David Perell put $150,000 of his own money into a pilot episode after Hollywood turned the idea down, published it from a channel with no subscribers, and hit 100,000 views in 18 hours.
The usual route is the other way around: get a studio to fund development, then find an audience. Perell's account of the meeting he took in Los Angeles the day before is that studios buy access and celebrity, and will not pay to turn an unknown writer into a household name.
"They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not going to allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain."
Perell writes and hosts How I Write, has recorded roughly 130 interviews with novelists, screenwriters and nonfiction writers, and hired the anonymous account behind the Cultural Tutor as a writer in residence when its author had just left a job at McDonald's.
I listened to the full segment so you can skip it. 40 minutes of audio, 15 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: David Perell, writer and host of the interview series How I Write, who has recorded about 130 interviews and funded a television pilot himself after Hollywood passed on it
🎙️ Hosts: John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who present TBPN live on X and YouTube every weekday
📰 Published: 9 September 2026 on YouTube (TBPN)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Show notes | ⏱️ 40 min | ✅ Time saved: 24 min
Key Takeaways
He watches every one of his roughly 130 interviews back, in a dark room, as game film
His most-watched interview last month was two years old
The recommendation algorithm found it about 15 months after publication
He is not booking guests who will go viral; he is building a record for 50 years from now
He funded a pilot himself for $150K after studios said no, and it did 100K views in 18 hours
The channel had zero subscribers when it published; the video is now at 5.6 million
Studios buy exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place, and will not develop talent
Prestige, in his framing, is an illusion worth paying for anyway
The reason building is expensive is partly that new buildings are ugly
Ugly buildings produce more regulation, regulation raises costs, and cost pressure produces more ugly buildings
Houses got generic because they became a liquid asset built by people who will not live in them
He says maximalism is returning and he is having a car painted metallic rose to prove it
1. He Watches All 130 Back
The segment opened on interviewing craft, prompted by the foldable iPhone Apple had launched that morning.
His research setup during an interview is a phone, not a laptop. Opening a computer signals seriousness; taking out a phone reads as scrolling. He said it feels a little disrespectful
He solves that by not going live. Because he edits, he can tell a guest to keep talking while he looks something up, and the pause disappears
The habit he described as his own discipline is review. "And then what I do is I watch every interview back." He put the count at 130 and called it his game film. A host filled in the image: dark room, screen on, locked in
2. The Two-Year-Old Hit
Asked which recent interview came closest to what he wants the show to be, Perell named a conversation with the poet Dana Gioia, brother of the writer Ted Gioia.
What made it work was loss rather than reading. Gioia lost a son in infancy, and Perell used a distinction he credited to a friend, Jeremy Giffon, between someone who has not yet been through something and someone who has and has wrestled with grief
The production was extreme. "So I flew out to Soma, we recorded for seven hours, chopped into a three-hour interview"
The distribution arrived long after publication. Perell said "that interview did okay and then the algorithm found how to distribute it like 15 months in" — and last month, two years after it went up, it was the show's most-watched interview by watch time
3. Chasing the Paris Review
The hosts asked whether he books guests for algorithmic upside, and named the rising-star strategy of catching somebody just before they break out.
He said that is not the game he is playing. "I don't really care about having something that crushes right away."
The model he named is a literary institution rather than a channel. He wants the Paris Review interview series — a body of work that looks like a snapshot when read decades later
The guest he used as the example is a fund manager who rarely does podcasts. Perell named Paul Tudor Jones as the kind of booking he wants
He gave a rival full credit anyway. He said Patrick O'Shaughnessy runs several products in one feed: interviews with people who have been quiet for years, timely conversations with a chief executive at a turning point, and regular catch-ups with an investor — and, on the hosts' example, breaking a founder's first public appearance
The hosts described their own product lines back at him — a ten-minute lightning-round interview with a young founder, a thirty-minute conversation, an hour in studio — and asked whether he is thinking about separate formats inside one feed. His answer was yes, without hesitation
4. Six Million Views a Month
His first goal was a roster, not a format. "I want to get the best writers in the world. That was my first goal." The month he described included Andy Weir, Gillian Flynn, Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell
The ladder from there is other crafts. Music, screenwriters, and whatever comes after that
The traffic numbers he gave. "So, we're going to do 6 million views on Instagram this month." A host asked about YouTube; the figure given was 3 million
He described the position as a local maximum. He got into this because he loves posting, and what worked turned out to be novelists and poets, which is now what he does
The status it produces has a name. A host defined it for him: a niche internet micro celebrity — recognized inside one community and invisible outside it. Perell's own version was that he and the hosts would be recognized at a startup accelerator and nowhere else, the way a car reviewer gets stopped at a car meet and not in a supermarket
5. The $150K Pilot Bet
He found the Cultural Tutor account on Twitter in 2022 and expected a retired academic. The author was 24, living in the north of England, with no money, and had just quit a job at McDonald's. The fallback plan was to join the British military
Perell hired him instead. He had just raised money for his writing business and made him a writer in residence. The follower count went from 100,000 at the time to 1.6 million on X three years later
The idea for a show came from a walk around London. "He's giving me a tour every day," Perell said, and his conclusion was that the man was a better speaker than writer: "You are the next Bourdain."
Hollywood said no first. The instruction he came away with was to go and make a pilot episode
So he paid for it. "Put in 150 grand of my own money. I really believe in this guy."
The result beat the target by a wide margin. "It was our goal to get 100,000 views and then go pitch Hollywood. And we did 100,000 views in 18 hours. And then 5.6 million views now. And just from that one video, almost a quarter million subs."
The hosts' framing was that this is the crossover year — Hollywood has noticed that internet properties adapt profitably — and their question was whether he still needs a studio at all
6. What Hollywood Wants
He had taken a meeting at a major studio the day before. His summary of the criteria was blunt: "This is what Hollywood tells us. They want exclusivity of person or exclusivity of place."
The worked example. Filming in the Sistine Chapel when nobody else can, or attaching Brad Pitt as host because he is interested in architecture. Either one unlocks money
The hosts' punchline was the third condition — one more change, and it needs to be a low-budget horror film
Perell said he does not expect to take that route, and one host judged the studio pitch not compelling
Asked what the pitch actually is, the answer was capital. Money now, in exchange for the thing being theirs
7. Prestige Is an Illusion
He named two things a streaming service supplies. Budget from Amazon, HBO or Apple to make something at a scale he cannot self-fund, and prestige
Then he defined the second one down. "I think the root of prestige translates to illusion." He said he reminds himself of that because views are now genuinely available without a studio
The gap is talent development. Studios are not in that business: "They will attach Brad Pitt, but they are not going to allow you to spend their money building the cultural tutor into the next Anthony Bourdain."
His conclusion is a sequencing one. Build the person on your own platform, and the studios open the door once there is nothing left to risk
The historical contrast came from a weekend at Sundance. Not the festival, the hotel where Robert Redford started it — a room hung with photographs of old Hollywood that he read as a record of risk-taking
8. Ugly Makes Building Costly
The hosts asked whether there is a line running from housing costs to the inability to build anything to architectural malaise.
Perell inverted the usual causation. The standard account is that building is hard, so it has to be cheaper and uglier — a cost problem. He cited a new article in Works in Progress making the opposite case: part of why it is hard to build is that what gets built is not beautiful enough
The neighbor is the mechanism. Objections come from people who expect the new thing to be a square box that makes the street worse
The loop, in his words. "And so it's this weird kind of compounding loop where things are ugly, so then there's more regulation, then there's more regulation, so it's more expensive. Then we need to save money, so things get ugly."
He thinks it can be run in reverse, with better buildings making people more willing to allow building
His evidence is anecdotal and recent. A European architect he met is working on buildings he expects to end up on every mood board, and a developer friend in the American Southwest showed him an entrance he described as certain to become iconic
A commercial force is pushing the same way. Perell said the world is Instagram-driven enough that beautiful things are now built specifically to stop a viewer's thumb
9. The Home Alone Remodel
Perell walked the hosts through what he called the side-by-side format — one old picture, one new one, no argument attached.
He thinks the format is underrated. "All it is you show one old thing versus one new thing" — common on X and Instagram, and taken seriously by nobody
The example on the screen was the Home Alone house, 1990 against its remodel. The original: wallpaper, carpet on the stairs, texture and warmth. The remodel: several shades of white and grey
His first cause is that housing became an asset class. Homes moved from something people built for themselves to something built by agents and companies, and a liquid asset rewards being generic
His second is that builders do not live there. "So they see the world through a spreadsheet."
One host read it as a trade rather than a tragedy — buy it, put carpet back on the staircase, restore the style
Perell had a caution about over-restoration. A friend spent heavily personalizing a property, and he thinks the work made it worse for almost any other buyer, so the spend has to be deducted from the next sale price rather than added to it
10. Pro Quality, Anti Crap
He expects maximalism to return and pointed at cars: a way to express yourself that became so uniform that a green car with tan seats now reads as basic
He is deliberately going further. "I'm in the process of specking a car that is like a rose metallic and it's like completely insane."
But he refused the label the hosts offered. "I'm just pro quality and anti crap."
His objection to minimalism is imitation, not minimalism. Done by people who understand the form it works; done by people who do not, it produces the meme of a mattress on the floor and nothing else
He does not want a revival either. "The thing is, I don't want to return to any era of design. I want us in 2026 to have a sweet era that like reflects who we are, what we value that like projects a bold vision for the future"
The spec house gets a partial defense. He described it as a canvas somebody else can paint on, which is what makes it liquid
11. Castles Become Museums
The hosts asked what he made of Mark Zuckerberg buying a castle in Ireland, given the criticism that technology wealth is not going into beautiful things.
He accepts the criticism and thinks the timing is wrong. The museums and libraries have not arrived yet, and the Stripe founders bought an Irish castle before this one
His forecast is generational. "Wait until they're 45, they'll buy the castles, they'll get sick of them at 65, the kids won't want to live there, and then there'll be museums and libraries" — because at some point nobody wants to pay $5 million a year to maintain an eighteenth-century castle
He noticed what both buyers did not do. They bought existing places rather than building. His counter-model is William Randolph Hearst, and his stated ambition is to start something so large he dies with it unfinished — and to encourage others to take on projects only the next generation will see finished
His main objection is the scale of the conversation. "I think that the beauty conversation is way too much about these giant big buildings." His alternatives were turning San Francisco's Panhandle into one of the best parks in America, or restoring four or five blocks of Fillmore Street, which he said somebody is already attempting
One host's example of the small version was John Paulson's $100 million gift to Central Park
12. The Lucas Museum
Perell arrived at the studio directly from a preview of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which he said opens on September 22nd, and left the museum on the promise that he could come back.
He called the project itself the encouraging part. San Francisco and Chicago turned it down; Los Angeles took it
It is not what he expected. He went in braced for Star Wars and found a collection of narrative painting
His comparison was to a canonical museum. He rated the Museum of Modern Art's collection higher, but said what you see there are the canon pieces; this is full of paintings he did not know
What unifies them is cinematic composition. "And almost every painting feels like a freeze frame in a movie and you almost feel like somebody stopped it." Dramatic lighting, dramatic scenes, a wide range of styles, and what he believes is one of the largest collections of Norman Rockwell anywhere
The curation is thematic rather than chronological. Family, school, friendship, or a single artist, instead of period and jargon — which he said makes it feel un-intimidating and genuinely mass-market
The hosts put George Lucas's collection at about 4,000 pieces and asked repeatedly whether there was at least one Chewbacca. Perell promised to send a selfie with one
Bonus Insights
On the new Obama library, Perell defended brutalism with a condition: "Good brutalism rocks" — but the variance is enormous, most of it is awful, and a style only works when average practitioners can execute it. A host said his own reference point for the style is Osama bin Laden's compound
Perell contrasted the library with three buildings from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. They were temporary, made of plaster, and not built to last — and his point was that today nothing would be built to that standard even permanently, let alone temporarily
His personal example of decline was a set of chains along the San Francisco waterfront he used to touch as a child, replaced with stainless steel: "each one of these is not a big deal, but if you have 10 or 100,000 decisions like this in a country and a culture, you really stamp out the soul and vitality, the spirit of who we are." His alternative was a design with small Golden Gate Bridges worked into it, which he said an artist somewhere would do at cost
The same argument extended to brand logos, which he said have converged on the same shapes. His reading is that aesthetics are the outward form of what a society values, and what these logos show is efficiency and conformity: "I want a world where there's like radical diversity." Then: "That's the world I want to live in. That's the world that inspires me."
He tracks John Lautner houses for sale and named two on the market — one in Pasadena, and one on two acres in Alaska at "only 1.37 million", which he pitched to a host as a starter home and a possible outpost for the show
His museum trick when a venue is sold out: "A ticket at most museums costs like $30. So if you're going with a friend, it's like $60." A membership is $120, and members get in. "So, if you just pay $60 more, $30 per person, you can basically get into any museum in the world. No lines."
The childhood version of the same instinct: he talked his father into cheap season tickets to Warriors games and sat outside the first deck for six of them, and he collected six baseballs at Wrigley Field in one visit by wearing the away team's cap, sitting by their dugout, and knowing the bullpen catcher's name
Perell's bottom line is that the platforms now supply everything a studio used to — audience, budget by another route, and proof of demand — so the only thing left worth buying from Hollywood is access, and the work of building a person into a name has to be paid for by whoever believes in them first.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
How I Write (Perell's interview series — about 130 recorded, with the best writers in the world as the stated first goal)
The Cultural Tutor (The account Perell found in 2022 and whose author he hired as a writer in residence; 100,000 followers then, 1.6 million on X three years later)
YouTube and Instagram (3 million and 6 million views this month respectively, on his numbers — and the algorithm that surfaced a two-year-old interview 15 months after publication)
Invest Like the Best (Patrick O'Shaughnessy's show, which Perell holds up as several products running in one feed)
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (Opens September 22nd in Los Angeles after San Francisco and Chicago passed; narrative painting rather than Star Wars, with a large Norman Rockwell holding)
Museum of Modern Art (His comparison — a better collection, but the canon rather than the unfamiliar)
Sundance Institute (The Utah hotel where Robert Redford started the festival, whose photographs of old Hollywood he read as a record of risk-taking)
Central Park Conservancy (The hosts' example of technology-scale money going into public beauty, via John Paulson's $100 million gift)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Works in Progress (The magazine carrying the new article Perell cited, arguing that part of why building is hard is that buildings are not beautiful enough)
Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir and Gone Girl – Gillian Flynn (Two of the authors on his slate for the month, alongside Michael Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell)
The Paris Review Interviews (The model Perell says he is copying — a record that reads as a snapshot decades later)
Steve Jobs Would Have Loved AI, and Been Hated for It (The show's own notes for the day, listing the running order and the headlines behind the news block)
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