#14 – A deep dive on written communications | David Perell & Sam Corcos

Long-form written content takes a lot of time and thought to produce—or so many people think. While written content does take a level of concentration, it often allows you to think more critically about the subject at hand, and it doesn’t always take as much time as you might imagine. In this episode, Sam Corcos and David Perell of Levels share their thoughts on why writing is such a valuable resource for companies.

08:54 – Writing feels hard

Sam said it can feel mentally easier to watch a long video than to write a short reflection, because writing seems like a burdensome task even when it doesn’t take long.

It feels like writing is a lot harder than firing off a Loom or an audio note, or just like, “Hey, let’s just get on a call.” I don’t totally know why that is, but people are more than happy to watch a one-hour recording of a meeting, but spending 15 minutes writing out thoughts feels much more burdensome. I don’t know if it’s emotionally burdensome or what. But one of the things that was most interesting to me, I did a retrospective on how I spent my time for my first two years at Levels. And one of the biggest surprises is we write a lot. I’ve personally written hundreds, probably thousands of pages of long-form documentation and philosophy, and strategy within the company. And I thought it was easily 20% of my total time was spent writing these documents. And when I actually did the math, it was about 5%. So, actually not that much. I spent way more time in just casual meetings than I did doing these things that were incredibly valuable, but just felt way harder.

10:12 – Preserve your ideas through text

David said writing forces you to contend with your ideas and think through them so you can preserve them long-term in text.

You have to think, and you have to confront the limits of thinking. And you have to actually stop and contend with ideas and realize that you don’t know things, and that you have to be more precise with things. And I think that’s what’s good about writing, is it forces that clarity and all these different mediums like to say, “Oh, writing is the best thing for everything.” It’s just a ridiculous statement because it’s obvious that there’s good things with podcasts and good things with videos. But like from the producer’s side, writing is good because it is just forcing you to stay in one place for a while and have thoughts that are just on the page and just rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. And if you talk to a good author, it’s painful and they’ll have rewritten that book, five, six, eight times. And they’ll just do it over and over. And so, if you want speed and quick back and forth of communication, you’re going to end up with an oral culture where people are speaking through video and speaking through podcasts. But if you want things to be preserved and things to be specified, and things to be precise and logical, that’s what’s good with text.

12:20 – Look at each individual part

David said writing is a great way to break down a large concept into manageable parts, and it also keeps an exact record of thoughts and conversations.

What is really interesting about writing is that rather than looking at the system as a whole, you can dissect the parts. And so, you can take clause 3C, the third line, and you can say, “I have an issue with that.” Whereas like if we have a transcript of everything I’ve said for the first 12 minutes, how would you do that? How would you be precise and recall exactly what I said? Because Sam, you could say something, and then I could say, “No, no, no. I said something different. And now we’re having a game of emotional ping pong of what did I say? But then if we can to the text, now, like you said, we’re no longer speaking emotions, but we’re speaking specific words. And then we can focus on that, improve that little section and move on.

14:20 – Writing offers rich content

Sam said that while video and audio messages can feel productive, they aren’t as content-rich as a written memo.

There is something about seeing a face on the other side of the screen and seeing how they’re reacting to what you say, that completely changes the tone of what you’re saying. I tried to do this with my co-founder, Josh, I said, “Hey, I want to try this thing. I need to write this important memo, but I don’t have the emotional energy for it. Can you just get on a call with me for an hour and see if that helps?” And it was fun. We spitballed on it. We talked. I got the transcript after. I was like, “All right, all I’m going to have to do, take the transcript, edit the text a little bit.” And then, basically two hours of company time, I got a couple of sentences of value out of it. It was shockingly little. And I don’t really know what to make of that, because I felt like at the end of that meeting, I had solved all of these problems, but the actual density of information in that meeting was so incredibly low.

16:33 – Different mediums offer different levels of depth

David said conversation is a conduit for discovering ideas while writing is where you go to develop those ideas more deeply.

Conversation is an algorithm for randomness. Writing is an algorithm for depth. So, basically here’s what I mean by that. We’ve been talking now for 15 minutes. I have created and what’s come out of my mouth is a bunch of things I’ve never said before and a bunch of ways of thinking about something that I’ve never had. And in conversation, I’m forced to come up with initial structure for those ideas. But if I were to look at the transcript of what I have said so far, I wouldn’t be satisfied with the precision and the clarity of what I’m saying. So, this conversation is a very good place to find new areas, new territories, say, “Oh wow, that’s a part of my brain I’ve never come across before.” That’s like a new plane of reality that my brain has never traveled. It’s a new zip code I didn’t know existed, but you’re not building houses. Writing is where you’re building houses. You’re thinking through the plumbing of an idea. You’re going in. You’re adding furniture and stuff like that. And then what’s great is once you have that, then it’s much easier to speak about whatever the thing is that you’ve written about.

28:08 – Writing is a mental and emotional commitment

Sam said that because writing is an ambiguous process, the task can appear to be a large commitment, even if it’s eventually completed in a short amount of time.

There’s something around the ambiguity of time to completion that comes with writing. If you have a one-hour meeting, you know you’re committing to an hour. When I start writing a memo, I’m opening Pandora’s box. Meetings are in manager time and writing is in maker time. I will not be able to muster the emotional energy to start writing something unless I have the entire rest of the day blocked off. I’m just incapable of it. I know some people can block like six hours to write. I can’t. I have to have nothing else going on or I just can’t muster the emotional energy. And sometimes that memo ends up taking 45 minutes even though I blocked off the whole day.

34:13 – Exercise your mind

David compared writing to exercise. The act of writing is good for you, but it can also wear you out and take a toll.

I just love the idea that writing is weightlifting for the mind. And the thing is you can go to the gym and you can put up some serious iron and everyone’s like, “Yeah, of course, that’s tiring.” Of course, you’re going to crash harder that night. But if you really need to dive into certain ideas, you know that there’s a cost that’s going to come from that. No one is weightlifting in the morning and it’s like, “Okay. I know that I have the same amount of energy for the afternoon to do something else.” And writing is the same way. I mean, after this, I have to edit a document for my friend. And I’ve just been postponing it, postponing it, because I know that’s going to require serious thinking and it’s going to make me tired.

42:57 – Writing conveys authority and trust

David said because of the time and effort it takes to write something, the act of writing conveys a sense of authority to the writer.

If someone has written about something, you inherently trust that, right? Think of how often you’ll hire someone, “Oh, they wrote a book on the subject. Have you read the book?” No, but they wrote the book on the subject. We just know culturally that there’s a level of work that comes with that. And you can wing it with video and podcasting, in what you can’t do with writing. People know that. And so, the thing is most of the time though, you got to wing it. I mean, if you took the intensity that you bring to writing for most of the things that you do, you would never go anywhere. Your feet would just be stuck like glue because everything would take too long.

47:47 – Know when to speak in-person and when to write

David said writing out messages increases your efficiency, but you need to take into account how that message will come across to others.

Writing exerts a cost, but the benefit of the increased cost is compression and efficiency. But then you’ve got to solve the emotional issues for certain things. I mean, if you’re talking about certain kinds of strategy, right? Your go-to-market for glucose monitors, I don’t know. I’m just picking something up. Then you don’t need a certain emotional subtlety, but if you’re talking about, “Hey, this company isn’t serious like it used to be. We used to show up. It was early startup days. We used to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. Saturday afternoon, we would always meet in the coffee shop, me and the founders. And we would get after it so hard. And now, none of you even care that much or try hard. I sense it’s remote work and you’re cutting off at 3:30,.” All those sorts of things. No, you can’t write that. There needs to be an emotional wrapping around that message

48:43 – Deliver criticisms verbally

Sam said written criticisms can come across as reprimands or threats, so if you have a problem with what someone said, you should take it up with them on the phone or in person.

One of the first indications that there was something different about writing was in one of our Friday forums, just a team all hands, somebody made a joke, and I didn’t think anything of it, but there was some subtext that somebody found marginally offensive. And they called me, they explained the situation, said like, “Should I write this to them and tell them?” And I immediately said, “You should actually call them.” Because there’s something about writing that feels like a threat or a reprimand, or something that the exact same words in a call just doesn’t have the same sort of weight. And it was just a passing comment. The person didn’t know the subtext of this thing. It ended up not being a problem. But there’s something about writing that just, it has something deeper that escalates these problems.

David Perell (00:00):

And I think that’s what’s good about writing, is it forces that clarity and all these different mediums, like to say that, “Oh, writing is the best thing for everything.” It’s just a ridiculous statement because it’s obvious that there’s good things with podcasts and good things with videos. Writing is good because it is just forcing you to stay in one place for a while and have thoughts that are just on the page, and just rewrite and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. And so, if you want speed and quick back and forth of communication, you’re going to end up with an oral culture. But if you want things to be preserved and things to be specified, and things to be precise and logical, that’s what’s good with text.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (01:24):

As digital platforms and creating content becomes more prevalent, something that’s ingrained in the daily behaviors that a lot of people undertake, that’s creating content, things like audio and video through our phones. It’s really easy to turn that phone on. It’s really easy to record something like a Loom, to put your thoughts out there. And there’s a lot of sentiment when you can listen to somebody’s thoughts, or you can watch their actions through something like Loom, through something like UGC, user-generated content through a video. But where things are still pretty challenging when it comes to putting out content is in this category of writing.

Ben Grynol (02:03):

Writing is very intentional. It’s very thoughtful. It’s something that is often long-form, not snappy texts. And by snappy, I mean something that is quick and easy to ship. Real, long-form written content takes a lot of time and thought to produce or so people think. Sometimes that barrier is somewhat of a mental barrier. People think it’s going to be a lot harder to sit down and start writing something that actually might take them seven minutes. The idea is to put out thoughts and to articulate, to go deeper into some of these thoughts when you have to think about what you’re saying. There’s a lot of intent when it comes to writing.

Ben Grynol (02:42):

Well, Sam Corcos, co-founder and CEO of Levels, he sat down with David Perell. David is very much a content creator in every respect. Although, he does have a podcast called The North Star, he focuses a lot on long-form written content. You can check out his work at perell.com, P-E-R-E-L-L.com.

Ben Grynol (03:02):

So, Sam and David sat down and they discussed this idea of how do people communicate? Where have these ideas come from? And why do people think writing is a lot harder than it actually is? It’s one of those things that when you start to deconstruct, it’s always easier to find a way of when and where, what the right form of communication is and why people should use it. It was a great conversation. Here’s where they kicked things off.

Sam Corcos (03:32):

I have a lot of questions for you related to writing, which I know you have some opinions on. We do a lot of writing, a lot of it in very long form. And we’re starting to run into some limits with writing and bumping into some of these edge cases, that I’m hoping maybe you have some opinions on. One of the limits that we’re seeing with writing as a medium compared to something like video or audio, or meetings, is that writing does not convey, this is my hypothesis, that writing is not capable of conveying the same kind of emotional information that you get when you do something in video or in a meeting. The body language, the tone is just like, I would say that doing things in writing is almost like pushing information through a lossy compression algorithm. It’s denser, but there’s just a lot of information that gets lost in that compression.

Sam Corcos (04:39):

And so, there have been conversations that I’ve witnessed in back and forth written communication where I can see the tension escalating in the conversation, but totally unnecessarily so. It’s just a misunderstanding of a couple words in a sentence that led somebody to think that somebody was upset about something, even though they weren’t, which then just, it almost feels like writing as a communication form is inherently trust depleting in a way that in-person or audio, or video isn’t. I don’t know if you have thoughts on that.

David Perell (05:16):

I think that you have to think of the jobs to be done with each of these mediums. So, audio is very good at riling people up. If you read certain history books around the invention of radio, the authors repeatedly argue that radio created the ability for dictatorships to happen and for these mass movements to begin.

Sam Corcos (05:44):

Really?

David Perell (05:45):

Yeah, because of the way that the audio message can fire people up. It can spread widely. It can reach the masses. And audio is very egalitarian in terms of consumption. Everybody understands audio. Whereas text is a bit more hierarchical. You could take continental philosophy as example of this. The people who can understand and parse that, they don’t just have to have high intelligence, they also need to have high attention spans, and then high education of a certain ilk, so that they can understand that stuff and process it. So, you could basically take those things on opposite end to the spectrum.

David Perell (06:33):

Video is adding visuals to audio. So, basically you’re suppressing the audio aspect of it. You’re adding visuals, but it’s super expensive to produce, right? How would you ever communicate via email on video? I mean, I guess you could do Loom or something.

Sam Corcos (06:53):

Yeah, that’s what we do.

David Perell (06:55):

So, that is a kind of personality. And I think that video and audio can be fun and stuff. So, then that leaves text, I think, on both sides of the barbell. So, I think what text is really good at is first, it’s cheap and it’s efficient, so everyone can receive text. It doesn’t cost a lot of storage on your computer. It’s pretty easy to fire off. And I think that it’s a good balance of exerts higher costs on the producer of something than the consumer it, whereas I think audio often actually has higher costs for the consumer of something than the producer of it. Right? So like, say that I call you, well, now I’m calling you at a time that’s convenient for me, but not for you. And you have to pick up. So, there issues with that. You can get a kind of symmetry with voice notes, but then text is also really good on the other side in terms of preservation.

David Perell (07:54):

So, what’s great about text is we know that text is going to be around in 30, 50 years, and it forces a kind of compression that then can be valuable. So compression, I think we need to talk about that, because compression is an issue when it’s stripping out emotions in a conversation that needs to have a certain emotional tenor. Compression is an issue when there are things that need to be said that don’t make it into the message, but compression is good when it comes to say onboarding, when there’s things that you need to read. And you could have a whole team working on a document, and they can compress that into its finest parts, so that it stays preserved. So, you could almost think of a tension here between lossiness and preservation, and lossiness and efficiency.

Sam Corcos (08:45):

Yeah. It’s funny when you say that. This ties into one of the other things that I have in my notes, that for some reason, this is another hypothesis, it feels like writing is a lot harder than just like firing off a Loom or an audio note, or just like, “Hey, let’s just get on a call.” I don’t totally know why that is, but people are more than happy to watch a one hour recording of a meeting, but spending 15 minutes writing out thoughts feels much more burdensome. I don’t know if it’s like emotionally burdensome or what.

Sam Corcos (09:23):

But one of the things that was most interesting to me, I did a retrospective on how I spent my time for my first two years at Levels. And one of the biggest surprises is we write a lot. I’ve personally written hundreds, probably thousands of pages of long form documentation and philosophy, and strategy within the company. And I thought it was easily 20% of my total time was spent writing these documents. And when I actually did the math, it was about 5%. So, actually not that much. I spent way more time in just casual meetings than I did doing these things that were incredibly valuable, but just felt way harder. I don’t know what it is about writing specifically that makes it feel so burdensome to people.

David Perell (10:11):

I think it’s that you have to think, and you have to confront the limits of thinking. And you have to actually stop and contend with ideas and realize that you don’t know things, and that you have to be more precise with things. And I think that’s what’s good about writing, is it forces that clarity and all these different mediums like to say, “Oh, writing is the best thing for everything.” It’s just a ridiculous statement because it’s obvious that there’s good things with podcasts and good things with videos. But like from the producer’s side, writing is good because it is just forcing you to stay in one place for a while and have thoughts that are just on the page and just rewrite and rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. And if you talk to a good author, it’s painful and they’ll have rewritten that book, five, six, eight times. And they’ll just do it over and over.

David Perell (11:17):

And so, if you want speed and quick back and forth of communication, you’re going to end up with an oral culture where people are speaking through video and speaking through podcasts. But if you want things to be preserved and things to be specified, and things to be precise and logical, that’s what’s good with text.

David Perell (11:44):

And it’s no coincidence that the industrial revolution and a sense of like scientific progress and technological growth happens after the invention of writing, because there’s a paper that Patrick calls insights a lot, not a lot. I’ve heard a couple times. And he says that everybody knows that the printing press enabled the industrial revolution, because you could have ideas spread, but that gets invalidated with radio and with video.

David Perell (12:20):

What is really interesting about writing is that rather than looking at the system as a whole, you can dissect the parts. And so, you can take clause 3C, the third line, and you can say, “I have an issue with that.” Whereas like if we have a transcript of everything I’ve said for the first 12 minutes, how would you do that? How would you be precise and recall exactly what I said? Because Sam, you could say something, and then I could say, “No, no, no. I said something different. And now we’re having a game of emotional ping pong of what did I say? But then if we can to the text, now, like you said, we’re no longer speaking emotions, but we’re speaking specific words. And then we can focus on that, improve that little section and move on. And look, there’s issues with that. Sometimes you do need this global system. Maya Angelou said, people will forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you them feel. And so, that is like a global macro way to think about this.

David Perell (13:20):

But sometimes, you could basically invert that. You could say, this is going to sound really crude, and I don’t actually mean what I’m saying. I’m just proving a point, that when you’re trying to get stuff done, no one cares how you feel. People just care what you say. And so, I think that writing is good for that.

Sam Corcos (13:38):

I’ve run a lot of different experiments personally, trying to understand this emotional cost problem. And so, I did an experiment. So, one of the things that I’ve noticed with video, I did a podcast with Venee from Loom, to try to understand some of this stuff, because he’s thought about video and much the same way that you’ve thought about writing, just like really deep thinker on the topic.

Sam Corcos (14:00):

And we do a lot of things asynchronously with Loom. So, we’ll do unidirectional meetings, or I just record myself, and then send it to the group. And people don’t actually need to be physically present. But what I notice is that there’s a certain stiffness that comes with that. There is something about seeing a face on the other side of the screen and seeing how they’re reacting to what you say, that completely changes the tone of what you’re saying.

Sam Corcos (14:31):

I tried to do this with my co-founder, Josh, I said, “Hey, I want to try this thing. I need to write this important memo, but I don’t have the emotional energy for it. Can you just get on a call with me for an hour and see if that helps?” And it was fun. We spitballed on it. We talked. I got the transcript after. I was like, “All right, all I’m going to have to do, take the transcript, edit the text a little bit.” And then, basically two hours of company time, I got a couple of sentences of value out of it. It was shockingly little. And I don’t really know what to make of that, because I felt like at the end of that meeting, I had solved all of these problems, but the actual density of information in that meeting was so incredibly low, much lower than I was anticipating.

David Perell (15:17):

So, what’s the lesson there? Is the lesson there that conversation does have low density? Or is the lesson there, this particular meeting. Where do you want me to follow there?

Sam Corcos (15:28):

Yeah. I mean, it ties into how it made you feel, because both Josh and I felt like it was productive, but when we actually looked at the output, it wasn’t. So, I’m wondering, it ties into that concept that you mentioned, but also I was surprised to see how different the feeling was than the actual output of the conversation was. So, I found for myself, this is one of your famous tweets around writing and connecting the dots.

David Perell (16:03):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (16:03):

And I found for me that I often discover ideas in the process of writing that I don’t in the process of conversation. If you think about just, we’ll take the proxy of the conversation I have with Josh. In the same amount of time that I was conversing with him, if I had just spent the time writing out my thoughts and thinking about it myself, I probably would’ve solved a lot more of these problems.

David Perell (16:32):

Well, here’s the thing. So, conversation is an algorithm for randomness. Writing is an algorithm for depth. So, basically here’s what I mean by that. We’ve been talking now for 15 minutes. I have created and what’s come out of my mouth is a bunch of things I’ve never said before and a bunch of ways of thinking about something that I’ve never had. And in conversation, I’m forced to come up with initial structure for those ideas. But if I were to look at the transcript of what I have said so far, I wouldn’t be satisfied with the precision and the clarity of what I’m saying.

David Perell (17:09):

So, this conversation is a very good place to find new areas, new territories, say, “Oh wow, that’s a part of my brain I’ve never come across before. That’s like a new plane of reality that my brain has never traveled. It’s a new zip code, I didn’t know existed, but you’re not building houses. Writing is where you’re building houses. You’re thinking through the plumbing of an idea. You’re going in. You’re like adding furniture and stuff like that. And then what’s great is once you have that, then it’s much easier to speak about whatever the thing is that you’ve written about.

David Perell (17:43):

And so, I think that there’s a certain intuition that you have to develop that I think we have to develop as a culture around these different modes of communication, and when is writing the place to go versus other things. One thing that I do think is a pretty good change though, is the death of everybody has to be in the same room, PowerPoint presentations. I think that’s the worst of all worlds.

David Perell (18:13):

I just want to say there’s also different kinds of writing here. So see, this is what I mean. This is a new idea I’ve never had before. So, you’re bringing me into new territory. So, I think that there’s writing is speech. And then there’s writing as, let’s call it writing as conversation, and then writing as a refined thought. And so, email writing is more writing a speech. This is like two people talking. And if you were to take that a step further, that’s texting, right? Texting. Like I just sent a text to a friend, “Hey, let me think about it.” But not let me, it’s L-E-M-M-E. “Let me think about it.” I’m actually trying to replicate speech patterns in person audio in the way that I’m writing a text.

Sam Corcos (18:54):

With emojis and such.

David Perell (18:56):

Exactly. Right? But it also brings, it comes into the way that the language is formed. And then there’s writing as very refined thought. And so, I think it’s worth asking like, why does Jeff Bezos get so much out of writing those annual letters? So, you could say there’s a scale component. There’s a lastingness of those ideas component. He’s just getting clarity on what are the big themes of the year. And I see the same thing with my annual review. I spend like two weeks, and this is all that I worked on, this annual review, giant piece. But what’s great is I know that by writing this thing, it forces me to do the work to clarify what are my goals for the next year? Where did I fail? Where did I do well last year? And think, what are my values?

David Perell (19:45):

And then what’s great about writing is a certain scanability. So, like for example, when I was using Levels, and night two I had no key. And my glucose spiked to the moon, maybe to Mars. I was like, “Dude, what happened? Right? What happened?” And you had an article right there. And so, I started reading different Levels articles. And in my notes, I can go back and look at Levels articles and what mattered to me, and I can now think better about my food. And so, there’s a transferability where it’s like, if you only had videos, then I wouldn’t be able to go back and reference that.

Sam Corcos (20:29):

It’s an interesting thing. I actually want to talk both about the conversational component of writing and the long form component of writing. Complete coincidence yesterday, I wrote a memo on why we write so many memos. It’s on long term memos and decision making. We’ll start with the conversational piece. I don’t know if this has been your experience, but we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation around this. I have found, at least my hypothesis here is that conversational messaging in tech form is inherently trust depleting between people. Like Toby from Shopify talked about this idea of a trust battery. And when you see people’s face, when you see them in person, when you hear their tone, when you empathize with them, you are recharging the trust batteries. When you see somebody behind just like text communication, behind a screen, just back and forth, which almost always because of the compression leads to lost information and ease of misunderstanding, it really does feel like written conversational form is inherently depleting in terms of trust, in a way that other forms of communication aren’t. Is that reasonable?

David Perell (21:50):

I think that given what you’re saying, the answer is yes. The one caveat I would add would be something like a performance review, where you want to write that out. And then what you want to do is come in with it written, go through the points one on one through speech and through conversation, and then give it to them, so that there’s an emotional frame that people can map on to what you’ve written. But I do agree if you just, “Hey, here’s your yearly performance review with all the things you did wrong.” That’s going to hit someone deep and it’s going to cut, and it’s not going to feel good.

David Perell (22:29):

And so, specifically the answer is yes, I see exactly what you’re saying. The big thing I would add to that is there’s times where you do want to write something to think through whatever it is that you’re saying. And I do this all the time. If I want to have a difficult conversation, I’ll show up at dinner with something written, often at bullet points, have the conversation, and then give it to them after as a central record of truth. Right? The record truth is a big thing here, right? It’s not a coincidence that the Magna Carta and Hama Robbie’s code, these are things that are written. They’re not things that are-

Sam Corcos (23:02):

Yeah. Right. So, an interesting counterpoint to the writing as inherently trust depleting. So, the memo that I just wrote on memos is actually about how writing and long form writing specifically is actually trust enhancing, and is necessary for delegating decisions and for trust in leadership, where you can have lots of meetings with people to try to understand their way thinking, but it’s only after somebody writes their thoughts in long form when you could follow along with their thought process, when they go deep on a concept and you can understand how they think about problem solving. A lot of the people who join Levels for a leadership role, the first thing they do is they write a long memo on their area of focus.

David Perell (23:56):

This is really interesting. We’re now getting into two different kinds of trust. There was the trust that you talked about with the trust battery, which is great concept. And that is the trust of emotion and empathy, and the trust that leads to friendship. That is a heart driven trust. Now, what you’re talking about is mind driven trust, which is the trust of expertise. And that is, “I trust this person. They have written this. And I’m going to go contact them.” So, I would say that even the impetus for this meeting is exactly that kind of trust. I’ve clearly written a lot about writing. You’ve seen that. You’ve seen it over time. And you said, “Okay. David is somebody who’s thought a lot about this.” And I basically did a proof of stake by words. And then you said, “Okay. Now, I trust him with the expertise.” And so, I think that we’re talking about two different kinds of trust here.

Sam Corcos (24:50):

Yeah. That’s a very interesting point. A specific recent example, Maz, who we just brought on to lead, he’s head of business. He just last week finished his first long form memo, define what he’s going to be working on. And it’s 12,000 words, which is actually not uncommon for the length of a memo at Levels. We really do expect people to put significant deep thought into what it is that they’re doing. One of the main advantages for me is that it really does build my confidence when I see how they think about approaching problems. One of the challenges that we’re having is what I’ll call, I think I’ve heard it called context collapse, which is we have so much information that 12,000 word memo, some of that really does need to be seen by engineering, but maybe like one paragraph.

David Perell (25:51):

Right.

Sam Corcos (25:51):

And it is too much to ask of the writer, of the author to know the context of every business unit to create a separate memo for each unit.

David Perell (26:02):

Right. That’d be ridiculous.

Sam Corcos (26:04):

It’d be ridiculous, because they also don’t know what the other people need to know.

David Perell (26:08):

That’s a great example of then Maz should make a Loom and should say, “Hey,” in the description of the Loom, refer to the one paragraph and have the Loom add context.

Sam Corcos (26:21):

Definitely. We’ve actually started doing a Loom summary at the top of each of these memos, which has been really helpful, just like the 10 minute walkthrough of the high level concepts. That’s been good. We’ve been considering the idea of hiring what we would call a librarian or a head documentarian, somebody whose job it is just to, they’re like the context masters. They read everything and they synthesize it for like the weekly engineering summary or the weekly editorial summary, everything the editorial team needs to know. We haven’t done it because it feels like busy work.

David Perell (27:00):

You should look into governments. And I bet that there’s somebody in the cabinet of the president, maybe in America, maybe somewhere else who does this position.

Sam Corcos (27:11):

It’s interesting,

David Perell (27:13):

Because this has to happen. Right? So, how does the president get this? And there’s all of these memos that are written. So, who is doing that summary, that filtration? Because it’s not the chief of staff, they’re doing a bunch of other stuff. Where does that role exist? And for me, what comes to mind is government.

Sam Corcos (27:34):

That’s fascinating. I know some people that I’m going to ask that exact question. One of the other things I had in my notes here for the call is circling back to the concept of the high emotional cost of writing.

David Perell (27:45):

I feel it every morning.

Sam Corcos (27:48):

Yeah.

David Perell (27:50):

Never changes.

Sam Corcos (27:51):

Yeah. Totally. One of our engineers, Gin Lu, I had a conversation with her about writing. And she had a hypothesis that I think might be accurate or at least somewhat, it certainly might input, which is that there’s something around the ambiguity of time to completion that comes with writing. If you have a one hour meeting, you know you’re committing to an hour. When I start writing a memo, I’m opening Pandora’s box.

David Perell (28:21):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (28:22):

There’s meetings are in manager time and writing is in maker time. I will not be able to muster the emotional energy to start writing something unless I have the entire rest of the day blocked off. I’m just incapable of it. I know some people can block like six hours to write. I can’t. I have to have nothing else going on or I just can’t muster the emotional energy. And sometimes that memo ends up taking 45 minutes even though I blocked off the whole day.

Sam Corcos (28:55):

Tom on our team mentioned how there have been some memos that he kept hunting them for months and he finally got around to writing it. It took him an hour and a half. He’s like, “Why did I wait for so long to do this? I don’t understand.”

David Perell (29:11):

Yeah. But that has to do with the chores, right?

Sam Corcos (29:13):

Yes, sure.

David Perell (29:16):

I mean, I got to mail in my Texas voter registration. It’s been on my table for so long. But I think with writing in particular that time when you’re thinking through something, when it’s stirring in your mind, you’re also thinking about it. And so, look, I think that what we’re coming to here is you absolutely positively do not want to write for a lot of these things. And writing is almost like a time horizon. There’s a time horizon function.

David Perell (29:45):

So, I just did these… And I promise this relates to what we’re talking about. Here’s something else. When I was a kid, I always wanted good sports jerseys. And my parents would never buy me the nice sports Jersey. I wanted the authentic one with the actual like Adidas or Nike. And they would never do it. I was like, “Oh, why?” I get so frustrated. They’d be like, “David, it makes no sense to buy you this Jersey, if in six months you’re going to grow out of it. It makes no sense. We’ll spend $200 and you’re not going to be able to have it.” And so, then I got really frustrated as a kid, and my mom was totally right. She was totally right.

David Perell (30:31):

Then a couple weeks ago I was in Montreal. And until then, I didn’t own like a nice winter coat, like a coat that if it’s anything more than between 10 and 30 degrees, I can put on a coat and I’m not going to be freezing cold. I bought one from Amazon. My entire time living in New York City just made me hate the winter, but I just didn’t have the money to buy something. And I basically started thinking, “Okay, I really want to get a Canada Goose jacket. It could cost me a thousand dollars, five times more than those jerseys. But the reason I ended up doing it and I had to wait in line before I went to the store. And we walked to downtown, so I could go get. It was because I’m going to own that coat for the rest of my life.

David Perell (31:17):

All this to say, writing is you want those long term things that are going to last the test of time, like a Canada Goose jacket. And sometimes it’s good to get the knockoff Jersey. And I’m not saying that podcasting and video is a knockoff Jersey. It’s a metaphor. But all this to say, you want to be writing when it’s something that everyone needs to see. You know that message to be relevant in a couple years. You want it to be both skimmable and you want it to be precise. You want many people that comment on it. You want to be able to go in specific sentences. And you want things, if you’re writing your yearly thing where every single person at Levels is going to read this, I think that should be written. I think that should be written. But your weekly review in a 20 minute meeting, of course, you shouldn’t spend all these hours writing it. So, I think that there’s a time horizon function here.

Sam Corcos (32:21):

Yeah. It’s a good point. And a number of people who follow it. Some of our longest strategy memos, like our editorial strategy was written a year ago and it’s still relevant.

David Perell (32:34):

Of course.

Sam Corcos (32:35):

Our editorial director put many, many weeks if not months into writing it. And then it became the strategy. So, I look back on some of our foundational strategy documents and I’m shocked by how they’re still relevant a year or two years later. So, I definitely hear that.

David Perell (32:54):

Yeah. I mean also, I just see for my annual review, so we’ve been hiring a bunch of people. And people will ask certain questions, “Hey, what’s the vision? And how’s the company structured?” And had I not written out those answers, there just wouldn’t be a level of clarity. Writing is going to force clarity. And so, you have to think of writing as basically like a high investment activity. And so, the only thing like a Canada Goose jacket, that’s going to justify a high investment is a long time horizon or volume of a lot of people can read it, but even then that doesn’t mean that you should necessarily write. And also something that you really need clarity around, whatever it is that you’re saying.

Sam Corcos (33:40):

I actually want to circle back to something you said just a minute ago, that struck me, which is that you’re also postponing chores. But I think what you’re also implying is that writing feels like a chore.

David Perell (33:53):

It’s really hard.

Sam Corcos (33:55):

Yeah. Because I’m sure this has happened to you all the time, where somebody says, “Hey, can we just jump on a call?” And you’re like, “Yeah. Okay. Whatever.” How many times did somebody say like, “Hey, can you just write up a quick memo on this and send it to me?” And you’re like, “Oh.” It’s like, “Can I do it by the end of the week? I don’t really want to do that right now.”

David Perell (34:11):

The thing is, it’s just like, I just love the idea that writing is weightlifting for the mind. And the thing is you can go to the gym and you can put up some serious iron and everyone’s like, “Yeah, of course, that’s tiring.” Of course, you’re going to crash harder that night. But if you really need to dive into certain ideas, you know that there’s a cost that’s going to come from that. Right? No one is weightlifting in the morning and it’s like, “Okay. I know that I have the same amount of energy for the afternoon to do something else.” And writing is the same way. I mean, after this, I have to edit a document for my friend. And I’ve just been postponing it, postponing it, because I know that’s going to require serious thinking and it’s going to make me tired.

Sam Corcos (34:59):

One of the other categories of problems that I’m trying to think through is there’s this concept of we’ll call it finality of ideas or decisions. I’ll give you a specific case study. So, when we hire a candidate, we would often write out what the job description is. We’d write out why we’re hiring this person and we would post it. And then we would get questions from people later on of like, “Why are we hiring this person? I don’t understand.” We started just as an experiment, doing decision meetings, where two people who were talking about that candidate, they basically just read out loud all of the things that were written down. And for whatever reason, because there was a meeting where people agreed on something, even though it’s all the same content, it leads to much more cohesion and finality on decisions.

Sam Corcos (36:00):

And so, one of the problems we have in say our communication tools and some of our long form memos even, it’s like every question or comment opens up a new open threat. And the conclusion of those threats never reaches a certain point of finality. And so, we’ve tried different approaches. And on one end, the long form memos can feel like tablets from Moses of like, “This is the answer. And no one can question it.” And on the other end, it leads to just a never ending series of open questions that never leads to that same feeling of resolution and finality. I don’t know what exactly to make of that, but it’s a consistent problem.

David Perell (36:48):

Well, so let’s talk about the tablet from Moses thing. It’s hilarious. But the thing is in the modern age, Moses can do a collaborative Google Doc before he brings them down from Mount Sinai, right? Or something like that. I mean, only Moses was actually allowed up on Mount Sinai, to go be with the burning Bush. So, the metaphor doesn’t quite hold, but we can do some Bible reconstructionist here and make our metaphor. But that’s the thing. And it’s just important that for certain kinds of projects, that there is space for that collaboration. But also that finality is important. It’s important. The Declaration of Independence is not the perfect document. The Bill of Rights is not the perfect document, but it’s one that we have. It’s set in stone. And well, it’s set in papyrus. But the Magna Carta was set in stone. And there’s an importance to that.

David Perell (37:46):

And I don’t think that having things be perfect is necessarily the best thing, because sometimes you’re better off with something that is imperfect, but where you have alignment. And if you’re so focused on perfection, what you’re giving up there is a certain amount of alignment and cohesion. And it’s like a boat. It’s like a boat, right? Or it’s like a rowboat. And I love watching the rowers in Austin, because they’re all moving the same speed. But if people start peddling differently, you don’t have the coxswain at the front of the boat. And now, you’re getting friction in places where there shouldn’t be. And the boat slows way down, even though the total units of effort are the same, if not more.

David Perell (38:32):

And so, what is so interesting about all this is there’s trade offs in every single place. And so, a lot of these questions are just, what is the problem to be solved? What is the job to be done? And then what are the best tools or combination of different mediums that are going to allow us to achieve that outcome, the best?

Sam Corcos (38:55):

That makes sense. I wonder in the context of finality or closure, we’ll take this in the written conversational form as maybe the medium. From your perspective, what is it about meetings, specifically of people being in the same room at the same time, or actually in like an interesting parasocial way, watching people in a meeting at the same time, make a decision? What is it about that feels so different than coming to decisions in writing?

David Perell (39:36):

I don’t know. I’m not sure I have enough experience with watching other people set decisions in meetings. Generally, I just ask them to send me a write up of the decision and what they spoke about that is supposed to be lossy. I don’t need to know everything that happened in the meeting. I just want to know in five to six sentences, what are we going to do? And why are we going to do it?

David Perell (39:59):

And I see writing so often it’s proof of work. It’s just like, “Okay. We’re going to make this change and write a passage.” “Okay. Why? Send me a memo.” And if you don’t care enough to then send me a, it doesn’t even need to be a page, three paragraphs of why you made this decision, why you’re thinking about it, then I almost don’t trust it in a sense. It’s a way of showing me that you care instead telling me that you care or something like that.

Sam Corcos (40:27):

One of the topics that I have in the memo about long form memos is that there were organizations that lead by title, where it’s like, “I’m the head of X, therefore I don’t need to explain myself to you. Just do what I say.” And then there are organizations that are built on real trust, deep trust, where it’s a culture where people are treated like adults. It’s reasonable for an adult to ask, “Why are we doing this?” And writing allows you to do that, to answer those questions in a scalable way.

Sam Corcos (41:08):

One of the things that I’m sure my team is sick of hearing you say at this point, is that content solves a lot of problems. Content scales, whether it’s an audio, whether it’s a video. One of the things that we actually do, all of our meetings internally are reported. And we don’t distribute most of them. But maybe one out of 10 meetings, there’s this like a random jam that appears in the conversation. There was one recently where two people in their one-on-one, somebody was explaining their thoughts and methodology on business deals. And he said like, “We have to clip this and share this with the team. This is so interesting.” And some of these internal conversations we’re going to end up publishing externally and get thousands of views from random people.

David Perell (41:55):

That’s probably great for hiring too.

Sam Corcos (41:56):

Yeah, exactly. It is. And it really does build trust. Interestingly, yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I got an email from a candidate. He was asking about what our clinical strategy is. And I sent him a long form document on clinical strategy, which Lauren Kelly Cheu on our team wrote up. In fact, I’m going to pull it up here and find out just how many words it is. She spent more than a month writing it. And the document is 7,000 words. And the candidate responded with like, “It’s really encouraging to see the depth of thought that has gone into these ideas.” And that’s the trust building that I don’t think you can get in any other way, other than writing. It seems like that’s the only pointer.

David Perell (42:47):

There’s a reason that people give out books as business cards and not documentaries.

Sam Corcos (42:53):

Yeah. Right. Right.

David Perell (42:55):

Not YouTube videos.

Sam Corcos (42:56):

Yeah, for sure.

David Perell (42:57):

If someone has written about something, you inherently trust that, right? Think of how often you’ll hire someone, “Oh, they wrote a book on the subject. Have you read the book?” No, but they wrote the book on the subject. We just know culturally that there’s a level of work that comes with that. And you can wing it with video and podcasting, in what you can’t do with writing. People know that. And so, the thing is most of the time though, you got to wing it.

David Perell (43:26):

I mean, if you took the intensity that you bring to writing for most of the things that you do, you would never go anywhere. Your feet would just be stuck like glue because everything would take too long.

Sam Corcos (43:41):

One of the things that I wanted to touch on again, is this idea of context, collapse, where almost every person who’s worked for more than a couple years at a company has experienced this, where there becomes a point where there is so much information that the signal gets lost in voice. And now the context that is needed to solve problems just ends up collapsing.

Sam Corcos (44:08):

And Darren Murph from GitLab said something in a conversation I had with him a couple months ago that really stuck with me. And I keep thinking about it, because we’re dealing with this right now. We have two much communication happening, or at least I shouldn’t say too much communication. There is too much communication noise and people are getting lost.

Sam Corcos (44:31):

I was doing a screen share with our head of design, Allan, the other day. And I saw his screen and I noticed that he has almost 700 unread messages in threads, which is our communication tool, which is like just way too many. It might just all be insanity. And one of the proposals that people have said on the team and it’s like, well, maybe we should do things as direct messages, not share as much to everyone. And Darren said something that stuck with me, which is, do you ever hear people argue that there’s too much information on the internet? It’s like, no, obviously not.

David Perell (45:05):

Yeah.

Sam Corcos (45:06):

So, too much information can’t be the problem that you’re describing.

David Perell (45:11):

Somebody said information overload doesn’t exist, it’s filter failure.

Sam Corcos (45:15):

Yeah. That’s right. I imagine you have a lot of writing internally. How do you think about solving these problems? Not necessarily tactical implementations, but approaches.

David Perell (45:29):

Well, how big is Levels?

Sam Corcos (45:31):

We’re about 40 people.

David Perell (45:31):

I mean, we’re just not. So, we’re small. I mean, it’s just every big decision has to be made in writing. So, just that simple. And then most of the smaller things are done in meetings and text messages. We don’t have that issue yet. We really don’t.

David Perell (45:47):

And so, the thing that I would say though is, as you scale as a company, you have to solve the filter problem with writing and basically exerting, right? If you want less of something to happen naturally, you have to exert some cost on it. One of the things that you can do is you can promote long form writing internally. And what you’re doing there is you’re saying, “Okay. The things that get shared are going to have a long form writing component.” Which is going to force people to think about things. Now, one of the big issues with that though, so you’re going to attract people who are writers, but you’re going to create just a certain egalitarianism, where certain people are better writers than others. And so, you’re now hurting the people who don’t write well. And maybe they can team up with other people to really think through things.

David Perell (46:44):

And then, one of the things I would say is, maybe there’s like the Levels gold channel. Okay. So, this is where good vetted by Sam and executive writing gets put in. And this is like, comes in a weekly newsletter or something like that. So, then what happens is at the top of every essay, there’s a 10 minute Loom video. Once you have an essay, now you’ve done what you need to in order to get something published on the podcast. And the essay is like, or the memo is like a way of doing the work in order to then be heard over time. And I think so when you’re 400, I think that’ll be more the case. When you’re 4,000, I think that’ll definitely to be something. Because when you’re 4,000, you can’t have the same slack or whatever back and forth that you have now. But when you were four or 10, like we are now, you can get away with a lot of those things. So yeah, that’s how I think about it.

David Perell (47:45):

I would think of writing exerts a cost, but the benefit of the increased cost is compression and efficiency. But then you got to solve the emotional issues for certain things. I mean, if you’re talking about certain kinds of strategy, right? Your go to market for glucose monitors, I don’t know. I’m just picking something up. Then you don’t need a certain emotional subtlety, but if you’re talking about, “Hey, this company isn’t serious like it used to be. We used to show up. It was early startup days. We used to grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. Saturday afternoon, we would always meet in the coffee shop, me and the founders. And we would get after it so hard. And now, none of you even care that much or try hard. I sense it’s remote work and you’re cutting off at 3:30,.” All those sorts of things. No, you can’t write that. There needs to be an emotional wrapping around that message.

Sam Corcos (48:41):

Actually, it’s funny, it ties into that. One of the first indications that there was something different about writing was in one of our Friday forums, just a team all hands, somebody made a joke, and I didn’t think anything of it, but there was some subtext that somebody found marginally offensive. And they called me, they explained the situation, said like, “Should I write this to them and tell them?” And I immediately said, “You should actually call them.” Because there’s something about writing that feels like a threat or a reprimand, or something that the exact same words in a call just doesn’t have the same sort of weight. And it was just a passing comment. The person didn’t know the subtext of this thing. It ended up not being a problem. But there’s something about writing that just, it has something deeper that escalates these problems. So, I don’t know what that means.

David Perell (49:46):

I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I had a really uncomfortable interaction yesterday. And I got to call this guy and be like, “Dude, what?” But I could have texted him. I got to call him. Actually, I got to FaceTime him. Right. FaceTime adds a whole other element of personality and honesty. And that’s always what I do, if I have a difficult interaction. Mom called me on Sunday night, “Dad is mad at you.” Dad gets a FaceTime. It’s not a text.

Sam Corcos (50:15):

Right, right, right.

David Perell (50:16):

“Dad, we got to talk about this.” And then have that. And I agree. It’s funny with things like this, because everybody thinks that they know this. And there’s certain things that people don’t know that they know they don’t know. And then there’s certain things that they don’t know that they know, they know, and that don’t know that they know, they know, is a really tricky place to be. I was thinking about this in building a career.

Sam Corcos (50:43):

The Dunning Kruger problem.

David Perell (50:43):

I wanted to work in social media. And the problem with social media is people actually aren’t good at social media, but everyone has got Facebook and Instagram, and Snapchat. So like, “Oh, I’m a social media expert. I don’t need to hire you.” And so, the point is in imparting these ideas, you can’t baby people and it has to be done intelligently. And also, there’s just a certain set of cultural norms to build around these things. Actually, that’s an interesting idea. With things that people don’t know, but they think they know, maybe the solution is cultural norms instead of explicit things that you’re saying, because sometimes the explicit nature of things feels like you’re talking down to people, “Hey, if you have an issue with somebody, call them instead of text them.” They’re like, “Geez, what is this? The third grade?” But then if you’re leading by example and you’re creating a culture, which is just a set of precedent in a way of doing things, where it’s okay to call people, then I think maybe you can solve those issues.

Sam Corcos (51:50):

Yeah. And it’s funny, actually, the role that writing plays in surfacing the things that you thought you knew, but you don’t actually know.

David Perell (51:57):

Of course.

Sam Corcos (51:59):

The number of times that I had an idea that I thought was very clear and crystallized, and other people on the team were confused by it, and I was like, “Fine. I’ll just write a memo on this.” And I start writing it. I’m three sentences in, I’m like, “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” Okay. Maybe I didn’t know this topic as well as I thought I did. And it required a lot more exploration and thought to really crystallize that, to get it out.

David Perell (52:26):

Writing is a process of digging. It’s, you’re in one place and you just keep digging, and you keep digging, and you keep digging. And you go to different layers and you discover weird things. And as you dig, there are these weird ways that the typology of ideas begin to come together and synthesize. And it’s almost like the geology of your own mind or something.

David Perell (52:49):

On Monday, I put together like four different dots. It was the history of Christianity with psychedelics, with why we’re thinking differently about how we create things. And I was like, “Oh my God, to the best of my knowledge, no one’s ever had this idea before.” It’s like brought in with Fordism and the surrealist. It was just one paragraph. I was like, “How did I end up here?” And I think that’s what writing is really, really, really helpful with. And that’s deep down in the context of something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. But like you said, that requires a tremendous amount of work and patience. And digging is the antithesis of… It’s like a vertical exploration rather than a horizontal one.