David Perell on AI's impact on writing: why utility writing is already gone and what human writers must become

you. Thanks for dressing up. I figured I'm coming on hanging out with the tech guy. I'm gonna I'm gonna dress up. Yeah. Well, it's great to great to have you. How's your week been? You know, I had a white shirt but couldn't find my cuff link. So, major issue 15 minutes ago. No, no, no. You're looking fantastic.

You look fantastic. How's the week been? How have you been uh processing all the recent AI news? What's new in your world? Dude, week's been good. I uh I was driving over here. I saw my first ever Austin car chase. Uh so, is that a regular thing? Uh no, I've never seen one before. You know, usually an LA thing.

And I must admit, I got a speeding ticket on Sunday in Tennessee, so it was good to see the red, white, and blue lights in somebody else's rear view. What uh what were they drive? Was it like an F-150 being chased by Dodge Charger? It's always the crappiest car that you've seen all day. Yep. Less to lose.

Less to lose, more to run for. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um there's so much to talk about. I mean, one, you should have been one of our first guests. Um but you still are. You're still in the first 200 guests. It's no big deal. Yeah, we've been we've been racing through the guests.

Um but yeah, I mean, did you want to start with his uh post, his thread? Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. Um c can you set that up for us? Just kind of like general reactions to uh AI writing kind of the studio Giblly moment. You're clearly thinking, your wheels are turning.

A lot of stuff is going on in your head, and I think you kind of synthesized it well, but I'll let you tell it yourself. Yeah. I mean, we're just Look, I've been teaching writing for the last six years and I've taught few thousand students and I had a moment in November. You know what happened?

I had a guy who was working for me. He sent me a memo. I said, "Dude, this the best thing you've I've ever seen you write. " He goes, "AI wrote it. I was at a dinner last night and I wrote up some notes and then I just asked AI to summarize it. " And I was like, "Whoa. " Wow.

And I shut down Write a Passage November 11th and then I went to Argentina in December. Mhm. And it was my first vacation in a few years and I want to learn about the country. So I was just using AI and I was doing like 50 to 70 prompts per day and I was like, "Oh my goodness, this is this is insane.

" And basically, fast forward to now, we're in March or we're in April. And I mean, the writing's on the wall. Um, AI is going to just completely transform writing. And this week actually, I got my first ever rejection for how I write because somebody doesn't like that I'm talking about AI, that I'm promoting AI.

So now I think what you're beginning to see is a big riff, right? There's going to be certain people who say, "No, um, writing with AI is absolutely taboo, not cool.

There's going to be the purist, the lites, and then there's going to be other people who just go full steam ahead and they're going to say, you know what, this is the future.

" And it's really taboo right now to write with AI, but if you talk to people behind closed circles, there's a lot of tech forward writers who are like, "Whoa, I can like 34x my output. " And they've basically built custom prompts, custom software to to help them write better. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean Ben Thompson has kind of a thesis around this with the, you know, the the printing press reduced the the the the replication cost and the internet drop distribution cost to zero because you know no longer needed a paper route.

Now it's the instantiation cost has gone to zero, but there's still that human in the loop for actually generating the novel ideas or even just bringing the idea or the fact or the information to the chain. I I talked to some reporters. Uh, how is AI changing your job at the Wall Street Journal?

It's like, well, writing up the fact is the least hard part about the job. And yeah, maybe it took me from that being one hour of my day to being five minutes of my day, but 90% of my day was still talking to people, understanding what's going on, surfacing new facts, and then bringing those to the readership.

So, do you think there's still value in being a writer in the sense that you are a generator of ideas or novel information? And yes, you are using AI as a tool to instantiate it, but AI hasn't really replaced your importance in the world. Yeah. So, let's just preface this. We're going to talk about non-fiction writing.

That's what I know a lot about. Fiction is not really um something that I can speak nearly as well about. Um but I went to a Peter Teal lecture last night. He's in Austin and he's doing these these lectures on the Antichrist. And I was at the lecture last night and I was thinking a lot about this, right?

Because you know Peter, he's a really interesting guy. He's always looking for what is the thing that people are talking about that other people haven't found. And I think that the lecture showed um first of all that of course there's so much edge in just finding the things that other people aren't talking about.

Uh but then also I was you know I went up to someone who I he worked with after I said hey I think the lecture could have gotten better in this way and this way and this way. All this is to say that AI can't do that work for you and it's through the process of writing that you're really working through your ideas.

You're trying to say how do I frame this better? How do I shape this better? But what I do believe is that basically any form of writing that is driven on pure utility. So, we're talking um business memos. We're talking emails that your lawyer sends you that are fairly standard.

Pure utility, not about the art of writing and not about basically maximizing the quality of thinking. I think basically all of that's going to be written with AI. So, and only in a few years, you know, by the end of 2026, 2027, we can just assume that that'll be the case.

But absolutely, if you're really trying to be a maximizer and not a satisficer, that'll be major human in the loop big time.

What do you think happens to our thinking abilities as humans and our clarity on life, business, work, our relationships when so often we have just this like, you know, perfect autocomplete of everything that we thought we were going to say.

is sometimes when I'm, you know, let's say I'm like writing an email to John or one of our partners or somebody we want to work with the act of it's sort of annoying that taking the time to think about the um you know what I want to say and how I want to say it and and you know what what I'm trying to convey it gives me clarity on that relationship or that whatever activity that we're doing and in a world with like perfect autocomplete or suggestions maybe theoretically I can just you know think about it for a while myself or autocomplete send send it and then think about it but the reality is there's so much distractions in life so maybe everybody just moves like all the time that was spent writing emails just moves on to you know Tik Tok or or X and it's just like you know you're autocompleting and then there's there's there's brain rot that's that's sort of like a a dark take on it but are you worried about what humanity loses by not thinking through writing I'm absolutely worried I mean I see major white pills and major black pills here.

Like I think that if you're not seeing the pros and the cons, and I mean major pros and cons, you're you're you're missing out in a fundamental way of what's really going on. Um I agree with you. I think a lot of our information is or a lot of the way that we communicate is like, did this person actually write it?

And I think that what's going to end up happening is you sort of see this in the differences like have you noticed like how big of a separation there is between the vibe of like your private group chats versus like what you feel in public. I feel like the private group chat vibe is just going to be like go even more.

We're going to have to learn to write with voice and really show off our distinctiveness in writing as almost a adaptive way to say hey this isn't written by LLM. Yeah. And at the same time, I completely agree. I mean, I think that, you know, people are super busy.

And the one thing that we've learned time and again about technology is that people value convenience. You know, like I listen to music all the time on my crappy iPhone speakers because I don't want to get up and walk to the other side of the room and like hook in my USB cord.

And I think you should never bet against humans going for convenience in the aggregate. Um, I think about that. That's how I'm thinking about it. Yeah. I I think about that that web comic or meme all the time where it's like, "Wow, this AI was able to take my five bullet points and turn it into a whole essay.

" And then the and then the guy receiving the email is like, "It took this really long email and turned it into just five bullet points. " And and I have noticed that I'm doing way more work now, not over email, but just over text message. We coordinated this interview entirely over text message.

I don't think a single email was exchanged.

Um and and I imagine like there is this world where maybe we just do away with that intermediate step of like instantiate this as like we all know that we could turn this into a 20page research paper if we wanted or a or you know 500word blog post but really the takeaway is just what I could put in my group chat in one line.

So communication just, you know, condenses down and and it's just like people saying their base interests like I want status, I want security, I want security, you know. Yeah. I mean, Dan Kesh had a great line about this.

He was like the the the recipe to being a good poster on Twitter X is just write like you're posting in a group chat and just and just say just exactly what you were thinking. Don't try and words smmith it into this big thing. Just post exactly what it is. Like if yo, this is the age of vibe.

like this is super high vibe times because basically like if I'm teaching writing and you're like all right DP what are you going to teach people what I'm going to say is like what is your vibe and how do you get it out into the world y and how do you communicate that through writing and so you're seeing a few things personally I'm investing a lot in like rz and vibe and I'm trying to think about how do I do those things it's working like yo I'm putting my money where my mouth is one thing I did started a few weeks ago I've become a greeter at the church to get a lot better saying, "All right, how do I, you know, get better talking to people, saying what's up, you know, doing all the sort of frankly like shallow conversation that people rail on?

" I'm like, "No, I want to get good at that. " And then when it comes to writing, whenever I'm writing even like a text or something like that, I'm thinking, what is the energy that is unique to me and how do I get that in writing?

And frankly, like I don't really know the answer, but that's the major question I'm asking. And when it comes to writing, I think that's what people should be thinking about a lot more. Yeah. We uh we like to call it the golden retriever mindset here in the age of intelligence too cheap to meter.

It pays to be hot, smart, and dumb or hot, friendly, and dumb. And so you got to be just super friendly to everyone, uh looking good, and uh you don't need to worry about, you know, being too too much of a cases, as they say. Exactly. Exactly. Face allowed. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about uh specifically agents in in the context of the the workplace. Like it's very possible that likability becomes a core reason why somebody has a job because somebody's running a business and they go, uh, I really like David. I like being around him.

I want him here even though, you know, we could get an agent to do this. Like it's more fun to have David around. Yeah. It's like the one the one person 1 billion dollar company.

It's actually gonna be like one person creates a1 billion dollar company and then like brings on nine of his friends just because like why not split it? It's a lot of money and like you like to hang out with other humans. Yeah. I think well I think you're going to sort of see the bifurcation.

It's like I think that as if you're like thinking about oh talk about me. So like I'm thinking about my career. I'm like on one hand I really want to invest in the human things looking people in the eye having better conversations.

How do I show love and like actually connect with people at a far deeper level and all those sorts of things that have always been core to the human condition but now we're like wait hold on intelligence is getting too cheap to meter that actually isn't as something that's unique to humans anymore and then on the other side like you know you just think of the super cracked engineer who is really good with cursor really good at writing um you know I'm talking to some friends who are building AI enabled agencies and now they're working with like five times as many clients because they're like boom boom boom boom boom.

Um, but most of the people I'm talking to like entrepreneurs and stuff, they're beginning to Justin Mars has a good line where he says that the company is going to look more and more like the hedge fund where what you have is you have fewer people super highly paid.

And one of the things that I've noticed is it's been a real head scratcher for me like why has the managerial class adopted AI so much more than the sort of frontline workers? like what is going on?

Cuz if you look at sort of the archetypal roll out of technology, it's usually the young people who are the early adopters. And there's a way that that's not true with AI. And here's my working theory. My working theory is that the way that you work with AI is basically like a manager.

So if you think of what do you do as a manager? You set a vision. You delegate the task. You say, "Hey, do this. " You expect it's not going to be good enough. You're giving feedback. And you're going through the cycle. and then you ship it, right? That's how we work with LLMs.

If you're a frontline employee, you don't work like that at all. So, this is super disruptive to your work. And all this is to say that a lot of those managers, too, if you talk to them behind closed doors, you know what they say? My hardest problems don't have to do with the work. It has to do with the people.

And now I can take out the people. Once again, I think it's super dystopian and also pretty exciting. Uh both of them at the same time, but that's what I see happening right now. Uh shifting gears, can you talk a little bit about the uh the religious vibe shift in tech?

I've had a number of uh reporters reach out to me, hey, I'm writing a piece because I saw Augustus Dico had a cross on his neck or something like that. Uh you've been in this uh millu for forever. Uh what what is the mainstream media getting wrong or right about that narrative and that shift? Let's see.

So, I'll just give sort of my take on the shift is um we've had a few things happen. So, the first thing is the more online you are, I think the more that you've looked at what's happened basically since about 2012, maybe 2016, last 10 to 15 years, and you've just said something is strange about society right now.

You see co, you see the Hunter Biden laptop story. I mean, there are so many ways that we've been lied to. Um, I was thinking, you know, uh, in the early 2010s, if you went away for five years and you came back, what would be really confusing was the rise of social media.

In the late 2010s, if you went away and you came back, what would be really confusing is how much morality had changed. What you could say, what you couldn't say completely changed. And for me, I looked at, wait, hold on. The all of our moral codes are ebbing and flowing.

There's all of these ways where we've gone from a kind of a democracy to a bureaucracy and and I don't want to live in that world. And as I looked at it, I traced a lot of that to a kind of atheism where Malcolm Mudgage, he has a great line. He says, "The problem with atheism isn't that you believe in nothing.

It's that you'll believe in anything. " Mhm. And so I watched people with empty their their bodies as empty vessels adopt completely rotten and corrupt ideas.

And I think a lot of people including myself by the way and I think a lot of us who are more online have seen that cycle play out and we've said hold on here I don't like what I'm seeing.

So then we take a step back and the more techoriented people we've seen people like Peter Teal a lot of us have studied the work of Renee Gerard and we've said you know what smart people like Peter and Renee they're talking about Christianity there might be something here and then um for me what happened is I looked at that for five or six years I really studied it deeply and I came to the conclusion that Christianity wasn't just useful but it also happened to be true.

Can you talk about how you would walk someone uh away from the cliff that is utilitarianism? Uh I would just say look that's that's probably not the frame that I would take.

Um what I would just say in terms of if I was um talking to somebody about faith, what I would just say is I'd probably be more likely to talk to someone about, hey, look at what's happening in the world and are you, you know, are you happy with it?

I mean, if they're happy with it, it's going to be it's going to be hard to have that conversation, but um I think that part of the challenge with utilitarianism and a lot of these moral philosophies is we've seen them rise up and sort of cycllically break and um I don't know, this isn't a great answer.

I'm sort of fumbling my words, but I think that the Bible carries sort of this supernatural truth that I mean, I I I had a hot take here I wanted to bounce off you.

Um it was this idea that um a lot of the AI doomers were driven by this idea that uh God is dead and if we're inventing AI god and it returns it might judge me and if I'm living an immoral life the AI god would sentence me to essentially like an AI version of hell.

It's not a problem to live an immoral life in the absence of God. But if God returns in the form of this AI god then there will be a reconciliation moment. is do I need to put on the tin foil hat for that? Well, I mean I personally think that uh Oh, there we go. There we go. Put it on, baby.

I mean, personally, I think that uh if you read the Tower of Babel story, I think that uh a lot of my faith is I don't think these AIs can become gods. I think that something will happen. And we see that in the Tower of Babel story. You know, you've seen people come out and say, "Hey, we're building these new gods.

" Um read Psalm 115. Bad things happen when humans try to create gods. We've seen this story play out. And to come back to some of your earlier questions about tech and utilitarianism, look, a lot of the peace that I have with what's happening with AI, I'd be freaking out if it not if it wasn't for my faith.

I mean, I have complete faith that God is in charge. He'll take care of this. And when I read books like the book of Judges, I see people turn away from God all the time. When I read the Old Testament, the Exodus, you know, you know, you see the golden calf. And I just see AI as another version of that. Mhm.

Um can you talk about uh any Yeah.

specifically historical moments that we can learn from in the context of this you know explosion of of artificial intelligence right I think people talk about the industrial revolution right look you know we we didn't know how the industrial you know revolution was going to change the world uh we we do now uh looking back obviously but uh it feels like right now we're we're standing and and especially in the context there was a piece that came out this week AI 2027 seven.

We covered it earlier on the show today where it just feels like only 18 months out like you know there there's these various paths. Um neither seem that appealing at the moment. Um and so I hope there's a third or a fourth or a fifth. I'm sure there are.

Um but you h how do you um you know whether it's in the context of the Bible or other things that you've read uh you know process this moment and maybe it is only maybe maybe you know you can find all the answers in in faith but but I'm curious uh no yeah I think that the work of Marsh McLuhan has been super foundational for me so Marsh McLuhan he um was a media theorist uh late 20th century and what he did for me was I felt the same sort of oh my goodness everything is changing kind of feel from the internet and he basically had ways of seeing what happens um when new technologies develop and basically I think a lot of what we're seeing here is this like vast acceleration is what saw.

So you get this 10x acceleration and then what happens is things begin to flip and things that used to be core to how we lived and what we do now become art.

And I think that that's a lot of what's going to happen with writing where I think writing is going to be very sort of a form of art in the same way that film photography was a form of art in the same way that a lot of a lot of art that you see um and craftsmanship that you see used to be very core to what we do.

And um I think that's what's going to happen. I think that writing is going to be the utilitarian kind of writing will just be done by the AIS and then a lot of writing will just be artistic.

And what we're going to need to figure out is how do we put our artistic stamp on writing because there's no real way to verify that a piece of writing is writing in the same way that you could do that with like a live performance.

Um, but one of the things I'm really looking forward to, you know, there's all these doomers and to your point about technological precedences.

I was talking to my friend Justin Murphy and you know he said if you look at how uh art shifted from the 14th century to the 16th century, you look at 14th century medieval art and it just looks weird and creepy. It's like super flat.

And then you look at 16th century art in Italy and it's got this beautiful perspective. The the the paintings are aligned or are or alive.

And what happened was we got the technologies of the camera obscura and then if there was a guy named Leon Alberti and he was an architect and what he did was they used a lot of the technologies and architectural tools at the time to basically show perspective and from that we got the renaissance a renaissance in painting and the same thing's going to happen with writing the same thing's going to happen with writing and I bet that at the time people were like oh you can't be using technology to paint like that's not cool and then like I don't want to go back to that sort of painting like this came from it was super cool and I think the same thing is going to happen with writing.

Yeah, it's interesting to think about the great writers in history sort of referencing, you know, past works and having to go to a library or travel to multiple libraries or visit collections and sort of study and then now the ability to like studio style well communicate with an LLM that is trained on, you know, every available text at least that's been on the internet and maybe some esoteric text as well.

Do you think there's any do you think there's any merit? Have you spent any time like trying to find books that just haven't been uploaded into the ing inested into forbidden knowledge. Here's Okay, so I'm going to I'm going to answer that and then I'm going to ask a question to you guys.

Um, so here's rather than the forbidden knowledge, I haven't been doing that as much, but there's so much that's just lost to to there's so many answers that we used to have very clearly that then we have just forgotten.

I think one of the fundamental lies of modernity and basically of progressivism in general is that new is better always. And that's not true. You know, like Joe Rogan always talks about how did they build the pyramids? Oh my goodness. Like they must have had these crazy technologies.

Like even, you know, we could put the tinfoil hat back on, but even if that's like nonsense, whatever, I don't know. But there are so many times in history where we really had deep understandings of things that we've completely forgotten about.

And like we don't necessarily need to go find these like crazy esoteric texts. We can go find like take uh Henry George's book, right? Late 19th century. It was like the number one number two bestselling book in the world. There's the imitation of Christ by Thomas Ampus. Great book 17th 18th century.

Like I think there's a lot of alpha in just going back at the bestsellers before 1970 and just go go read those books um and see what people are saying. And luckily AI is a really good way to do that. You know one thing that's fun to do is go in take an idea go into chatb and say here's my idea.

Now, help me round it out and give me some examples. Like, I've just been working on this little bit that there's fundamentally three three kinds of girls. There's Lana Del Rey girls, Taylor Swift girls, and Beyonce girls.

And so, like, you know, I was joking around with some friends who like, "Hey, let's just pop it into Grock. " And Grock is like helping us, you know, think out the theories. Hey, this why it's a stupid idea. Here's why it's a good idea.

And that's what I love about it is like you're giving it some sort of ridiculous idea and then it's saying, "Okay, let's kind of fill it in for you. " And you can very quickly get to the stage of like, "How can I find those esoteric ideas much faster?

" And how can I kind of um find the lines that then I can draw inside of? How uh do you have any type of thesis around um you know uh the LLMs and and humor? It seems to be the one thing that they really struggle with today where they get the structure of a joke but they're not nailing it yet.

They can make you laugh by being absurd. But did you see the Tyler Cowan joke? Yeah. Did you see that in GBT4. 5? So the be me one. Yeah, dude. It's hilarious. So I think that the the the humor thing is going to be a problem to be solved. The LLMs are going to be hilarious. And they're going to be hilarious in two ways.

Mhm. So, the first way is niche humor.

Like, you know, if you take a great comedian, they're going to be good at the mass market stuff, but like say that you and you know, the three of us, we go and we do like a trip to New Orleans for the weekend and we say, "All right, all these things happen and like we talk to LM for like 45 minutes.

We say, you know, here are all the things that happen. Now, give us some jokes. " Dude, I bet it would rip. I bet it would be so freaking funny. Yeah. Exactly. Like, no. and and we so we we've talked about we talked about this earlier on the show.

Uh John has Kugan's law which is like you know talking about the the value of coin coinages.

Uh so on that note I I've been working on the Hayes paradox which is the idea that the funnier that you think something is uh the less likely that the mass market is going to find it funny right because like something that is just ultra ultra ultra niche is just like the most interesting most funny the most stimulating or whatever.

And I think that's what you're kind of getting at in some way is like the, you know, having a comedian in your pocket that can joke about like the thing that happened to you that minute and simultaneously, you know, 10 years ago in your life and like connect those ideas and you know the idea of like the same thing of oh we have a therapist in our pocket or we have a tutor in our pocket.

Uh you now could potentially have you know the sort of like comedian. Yeah. So last question is a question I think you had for us. Do you want to close out with that?

Well, I mean, this is the question that I've just been thinking a lot about, and it gets down to like the nature of the soul and the nature of what it means to be a human. Yeah. You know, there's that famous um idea of the map and the territory.

And what I think is basically happening is that when it comes to writing, the map and the territory are going to be the same. And when the map and the territory are the same, what is just what is what comes from that?

um is like if you have such a good simulation of humor and such a good simulation of consciousness and such a good simulation of care, is it those things or is it not those things? And I don't know the answer. It's just the question I've been asking all week.

And um my immediate my immediate thought is that uh uh our mutual friend Jeremy uh had this idea, master of the take, the king of master of the the takes himself. Uh, no.

He had this idea like in the Giblly moment he was like, "My thesis that like AI will be the reason that everyone logs off forever is like if you go on your device and it's just this, you know, hamster wheel of entertainment, dopamine, and dopamine and then eventually you just it gets so good at, you know, at at whatever it's doing or whatever you want it to do that you want to actually go back to the variable reward of going into the group chat where somebody has a terrible take and then somebody has a good take And it's this sort of like truly organic uh experience and I and I and and who knows if everyone logs off forever but it's that uh desire for for realness has been something that has been common throughout human history right you don't like you know people wouldn't travel somewhere far to have like uh the authentic cuisine if it hit the same to have like you know the the sort of like perfect recreation of it here in America right um so that like desire for authenticity and realness I think is is deeply human and I think people will seek other humans out for that which is great because what I hope is I think that we were at the absolute bottom of realness in the late 2010s in cancel culture that was a time when people were terrified to be themselves everyone was super polished it was the decline of the mass media empire that we're still sort of living in and seeing play out every single day and then we're going to get a big flip into realness, into authenticity, and here's the other one, into forgiveness.

Because we can only have realness and authenticity in our culture if we have a culture of forgiveness when we can allow people to make mistakes. And I think what was so traumatizing as a culture about those years is that we couldn't be ourselves because we couldn't forgive.

And my hope is that we can just move on from that and um become humans in this digital sphere. Well, you'll have to forgive us for not having you on sooner. This was a fantastic conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much on the show. Uh we'll talk soon.

Thank you for addressing the part and looking very polished. You know, some things from the late 2010s. Polish is back, dude. Polish is back. You know, actually that's what we have in common. You know, you guys have the polish with the show. I try to do it with how I write. Yeah, of course. And uh thanks guys. Yeah.

Yeah, have a great weekend. Fantastic. Have a great weekend. Next up, we got V from Sword Health coming in the studio. I believe he's here and I'll let him do the introduction. I had a call with him uh almost a year ago. Uh fascinating company.

Uh backed by Delion very early on we got connected and uh I want to hear all about how his business is doing and uh get the general update. So V, are you there? Can you hear me? I am here. Can you see me? Yep, we are all good. Thanks so much for stopping by. Uh, how's your week going?