Wright Thompson is one of the best nonfiction storytellers in the world right now. He showed up to my place, and I immediately liked his vibe. We started talking, and it turns out we both love Guinness Zero. So we cracked open a beer, and we just talked about the writing process.

How do you tell a great story? How do you nail an ending? How do you use details to bring a character to life? That's what this episode is all about, and it's a heck of a lot of fun, too.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Ocean Vuong is a poet, a novelist, and a professor at NYU. He's just really good at writing in this fresh, enchanted, and imaginative way. He has this way of seeing and experiencing the world that's alive and filled with wonder.

If you want to write prose that's lush, words that are vivid, and stories that pulse with life, then you're going to love this episode.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Do you ever wonder how the book publishing industry works? How does the CEO of a top-five publishing house even think? That's what this episode is all about.

My guest is John Yaged. He runs Macmillan, which is one of the top five publishing houses. I asked him to talk to me like I'm a young writer who has never published a book before. And that's what he did.

If you're interested in improving your writing, if you want to be a super successful writer and understand how this industry works, then you're going to like this episode.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

I wanted to ask him how he dreams up vivid characters and how he writes about a city, a town, or a place. If you want to write, come up with stories, imagine worlds and put them onto the page, you're in the right place.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Steven Pressfield is a master in the art of storytelling. He spent decades studying what great stories have in common. So that's what we're going to talk about: the principles of storytelling and character building.

I want to know the things that transcend genre and culture, and speak to the heart of the human condition. I want X-ray vision into what makes stories great. I want to know what makes you get to the end of the story and just say "wow". That's what this conversation is all about.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Robert Mac is on the show today to teach us what he's learned from great comics like Jerry Seinfeld and Mitch Hedberg. Robert has been doing stand up for more than a decade, and I wanted to know what he's learned about how to be funny, how to tell a good story.

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This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Bill Browder has written two books, Freezing Order and Red Notice, which was everywhere when it came out in 2015. It’s a page-turner. I had to ask him how he thought about building character, bringing people into the story and keeping people engaged. Enjoy!

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Diarmaid MacCulloch is an author, a professor at Oxford, and he's obsessed with history. A real expert who's been studying it for decades.

In this episode, we talked about how to do history, the role of a historian in society, and how to take everything you learn in the research phase and turn it into clear, vivid, and entertaining writing.

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This episode is brought to you by Basecamp, the world’s simplest, most effective project management platform. Check them out at https://basecamp.com and tell them David Perell sent you.

So how does he do it? How does he write it? How does he come up with the ideas? That's what we're going to find out.

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This episode is brought to you by Basecamp, the world’s simplest, most effective project management platform. Check them out at https://basecamp.com and tell them David Perell sent you.

We talk about how they taught themselves filmmaking by building a mental archive of films, how a single frame can unlock an entire scene, and why adapting a book spirit often requires stepping away from its words. This How I Write episode is an exploration into how two directors think together, and how a deeply human story becomes something monumental.

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