Oh, by the way, before we get into this episode, I would love to tell you a little bit about Life Notes. Now, Life Notes is a weekly-ish email that I send completely for free to my subscribers, and it contains my notes from life. So notes from books that I've read, podcasts I'm listening to, conversations I'm having, and experiences I'm having in work and in life. And around once a week, I write these up and share them in an email with my subscribers. So if you would like to get an email from me that contains the stuff that I'm learning, almost in real time as I'm learning it, you might like to subscribe. There is a link down in the show notes or in the video description.

So you got a law degree from Durham. Yeah. And then you're applying for jobs and you end up working at McDonald's. Because I had no money in my bank account. I had nothing to lose, nothing to fall back on. It was like, it's either do or die. Either this Twitter account works or whatever the army or film school or listicles or tutoring. Something has got to work. So I just gave everything. Wow.

How does someone go from being a cleaner at McDonald's to building an audience on Twitter of over 1.5 million followers, along with DMs from people like Elon Musk and other celebrities? And how do they do that without ever showing their face and with basically no one even knowing who they are? That is the story of the incredible Sheehan Quirk,

who features on this episode of Deep Dive. He on Twitter is known as @theculturaltutor. - Just imagine me there, this guy who's always thought he was gonna be a writer and life hasn't quite turned out how he thought it would. And then I had a bit of a revelation. - This is one of my favorite interviews I've ever done on Deep Dive. And we're gonna hear all about Sheehan's story of how he got his start,

how he was working at McDonald's, how he decided to quit his job and start writing on Twitter of all places, and the strategies and tools he's using to build his writing career on the internet in a world where no one knows who he is. The internet is a beautiful, flawed, strange, incredible place. But if you say anything slightly wrong on the internet, everyone will let you know immediately. But at the end of the day, you've got to put those things out of your head and focus on whether you are happy with it. Because if you're happy with it, if you can put something online, write something, and say, I stand by this, then you'll be fine.

Shia, welcome to the Deep Dive podcast. Thank you so much for waking up early. You have an incredibly interesting story. You have grown your Twitter following from literally nothing to 1.5 million followers in a very short space of time. And no one outside of like a week ago really knew who you were because you're a fully anonymous account. I think your first interview was with David. That's correct. Is this going to be your second? Yeah.

This is the second podcast I've ever done, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, no, I did do an interview with a Dutch or a Belgian-Dutch architectural magazine about six months ago. And I did an interview with a Bulgarian magazine as well. So this is my first, my second other English language press or interview, whatever you want to call it. We are the press. Okay.

Lots of people in our audience are keen on growing some kind of following online. They like the idea of being a creator. A lot of people in our audience like the idea of being a writer. And we were doing some research for a video the other day, and actually being a writer is like one of the top kind of dream occupations in a lot of places in the world. Second sometimes to YouTuber, sometimes ahead of YouTuber, sometimes astronaut comes further up in the list, sometimes it doesn't. But like writer is like a thing that a lot of people aspire to, and you are doing the thing.

And so I was hoping in this podcast we could dive into the backstory. And then I'd love to know how you ended up being the cultural tutor with all these followers and in the DMs with Elon Musk. And then I'd love to dive into your writing process or lack of process. No, this sounds delightful. And I hope what we have to say will be useful for your listeners. Because, look, I always wanted to be a writer. I mean, you know, you have those yearbooks when you leave school.

When I left school, my primary school in year six, my little profile, there's a photo of me in some silly hat or whatever. And when it says, what do I want to be when I grow up? For some reason, the first thing I wrote was businessman. And the second thing I wrote was writer. Now, it's turned out that I'm not a businessman. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm terrible at maths. I hate organizing and scheduling things and managing people. But being a writer is what I wanted to do since I was 18.

I'm 10 years old and I was writing every day probably since that age. So for like 15 years, imagine you're writing every day, all sorts of things. I've still got the stories I wrote when I was like 11 or 12. I wrote this one about how lions had like evolved into beings that were more capable and more intelligent than humans. And there's a war between these lion creatures and humans, that kind of thing.

So I always wanted to be a writer, always wanted to be a writer. Went to university, I did law. I'm not a lawyer, never wanted to be a lawyer. I took law, I think, because it was something appealed to me about it. I loved my degree academically, but the working side, getting in the office, drawing up contracts, being a barrister, not so much.

Anyway, I'm 22, 23, got my law degree. I'm still not a writer, at least not a published writer. I've got a bunch of unpublished novels. I've tried to get some novels published in the past, which every agent I sent it to rejected it. I've probably had 200, 300 rejections. Oh, wow. Wow.

In total, that's probably not far off the number. I would often, when I was 19, I'd just be like, okay, I've got this idea for an article. I'm going to email The Guardian or The Times or just anybody who will listen saying, hey, I've got this great idea for an article I want to write. Obviously, I never hear back.

I did also apply to be the manager of Buy Munich when I was 15. They responded, declining my proposal. Anyway, so that's where I was. I always had these ideas, thinking, oh, I could do this, I could do that, asking other people to publish my book for me, to publish my article for me. You can probably see where I'm going with this. Life gets on a bit. I don't want to go to London and become a lawyer like all my friends have done.

hang around. I need money, right? I'm living in a house in Durham where I went to university. I need to make money to pay the rent, to pay the bills. So what do you do when you need money? You get a job. So I applied to just about every job I could think of in the area, all sorts of things.

The one I ended up getting was a McDonald's. So you got a law degree from Durham. Yeah. And then you're applying for jobs and you end up working at McDonald's. Yeah. What were your other options? Where were you trying to get to? Sure, sure. This is really interesting. I think it's like a lot of people may be listening to this right now. I wanted to be a rider, but I got this kind of idea into my head.

that eventually someone was going to come along and knock on my door and say, hey, man, we've heard you're this hidden genius. Here's a book deal. Go and write us 20 bestselling novels. I just thought it was going to happen eventually. So I'm writing away, waiting for life to give me what I think I'm owed. I'm feeling entitled almost to success. And obviously, if you don't do anything, it doesn't come to your door. As I said, I tried. I'd sent the emails to

tried to get the book deals, whatever, never happened. And I sort of maybe, some extent, I sort of hung up my cap as it were and thought, washed my hands of it and thought, fine, I'm just going to write in my spare time with a normal job. That's what I'm going to do for the rest of my days.

So when I was working at McDonald's, which I applied to because I needed the money to pay the bills. There was no second thinking with it. It was a very honest application to anybody who would take me. I applied to Pizza Hut and they rejected me. All sorts of things I applied to. Just looking for some way to make some money to make a living so I could then ride in my spare time. This was about two years ago. I worked at McDonald's for four or five months.

Getting in at 6 a.m., I wasn't a burger maker. I was a maintenance person, so my job was to bring in the stock, get in the freezer, load up the boxes of fries, clean up as well, degrease the floors, get the jet washer in the car park, pick up cigarette butts, wipe splattered McFlurries off the booths in the drive-thru, this kind of stuff. It was good, honest work. All work is good. If you're making money, if you're working hard, then there's dignity in that. Yeah.

And the people there were great, but the truth was that I wasn't happy there. And more than happy, it's not really about happiness, it's more when I woke up, I didn't wake up excited about the days to come. And I was going to bed thinking, I'm glad another day of my life is over, which isn't how it can be when you're doing what is right for you.

I mean, I don't know if I've painted this picture quite right, but just imagine me there, this guy who's always thought he was going to be a writer. That's all he ever wanted to do. And life hasn't quite turned out how he thought it would when he was 12 years old, working at McDonald's, earning the money. And then in April of last year, so it was just after my 25th birthday, I had a bit of a revelation. And the way I put it to people, there are two ways I frame it.

The one I tend to go with is, I call it my Mulan moment. The Disney film Mulan, you've seen it? Of course. You know the scene, I adore that film, the scene when...

She suddenly realizes that she's going to go in place of her father. And this music kicks in, the synths, and she goes, she gets a sword and she cuts her hair, puts on the armor, rides off to war. That's how it felt for me. And I said to my girlfriend one day, I just got home from work, I said, look, I'm going to quit my job at McDonald's.

and I'm going to throw everything on the wall. I'm going to work until I die to figure out if I can make a living as a writer. So what do you do when you want to be a writer online? It came partially from a good friend of mine who said, look, Brian, you need to start bringing an audience to yourself. You need to put your work online. That's where people will find you. Don't wait for a book publisher or an agent to come along and say to you, here you go. You've got to go out and claim it for yourself.

So similar in some sense to the work you've done, you know, you've learned this lesson. There's an audience there waiting. There's this wonderful line from Pliny the Younger. He was a Roman lawyer back in the second, the first, second century AD.

And in a letter to one of his friends, his friend was moaning, saying like, oh, you know, I'm writing all this good stuff, but, you know, no one cares about it. No one's interested in the classics anymore. Everyone just wants all this, you know, crappy modern rubbish. And Pliny says to him, look, man, you know, we can't complain about the state of the world and what readers do or don't want. We've got to go out there and write something worth reading. And people will respond if you do that.

So I had my Mulan moment, quit my job at McDonald's. First thing I did was start writing listicles. Great question. Was there an inciting incident that led you to this realization or was it just one day you decided you'd had enough? It was a one-day thing. It was a one-day thing. Oh, no, there was a moment, and I'll tell you what it was. My old school friends were getting together. There was a group of five of us, very, very close friends, and we were getting together. And I was like, look, guys, I can't come because I've got to shift to McDonald's.

I thought, hold on. You know, I can't go and see my oldest and best friends this weekend because I'm supposed to be working, working the shift, bringing in the fries and the McNuggets. And I thought, I can't have this anymore. I have to change what I'm doing with my life. This isn't... Because I'm a very laid-back person. I take things as they come. I go with the flow. I don't worry about things too much. I'm not particularly stressed. And that led me to this point of complacency. So that...

I haven't thought, I haven't actually remembered that moment for a while now. And I'm glad you asked me that question because it's sort of, that was it. It was like this brief moment of clear thinking. Like, you know, you wait, suddenly the world is, it's like, you know, you take off sunglasses and everything's brighter. So that was my Milan moment. Yeah, I find that whenever anyone makes a change in their life,

It like always stems from one moment, one moment where a story changes from A to B and the changing of that story or the changing of a belief or just that decision that's been made, that then sets off a chain reaction of events. And often people can sort of, can boil it down to like that one moment where you realized, oh,

Exactly. I mean, I suspect it's sort of like starting a fire. I mean, the kindling was probably gathering the sticks, you know, and the leaves and whatnot that was gathering over those long, slow months of working at McDonald's, slowly but surely running out of money as well. By the time I quit, I actually had less than no money. I owed money to all my friends.

and to my family as well. But I think all that had been building slowly. So it's not like I suddenly just woke up and just changed my life. There is a bit of a backlog there, a back catalogue, as in the kindling slowly building. That's the spark that lights the fire that then transforms your life. That's how I'd phrase it.

But it didn't exactly go well at the beginning. I did a lot of things. I applied to the army. I applied to film school because I love cinema, one of my deepest and oldest passions. And I started writing listicles. There's like a website called Listverse. They pay you $100 for a top 10 list of like, you know, most interesting houseplants. And I churned out a few of those. And it was good to earn some money online suddenly because

And then I suddenly, one of my friends said, oh, you know, maybe you can make money tutoring online. There's a lot of money in online tutoring. Because you've got to remember, the desire for flexibility was probably a big part of that change. In fact, I wanted to go and see my friends and I couldn't. If you have a job where you work online, you can go anywhere, right?

So it was flexibility and earning money were the two things that I wanted. And writing, it was kind of mixed in, but it wasn't all there. So tutoring, a great way to make money online. You'd probably be quite good at it, my friend said. But I didn't want to tutor history and maths and physics like for GCSE or A-level.

I did law. I enjoyed law. Maybe I can teach people law. Posts on a load of Facebook forums saying he wants law tutoring. You get like one like.

Nobody pays any attention. So not going to do legal tutoring. Fine. Maybe I'll go completely think outside the box. And why not give sort of cultural tutoring? You know, people want to be well-rounded. I don't know about yourself. Like maybe you feel like, oh, you know, I'd like to know a bit more about art. I'd like to know more about culture. I feel very uncultured. I go to a museum and I'm completely lost. I go to a new place and I'm like, I don't understand anything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. This is it. I thought a lot of people like that. So I'll do cultural tutoring. Yeah.

Made a website, and I just used Squarespace. Made a nice little website, advertising my services, and then start trying to get a post online about that, not getting any traction. My friend says, start a Twitter account, man. That's a good way to drive traffic. It's a classic model. Make some sort of social media profile on one of them. Well, X, formally, Twitter, I should say. And that's the one I went with. And it became clear pretty quickly that people...

weren't interested in my tutoring, but they liked what I was writing on Twitter. I'll probably refer to it as Twitter for the duration of this conversation. When I first heard you tell me the story when we were having dinner a few months ago now, I found that it basically...

It paralleled my story in a bunch of interesting ways as well. Because I had my moment of like, oh, I need to change something. Because A, I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And B, I started speaking to doctors and spoke to doctors who were 10 years ahead of me in their career, 20 years ahead, and asking them if they actually enjoyed their jobs. And the answer was always, well, it's a bit of a slog and this sort of thing. So I had this moment of realization of like,

I need to make money on the side. And that coincided with me losing a thousand pounds because I got scammed out of a MacBook from some dude on Gumtree. I was going into medical school and I was like, my first Apple product, tried to buy it secondhand, ended up getting scammed with a defunct product. And you just lost a thousand pounds. So I'd built up that over two years of doing tutoring in maths and physics. And I was like, you know, painstakingly making sort of five pounds, ten pounds an hour, fifteen pounds an hour, got this thousand pounds, lost the thousand pounds.

And I was like, okay, I need to somehow make money. And I landed on tutoring people to get them into medical school. And that worked for a while. And then my YouTube channel started because the business started to plateau. And I thought, well, if I make videos on YouTube, teaching people how to get into medical school, some of them might think I'm legit. And therefore they will sign up to my courses. Yeah.

But it sounds like for you, you were like, I want to do this cultural tutoring thing. If I start writing on Twitter, some people might think I'm legit and therefore sign up to my cultural tutoring services. Precisely. That's very eloquently explained. So it was an accident, basically. I didn't set out to conquer the world or whatever and get a load of followers on Twitter. I was just trying to make some money in a way that would make a living, in a way that I would find more enjoyable day to day, make my life more fun.

more flexible. And I mean, what I will say is, when I made the Twitter account, obviously you're making, I don't know how you found it when you started your YouTube account, but when you make an account, you have zero followers, zero subscribers, whatever it is. So getting the first thousand followers was a big grind. I worked very hard. But I think I decided, basically, what I'm going to do is write one thread every day. And

The original plan was for 90 days, just to see what happens. Because ultimately, if it doesn't work, you can try something else. But I'd heard it was good for growth to write threads with a thing to do. So I started writing a thread every day. Why did you decide to call yourself the cultural tutor rather than your real name?

Because a lot of people have this issue where they're like, yeah, I kind of want to do stuff on the internet, but I don't want to show my face. Especially like people, you know, I talked to a lot of wannabe YouTubers and they're always like, oh, I'm worried about what my friends and family will think. I'm not very good on camera. And there's all that kind of stuff. Sure. It wasn't a desire for anonymity so much. It was, as I said, what I wanted to offer people was cultural tutoring. So the name cultural tutor was literally just a complete, a literal description of what I thought I was doing. I didn't want to set myself up as this sort of

this font of knowledge and understanding. I literally just wanted to offer people tutoring and things that were culturally related. So that's where the name came from. And the reason I chose that for my Twitter account was because I just thought it sounded more

authoritative with a picture of a statue of Plato. There wasn't a lot of thinking that went into it. It was very, very quick. This is a beautiful thing. You may have found it as well. When you start something new, everything is so simple, so straightforward. You don't worry. You don't think ahead because there's nothing to worry about, nothing to fail, nothing to lose. You just go with your instincts.

And I thought, who cares what Sheen Quirk has to say? Who's going to care if Sheen Quirk writes something about how to date a church by the shape of its windows? But if there's a picture of Plato and then this anonymous name. So it's almost like Batman. There's a great line in Batman Begins, the first of Christopher Nolan's trilogy, when he's like, as Bruce Wayne, you're just one man, but as Batman, you're a symbol.

It felt a little bit like that. I mean, I hope it doesn't sound too silly, but to me, almost the cultural tutors are my alter ego. I don't know if I have quite the same relationship with him that Bruce does with Batman, but to some extent, that's how I felt. It was like putting on my mask, as it were, to become a cultural tutor. To what extent were you concerned that...

you don't have enough credibility, why would anyone care what you say? It's not like you did a degree in history, you just did a degree in law. It's like, I think a lot of people have some level of imposter syndrome that holds them back from doing things, even anonymously, because they're worried like, oh, but I don't have the right credential to be able to do this thing. Sure, that's a fantastic question. I'll say two things. First of all, I still feel that. In fact, the more and more this journey has gone on, the more I feel that I know absolutely nothing about anything I'm writing about. It's all just spurious nonsense.

But I think the reason that I didn't worry about it in the beginning is because the ultimate test of credibility is how people respond to it. Like, you know, if you worry that you don't have the authority to write about what you want to write about it,

Let other people be the judge of that because if they don't like it, they'll tell you and then you can improve as well. Because there were some things I said in the early days and people were like, man, this is so wrong. So I went away and researched it and then I got better. It's like a sort of self, it's a positive feedback loop. But I think that that's the key. Let other people be the judge of whether or not you've got the credibility. Ultimately, if you want to write about it, if there's something that interests you, however interesting,

far from the truth you might be, you've got to start writing about it. Because otherwise, you know, you never will. I mean, look at it this way. That whole point about credibility applies whether I'm writing to an audience of a million, an audience of a thousand, or an audience of none. If I'm just typing away on my laptop, that doesn't mean I have more or less credibility, right? I don't know if that quite makes sense. I think that's a really good point. Like, let other people be the judge. But I think there's sort of, that is a mindset shift that...

That's a mindset that a lot of people don't have. I think law is a fairly traditional thing. Medicine is a very traditional thing. A lot of people who've done well in school have gotten very good at doing the things that the people in power say that you should do, working towards a badge. And so thinking like...

screw it, I'll just let other people be the judge of whether I'm good, is a completely counter to what most people would think, which is, oh, I have to be good first, and then good things will happen. Exactly, and the beauty is once you start, you get better so quickly. Like, if I'm, I'll go back to the other example, if I'm just writing a little essay on my laptop, oh, I'm thinking about whatever it is, you know, impressionism, and I write a little essay for myself, and I'm like, oh, how could that be better? I don't know, then I go in and leave it for two weeks and I forget about it. When you write online...

The internet is a beautiful, flawed, strange, incredible place. But if you say anything slightly wrong on the internet, everyone will let you know immediately. And that can be quite scary. But to me, I treated that as an incredible tool. Because as I said, immediately you start getting better because you have to get better because the stakes are raised when you're talking. Yeah.

to people about, about online. Um, there's a point you mentioned earlier about the exams and a really good point. Yeah. We're all trained in school. I get, I get an A star, I get praised, whatever I get into university because I've done this thing that other people want me to do. And I suppose speaking about a mindset shift for anybody who wants to be a writer, what I would ask them is who are you writing for? And to me, the answer was myself. Like I'm not

I hope what I write is useful. I always say what I produce, I want it to be useful and interesting and beautiful for other people, but mainly for myself. And when I write something online, even today, well, you know, I'm going to go and write something on Twitter later today. I'm not quite sure. There are two things I have in mind.

Today's the birthday of Commodus, the Roman Emperor, who was played by Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator. So it'd be kind of interesting to tell the real story of his life because he's almost wilder than he was in the film or something else about the Eiffel Tower. Anyway, when I'm writing those things, I'm writing them for myself because I'm really curious to know about them because I'd like to... I know a few of the facts about the life of Commodus, but I'd like to try and write something about him properly. When I'm writing these things, it's for me because I want to know about them because I'm curious about them.

And if I'm happy with what I've written, then there's a point in which I don't care what anybody else says. And I can have thousands of people online telling me this is the worst thing I've ever read. You should be banned. There's a wonderful moment when someone did quote tweet me saying this dude should be banned. And it got like 95,000 likes. Wow.

But equally, if thousands of people are saying, wow, this is wonderful, this has changed my life, people have said these things to me. And it's almost shocking to hear that. I'm beautiful and uplifting. But at the end of the day, you've got to put those things out of your head. If you want to be a writer, you've got to forget what anybody else is saying, good or bad, bad or good, and focus on whether you are happy with it. Because if you're happy with it, if you can put something online, write something, and say, I stand by this,

then you'll be fine and nothing can bother you. No problem can stand in your way online. Whether you go big or you fall, you'll be okay. Because ultimately that's what it's about, I think. It's about writing something that you are proud of isn't necessarily the word because, you know, whenever I write anything, I always think, God, that could have been 10 times better. You probably feel the same way. You make a bit of, you know, you make a video, you analyze something like the next day, you're like, man, that was awful. I could have done it better. But if you can put something out and say, I'm okay with that.

Then all these other problems kind of fade away. Yeah, the bar I have in my mind is, is this at least reasonable? Sure. And when I spoke to Cal Newport, who's written a bunch of productivity-themed books, he said the way that he keeps himself going when he's writing a book is he tells himself, this one just needs to be reasonable. The next one is going to be good. Sure, sure. Look, everyone has different ways of doing it. I mean...

Well, one thing I will say, this is a slight tangent back to what I was just saying. I think it was from those long months and years when I had no audience online and I was writing for myself that I kind of got this mindset. I set myself a challenge in the summer of 2021. I wanted to write a novel in four weeks. I thought a novel that's exactly 99,999 words long. I just thought it sounded fun to do that. And I did it. And at the end of it,

Uh, four weeks I was working at the time and writing in the evenings or writing while I was at work. That was when I was working as a kind of a security guard or night watchman on the graveyard shifts. Um, that's another job I did. And I think it was in those days when it was just me writing for myself that I learned, um,

that I learned this. The point you make about standards is interesting. I mean, maybe we can go down that route now or another point. And I suppose that's scary for young writers as well. People think, oh, I want to be a writer, but look at all this other stuff. It's so amazing. How can I ever possibly compete with that?

To me, at least, it's, yeah, this stuff is good. We shouldn't hide from it. You've got to believe that you can do something better. And even if you fail, you've got to at least try. If you set the standard up here, but then you only reach this far, you've still achieved more than if you set the standard down there. That's my take anyway. And it can be quite taxing because you're never happy with what you've done. But I like to believe it's maybe made things I've written just a little bit better.

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And that will let you sign up to a completely free 30-day trial. And if you're one of the first 200 people to use that link, you'll also get 20% off the annual premium subscription. So thank you so much, Brilliant, for sponsoring this episode. So you make the website on Squarespace, theculturetutor.com or whatever the domain was. You decide, you know what, I need lead gen for my business. I'm going to make a Twitter account. Oh, sorry, lead. Lead gen. Lead generation. You generate leads for the business. Got it.

And so you start writing on Twitter. Yeah. And you think, okay, cool, I'm going to do a thread every day for 30 days, 90 days. Day one to day seven, what happens next? Well, I think the first week I was so excited about writing threads. I wrote like five a day. I just thought, that sounds great, that sounds great. The way I got my first few followers was by asking my friends to follow me, of course, as one would. And then I...

If I was, say, doing a thread about Roman history, I would just search on Twitter for other people writing about Roman history, follow them, follow people who'd liked it and commented on it and retweeted it, hoping they would follow me back. And, you know, I got up to like 20, 30 followers that way. And then...

I would message some bigger accounts as well, being like, hey, this is what I'm doing. I write about history, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you have any advice? How did you grow? And some of them, you know, one thing I should say is a lot of people are incredibly kind and helpful. The internet seems like this great big terrifying scary place, but a lot of people on Twitter were so, so incredibly friendly and helpful to me. Gave me all sorts of wonderful detailed advice accounts with everything from 2,000 to 100,000 followers, you know. Some of them would retweet me.

And then I got into this habit of every time anybody had liked anything I'd ever posted, I would then message them personally every time I uploaded something new. So, for example,

it's 10 p.m., I've just finished the thread for the day, I'll stay up until four in the morning messaging like 150 people. And often what would happen is I'd get to that point where it stops you because it's like you've sent too many messages in the past hour, you're clearly a bot or whatever. So I usually send messages until I wasn't allowed to send them anymore by the platform. And I ground out those first 1,000 followers. Then you have a thread which gets 100 likes, 150 likes. I remember I did this one

He got 900 likes. He was about a speech given by Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. And I'd kind of like analyzed his speech and broken it down. It got 900 likes. And I was literally...

I was like, well, I've made it. I'm famous online. I'm successful. How far into the journey was this? That was after two weeks, I think. After two weeks, you got a thread with 900 likes. Yeah. Damn, that's cool. It went, yeah. Look, I'll say two things. Everyone has to be lucky. You don't ever...

get anywhere without a little bit of luck but I would like to think that I worked bloody hard for those two because because I had no money in my bank account I had nothing I had nothing to lose nothing to fall back on it was like it's either do or die either this twitter account works or whatever the army or film school or listicles or tutoring something has got to work so I just gave everything and I think it was once I started writing on twitter the joy of writing threads

completely overtook me. And I was like, this is the one that I want to work. If I can find a way maybe to make a living doing this. So I will say it was hard work. I was lucky. A combination of luck and hard work. I'll leave it at that. I mean, it certainly sounds like a lot of hard work.

Yeah.

So, yeah. I'll say a few things about that. First of all, I don't give people the wrong impression. It wasn't six hours of messages every night, but certainly for the first, it was at least an hour or two, three, often four. But I like to...

You know, there's that great saying, I don't know who came up with it, but how we do anything is how we do everything. And I think, I like to think it's how I tend to approach things. So like at school, you know, I loved exams. Then when I was playing football, I gave everything to the football, you know, I wanted to, I'm not very good at football, I should add, I'm a very cumbersome striker, but I still gave everything I could. And then when it came to Twitter, you've almost got to trick yourself into

Into thinking that this is the most important thing in the world and obviously it isn't it's just Twitter who cares about social media What people saying online, but if you trick yourself into thinking this is all that matters And suddenly the stakes are raised when the stakes are higher We all perform better if you think what you're doing doesn't really matter then you're gonna show in your work, right? Yeah, and in how much work you're able to put in and the fact I could push through that tiredness and

It was because I managed to trick myself into thinking that if this didn't work, if this Twitter account didn't work, then, you know, that was it. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. There's a lot of value in convincing yourself that the thing is going to work. And therefore, because if someone is like, oh, I'm just going to half-arsely start a Twitter account and start a YouTube channel, and I'll just publish a YouTube video when I feel like it. I'll just write a thread when I feel like it. Oh, it's not going to work anyway. It's like, you know, as...

Fluffy as it sounds, the belief that the thing might not work absolutely changes the way you approach the thing. Absolutely. Whereas the belief that this has to work completely transforms the way you approach the thing. He who says he can and he who says he can't are both usually right. It's a wonderful line. I think I guess the heart of what you're saying, I don't know about yourself, but when you say you started with YouTube, did you...

how much did you commit to it? A lot. I'm committing to making one video every week for the next two years, and I'm sure something good will happen. Look, man, that's how you've built what you've built today and how you've got to where you are because you've put in that work. I think it sounds frightening at first when you say to people that there's no easy way, that you've got to work hard and you've got to want to, but I think that's also reassuring in a way because it means...

Um, it's not just magic and it's not just luck. There are elements of that. Of course there are. But if you do put in that level of work, that's got to lead to something because let's think of this competitively, right? The day you start your YouTube account, the day you started yours, the day I started my Twitter account, probably 20,000 other people also started accounts on that day and they all wanted to do something with it. But I wouldn't be surprised if you worked harder than every single other person who started an account on the same day you did.

And, you know, I'd like to think I probably did with my Twitter account. Not just hard work, but passion as well. And Joe, you can work clever. There's all sorts of other things. But I think at the core of it is that compulsion. And I suppose I was in this position where being a writer is what I always wanted to be. And this is a really, really important moment because I've had this, as we said, this –

Um, this flashpoint when the fire was lit and I suddenly see the world in a different way, quit my job. That then reached this point when I started writing on Twitter, when it was no longer simply this compulsion to change my life. It was like I'd found the thing that fitted with me. I'd found, you know, people might say I found my calling. Um,

Which was almost another gear change. Because as I said, I would always want to be a writer. And suddenly I was writing and it seemed like it might lead somewhere. And when you're doing not just... When you're not just working hard, but you're also working...

in a way that the work isn't work, right? Writing threads for me isn't work. It's like, it's a joy, it's a delight. It can be a torment, it can be horrible, it can be painful. But I approach, you know, and it probably sounds silly to people talking about threads on Twitter in this way. But look, you know, from a certain point of view, that's true. It's just the internet. At the same time, if you write a good thread, a million people, 10 million people, 30 million people could read something you've written.

And maybe it'll do some good if they read it. Hopefully, I'd like to think some of the things I've written have made people's days a little bit better, made them see the world in a slightly brighter way. And the point was I was sat there writing and I was like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. And it's a blessing to be able to say that and to think and to feel it. And that was a world away from

from McDonald's. There are some essays from Paul Graham that I've been reading recently on how to find work that you love. And he talks about how the journey of finding work that you love is something that of the 8 billion people on the planet, only probably a few hundred thousand will get to the point where the thing that they are doing, they can genuinely say with an open heart, I genuinely love this thing. And what he argues in these essays is that like,

You want to find that thing as soon as possible, really. And if you don't yet know what the thing is, then the idea is that you want to experiment with a lot of different things. But it sounds like for you, you knew from a young age that, like, I want to be a writer. And then after you had that flashpoint moment where you quit the job at McDonald's, you were like, cool, I'm going to find a way to make this work. Yeah, I think that's very fair summary, brief summary of it. And one thing I would add, though, that I realized...

This is for people who want to be a writer. To me, at least, you either are a writer or you aren't. Now, whether you're a published writer or a writer with no audience, that's a different matter. But being a writer isn't about having a book on the shelf. It's not about having a million followers on Twitter. Being a writer is about...

What defines somebody who we can say they are a capital W writer is whether or not they wake up and they write that day. It's about doing the thing rather than being the thing almost. Precisely. Precisely. Exactly. That's exactly it. And a lot of people think, oh, I'd love to be a writer. Well, if you're writing, you already are. And I hope that doesn't sound like paltry consolation, but that is the most important thing. Whereas if you're not writing, thinking I would like to be a writer...

Yeah, you're kind of waiting for someone to give you permission to start doing the thing. Exactly. But actually starting doing the thing is what ultimately gets you in front of people. What are you waiting for? Like a lot of people say, oh, you know, I'd love to write, but I don't have the time. I've got this idea, but I didn't have the time today to write. Like if you need to write, if you want and need to write this thing, you'll find the time. You'll make the time. Every action is an expression of our priorities. We find the time to eat every day. You find the time to go and see your friends. Find the time to sleep. If you

If you can find the time to sleep in, you can find the time to write if you really want to do it. So that's what I'd say to anybody who is sort of in this position where they don't have the audience, they don't have the book deal like I was in literally 18 months ago. Slightly less than that. You're still a writer anyway. Yeah. And, you know, this is going to be a trite point, but we are talking about writing, but actually everything that we're talking about is applicable to it.

almost everything else as well yeah you want to be a creative in any kind of field you want to be a youtuber you want to be a musician you want to be an artist it's like do the thing do the thing don't wait for permission to suddenly one day at some point in your life you're gonna magically have the time to do the thing everyone's lives should generally tend to get busier as they grow older you know you get a family you get responsibilities you have kids all this kind of stuff if if right now i feel like i don't have the time to write i'm

I'm like a dude with no kids. How do I possibly think I'm going to suddenly start having a time once I have kids? Yeah.

There are people who start a business because they want more free time. And you speak to anyone who's got a business, they're like, yeah, how's that going for you? You realize that starting a business to try and get more free time is a complete myth. Starting a business does not give you more free time. You realize, oh my goodness, there's all this stuff I need to do. But if a friend did say something to me once which sounded very counterintuitive but very wise, he said, I'm assuming some famous person said it originally, but it was like entrepreneurs, let's say,

like yourself, work 60 hours a week so they don't have to work 40 hours a week. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I feel sort of the same way about it. I'm certainly not an entrepreneur, but I'm happy to spend 10 hours. If you're doing what you love, like the Paul Graham point, then you're happy to spend 12 hours a day doing it rather than spending eight hours a day, seven hours a day doing something you don't really want to do.

So you're two weeks into the thing, into writing threads. You put this thread out and it gets 900 likes. And you were thinking, fuck, I made it. What happens next? Well, then I just started writing immediately. When things...

When things are going well, you're always more excited. The key part is continuing when it's not going well. Because I think the next thread I wrote didn't even get more than 20 likes or something. And it brings you right back down to earth. When suddenly you think you're king of the world, you think you're going to be the most famous writer in history, and then suddenly six people...

It's actually not to be sniffed at, but only six people like what you've written. So that was, I think, the first thing that happened was that my suddenly expanding ego was immediately burst. But in terms of the story, I just kept going. And then I think after three weeks or four weeks, perhaps, four weeks,

I was on about 3,000 followers. So I'd been building, still grinding it out, getting retweets from bigger accounts. They would bring in another 20, 30 followers, grinding, grinding it out. And then I did this thread about medieval education, and it got like 5,000 likes and another couple of thousand followers.

And then I did this one thread about modern architecture. And the picture that I'd used for it was I just took a photo of a light switch in my house. This light switch I really hated. It's similar to the one over there, actually. It's sort of just this white, pointy plastic light switch. And it was really annoying me that day. So I took a photo of it and then wrote this thread about the problem with modern architecture.

not being quite what you think it is. And that got 15,000 likes. And my follower count shot up after that to like 12 or 13,000 or I can't remember all the numbers. And then two weeks after that, I think came the big one. I did this thread called, um,

Remember, at this point, I'm still doing one every single day. Most of them are misses. You occasionally get ahead, but you've got to keep doing because by writing a thread every day, you're just increasing the odds of something doing well. I mean, I'm talking here from a purely engagement perspective rather than some of the other more important things. But as you know, the more content you upload online, the more potential engagement there is.

So six weeks in, I'd had this, I think I probably had three or four days on the trot that I was like, with engagement immediately dropping, I was thinking, okay, this is it. This is the end of the cultural journey. This is the end of my journey. You know, whatever it is, 15,000 followers, that's where it ends for me. Fine, I'll take it. But I was annoyed. I was thinking, I've got more to say, more to do. And I was so mad. And then I just opened my laptop and I wrote this thread about

entitled it The Danger of Minimalist Design and the Death of Detail. And it was basically analyzing the ways in which the world has got less detailed. Everything's getting simplified from brand logos to architecture, graphic design of all kinds, and this thread.

I remember I shut my laptop and then my friend messaged me being like, whoa, man, that thread's doing pretty well. I opened it, you know, a few hours later, it was on like 30,000 likes. So, wow, whoa, you know, bloody hell, this is shocking. Then I went to bed and I woke up and then my dad had messaged me being like, wow, man, that's really doing well. And then it was on like 250,000 likes. By the end of the day, it reached half a million. Wow.

And my follower count had increased by 80,000 to nearly 100,000. And at that point, I had then the critical mass of followers to be able to grow to the point where I'm at now, where I had enough followers that I wasn't relying too much on the algorithm to favor me, you know, the all-seeing, almighty algorithm.

And that was, I think, six weeks after I started the account. So from that point to then, it's basically, those first six weeks were just these beautiful moments

beautiful days where, as I said, you're not worrying, you're not overthinking, everything's simple, you move fast. I started a newsletter in that period as well. Didn't worry about what it was called or what it was going to be. I just started one and started writing it straight away. And then from that sixth week from a big thread to now, it's been sort of one thread every day since then, growing to apparently one and a half million followers on Twitter. Yeah.

This is... There's so much I love about your story. One of the big things is that I think for someone hearing it, it just shows that there's basically no excuses. Like you're an anonymous account. No one knows who you are. No one knows your name. No one knows how old you are. No one knows whether you have a degree or a qualification. And you decide to just do the thing.

You don't have a degree in anything related to cultural stuff. You're just interested in the thing and you're interested in writing and you just do the work. And now freaking Elon Musk is in your DMs and you've got one and a half million followers and you could now spend the rest of your life literally like making a living out of writing. And you started with like seemingly no unfair advantages other than enjoying writing and enjoying the subject that you were talking about. Is that fair to say?

I think it is fair to say. An important part of the story is that, as I said, I've been writing every day since I was 10 years old. And when you write for that long, you know, I can be a lot... I think I can do better, but I don't think I'm a terrible writer. And that came from all those years. So I think that has something to do with it. It wasn't like I just woke up and said, OK, I want to play tennis, and then I was at Wimbledon in a year. No.

I had been training, if you like, for well over a decade by the time I started writing online. And David Perel, the founder of Writer of Passage, who have been sponsoring me now for over a year, not actually sponsoring me, they've been my patrons. They don't ask me to publicize anything about them. This is an important part of the story. We'll get back to what you were saying, but I just want to tell this really incredible part of the story when

It was around the time of when I'd blown up and I got the newsletter. I still wasn't making money at this time. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to monetize the newsletter. And then on literally the same day I decided to do that, this guy called David Perel gets in touch with me. He has no idea who I am or how old I am, where I'm from. He DMs me on Twitter, get his number. We talk. He tells me who he is, what he does.

He said, look, man, I love your work online. I teach people to write online with this course. So I want to support you. I want to help people in your position who've just started out, who don't have a source of income. Because he realized if I started dedicating my attention to making money at that point, probably engagement would drop because I'd be spending less time writing for the general audience and more time trying to curate people who were supporting my work. He said, how much money do you want? I'll pay you. How much do you need?

to live on and to buy your books. And ever since then, in June or July of last year, he's been supporting me. With no strings? No strings attached. Why?

Well, I think from his point of view, this is something, I was sort of a trial run for this role, writer in residence. What Writer of Passage want to do is literally do this, just patronize, in the old sense of the word, not patronize, the way we use it now, but become a patron of young writers. Help them by just giving them the money they need. And writers don't need that much money. You know, it's not like investing in a business where there are loads of costs. A writer, there's a great line from John Ruskin, one of my favorite writers,

writers and historians. He says all a writer needs is bread and salt. Give them their bread and salt. By this he just means food on the table, water, and a place to live. That's all they need. It's all they should have, in fact. If a writer has too much money, it's probably not good for them. Anyway, yeah, so he just wanted to support my work. Everyone always asks, well, what does he get out of it? Does he benefit? And I think it was genuinely as shocking as it is to hear

it was an act of generosity and a faith and belief. It wasn't a zero-sum game calculation. It was just, I want to help you because I believe in what you're doing. And it's beautiful. I mean, as a writer, someone who wants to be able to

wake up and write until I fall asleep, until I can't write anymore, what more could you ask for than someone saying, I'm going to pay you to live? As long as, okay, there was one string, which was that you keep writing. That was the only one, which of course isn't a string at all. That's an important part of the story. But this came from a tangent. Now, what were you saying just before I got onto that?

Unfair advantages. Unfair advantages. Lack of unfair advantages. You put in the grind, the hard work while enjoying the process and ended up with 100,000 Twitter followers in about six weeks. Speaking about that early growth, I think there's a couple of other important things about why I grew so quickly. I think the first is that I probably wasn't writing in a way or about the things that a lot of other people wrote

writing about. And the reason for this is because, you know, the way we write is influenced by what we read. And I wasn't reading what anyone else was reading, broadly speaking. I have this one rule when it comes to which books I read. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't read anything published in the last 50 years. For a couple of reasons. One, I

of course, is that if you read the same books as everyone else, not only will you write the same way, but you'll think the same way. So if instead of reading, you know, whatever's on the New York Times bestseller list, I'm reading something published 700 years ago, whatever I end up writing will inevitably be different. So that's part of it, I think. The second thing is the kind of content I was putting online.

The internet is, as I said, this beautiful, bizarre, terrifying, strange thing that we don't yet really understand all of its consequences. I often sort of look back and think,

like Erasmus, one of my heroes back in the 16th century, he was writing his books, a great force for education, literacy. If he could see the internet where, you know, as long as you can afford an internet connection, it's free. You've got every book ever written at your fingertips. I mean, it's an incredible resource. But, and yet, the internet is filled with a lot of crap, frankly. You know, there's some wonderful creators out there, wonderful, wonderful writers, video artists,

artists and all sorts of people. But a lot of the internet, if you open Instagram and go on it, what do you see? Probably you're going to see monkeys doing backflips and funny videos, celebrity gossip. And the internet, suddenly what we have is when people go online, what they experience most of the time is either politics, which just causes division and it makes you angry,

Or it's just mindless doom-scrolling content designed purely to keep you staring at it so then they can make more money from your ad revenue. So the internet is full of this sort of thing which is either making you angry and unhappy or just leaves you feeling empty. You know, what does it say in the Bible? Man does not live by bread alone. And I think the things that I'm writing about, art, architecture, history,

It's apolitical. It's not clickbait, I don't think. It's not merely something that's entertaining in a simple sort of way. Look, I love videos of otters, you know, swimming around with their little baby otters. But ultimately, that's not enough to live on. You need something more. And I think when people suddenly find themselves reading online about politics

art, about something as simple as Claude Monet and, you know, his paintings of the water lilies in his garden, or about Gothic architecture, you know, or the great step wells of India, whatever it is. When people are reading this, suddenly they find themselves reading about something which isn't politics, which isn't doomscrolling content. It's actually quite interesting, quite uplifting, quite beautiful, and quite meaningful.

And I think that's part of what resonated so much. And I got a lot of those sorts of comments, and I still do. You know, one thing I noticed is people would often, quote, tweet me, and they'd say, you know, timeline refresh and that sort of thing. And, you know, I didn't think much of it at first. But looking back, I think, hold on, there's something interesting there. You know, what they're saying is their timeline is so full of just either nonsense or unpleasant things. To read something that was quite pleasant and meaningful...

wasn't the sort of thing they usually read online. And I think that's part of where the growth came from, that it was this sort of thing, that people experienced a different form of content, as we now call the things you find on the internet.

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I'd have to dive into the writing process. Sure. Or lack of it. But before we go there, I'm curious. So you're covering a wide range of topics. History, art, architecture, cinema, tons and tons and tons of stuff. Football. I still... You do football as well. I adore football. And I do find a way to connect the things and write about football as well. Presumably, you don't just have all this knowledge in your head. No. So like, how...

You know, someone looking at this and being like, you've written like basically an essay on Twitter every day for the last 500 days or something. I've said like that, probably more than that. How on earth do you not run out of stuff to say? Two points. First of all, you can never run out of things to say. I mean, I suppose I'm lucky given the things I write about, about culture, history, art, architecture, football, whatever. Like the world is full. If all you do is open your eyes and look,

You'll never run out of things to write about. If you go outside your room, open your eyes, look around you at the trees, you know, there's an orange tree here. You know, you could write a book about that orange tree. There's so much to say about it, so many tangents to go off. So inspiration comes from literature. And a lot of my best work has come, you know, I wrote a thread two days ago, or rather a post, a long post, about the benefits of trees in cities.

And engagement-wise, that one did pretty well. It's been a bit up and down recently, but that one got like 100,000 likes. And that had come from walking around as I do. I spend a lot of time walking around doing nothing. And I'd just been looking, and I was on this one street, and then I went to another street. And I suddenly felt happier on this other street. I was thinking, why is that? Like, I suddenly found myself, my head was up rather than down.

I was like, oh, there are trees on this street. And I found myself looking at the trees. It was all so shady, so I was cooler. I was like, there it is. I've got to write about trees and why they're so good. And that came, as I say, from just walking outside and listening to yourself, not looking at my phone, not listening to music. So inspiration comes from everywhere. But more to the point of your question, look, I have a lot of books. I spend most of my time when I'm not writing books.

And I'm always buying more books, more than I could possibly ever read. So the knowledge, so to speak, that I use to write with mostly comes from books. The internet is, of course, an incredible place to research things as well. And I think once you get enough basic knowledge about something, you then sort of start to pass into this other territory, which I would call understanding.

And understanding is much more powerful than the knowledge. And I think once you've got just a little bit of understanding, you suddenly start to make connections you wouldn't have previously made and you look at things differently.

And even when you don't know that much about them, you get a few little facts about it. You can then start to build the connections in and it's suddenly, whereas before I might've looked at something and not how much to say about it. Now, when you've got all these, these links there in your brain from reading all these books, giving it time to percolate, you can then look at it and then suddenly you've got these connections to make drawing back on other material you've written about, um, other things you know about. And

And then you're able to suddenly look at a lot of different things and write about them and seeing the similarities. I don't know if that's too fluffy an answer, but the hard facts are it comes from books, many. You read a book about something, basically. Okay, so...

Let's say you and I are both walking and we're walking down Hyde Park. Sure. And we're both thinking, let's write a thread about trees. Sure. I'm going to be thinking, well, I know very little about trees. Let me find the Wikipedia article and let me... I don't know. At that point, the thought process of like, let me write something about trees lands at a brick wall pretty quickly. What does your thought process look like when you think...

I want to write about trees. This is why I said you want to open your eyes and look and then interrogate yourself. So we're there in Hyde Park. We're looking at a tree. And we look at the tree and I say, oh, you know, Ali, do you know what kind of tree that is? You don't know. And I'll say, I don't know either. And then, oh, what kind of tree is it?

Okay, is that kind of tree native to England? Did we bring it from somewhere else? Why did they plant this kind of tree here? Are the other trees in the park the same sort of tree? Why did I not know what that tree was called when the world is full of trees? How can I not know what type of tree this is?

Well, people in the past, did they know what trees were called? Maybe they did. Maybe people living in the Middle Ages had a bit of a closer connection to nature and they knew what the plants and the trees and the birds were all called. And then suddenly, it's like, wow, now we've got something to write about. We're more distant from nature. Or the history of this particular kind of tree and how it got here and whether it was planted and why it was used in Hyde Park. And then, as I said, when I was walking on the side of the street, we're looking there, we're thinking...

you know, oh, it's nice to be around this tree, isn't it? It was shading us from the sun. And that in itself is, I think, interesting enough. And that was one of the points I made about urban trees, what they're great at is regulating temperature because we're cooler. Like we look around in Hyde Park on a sunny day, why is everyone gathered underneath the trees? Aha, it's not complicated at all. None of this is complicated. None of it's remotely complicated or difficult to comprehend. I think the key is just looking and looking properly.

and pausing for 20 seconds more, 30 seconds more about the things you're looking at to ask yourself why and what and how and when. If you ask those four questions about everything you look at, you'll suddenly realize there's too much to write about. It's not a question of are there enough things to write about. It's there are more things than I could ever possibly write about in 10 lifetimes. You know, same for this building and the street outside.

just take a walk through London and your mind will sort of explode with potential. And then, okay, so you've got all these questions. So I'm going to jump in there one point. And then once you look in that way and really look at things, and then you've also read a little bit and you do know a few facts, you can then maybe start making connections. So, you know...

One example might be like architecture is a great example. You know, when you look at a building and you really look at it, you know, we don't pay attention to things, but I look at that building and I notice a particular detail of it and I'm like, hmm, why is that there? Then I suddenly remember a fact about that building. Like, you know, the building here just over the road is vaguely neoclassical.

You've got the columns, it's a Doric order, and you've got the triglyphs above them. And then when you look at them, suddenly, because I know they're called triglyphs, this is just a hard fact. A hard fact in itself is potentially interesting, it's useful to know what things are called, but once you connect that fact to a bit of history, this is a cool thing about triglyphs. So a triglyph, imagine like the front of a neoclassical building. You've got the columns, then you've got like sort of a flat...

The architrave above it resting horizontally, and then the pediment, which is a triangle a bit. And on the architrave, you'll notice when you go outside, there are these decorative strips. They're like groups of three little lines like that. There's three of them, then a space, then three of them above each column. They're called triglyphs.

And what's cool about triglyphs is that although they're in stone on the front of this building, and they were in stone in ancient Greek architecture and in Roman architecture, they originate when Greek buildings were made from wood. And when they built them from wood, these three triglyphs were originally bits of the cross beams that were sticking through the front. And then when the Greeks started building in stone instead of wood, they just imitated the shape of it. So they kept these three decorative strips.

in stone and then it was no longer functional, it was decorative. And then two and a half thousand years later on a street in London, the decision of some Greek builder, anonymous Greek builder, two and a half thousand years ago to keep this bit of wood and turn it into stone is influencing the way the streets in London look. I mean, it's a miracle, you know, and that's where a few facts do come in handy. I think that's where reading the books. So if you read a few facts and then look.

That's where the inspiration comes from. Anyway, you had a... And so you're thinking, because I guess when I make my YouTube videos, the guiding question is, what actionable point can someone take away from this that would help them build a life they love or something? Mm-hmm.

What's the guiding? That's, so that's like self help. But sort of in your genre, what's, what's, what are the guiding questions that you're thinking about? Like, whether it's worth sharing something, or whether it's just Oh, this is a factoid. No one cares.

That's a good, a very good question. Yeah, we do work in fairly different fields in that regard. I do have this line, I think I mentioned earlier, I try to make sure everything I write is either one of and hopefully all of interesting, useful and beautiful. But I mean, you know, that's a bit of a slogan rather than a

a tool with which I analyze the things. I think it comes down to judgment and taste. You just have a sense for things. Like, am I excited about it? Do I want to know this? Do I find this interesting? Do I think this is useful? And that's it. It's my tip. I try not to think about what people want to read, what they need to know about. I mean, who am I to say what anybody else wants or needs?

And I think once you start playing that game, at least from my point of view, I think I would immediately lose the spark. Like the thing about trees the other day, I was just excited to write about it. I was excited to think about it. It's just something that had me interested. And I suppose there is a bit of texture there because there's a difference, as you say, between a factoid and then a story maybe. So if someone is...

If you were to hire a Twitter growth agency or something and they were to be like, look, Sheehan, the most important thing is the first tweet and the most important thing of the first tweet is the first line. We're just going to find the most viral first lines imaginable and just feed them to you and then you go and create a thread based on that. That would be... How does that kind of idea land with you? In some sense... Look, I'll say one thing. When you have a first line, the thread or the post...

writes itself when you have a great title um you know there are even these stories in hollywood apparently the producers they sit around and come up with titles they've got a great title and they go and find somebody and say write me a script based on this title um if you have a great title everything writes itself everything falls into place but in that scenario specifically i couldn't do it i think i'm i'm too protective over over my own of my own work and i think for me the key is

is that, look, I don't plan ahead. I don't have a content schedule. I just wake up and wait until something strikes me, something inspires me that day, and then I write about it. When the passion is there, the fire, the curiosity, when it's fresh in your mind, I think that's the vital part in my writing process on Twitter.

And once that stops, I don't think I could do it. Yeah, because then you become a content factory. Yeah. And then you have a job. Exactly right. That's it exactly. Whereas right now what I'm still doing to this day is literally finding something that's been on my – maybe it's been on my mind for a couple of weeks and then suddenly I'm turning it over in my head trying to understand something.

I've got it. I need to go and find a laptop and start writing before I forget. I'm still in that beautiful space, and I'm very lucky to be here doing this sort of thing. Yeah, there's a little... I've drawn a sort of bell curve. Sure. With art and optimization on opposite ends, or creative and business on opposite ends. And...

I think there's this... I really struggle with this balance. Because, you know, with YouTube videos, we could only make two YouTube videos a week. And I was... Sorry? I said that's still a lot. That's still a lot. But that means there's only eight videos a month. And so I'm excited about all these different things. But we're thinking, well...

unless we can find a good title and thumbnail, there's no point in making the video just because I'm excited about it. Because why bother making a video that 50,000 people will see when I could also make a video that 500,000 people would see and it would just be a different topic that I may not necessarily be excited about there and then. But once I've got a title and a thumbnail, I can whip something up and I can feel at least somewhat proud of it by the end of it.

And it's like this balancing act between like, I want to make a video about this thing, but like, oh, I also want to find a good title and a thumbnail and a hook. And I guess the first line of the thread, I also want it to do well. And you're combining like the arts and the creativity and the wanting to share from the heart with the commercial incentives of the business that needs to grow because we've got a team now and stuff.

If I just throw that at you, I'd love for you to riff on that idea. No, no, no. Look, man, I don't envy you. I don't envy that position. I'm lucky to have right of passage as my patron, so I don't need to worry about, you know, they pay me regardless of how well, they support me regardless of how well or not I'm doing. So I'm lucky to have a disconnect between the money coming in and the work going out.

Which I think is a good position to be in, potentially. I don't know that. I think it might be a good position to be in for it. Not always, but sometimes.

But look, I don't want to give the wrong impression. I'm sort of immune to the notion of a good thumbnail, as it were. You know, I've had plenty of images where I have these little, like, you know, I did this thread about the origins of the Argentinian football kit and why it's blue and white. Okay, this is an example of looking. By the way, we're going to jump off here for a second. I saw Lionel Messi lifting the trophy of the World Cup. I was delighted, by the way, for Messi to win the World Cup.

And this image is being beamed all around the world to billions of people. And I was like, why is he wearing a blue and white shirt? And I know it's because the Argentinian flag is blue and white, but why is the Argentinian flag blue and white?

And then I went back and I researched it, and this is kind of an interesting story. So that's an example of what I mean by looking. Just looking and asking the simplest questions. Nothing complicated, nothing overwrought or too detailed, just why is that thing like it is? And suddenly this incredible story opens up, which takes you back to the Byzantine Empire, through the Middle Ages, through this particular color that was imported from the mountains of Afghanistan for the painters in the Renaissance, blah, blah, blah, blah. Incredible. Anyway, for this thread...

I made this image with like Messi at the top and then there's King Charles of Spain and then there's some Byzantine emperor and there's a load of like colorful arrows going in between it all, you know, to show the progression. They're the kind of thumbnails you see on YouTube, you know. I don't think there's anything wrong with getting people's attention.

of doing clickbait, as it were, dare I say the word. And I think some of the titles I've written have probably very intentionally been pretty clickbaity. But what I tell myself is I can clickbait people as long as I back it up with something really valuable and good and useful. So that was all to make it clear that I don't want to give the impression that I'm in this

vacuum, immune to the way the internet actually works, which as we all know is you need to get people's attention because it's just a sea of content and millions of people shouting at you and you have to be the one who shouts the loudest. But then the tension, the broader tension between business and art, as it were, I probably can't talk too much about, but I will say sometimes I have been tempted to write about things that

because I think people want to hear it. And occasionally I've fallen for that temptation and I've written something because I think this will get the most engagement. More often than not, those sorts of pieces have done the worst, either just got the worst engagement or got the worst feedback. And I didn't feel very good about them afterwards. I think I've come to realize it's worth paying the price of what you think will be less engagement,

for writing something, for creating something you actually want to create and that you're proud of. Because I do think when people watch the things you make, read the things you write, they can usually tell how much you cared about it. Even if they don't realize it, but it's often just better. And there's something to be said about that. All this being said, I'll give you one counter example. The 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky.

you'll recognize it when you hear it. The crescendo has cannons firing, one of the most wonderful pieces of music. Um,

Probably Tchaikovsky's, you know, one of his most popular. You see it's on TV all the time and it's in movies. He wrote it in like three weeks, I think in 1872. And he said very openly, I didn't have any passion for this. I just wrote it because I thought people would like it and I needed to get something. I can't remember the particular circumstances, but essentially he needed to get something written for a particular deadline to make some money. He wrote it and it's one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

Sometimes by accident when you think you're being this sort of callous businessman-like content creator, you can actually accidentally create something extraordinary. So I don't know. I often give answers like this. I'm not someone who particularly sees the world in black and white either or. To me, the via media, the middle way, is always usually right. It's a bit of this and a bit of that. Yeah, I think that's...

I think often I default to trying to find the answer. I could be wrong here, but my vague understanding is that sort of Western thought is very much about the answer and about like labeling things and putting things in a box, where the Eastern thought is a bit more like,

um two two seemingly contradictory ideas can exist to can you can hold them both together is that like what okay i'm not much of a philosopher and i'm very cautious of all philosophers but broadly speaking i i think that is fair to say um certainly my experience of what i've read that that does that that does come through um but i i i wouldn't wish to say anything too uh too certain about that because i'll say for philosophy is not really my um

my realm of expertise and i find them very frightening strange people so i try and stay away from them yeah one one thing i've been trying to figure out when it comes to my creative process for videos is how do i i'm gonna sound cringe but like no no man some some combination of like mind heart and soul and i think the heart and the soul comes from me being passionate about the thing and feeling excited about it yeah and the mind component is like the

all right, let's see, how do we optimize the shit out of the title and the thumbnail kind of thing? And it's like some balance between all... We shouldn't be afraid of this. We shouldn't be like... I think all the greatest stuff doesn't just... The greatest stuff doesn't just come from this pure, completely uncontrolled passion. And that stuff usually ends up being messy and poorly structured. Think of it like a film. You know, like the best films...

The screenwriters, the directors, if all they worked on was passion, the thing would be seven hours long and the plot, the pacing would be all over the place and the narrative would be hard to follow. And it might be beautiful in some sense. The best work always comes when you have the passion and you can see it clearly. But then you're also able when you need to, to step back and think about it very rationally about does this need to be here?

to think about thumbnails say and i i don't think look look i mean in some sense i'm a bit of a purist but i i think it would be historically wrong to say that all the great stuff has come from people who only listen to their passions they didn't actually think about it very carefully what they were doing um whether that's about things as you know thumbnails or structure whatever it is the the detail the hard details of a piece of work um

So those three things, yeah, can be and should be united. And if you cast off one, you lose everything. You need all three of them, you know, I suspect. What do I know? How do you think about what your niche is, if at all? Oh, I don't think about it at all. I don't. Because traditional writing advice is find a niche, find your personal monopoly, do the thing, find that niche.

That one thing that you can talk about and talk about really well, and then people will follow you for that one thing. And if you stretch too far outside of your lane, then your engagement goes down and all of those things.

Um, that advice, I've read that advice before. I think probably in those early days when I was Googling how to become a writer online after I left McDonald's, I read that sort of thing. And it seems like very fair advice. I certainly didn't apply it myself. Maybe retrospectively, you could say that I've fallen into that category. But I don't know what my niche is. I mean, I suppose if I started talking about

Self-help. Yeah, well, even some of the things I do do touch on that. You can tie that in. I write about Boethius all the time. I talk about him nonstop. And Boethius, he was around just after the fall of the Roman Empire, 5th century, early 6th century. He rose to the top of society. He was a friend of the king. Suddenly, everything goes wrong. He gets thrown in prison. When he's in prison awaiting execution, he wrote a book called

called The Consolation of Philosophy, and it's him sort of reasoning with the fact he's had this fall from grace, he's about to die,

and he's exploring the true meaning of happiness and of what it means to live a good life. And this book was basically a bestseller for 1,500 years. Like we talk about, you know, self-help. This was essentially an early medieval, you know, late classical self-help book, which topped the charts for well over 1,000 years. And it's all, it's about 100 pages. And I, it's one of the

When you read it, you can see why it was so popular for so long, because it's got some of the most brilliant, brilliant advice and wisdom that anybody could hope for. This is all a very long way of saying I've written about this book before and I talk about Boethius a lot. I talk about self-help, so to speak. Maybe not in quite a, it's quite a pointed way, but I certainly don't, I'm not afraid of talking about it.

But to answer your question, I'm sort of jumping around because I don't think I have a niche. I just followed my nose, followed my instinct. I suppose if I was – I don't like giving advice particularly because everybody's journey is different. I say one thing, you say another thing. We're both right and we're both wrong at the same time. But rather than picking a niche to –

to capture, to enter, just you are your own niche. That's how it works for me, at least, I think. Yeah, there's a phrase that a friend of mine, Paul Millard, uses, which is kind of the difference between a niche and a mode. It's somewhat semantic, but like a niche is sort of like a topic area, a mode is sort of like an operating system, a way of being. And Paul wrote a piece for his newsletter where he said,

He had a really interesting paragraph. He was like, see, someone like Ali Abdullah has managed to do it well because he's found himself a mood where he can make videos about whatever he wants and whatever he's passionate about and whatever he's learning. And I was like, really? Can I? That's a good point. And I guess thinking of it, because I also think I don't really have a niche. We've been trying to figure out what are our topics, like productivity, how to be a YouTuber, relationships, health, business, how to make money. Yeah, that's not a niche. It's not really a niche. It's more like...

I learn stuff and read stuff and talk to people and then make videos about the things that I think are cool. Because you are your own niche. Ali Abdaal is the niche, as it were. It's the same in your case. If you wanted to, you could pick up the top 10 New York Times bestselling books of this year and you could probably find something really interesting to say about them from the lens of the stuff that you're interested in. Yeah, I'd like to think so.

Were you going to lead on to something else there? No, that was it. No, no, it's, yeah, which is why, you know, I do like this idea that you pick something, something very specific, very, very specific and become the best in the world at that one thing. That sounds quite exciting to me. You know, maybe for about two months, there was a sort of golden, the golden age of last year. Maybe I was probably the best person in the world at writing something

Twitter threads of a certain kind. Let's say that is very specific, but that's one thing I was pretty good at. And, you know, maybe if someone wants to be a writer, we could say that to them. But look, I just, I just, I find it odd suggesting to a young writer that you should advising them what they should write about or to pick something or

Because I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, because ultimately I picked something, I picked cultural stuff. This is interesting. So I didn't, I wanted to be a novelist. That's what I, it's novels that I wanted to write. You know, I'm hoping, hopefully,

I'm going to write a book, more than one book, about the things I now write about on Twitter, about architecture, art, and history, and working on a book proposal as we speak. Well, not as we speak, but I will be working on it later. But I always wanted to be a novelist.

And there, there's a shift in what I was writing about there. I didn't used to write about this kind of thing. In my spare time, I was always writing screenplays and dramas and poetry. So I did change what I was, so I think you can, maybe you can pick something. I don't know, as long as it interests you. One of the mental models we say for our YouTuber Academy students is the difference between being an architect and an archaeologist.

and an architect is someone who sort of has a plan in advance. They've got the blueprint. They're like, cool, this is going to be the thing that I do. This is a strategy and so on and so on before they lay the first brick, as it were. Whereas an archaeologist...

You know more about archaeologists than I do, but my understanding is that they think, okay, there might be something there and they dig a bit and there's nothing there. And then they go somewhere else and there might be something there and they dig a bit. And then eventually by digging in a bunch of different sites, they will find gold. They'll be like, ah, I'm going to excavate a bit more around this place. And then they discover this new ruins. It's like, cool. And now they double down on that particular thing because they've seen that essentially there is a market for the thing. And so they might have been passionate about site A, B, or C, but

But the fact that there's a market in Site D means that now passion plus market forces combine. And now it makes sense for them to build their business and make a living off of Site D. Doing more and more work there. And in a way, the fact that it's now working and the fact that there is a market for it makes doing the work feel even more rewarding because now you're not just...

pissing in the wind as it were you're like doing something and it's getting traction people like it and you're making money or whatever the thing is you're getting patronage from like the local museum all of that kind of stuff sure um yeah that's kind of a nice i'm not i'm not a big fan of um

sort of models and analogies. But that sounds, it fits what you've just said. I suddenly realized when you were talking just then, I think the reason I'm struggling to answer your question, and we're both sort of struggling a little bit to get to the heart of it, because I think it comes down to what you want to do or what you want to get out of it, whether you want to A, make money,

B, make money while doing something you like, or C, just do something you like and survive if you can while you're doing it. I think that's why I found the question slightly hard to answer, depending on whether or not, as you say, traditional writing advice, pick a niche. It depends what you want. It depends on the goal. Yeah, if you want to grow an audience, then maybe that is a good thing to do. But I don't know because I didn't particularly – and I suspect a lot of people who do write online and who have done well –

I wonder if, because it makes sense in hindsight. When you say that, for me it kind of makes sense in hindsight. Maybe for you it maybe makes sense in hindsight. But all these people who have grown an audience, I wonder if they really did proactively and very coldly, rationally pick something. Or if they just sort of instinctively picked

went for it because it felt right at the time. And this is something I really believe. You've got to trust your instincts that spark within you as a writer, as a creator. Everyone's got advice. Everyone's telling you how you should do X, Y, Z. Everyone's got a million different ideas about the way to grow, the way to become the person you can be. But what we all have

Is an instinct a spark? Whatever it is that thing inside you that little voice That feeling that gut feeling and I think everyone you've got to trust that you've always got to trust that sometimes it's wrong You've got to learn to understand yourself more clearly, but as soon as you start ignoring that Instinct within you. I think that's when you get lost. What does your writing process look like? Sure um

What do you mean by process? I guess, what does a day in your life look like? And how does writing fit in? Gosh, well, no two days are the same.

And I don't mean that because my life is exciting. I mean that because I don't really have a sleep routine. So I sort of wake up. Look, look, when I go to, okay, we're going to begin the story of my day when I go to bed. So I go to bed whenever I happen to go to bed. I don't know what time it is. It's whenever I finished writing the thing that I want and need to write that day. So I've done a thread on Twitter.

I've been working on the newsletter, worked on the book proposal, and then I'll work for a couple of hours on something that's never going to get published. It's never going to, I'm probably going to delete it in a week. Just some private passion that's got me gripped or I read something important and useful. Go to bed. And then I won't set an alarm. I'll just wake up whenever I happen to wake up.

Usually ends up being, usually I'm, you know, 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 p.m. in the afternoon. Oh, wow. So you're up until like 6 a.m.? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Normally I like to see the sunrise before I go to bed. I enjoy working at night because it's much quieter. It's darker as well. Something like the darkness blocking out the world because otherwise I'm looking around when it's dark and I can't see anything. And also no one bothers you at night. You don't have e-mails and texts. I hate e-mails. I hate texts.

can't stand them that's why i don't reply to most of them um same yeah sure it is it's why i tend to tend to work at night are you working in your in your in your house or like in a coffee in a pub or like um what's open at five o'clock in the morning well exactly um nothing really i tend to work at home i have a little desk and then i have a bookshelf you know a few few bookshelves with all my books and i'll just i'll sit there and work i can't work in cafes

Too noisy, too much distraction, it's too loud. There are lots of cars going past on the road. There's something about people and the chatter. I think when you're writing and creating, it depends on what you're doing, of course, but I like to be secluded on my own where the only thing is just me and the page, me and the blank page, as it were. And it's like I'm in a fight with this blank page and I've got to beat it to death until some words appear.

So look, I'll wake up whenever I happen to wake up. Okay, so let's say you wake up at 4pm in the afternoon. What happens next? Have a cold shower. I only have cold showers. One of the few bits of life advice I would give to people is to attempt having cold showers. It's wonderful because it's horrible every single day. You hate it.

There's something about it. It just wakes you up, gets you going. And do you do sort of cold completely or like hot? Because I go hot and then cold. Oh, I see. Right. I've heard that. No, no. Just completely cold. Yeah. Okay. Then, done that, get dressed, iron a shirt, iron a pair of trousers, put on a tie and head out and just...

go outside for a bit why why shirt trousers tie rather than like uh sports lululemon comfortable top with yoga pants so which is my look sure I mean look I feel like everyone's got a uniform you know and and for me this is this is my uniform it's like you know Messi puts on his jersey if into my other pink jersey of into Miami to play football um

Your soldier puts on their coveralls. Whatever it is, everyone has a uniform. And, you know, it's not as comfortable dressing this way as it would be to wear a T-shirt. But that slight lack of comfort, it...

I mentioned earlier, it raises the bar. It's like I'm here to do something. I'm not here to be comfortable. I'm not here to relax. I don't want to be relaxed while I'm writing. Like I work, so to speak. I'm in the trenches. And for that reason, you know, and then there's no better feeling than getting, you know, taking a tie off in the evening after a good day's work, taking a tie off. Suddenly, you know, you don't have a tight collar around your neck anymore.

So that's what it is. It's my uniform. Everyone maybe has a different one. But I think comfort can be dangerous for creativity. If you're too comfortable, I think you need to have a few thorns in your feet. That's not a saying, but let's imagine that. That is an idiom. Something along those lines. So I get dressed and then the first thing I do is I've got to get outside. And...

Not to do anything in particular, just to get a coffee. I'll drink a coffee at home and then just go outside and see what's happening. Just walk around for a bit. Just walk around for a bit, like 5 p.m., just like walking around? Yeah, walk around, see what the weather's like and let my brain slowly...

from its slumber because I take a long time to wake up. I'm not an early riser, evidently. It takes me four or five hours until I can start thinking clearly. So I usually just wander around and just see what comes into my brain. I mean, some days it's awesome because...

I will actually have a moment of inspiration just after waking up. And then I'm going straight to the laptop. So this is an important thing. As soon as in the day, in wake up, whatever point in that day, the inspiration hits me. That's when I go and start writing immediately. As soon as I've got it. Look, I'll get up and wander around and I'll have another coffee, then another coffee. Then I'll go home and I'll sit around. I'll read a book. This is like 11 p.m. at this point. Just whatever time it is. It could be 11 p.m. It could be 11 a.m. I don't know. Just whenever I've woken up and then wander around and...

You know, I smoke a few cigarettes, probably too many. You know, maybe head down to the boozer, just get warmed up, whatever it is. And then eventually, if you wait long enough, if I wait long enough, my brain suddenly starts working. The cogs start whirring. And then after sort of dozily walking around, I'm like,

for a few hours, I suddenly start walking more quickly. And then suddenly, you know, the hope doesn't sound too silly, but some days if I'm on the street and then I've got an idea, I'll run home because I'm like, I have to start typing for it. And I literally run down the street back to where I live. Um, and I'll, and I'll write and the right and right and right, right. If it's a thread on Twitter, right, right, right, right. Rewrite, rewrite. That doesn't work. Fix that. Um,

And then once that's done, it can take one hour, take half an hour. It could take 10 hours. And then once it's done, hit send, hit post, send it out to all those people. Try not to think about it too much that you've just put out something you've created to an audience of potentially millions of people. Shut the laptop, forget about the internet, forget about Twitter, go back to reading, um, go back to smoking and boozing or whatever the hell it is. Um,

And another wander, another walk around, look at the birds, if there are any at that time of day. Listen to them singing in the morning, of course, read a bit of poetry, maybe see my friends, depending on what time they're awake, if and when. The problem with this routine is, and with, I think, I don't know how you found it, when you're working a lot, really hard online, trying to build an audience online,

It ends up putting a big strain on your relationship with your friends and your family and so on and so forth because, look, it's hard to say no when somebody says like, you know, hey man, we need an extra man for the game tonight. Do you want to play some football? Like, I'd love to play football. But I know if I don't write this thing, maybe it's something boring like editing a video you've got to do. But if you don't do that thing,

you know, you're going to fall behind and you've got to say no. And I, you know, from time to time, I do say yes. See my friends, look, then whenever time it is, I just get into bed and the day's done. And we begin again tomorrow. And look, sometimes you have to get up early. Sometimes you have a two hour sleep. Sometimes you don't eat. It feels great sometimes when I don't eat.

Yesterday, actually, I tried some. I've been eating raw broccoli recently. I just got sick of bread and meat and cheese and crap, so I just honestly ate some broccoli. So yesterday I just ate some raw broccoli. And look, some days I probably could lead a more healthy lifestyle. I do run. Going for a run is never a bad idea. This is what I've learned. You never feel worse afterwards after you've gone for a run, after you really put yourself through it.

And that is a sort of portrait of a life, portrait of a day in my life. And it's been like that for 400 and something days now. A lot of long, dark nights when you really think, what is the point of this? Why am I writing this? What good is this doing? I don't know anything. I can't even put two words together. Days when you've slept for two hours,

Less than that. You haven't slept. You've stayed up all night. You haven't slept and you're still rising, still going. You can barely think. Horrible, long, unpleasant nights like that mixed with wonderful ones where you suddenly think, wow, I've written a good sentence. I've said this before. If I did have one aim every day, it would be just to write one good sentence. One sentence I can say that is a good set of words, well put together, useful, interesting.

Maybe quite nice to read as well. If when you were a 19-year-old law student in Durham, you would have listened to your future self on this podcast describing this as the life of a professional writer, what thoughts and feelings would have come up? Well, the first thing is I think I would have been delighted to know that I hadn't betrayed what I always wanted to do. I'd be far more shocked and disappointed. Not that there's anything wrong with

this line of work. But if I was a lawyer working in the city, one of those big glass towers making megabucks, working hard, those people work very hard. If that was what I've been saying to you on this podcast, then I would have been very disappointed in myself because I knew I would have betrayed what I really wanted.

To be honest with you, I wouldn't have been completely surprised. I was like that as a student as well. I didn't go to most lectures because I found I could just, all the materials were online for the lectures and the seminars. So I could just go through them myself more quickly and then do extra reading as well at the time. And I used to, when I was at university, I lived in accommodation where there was a dining hall where they served breakfast, lunch and dinner. I used to go to breakfast classes

At 7 or 8 a.m. Whatever and that was my evening meal. Ah I'll see everyone how you doing guys wrong off the bed to go home and then wake up just in time for dinner Let's say 6 p.m. Okay today. You have my breakfast. So this is pretty normal for you. Yeah Look, I like your natural rhythm when left to your own devices. Yeah, I'm completely you seem to be pretty happy. Would you say you're happy? Yeah, I am happy. I

I am happy, but I don't think that's anything to do with, it has something to do with the work I do, but it's more than that. It's more than that, I think. What do you mean? I think recently I've come to see more clearly what it is that does make me happy every day.

The writing isn't so much a part of that. I don't know if writing makes me happy. Look, obviously, in some sense, I'm materially better off than I was before, and I enjoy the work much more than I did before, in some sense. But suddenly having this Twitter account and all these followers and people saying, hey, do you want to write a book? Do you want to come on the podcast? In some sense, you have a little bit of fame, a little bit of popularity, a little bit of success.

But now I've got that, I suddenly see much more clearly how quickly that can all disappear and be taken away. Like Boethius, you know, the wheel of fortune turns one moment, you're on top of the world the next, you've lost everything. And now I have something that feels worthwhile and feels important. I see much more plainly that this is not the thing which will make me happy ultimately. The

there's a famous cliche, whatever happiness comes from within. It's completely true. And if I wake up every day, whatever state I'm in life, wherever I am, and the value I draw, the source of energy and joy and peace that keeps me going, isn't the money or the popularity. It's waking up and looking around me and

you know, it's rainy, it's sunny, whatever, wherever I am, whatever, whatever's going on thinking, you know, I'm alive. I am here. I can hear and I can see, and I can walk and I can run. I can taste. I've got food on the table. I've got clean running water coming out of my taps. I can have a shower, have a bed to sleep in. What in the world could possibly, could possibly make me unhappy when I have that to remember how blessed I am to have these, these things. And, and,

When you feel that way, suddenly all this other stuff seems less important, which may be quite healthy for somebody working online when people very readily tell you that you're an idiot or they want to kill you or whatever the hell it is people say. They say good things as well sometimes.

But it can make you sort of neurotic, I think, working online and worrying about what all these people are telling you and worrying every day, like, the engagement's going down, I'm over, I'm washed, I'm old news. I feel that often. Then I remember, no, no, this has nothing to do with what makes your life worth living, what makes you happy. And equally, you've got to remember in the good times, when you hit it out of the park, suddenly the biggest thing

Probably that thread I wrote about the danger of minimalist design got 500,000 likes and tens of millions of views. There probably weren't many more things in the world written that day which were read by as many people. That's a strange thought to think I've written something today which has been read by more people in the world than anything else that has been read. I mean, it's probably not quite true, but on some level. But you've also got to remember it then. Now, this sudden joy you're feeling...

about being popular and famous and successful. That isn't the source of the happiness either. It's only in you and how you see the world around you. And something like that. That was quite a long answer to whatever question you asked me. That was a good answer. I feel like... I think of it this way. Imagine if you could be in this position where you wake up, some days you feel crap. Some days you just wake up and you hate your life and everyone's annoying and you're tired and you're hungry and you're ill.

and you think, oh God, I've got this meeting, I've got that meeting, oh, I've got my taxes to pay, oh, I've got many things to do. If even in that position, you can just stop yourself for a moment, take a minute to yourself and find some beauty, some meaning, some happiness in where you are, in where you're standing, in the moment you're living through. If in the worst moments of your life, you can do that,

you know nothing in the world can possibly affect you nothing can make you unhappy if you're able to to have that strength of mind to to remove yourself from these things and remember how lucky you are and so yeah something along those lines it was a little bit strung out and that's very good um how does this sort of lifestyle vibe with like romantic relationships and

Yeah, you mentioned with friends it's tricky because it's like sometimes you're awake and they're asleep. But that's not the trickiest part is saying no. Because I love my friends. I mean, I'm lucky to have some really good friends, you know, people who, you know, I'd die for. But then when you have to say no, sorry, I can't see you because I've got to

write something on Twitter. It's kind of a bitter pill to swallow. Why is there any different, no, I can't see you because I've got my shift at McDonald's? What's the difference between those two things in your mind? Oh, well, clearly based on my behavior, I quit my job at McDonald's to see my friends, but I'm not quitting this to see my friends. I have said no. I wouldn't have been able to do what I've done for 400 plus days if I hadn't said no to a lot of people and to a lot of things.

It certainly puts a strain on, you know, it's probably taking years off my life. I don't know. I'm probably not going to live as long as I might have done. One of the worst things you can do for your health apparently is have a bad sleeping pattern. But is it worth it? Yeah, it's bloody worth it. Would I rather live to 80 and 90 and have not done this or...

Hopefully I can touch wood. I live long enough to write a book, a couple of very good books that are worth writing and very much worth reading that are not a not unworthy contribution to the great lineage of all the books that have ever been written and that might do some good for the world and for people. If I can write that one book, do this one thing, even if it kills me, even if I die right after I've done it, I think it will be more worthwhile than not doing so.

I don't know if that sounds extreme, but that's how I feel. That sounds pretty extreme. I see. But I'm being honest. That's how I feel about it. So it's like Socrates said. Socrates, the Athenians condemned him to death, the ancient Greek philosopher. He was in his old age at the time, but he had a trial apparently for corrupting the youth and encouraging them to worship foreign gods, something along those lines. So he has a big trial. The Athenians condemned Socrates to death.

But he's very controversial. A lot of people don't think he should be anyway, but the sentence has been passed. But he's given a chance to escape. He's told, you can actually, look, we're going to delay the sentence for like a day or two. You have time to get out of the city and keep living. And Socrates says, no, why would I want to go and live in exile and live a life I don't want to live? What's important isn't the length of your life. The length of a life is essentially meaningless.

The only thing that's certain is that we die, right? So whether it's 10 years or 100 years, quantity has no bearing on the value of that life. What matters is what you do with it and how you feel about it. And Socrates says this to his friends and they're all weeping. They're all like, you know, we're going to miss you so much in slightly more poetic language.

Socrates smiling, takes some drinks, the hemlock, the poison, and dies a dignified, noble death. And that's how I feel. I don't see the point in life for the sake of it. There is no life for the sake of life, you know. It's like if you want to avoid danger, let's say, if you want to avoid danger, you know, walking outside your house is dangerous. Getting in a car is dangerous. There are even more dangerous things.

You can do it, but ultimately, if you wanted to make your life as safe as possible, you would stay at home all day and never leave, and you might live forever. But then what would be the point? I don't think anything worth doing perhaps has an element of... That's a separate point. I think you see what I'm driving at here. So if... A somewhat pointed question. No, please do. If you were, let's say, on your deathbed, do you think you'd be saying...

I'm really glad about all this time to set a note to hang out, hanging out with my friends for the sake of writing Twitter threads. Or do you think you'd be saying, you know what? The stuff that I wrote has added value to the world. And I'm glad I did that. Even if it meant not spending as many evenings playing football with my friends. Sure. Um,

Two things to say for a great question. The first thing I will say is I just want to slightly maybe alter what I said. It's not just about adding value to the world. For me, it's almost actually just about trying to find the truth. I suppose that is actually my ultimate goal, to write something, to think of something, to do something that is truthful. It's hard to think about improving the world. It's a slightly lofty goal, maybe too lofty. But anyway, with that correction in mind, I don't know.

At this point, I'm going to start contradicting maybe what I said earlier. Although Ruskin has a great line where he says, I'm not happy...

with anything I've said, with any of my opinions, until I have contradicted myself at least five times in public. I feel the same way. Or, you know, like Petrarch. He has this great line where he's like, in one of his poems, neither yes nor no rings clearly in my heart. His point being, you can see something from both sides. You can understand them both and they both appeal to him, but you can't decide. When you put it like that,

Suddenly I'm back to what Michel de Montaigne said, the 16th century writer, essayist. He invented the essay, de Montaigne.

He went back to his castle. He retired from public life at the age of 38, went back to his castle in France and just started writing. And he did that until he died. Wonderful, interesting, funny essays. Anyway, he has this one observation where he's like, people, he hears them complaining, oh, I've done nothing today. I've done nothing worthwhile. I've written nothing worth writing. I've done no work. I've earned no money. I haven't been as productive as I could have been. I've not created what I should have created. And Montaigne is like, this is ridiculous. Have you not lived?

That's the question he asks them. Have you not lived? What point is there to life other than being alive? This is the greatest joy, the greatest pleasure of any purpose there is. You know, like the trees absorbing the rain, the water through their roots and the sun in their leaves, something like that. So suddenly, suddenly I ask that question. I'm leaning more towards the mountain side and thinking, you know what, maybe that is true. Maybe I would give it all up.

just for a few more nights of football with my friends. But here's the thing. I haven't, have I? Action always expresses what you believe to be most true and most important. So if I'm trusting not my own thoughts and feelings right now, which often we can't really trust what we think we think, but we can trust what we've done. I don't know. So I've often thought about this in the sense of,

You know, the whole actions speak louder than words and all that kind of stuff. Where, you know, it'll get to an evening and it's a choice there between do I want to do more work for three hours or do I want to go, like, have dinner with my grandma or something. And in that context and in that mode...

My base instinct is to do more work because my base instinct is to drive economic output and make more money and like get more of a safety net because I'm scared of like losing it all, becoming homeless and broke and all that shit. But my higher self is like thinking, what are the values I want to live by? Do I want, like, what is the decision my hundred year old self will tell me to make? Of course I'm going to fucking have to live with our grandmothers. Of course you will. And in that moment, I need to essentially rise above my base, my base desire to continue to drive economic output. Yeah.

And in that sense, I'm like, there are times where I allow myself to... There are times where the action is not actually in alignment with how I would like to live. And that's, again, where I struggle with this, where it's like, is it true that actions speak louder than words? Maybe it is, but... That's very insightful. I mean, I don't think it negates the idea that actions speak louder than words. I think it simply speaks to the fact that you can...

Guide your actions. It's not as if they guide us. We do choose what we do. That's what you're saying, that you can actually have this instinct or this desire, the default just to work. I mean, yeah, you work a hell of a lot. But then suddenly to think, no, hold on, this is what I should be doing. I mean, yeah, I think a lot of people in your position and perhaps mine have that same mindset.

and people who are maybe thinking about they want to create content online, they want to be a YouTuber, a writer, whatever it is, that's something they'll have to face as well. Yeah, and they often have the opposite dilemma initially where it's like my default is to scroll TikTok. Yeah. Or you're saying I have to not watch Netflix for three hours if I want to write a Twitter thread? Yes. Yes.

And eventually if you do that and you enjoy the thing, you start preferring writing the Twitter thread to watching Netflix for three hours. And now you have to stop yourself from doing the thing so that you can actually take care of your health and sleep on time and hang out with your friends and family. I mean, look, it's like... Here again, I go back to the V media. You can do both. You can do both.

I'm not an extremist. And the example you gave is really good. And I think I feel the same way. And to some extent, I have lived that way. And one of the reasons why in the past year, I've not slept anywhere near as much as I should have done. Look, I either sleep for three hours a night or 12 hours, basically. That's the only, no other way. I don't have eight hours sleep.

It's either nothing or everything. Part of that is because I have actually said yes to a lot of stuff as well. I've been very fortunate to travel a lot in the last year, sometimes on a bit of a shoestring, but always traveling, always writing when I'm traveling, trying to say yes more often and then also working at the same time, which is quite exhausting. But when you're seeing your friends and then you're doing the thing you love, you could do it forever. So, yeah, I should make that clear, yeah.

as well. But I don't know. It's hard to know what one would think of one's deathbed. Or if that's even the right mental model to... Yeah, well, listen, this is another thing Montaigne says. He's like, why do all these philosophers and these gurus be like, you've got to think about death and what would you say when you're ready to die? And he's gone about death all the time. Montaigne's like, just...

Stop worrying about that. You'll deal with that when you come to it. Don't worry about the future and all these details. Take things as they come. Montaigne's brilliant for that. He's brilliant, Montaigne, for this sort of very, very, very common sense wisdom. That being said, I'm not saying this because I agree with everything he wrote. At times I do, then at other times I'm leaning more towards, you know, stoicism has seen a great big revival recently. I'm leaning much more towards

Seneca, you know, on his deathbed, being the only one who's calm and collected with all his friends were weeping around him, saying that he was, you know, something like that. Yeah, the middle way. So what's next for you? What are you working on at the moment? Well, today, I mentioned earlier, there'll be a thread coming out in a few hours. I don't know how long it will be. And then a book.

I'm working on a book. I think it's the first time I've ever said it publicly or announced it that I'm working on a book. To be specific, a book proposal at the moment about the things I'm writing about. And it's just a miracle, man. Like...

As I said, having had all these rejections from literary agents, so for so many times I've got this novel, please, please let me write a book. Suddenly now people are asking me to write a book. They're saying, please, she and you. It's because I've got an audience, right? We don't need to pretend it's for any other reason than that. When you have a big audience, they know they can have someone sell a book to you. You've created, you've done all the marketing for them. Great. Yeah.

But that's rather the more cold commercial side of it. But anyway, I'm being asked to write a book and that's what I want to do. And I hope this book will be a distillation and improvement of everything I've written thus far. That is the next big thing for me. It's got to be. The work on Twitter has been great, but I think it's time to make a definitive statement to create something, a single work that

Pour everything into it, create a single work, which is, as I said, useful, interesting, and beautiful. Obviously, you know what it's like to write a book. Congratulations, by the way, on getting it. Yeah, I mean, I understand it's a long process. I've written books before, but that's when I'm on my own scribbling away. But when you have deadlines and editors and all these other people involved and departments, I imagine it must be quite a... Yeah, there's a bit more to it.

I'm not sure how I feel about the deadlines. I don't like deadlines. Yeah? Yeah. My friend has this great line, Harry Dry, who I should mention by name. He runs a marketing website. He runs a brilliant newsletter as well. The best copywriter in the world is how one Twitter user once described him. He told me once, what you lack is deadlines, not ideas.

And that was very wise. And that's essentially the rule I've applied to my work on Twitter. One thread a day. You have to just... Ideas are cheap. There's like 10 billion ideas and you can think of 100 ideas a day. The difficulty is in picking one and executing it. That's the skill. So anyway, deadlines are useful, but I know what you mean. I'm not...

the biggest one of deadlines i like internal deadlines rather than externally imposed deadlines oh i see right like when there is a sponsor deadline on the video here's the good thing about deadlines you can miss them and so what no one cares no okay like the world doesn't end yeah i used to i used to get annoyed people at university yeah i could run exam time i'd be like come on man it's just it's just it's just an exam it's just an essay what could go wrong you know

People didn't like to hear that. I probably sounded rather obnoxious at the time. But I did believe it. Anyway, yeah, the book. So how long did it take you to put it together? Start to finish, three years. Wow. As in three years if we count from the day the editor sent me the email being like, hey, do you want to write a book?

And the proposal itself was a year and a half, and then the writing and editing was another year and a half. Wow. So it's like you've put a lot of time in. Yeah, but it was very half-assed time. It was like kind of a few hours a week with all the shit going on. Exactly. If I had my time again, I'd be more focused. Sure, yeah, yeah. I think that's my plan, to literally lock myself in a room and not eat until I've finished this book. That'll get it done. Yeah, well, exactly. I'm going to hunger strike.

But often a lot of good stuff does come from necessity. And I think that's why I said earlier you shouldn't give writers too much money because then it's no longer, it's not complete, nothing, sort of, I wish everything I say should be caveated by the view that there's no single rule. And this is really important for anybody listening, anybody who wants to be a content creator, writer, YouTuber. With your course, you'll have experiences with your students, right?

I imagine, is that there's no single way to do it. There's never a single rule, a single approach, a single method, a single journey. And everybody's different fundamentally and what works for one person doesn't work for another. And history is true of this as well. I use the example of Anthony Trollope, the 19th century novelist, not

Not so famous now. Go into any second-hand bookshop and it'll be filled with the novels of Anthony Trollope. He was like the J.K. Rowling, whatever, of his day. But he worked at the post office his whole life. He would wake up at five in the morning, write 3,000 words, head off to work at the post office. So he lived a very normal, orderly life. Then you've got, you know,

Someone like Byron, Lord Byron, the great romantic poet who lived a scandalous life. He liked to stay up and see the sunrise as well when he was working. And he was also great. There's no one way to write or to create or to produce

Yeah, I think that's why I was very keen to talk to you on the pod to get your story, because it's basically the opposite way of working as me and a lot of other people I interview. No, no. Yeah, I appreciate you bringing me here because I think it is important that people hear this. Look, it does concern me a little bit.

Maybe, look, it's not the worst thing. In fact, it's great that the world seems to be getting healthier and more organized and people are being encouraged to actually live their lives more purposively than if I'm pronouncing the word correctly. But I think I'd like to remind people that this sort of routine isn't the only way and that you don't necessarily, it might work for you, but equally you don't necessarily need...

complex note-taking methods and you don't necessarily need eight hours of sleep a night. I'm probably going to get people telling me that I'm endangering the health of others by saying this, but I honestly believe it to be true. You don't need to do any of these things. And I think maybe sometimes it can even get in the way. You think by having the perfect routine, good things will just happen and they'll manifest. That might not be true. And at least if ever I've written anything good,

It's not because I had a good routine or because I was being productive. It all came from passion and brute force and a little bit of chaos. The madness that comes from a little bit of chaos, you know, you can't buy that. You can't capture it. You can't get it. You can't choose to find it, but you can optimize it out of existence.

I think. Ooh, you can optimize it out of existence. Yeah, you can optimize the spark within you. That makes you suddenly decide to say, this is what I'm doing today. You suddenly have this flash of inspiration. If you're too optimized, you can squeeze it out of yourself. Yeah, if you're overscheduled. I think I'm running into this issue right now where I'm overscheduled. Like, I look at the calendar for the next 90 days and it's hard to find a single day of, like, wanting to hang out with a friend because it's just, like...

one thing after another after another and I've chosen to do all these things but it's like first of all the problem is like oh you know we're flying to Dublin to give a talk at Google we're flying to Brighton to give a talk at some thing and then it's like going to Italy and then doing this thing with a podcast and then going to Austin for two weeks then going to Miami and then going to fucking Florida and then going to

What a nightmare. Exactly right, man. You've always got to remember yourself. Remind yourself how wonderful that is. What you've just said terrifies me. Yeah, over-scheduling. 90 days of scheduling, bloody hell. But we're talking about this from a creativity point of view. I think creativity can be very much stifled in that way. And the thing that only you can say can be stifled by following too many methods and routines laid out for you by other people. Look, that sounds terrible. 90 days. When people say to me, like, are you free for a podcast? Yes.

I'm just like yeah, just know just give me a day. Yeah, I don't have anything people say to me Hey, have you got time for a coffee? I'm like well, how about like January the 18th? Oh kind of vibe and I'm and I feel so bad about it because these are friends of mine But because I've over scheduled myself by saying yes to too much stuff Because in in isolation is like I wanted to say yes to all those things. I didn't I just never appreciate that

the value of unscheduled time, at least in advance. I look six weeks out and I think, oh, the calendar looks free. Of course I put that in there. Sorry, we're just complaining about my life right now. No, no, no. First of all, problems, you know, cry me a river and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, exactly. You're living an incredible life, doing amazing things. It's all stuff to be grateful for. But, you know,

But by comparison, I don't have a calendar. I don't put things into a calendar. I just hopefully remember where I'm supposed to be on a given day, which often doesn't work. So I'll take my chance to publicly apologize to all the people who I promised I would speak to or meet. Different way of doing the same stuff. Yeah, this is it. This is the important thing. There's no one way. And for all those people who are, who maybe, yeah, obligated,

optimizing the creativity out of themselves and and they're the ones who i hope can um you know if i can give them a little bit of consolation and faith that no if they are a slightly more chaotic individual i mean i don't think i'm not a chaotic person i'm very calm i just i'm just not organized yeah which is which is not the same thing anyway um it's to those people who i would like to offer a little bit of support that if you try these methods and they don't work there are the the

alternative solutions anyway final question um okay if you had if you had to give three pieces of life advice to someone who's listened to the last two hours of our conversation and vibes with your way of looking at the world what would they be um i'm putting you on the spot here because i know you can take it but yeah look man i i don't know whether i don't know whether to be

With all the caveats and advice and around giving advice. Have cold showers, smoke as much as you want, drink as much as you want, and make sure you get the thing written. That's all it is. Something like that. And don't go to any meetings and ignore all your emails. Life will be fine. Something like that. That would be my slightly... No, I'm not even being facetious. I probably believe everything I just said. Because look...

Life advice in general or for somebody who wants to be a writer or content creator? Because look, I don't think I'm in a position to give anybody... Let's say for a content creator. What the hell do I know? We have this impression that just because somebody has done something they know how they did it. If you ask, say, Tyson Fury why he's such a good boxer...

You know, how does he know? He's just a massive guy. He's a brilliant fighter and has a heart of a lion. I'm not saying I have any of those qualities, of course, but my point being, I'm not in a position necessarily to give advice. But if I can tell you what I've learned, maybe if I was to tell somebody what I have learned is this, and it goes back to what I said earlier, and this will be specifically for writers. Forget everybody else in the world. It's you and the page, and that's all there is. Forget...

This is true whether you're on your own or you've already got an audience, you're trying to build an audience, forget everything else in the world. It's you and the page and you're trying to write something which is truthful, which you would stand by and that's it. There's nothing else. There is nothing else that matters when it comes to writing. And every other worry, every other fear, every other concern, hope, dream, anxiety, doubt, throw it all out the window. That's how I believe, at least, I think cautiously you might be.

write something that's worth reading which isn't true of most things in the world and maybe hopefully one or two of the things i've written might fall into that category although i can't say so for sure nice jim thank you so much thank you for having me um i hope this has been of use to some people also great questions you're a very good interviewer thank you a very good conversation you're a

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