the Bible is the number one best-selling book of all time and so by definition the stories are very compelling and you can just look at it being like I want to understand how to dissect these stories so that I can be a better Storyteller myself and actually say like I'm gonna spend 12 18 24 months just like learning it from that perspective and applying that into my life like you don't need to be religious quote unquote to basically

[33:21] dissect something and I think that's like kind of like the world that we live in now which is like it's so like you know Polar Opposites I mean they're in or I'm out the Bible best-selling book of all time what is the most highlighted highlighted Kindle book of all time um give me give me a hint the four hour body by Tim Ferriss wow why is that I I don't know and I think the four hour work week is number four I mean it kind of it kind of makes sense you know I think like for our body so many of us are not happy with our

[33:59] physical appearance and here you have a guy saying like here's how you can optimize it like in those words basically and for our work week like I remember I I bought that book in 2006 and it changed my life I mean it's a corny title but like the concept of like I don't need to work 100 hours a week in Goldman Sachs or whatever to make a good living I could like basically create systems and become financially free the concept of financially free is so compelling to people and also the concept of passive income you know it's like what's so exciting to people it's like go to

[34:44] heaven passive income looking good that's it it's all you need getting laid Yeah well it's funny because we were talking about the stories and a lot of biblical stories whether you're religious or not have something in them that is a lesson that then you can apply to business so in 2019 I wrote an essay called Peter thiel's religion which is probably the most popular thing I've ever published and in that piece I talk about the Cain and Abel story which is my favorite story in the Bible I think it's like 16 lines and you could spend five years dissecting the implications of that story and it's all about

[35:28] sameness and how sameness leads to competition competition can lead to envy and envy can lead to violence and murder basically and how if you look at the Bible twins are repeatedly a curse and the reason is that twins are like this symbol for two people who are too similar and in the Kate and Abel story there's Kane who kills Abel towards a rock at him because he's basically envious of him and if you follow what then happens with Peter Thiel who is a Christian guy at PayPal he had this rule where every single person had to work on one thing and one thing only and he would only

[36:16] talk to people about one thing and he would Apple did the same thing they have to directly responsible individual similar and what I think the lesson here is is you want people to be differentiated own their territory not have other people stomping on those territories because that creates this competition and envy and this leads into the philosophy of renas your art who basically says that violence happens not because of differences but more because two people are too similar and similarity leads to violence similarity leads to destruction which is very at odds with how I thought violence went and deeply informs my worldview in terms of how I think about

[37:02] setting up a corporate structure for myself how my friends operate and stuff like that and I see the Kane and Abel stories show up some place in my life every week internal tools the software you build to help your team operate better dictates how fast every team from Engineers to sales reps can execute but you know this building internal tools from scratch and maintaining them takes a ton of engineering time and tedious work retool is a much faster way to build internal tools it has a complete library of 100 plus fully featured accessible UI components that you can just drag and drop any interface and retools platform

[37:54] lets you build the custom internal tools your team needs 10 times faster it's one platform to build your interface all you have to do is connect any data source or API and you can publish employee facing apps in record time it's also pretty flexible you can write custom code nearly anywhere to customize how your app looks and works in app environments SSO permissions and other critical app functionality are all available right out of the box the result well you can build production grade internal tools without the wasted effort of Googling component libraries debugging dependencies or rewriting boilerplate code thousands of teams at companies like Amazon doordash NBC and our own company

[38:48] lay checkout collaborate around custom build retool apps to operate faster and better also teams up to five can build retool apps for free so we're big fans I'm a big fan of of retool if you want to learn more about retool you can just check it out at retool.com so could can you even make that more tactical like from a corporate structure perspective or a friendship perspective or business perspective like what have you tactically done based on that story for example say that you have you're trying to get your finances in order okay and you have a cheap Opera a chief operating officer and then you have a Chief Financial

[39:37] Officer and you're trying to get your quarterly budget in order okay so the operations person could say hey this is mine to own because I'm an Ops person and it is my job to set the budgets for each department and I communicate with each department so therefore I should own that project then there's the financial person who says wait I have Finance in my title that's my territory and so then they both are working on it they have a disagreement so one person wants to work what is it like a cash basis another person wants to work on a cruel basis I don't actually know the

[40:10] words for accounting but they have different perspectives on how accounting should work and now all of a sudden they're fighting against the thing for for trying to fight for the same thing they have a slight differentiation Freud called this the narcissism of small differences it was Kissinger at Harvard who said the competitions were so Fierce because the stakes were so small and so often people bicker over the smallest of differences I heard about these two professors one at Yale one at Columbia who loathe each other because of some difference in an interpretation of some character in Dante's Inferno and they just despise each other because they

[40:49] have a different interpretation of this very s Fringe thing and so this shows up and so in a company what you'd want to do is you'd want to just carve it out you'd want to say no this is the finance person's job this is the operations person's job and operations person you are directly responsible for this this and that Finance person you're directly responsible for this this and that and the buck stops with them and we're very very clear within the company to make sure one person owns certain things because once two people start to own something all of a sudden there's there's competition there's Envy there's

[41:24] rivalry all these sorts of things and you don't want that yeah I also think it's it's super empowering to the person to be like hey here's your here's your territory like this is your kingdom yep and you get to decide and it's enabling versus like what sometimes CEOs do is they'll say like okay you'll get this piece or you'll collaborate with this person and what ends up happening is like they don't feel the agency over the the work uh and and that yeah to your point creates problems what do you think of uh companies I mean I know the answer but what do you think of companies have

[42:00] co-ceos I I mean I I don't have strong opinions but I would be skeptical on it from the outset that's my hunch based on the Canon able story is that like how do co-ceos really work if there's not territories like you're just collecting your you know your twins and you're making decisions on the kingdom no yeah I didn't expect to talk you know too much Cain and Abel today I gotta say I didn't have that on my bingo card with you but I want to talk about opportunities so I'm sure that you're you're seeing a ton of opportunities building what you're building like for example you know what would a rite of passage

[42:39] look like for XYZ vertical and I'm wondering first of all do you have any ideas where you're like oh I wish someone would build you know write a passage for XYZ so that's one question and the other question is you know are you tempted to you know basically expand your curriculum like what does this look like in 10 years let's say I don't know but a lot of how I think about what the company wants to be is I sort of work back with who are my heroes and what is the fact that they're my hero the fact that they are that I'm so interested in what they did

[43:16] how they built their career I sort of ask what is it about what they did that's really interesting to me and the person I'm just obsessed with is Walt Disney I went to Disneyland earlier this year and I flew out to Orange County to just say what can I learn from Disneyland that I can then apply to write a passage and I basically want write a passage to be like Disneyland for writing I eventually want to have houses around the world where people can come in and have conversations that embody the right of passage Spirit uh test them out to Greatness what does it mean to sort of be

[43:55] surrounded by people who've actually added something to human civilization you know there's no coincidence that right behind me I have the story of civilization books right here by Will and Ariel Durant I have a whole collection from Michelangelo and da Vinci like I want this room to basically be this holy place this sort of Cathedral of knowledge and I would love to build places around the world that embody that and I want rite of passage to feel like Disneyland and some of the things that Walt did that I thought was fascinating is like for example when Walt was building Disneyland people thought that he was going to throw his career away he

[44:37] had been at the frontier of Animation he'd been at the frontier of movies he had done all these things and the war comes the war ends and Walt gets obsessed with Miniatures he gets obsessed with little models and he basically buys a house in the Los Angeles Hills just so that he can build a 1 8 scale train that goes all through his house and he would invite people over and everyone's like well what are you doing you're one of the great entrepreneurs and now you're obsessed with model trains what the heck is wrong with you and so he then had attended a lot of world's fairs

[45:15] he hated Coney Island in New York he thought it was just the scum of the earth and he was at um what is it Knott's Berry Farm and at the time amusement parks they talked about each guest and they called them Marx mark one Mark II mark three mark IV this very utilitarian numerical way of thinking about people and Walt said no we can build something way better we can combine my love for Cinema with this belief that we can build a park that's not just great for kids but great for parents because he used to go to Griffith Park in Los Angeles and he would go with his kids and he would just

[45:59] sit on a bench and he would just Daydream and he's like why isn't there entertainment for me he took all of those life experiences he says I want to go build Disneyland and it's not a coincidence that when you walk into Disneyland what's the first thing you see you see the train now that train is at 5 8 scale and that train I I I sort of think metaphorically it's like a reminder to not be so purposeful about what it is that you want to do and to follow your passions regardless of whether you're certain that they're going to go somewhere but at the same time studying Walt I see that there's

[46:34] moments of a magical Divine unlock what he did was he worked with a designer and the two of them worked for 40 hours in a row to make the original map for Disneyland Walt basically narrated and they drew a whole map of what the park would look like frontierland thinking about the future over here and Main Street Snow White Castle and that original map was very close to what Disney ended up doing and he was obsessed with getting the details obsessed with getting the the details right and what I love about Disney is he was he put product and he put quality above everything else he was an artist

[47:21] a creative and an entrepreneur wrapped up in one and I see so many people who get obsessed with the numbers who get obsessed with the business model who get obsessed with the the exit and I just think it's very uninspiring I'm inspired by Walt because he cared about those details every single one of them and he committed to getting the details right and wasn't so worried about cost benefit and stuff like that and I think that it's important for the kind of companies that I want to build where the leader is like that and then whatever the other thing I've learned from Walt is to then

[47:54] surround yourself with people who could be the operational Financial people so Walt's brother Roy was that person at one time they didn't speak for two years and they had a lot of tension at times but without Roy the company would have gone bankrupt Roy was sort of there to protect well but Roy was really there to push Walt and his Creative Vision and I'm so inspired by that because Walt just went all out all out on trying to build the most beautiful thing that he could do and taking his imagination and trying to make it real so so you have a you have a Roy on your

[48:29] team like that equivalent my my VP of Ops is like Roy and he's amazing it's it makes life so much easier I can just bounce things off of him I'm like let's go go go go go no budget come on man and he is really good at disagreeing with me he's extremely financially sound he has built an education company very similar to the one that we're building and we go back and forth every single day and he's super super helpful I have that as well like my co-founder CEO Theo taba you know I always say that he keeps the Train on the rails and without him we'd be flying would be a

[49:13] flying train into a into a mountain probably um but now after your analogy I think about it is he keeps the Train on on the rails and I design the trains yep and I think that's a really important Dynamic to have if you're building a company like you need to have the Walt Disney energy if you're marching towards something big if you really want to build something big but you need to have Roy's soberness basically like as Founders as founders of vision and product Founders we're often like drunk on the product frankly and we need the soberness to bring us back to reality or else you know you don't get anything

[49:56] shipped or else you get like I don't know if you remember in The Simpsons Homer design like a car he designed like I think at the time it was like an 80 or 100 000 car and like the the horn was like like Cucaracha or something like that and it just like didn't really make sense but you know his heart was in the right place and it was just that he was lacking a Roy to kind of keep him on track yeah I remember earlier this year I was with my co-founder so this isn't Chris Mancus my CEO this is will man and who's my brilliant co-founder and

[50:32] product guy and will and I were going back and forth talking about this super small thing and we were just like who's gonna own it who's actually gonna get this across the finish line and it was a very tense conversation and I was just like okay this isn't gonna get done and we've gone to the point now where we have small things that because we don't have a good VP of Ops like Chris who can take care of that we're just gonna bicker because now the energy that you need to get that across the Finish Line we don't have that fast forward six months later we

[51:02] were in a meeting with an entrepreneur in Residence we have now and we got to the end of the meeting and we were all ready to wrap up and Chris goes no we are still at 5 000 feet we need to land the airplane and then we need to get the airplane to the gate and then we need to get our bags off the luggage carousel we need to get the Uber and get home and it's so funny because I'm like I'll take off I'll go to 40 000 feet I'll even come down to five feet to 5 000 feet but I need somebody to do all that stuff at the end

[51:31] who can help me just boots on the ground would we tactically need to do what are the objectives what are the next steps how will we know if we're successful and I was super skeptical of these things half a year ago and now I'm much more aligned and I just need his help to basically almost be like a mini curmudgeon to basically be like hey I need you to do this I need you to do this we need to Define stuff and it's super helpful it's the stuff you learn I don't know how old you are but it's the stuff you like that's the stuff you learn in your

[52:00] 30s I feel like when you're in your 30s like you're like okay I know myself well enough that this is what I need in order to become successful um and I guess that even you know compounds as you get into your 40s um we gotta rap out we're we're out of time but I can I can talk to you for hours um where can our listeners find you and write a passage probably the most interesting thing is to type in 50 days of writing into Google and then my name David perel and you'll get a 50-day email course that's all about how I think about writing it's

[52:32] totally free and that'll help you think through ideas right from abundance right from conversation right in public all the basics are in that email series all right check it out everyone thanks Greg

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