How David Perell found and hired The Cultural Tutor

The Cultural Tutor segment starts at 17:50 of the Video

Transcript:

“And then there's the cultural tutor.

So, I love this guy. I love this guy. I feel like I'm a big part of his story because when I found him, he had just stopped working at McDonald's, where he was sweeping the floors, cleaning out the McFlurry machines.

So, he would sometimes go to the bathroom and clean that as well. He was like a few months out, I think. He'd been writing online for 6 weeks and it just hit 100,000 Twitter followers. I looked at his account and said, "I've never seen somebody grow like this. Who is this guy?" He was a statue account.

Somehow, I got in touch with him, and we get on the phone. I say, "Who are you?" And he says, "Well, I'm like 25 years old. I had been working at McDonalds. I'm actually training to join the British military. I basically make no money, still living with my parents."

I say, "Hold on, hold on, hold on here. Hold on, dude. You got game. How much money are you going to need to publish a Twitter thread every day and grow your email newsletter? I don't care what you write about, but how much money do you need to do those two things?" He gave me a number, I gave him a little bit more than that. I said, "Great, we got a deal.

I'll basically be a patron for you. You write every day, promise me that you're going to do that, keep the quality bar really high, and I'll just support you." It's been now a year and a half. I think he has 1.6 million Twitter followers and has been one of the fastest-growing intellectual Twitter accounts in the world in that time.

His mantra, the thing that I learned from him, is if it was published in the last 50 years, don't read it.

The simplest reason not to read something published in the last 50 years is that's what everyone else is reading. The only books that most people read are books published in the last not even in the last six years, in the last two years.

I'm not disparaging these authors; they've done incredibly well for themselves, and their books are filled with marvels and wonderful things.

But the rest of the world is reading them. It's a simple fact of life that if you consume what everyone else is reading, then the likelihood that you will write what they are writing, and worst of all, think what they are thinking, is increased.

It's not certain, but if we all read the same books, we all think the same things. If all you do is read something different, then your output is going to be different.

If, rather than reading "Atomic Habits," you know, which is the first one that comes to mind, is one book that is everywhere, if, rather than reading "Atomic Habits," you go and read, I don't know, Boethius, "The Consolation of Philosophy," one example.

Your output is going to be different. It's all sounds a little bit calculated, and it's not really calculated on my part, but it's just a fact. If you want to stand out as a writer, if you want to find your voice, have a voice be distinctive, all the things that we say writers should have and should want.

Then, just by reading something different, you will achieve that. If a book, let's say I mentioned Boethius, that was basically a bestseller for about 1,200 years.

If a book has been held in such high regard for over a thousand years, it's not unreasonable to assume that it has something of real value in it. At the very least, even if the book itself is god awful, the fact it's been read for so long means it has had an immense amount of influence.

By reading that book, you will understand so much more about the world, regardless of the quality of that book itself. So, you have a choice, really. Whose recommendation do you take? The recommendation of the readers of the New York Times or whatever the New York—I don't even have a calculate—the New York Times bestseller list or Father Time, right?

Yeah, Father Time is the best recommendation there is. Years, 50 generations of the greatest minds in the world.

The thing that he understands is that the problem with new books isn't that they're bad. The problem is that everybody else is reading them, which then doesn't give you an edge as a writer.

Because as a writer, when you choose a book to read, you are choosing the soil that then you're going to take fruits from over time and grow your ideas in.

The best way to have a diversity of ideas as a writer is to read things that other people aren't seeing.

It was funny because we spent a week together. We were in the Bahamas during the summer, and I forget why, but I went down to his room. I think I needed to get something like a book that I had given him.

He had this stack of books next to his bed, and I didn't recognize any of them. There were people like John Rusin and Plutarch and all these old books that were many hundreds of years old.

Even one night at dinner, we were saying grace, and he just pulled out this poem from memory. Probably took him two, three minutes to recite, and it was like, "Oh yeah, that's from like 1874."

What I like about him is there's such congruence between what he writes about and who he is. They're the same person. He just doesn't read much new stuff at all. You ask him about pop culture; he has no idea what you're talking about. You ask him about the latest book; he has no idea what you're talking about.

But you ask him about history, you ask him about ancient architecture, you ask him about the Greeks and the Romans and poetry that's 400 years old—Shakespeare—he'll have a heck of a lot to say. That then fuses into his writing. It's not necessarily that he's consuming better, but he's consuming different. That's what makes his writing so distinct.

There's a real opportunity here because we are trapped as a society in the never-ending now.

If I could change anything about the internet, I would change the information architecture so that we can get away from this recency bias that just plagues our information sphere.

You go on Google, you go on social media, the things that are shown or the things that were published most recently.

I don't think that this is good.

We're all consuming the same stuff, thinking the same thoughts, reading, consuming, watching videos that were made and published and shared in the last 24 hours. Instead, we can do what the cultural tutor does, and we can say, "Hey, to heck with that. I'm not going to do that.

I'm going to go revisit the great books that have shaped our worldview because that's going to have a way better ROI. Not just because, hey, those ideas have stood the test of time, but also because I'm going to end up reading things that are different from what other people are reading.

That's going to give me an edge as a writer.

So, the takeaway for me has been, if I want to just think differently, what I can do is I can go read old things. It requires extreme intentionality because the internet so quickly pulls us to contemporary information. But the thing is, that strategy doesn't work for everybody.”

~ transcript from the David Perell Podcast:

Cultural Tutor’s Website: https://culturaltutor.com/areopagus

Index of Posts: https://areopagus.culturaltutor.com/profile/posts

Some of the “Old Books”

Another example of one of the books recommended by the Cultural Tutor:
“In Praise of Shadows“

“In Praise of Shadows​
​Junichiro Tanizaki (1934)

If you want to learn about Japanese architecture there is no better place to start than with Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows. It was written at a time when Japan was changing quickly under the influence of the west; this little book is something of a lament for the fading away of traditional Japanese aesthetics.

Thus Tanizaki lovingly and precisely describes those aesthetics for us — the lacquer, the thrusting eaves, even the toilets — and coequally explains how western aesthetics are incompatible with them, and have thus destroyed them.

But Tanizaki, like all the greatest writers, is not merely a sentimentalist. He writes with a mixture of dispassionate analysis, resigned irony, and perceptive poetic insight — and a profoundly informative and concise artistic expertise.

Large textbooks about architectural styles or the architectural and aesthetic histories of particular countries can be intimidating; In Praise of Shadows is a slim volume which demands to be read and casts a spell over those who are lucky enough find themselves reading it.”

Book by The Cultural Tutor:

Click the book to download the book for free

So, what do you think about the idea to read older books - rather than being part of the crowd reading all the current best sellers?

We’d love to hear your comments!