David Perell on the cultural tutor, Hollywood's risk aversion, and the architectural malaise stripping America's soul

David Perell on culture, architecture, and the soul of American aesthetics

David Perell, writer and host of the interview series How I Write, makes the case that aesthetic decline in America is not a superficial problem. Logos, buildings, chains along the San Francisco waterfront — each individual decision looks minor, but aggregate 100,000 of them and you hollow out the spirit of a place.

How I Write

The show is pulling 6 million Instagram views and 3 million YouTube views annually, with Perell booking writers at the level of Andy Weir, Gillian Flynn, Michael Lewis, and Malcolm Gladwell. His long-term model is less viral momentum than archival value — the Paris Review interview series, not the trending podcast. His most-watched episode by watch time is a three-hour conversation with poet Dana Gioia, recorded two years ago, that the YouTube algorithm only found 15 months after publication. The algorithm latency is the point: Perell is not optimizing for the first week.

“What has happened is things are boring now because we've gotten smart. They've gotten good at pricing risk and all that sort of stuff. But the problem is, then you end up getting Spider Man 74... I don't want a world that values efficiency and conformity above all else. I want a world where there's radical diversity. You go to different places, they feel completely different, and the things that are made have the unique character of the people making them.”

The Cultural Tutor

The segment's most developed story is Sheehan Quirk, the anonymous Twitter account Perell discovered in 2022. Quirk was 24, based in the north of England, had just quit a job at McDonald's, and was considering enlisting in the British military. Perell made him a writer-in-residence, funded from his writing business. Quirk had 100,000 Twitter followers then; he has 1.6 million now.

Perell then invested $150 to shoot a pilot episode in London, with the ambition of pitching a Bourdain-style travel and culture show. They published the video from an account with zero subscribers, set a goal of 100,000 views, hit that threshold in 18 hours, and are now at 5.6 million views and nearly a quarter-million subscribers from that single video.

Hollywood's offer

A meeting with a major studio the previous day produced a predictable result. The studio said it would move on the project under two conditions: exclusivity of place (filming somewhere others cannot, like the Sistine Chapel) or a celebrity host (Brad Pitt was the example offered). The pitch had nothing to do with building Quirk as a talent. Perell's read is that streaming services offer budget and prestige, but they are not in the business of developing new voices. The practical conclusion he lands on: you build the platform yourself, and Hollywood opens the door once you no longer need it.

Architectural malaise

Perell's argument on architecture is structural, not nostalgic. A Works in Progress piece he references argues that buildings became harder to permit partly because they became uglier — neighbors resist new construction not just from NIMBYism but because the output looks bad. That creates a compounding loop: ugliness triggers regulation, regulation raises costs, costs push toward cheaper and uglier outputs.

The clearest illustration he uses is a side-by-side of the Home Alone house in 1990 versus its current state, stripped of wallpaper, carpet, and texture in favor of uniform white. His explanation: housing shifted from something built for owners to something built by developers who see the asset through a spreadsheet and need to maximize liquidity by maximizing genericness.

The same pattern shows up in brand logos, where a decade of sans-serif flattening has produced global sameness. Perell's framing is that aesthetics are not decoration — they are the outer expression of what a culture values. What the current era expresses, in his reading, is efficiency and conformity above all else.

He is not calling for a return to any prior style. He wants 2026 to produce its own design language, one that projects a forward vision rather than retreats to pastiche. The most concrete version of that argument is small-scale: restore a few blocks of Fillmore Street before worrying about castles or landmark buildings. Start with the chains along the waterfront. Make one decision that adds character instead of removing it.