Transcript
Table of Contents:
[02:23] The story of Humans of New York
[05:35] How to interview strangers
[08:35] Where to find the truth
[23:14] The keys to a good conversation
[27:14] How to write somebody’s story
[33:39] Escaping the algorithm
[40:07] Telling ordinary people’s stories
[49:09] Brandon’s unique writing style
[57:11] Lessons from Robert Caro
[1:01:11] The one thing every story needs
[1:06:18] Brandon’s best writing advice
David Perell:
Brandon Stanton, the creator of Humans in New York, came on the show to talk about how he wrote his way to five published books and 13 million Instagram followers. Along the way, the man basically invented his own genre of biography. There are short stories and long stories.
What he would do every single day is walk out onto the streets of New York, photograph people, and interview them. He would say, “How do I tell this person’s story?” But what he discovered is that these people’s stories were stories about the human condition itself, and it went completely viral.
So if you’re interested in thinking about how to tell better stories about people, how to find my voice as a writer, then you’re going to like this conversation.
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The place I want to start is how you think about the writing for Humans in New York. When I first saw Humans in New York, I was like, “Oh, this is a big Instagram page.” I associate Instagram with photos.
Actually, in the prep for this, I came to realize, “Wow, writing is a big part of what it is you’re doing, at least words.”
Brandon Stanton:
Right. Well, Humans of New York started as photography. I was going to photograph 10,000 people, and I was going to recreate the city through that.
Through the course of doing that, I stopped and had short conversations with people about their lives. Then it became transcribing quotes. Then the interviews grew much longer. They became much more forensic, trying to learn deep themes and arcs about people’s lives.
That’s when more editorial and more writing came into it. As time went on, the season that we’re in now is really about writing in addition to the interviewing and the photography.
David Perell:
Well, you could basically look at every piece of writing along some sort of sliding scale where it’s like, how much of this is about the writer themselves. Hunter S. Thompson writes Fear and Loathing. This is Hunter S. Thompson’s take on what’s going on.
Yours is all the way on the other end of the siding scale. I didn’t even know your name for so many years. I was just like, “Oh, this is Humans in New York.” Is this one person, many people? So you almost remove yourself from the writing there.
Brandon Stanton:
That was more of an artistic decision than anything. Humans of New York started just before social media really took off. I was trying to make a blog.
It was kind of a benefit for me because the metric I was keeping score by was never really followers, and it wasn’t money either. I moved to New York. I loved photography and wanted to make just enough money to photograph all day long.
I always had my personal path, my personal journey, rooted in how can the art be better? Because I wanted to be an artist. Early on, I realized that my art was better, the less of me that was in it, the more that I was a channel and less of a source.
So much of my disappearance is deliberate. People come up to me and say, “Oh, you work for Humans of New York,” or, “How do you get a job there?” or, “You’re Humans of New York.” I intentionally removed myself from the work because I thought it was better that way.
David Perell:
So how does the interview factor into this?
Brandon Stanton:
It’s kind of hard to categorize what genre it is or what craft it is that I specifically do, because the photography is a big part of it, the writing is a big part of it, the editorializing. I would say the part that I’ve done most, probably more so than a lot of people in the world, is the interview.
A specific kind of interview, too. An interview where you’re starting from zero, where this person knows nothing about you and you know nothing about them, and you’re in an inherently awkward situation, maybe on Fifth Avenue, with people streaming by. It’s a very unique and specific type of interview.
My craft is in a very short amount of time with a person who might be a little nervous about talking to a stranger, to create an environment and a framework with which I can learn as much about their lived experience as possible.
David Perell:
So you just go up to someone? It’s like Stacy on the street. Stacy standing there. She doesn’t look like she’s doing much. Stacy looks interesting, maybe because she’s wearing funny clothes.
Brandon Stanton:
In the beginning, it was. If you look at the very first Humans of New York book, you will see a lot of very colorful characters. I was new to New York, and there are so many types of people in New York City. The freedom of expression, the creativity that I was looking for. People that you would only see in New York City.
As time went on, it became much less about the photography and much more about drawing out the story. I started to take pride in photographing inconspicuous-looking people and drawing very deep stories out of them.
David Perell:
What does the photograph reveal about the human condition that writing can’t capture? And what does writing reveal about the human condition that the photograph can capture?
Brandon Stanton:
Photographs can be deceptive. There’s the whole genre of street photography where it’s all about these candid moments. Beautiful work. Beautiful in ways that my work is not beautiful, or it has a beauty that is inherent to it that my work lacks. It’s this extreme candor.
There is a beauty in my work that is maybe not present in that type of genre. So many times I’ll see a candid photo of somebody across the street, and they’ll look very angry or they’ll look very hard, edgy, New York. I think to myself, if I could have only got that person, it would have been, yes, they were in a moment of stress. But this is a father of two. One of his sons has a drug addiction. He’s extremely stressed. All he cares about is his children, and he’s carrying that weight around.
That’s why you caught him in that moment of stress. Photos are gorgeous, especially photos taken across the street, because it can catch you in these unguarded moments. There is a truth to that, but it is not the truth. It is a truth.
When entering into somebody’s life and intervening with them, suddenly you have a new type of photo. Then you also have these words that come out of it.
As far as my photography process, I’ll take one photo beforehand. When I first approach somebody, it’s going to be the least candid because the person’s very posed. Then I’ll start asking questions, and with the words, I’m trying to get to a level of truth and a level of authenticity. Then I’ll have my camera with me and I’ll start snapping during the conversation, trying to get a photo that has this kind of recreated candor. Just as much candor as a photo you took from across the street, but in a more staged interaction where the conversation brought out that candor. Then I will match that with the words and the quotes that I get from the story.
David Perell 08:35 - 09:04
Can you read this quote for me? I think one of the most interesting things that I picked up was how truth gets revealed.
You just said it, at the beginning, there isn’t that same candor, and then over time we begin to learn more and more about who somebody is as they get comfortable opening up with you. This really stuck out.
Brandon Stanton:
Truth is often spoken haltingly, with pauses, like it’s being dug up one spoonful at a time from somewhere deep. Truth feels heavy; it has gravity. It’s usually not floating on the surface.
Interviews rarely begin with truth. They begin with discomfort and uncertainty. People protect themselves with cliches or generalities and punctuate their answers with nervous laughter. But most interviews will eventually get to truth.
I’m speaking of the interview on the street, when you’re kind of unprepared. The way I describe it is the difference between a Persona and a person.
On the streets of New York, you’re constantly interacting with people’s Personas. I call it the business card version of themselves. The part that they put out on social media, the part that they want to be seen as—somebody who has it all together, somebody who’s moving through the world, somebody who’s an operator. Or, on the other end, it could be somebody that’s the providing mother, somebody that, whatever it is, that is this story that we’ve crafted for ourselves in order to be the tip of the spear that moves us through the world.
That is normally what you’re intersecting with when you first meet somebody. And there is a negotiation process at the beginning of every interview with that person.
It’s harder the more that a person has a public profile, like they’re a politician or a celebrity. The more of a negotiation this is, the harder it is to get beneath that. But even with an everyday person, there’s a negotiation at the beginning of the interview, not always, but most of the times, where that person is presenting a version of themselves that they would like to be seen as.
Then, with an interview with sustained attention, with follow-up questions, with interest, you unpack that, you get below that. When you get below that, the answers start coming out more slowly, with pauses. Because you’re getting down to things that somebody has never been challenged to think about before. And that’s where the really beautiful stuff is, when you’re thinking through something with somebody for the first time in their presence or in your presence.
That’s where the writing comes in: these interviews are pulling on a very, very long string, one spoonful at a time, where you’re coming at somebody’s life from all different angles—the different characters, the different seasons, the different arcs, the different feelings. Then you find a moment that you think is illustrative of something deeper about them. Then you carve that out, and you dig out into that moment, and then you come out of it.
I’ll come out of it with like a 20-page transcript, but I’ll know what it is at that point. At the end of every interview, I could tell the person exactly what their Humans of New York story is going to look like.
[11:59] Section at [11:59]
David Perell:
So is that the caption that you’re going for?
Brandon Stanton:
I mean, is.
David Perell:
Caption is not a good word?
Brandon Stanton:
Well, look, it’s unavoidable caption content. We’re kind of trapped by the lexicon of the mediums that we use. But yes, how I view this internally, from behind my own eyes, is that these are these people’s stories. I am fitting these stories into a 2,200 character limit so that they can reach people.
I do value impact and I do value transformation in the way I look at my process. I try to avoid the words that are the tools of the trade, of the social media trade, even though social media is what allows my work to distribute.
David Perell:
This quote really stuck with me because it mirrors so much of the writing process as well. Truth feels heavy. It has gravity.
I’m going to replace some words here. Good writing is not usually floating on the surface. Good writing doesn’t usually begin with the truth. It begins with discomfort. It begins with uncertainty. I’m not sure I want to say this. I’m not sure I want to go there. What am I even trying to say?
Writers, we protect ourselves with cliches and generality and punctuate their answers with whatever else. But eventually, good writing, good editing through work, you finally get to the truth.
Brandon Stanton:
That was really well done. What is it that I’m looking for in an interview? And what is it that you’re looking for when you’re trying to write something good? Singularity.
Cliches and generalities put you in a pool of other people. “This person would say that,” or “This is how this person would have written this,” or “This person would have.”
You protect yourself from exposure or vulnerability by aligning yourself with people who’ve done things in very similar ways.
But I think writing that is transcendent. When you discover something that really resonates, it’s when you get down to a level where it’s like, “Oh, this is the only person who could have written this. That is why it is speaking to me so deeply.”
That’s also where I’m trying to get to in these interviews. I know the interview is going very well when I’ve gotten to a place where I’ve interviewed 10,000 people all over the world, but this person in front of me right now is telling me something I haven’t heard before.
When you’ve interviewed 10,000 people and you get to there, that’s a very singular place, and that is what I value.
David Perell:
Having someone tell you something that you’ve never heard before happens at multiple levels. There’s the words. What are they saying? “This is a crazy story, this crazy thing that happened to you. I cannot believe that you grew up, and this thing happened. This was your family environment.”
But then also, there’s a voice. There’s a way of speaking, and I want to hear about that level, like the unique voice. In some of the stories that you tell, it’s like 10 words, 15 words, and I’m like, “Whoa, that voice is completely different.”
Brandon Stanton:
You’ve got it. It’s the holy grail of an interview. Sometimes when I find these people, I will stay with them for a long time.
Tanqueray is a great example of that. You can actually pull it up; it’s right there. There is a woman with an absolutely fantastic voice.
There are some people with great stories, meaning the events of their life are singular. Then there are people with singular voices, meaning the way they describe things and turn a phrase is very singular. When you have those two things married together, it is absolute magic.
David Perell:
You know who’s like this? I don’t mean to interject, but a really good example is Forrest Gump.
Brandon Stanton:
Yes.
David Perell:
Weird things happen to Forrest Gump, but the way that he processes the world is actually more vivid than the things that happen to him.
Brandon Stanton:
This was a woman that I met, and she recently passed away, so she’s very much on the top of my mind right now. Her name was Stephanie.
I met her randomly. I didn’t even have my camera at the time. I was coming back from the gym, wearing shorts. She was wearing a mink coat. She called me over and said, “Can I ask you something?”
She pulled me over to her and said, “Why is it that only white boys wear shorts in the winter?” That was her introduction to me. Then she launched on this monologue. We were in Chelsea about how this used to be where all the hookers were, and James Brown was over there. She started telling stories about James Brown and the Temptations.
She launched into this monologue about being a burlesque dancer in the 1970s. She was painting this world, and her voice was so distinctive.
David Perell:
Were.
Brandon Stanton:
Here’s a quote. “My stripper name was Tanqueray. Back in the 70s, I was the only black girl making white girl money.” I’ve never heard somebody say that. That is completely.
David Perell:
That’s my point. It took 10 words.
Brandon Stanton:
Yes.
“I danced at so many mob clubs that I learned Italian. Black girls weren’t even allowed in some of these places. Nothing but Guidos with their pinky rings and the one long fingernail they use for cocaine.”
I started interviewing her with the intention of just telling a one-part story. Her voice and her world were so singular that I spent months doing hours and untold hours of interviews with her. That got turned into still what I think is the longest story, well, the second longest.
I told a longer one that’s ever been told on social media. It was told over 33 different Instagram posts over the course of a week, and millions of people read it from beginning to end. So that’s me pushing up against the boundaries of what is possible on social media, trying to tell a full story, trying to be a writer within the confines of this medium that I use to reach people.
David Perell:
Well, you have a funny craft here. You’re looking for people with distinctive voices, and then you’re talking to them and doing some kind of dance where you identify their distinctive voice, but also get them to a place where they’re comfortable expressing their distinctive voice.
Then what happens is you are this steward, this custodian of taking their distinctive voice and translating that into a story that you tell.
Brandon Stanton:
Yes, it’s a lot of editorial, and the editorial happens in the interview itself. It started with me just asking people questions, going back, having this list of everything that they’ve said, and then trying to put together whatever I could.
But then you start to notice patterns, like, “Oh, I should have asked that. Oh, I should have asked that.”
Now I’ve done it so many times that I’m almost writing the story with the questions. Does that make sense?
It’s like you realize, “Okay, you’ve got a very beautiful plot here, a very beautiful arc, but now you need descriptive. You want to know what exactly were they wearing? What exactly did they look like at the time?”
David Perell:
Do you feel like there’s a hook moment? Like you’re fishing, and it’s like, “I got the hook, and now I’m trying to reel it in.”
Brandon Stanton:
I call it following the heat. Because I don’t have preparation, I don’t have notes. The only thing I have is my own curiosity. I’m just listening very intently, and when I have those lean-in moments, that’s a proxy for the audience.
When I’m like, “Wait, that happened? Wait, what?” it’s like whenever I really get hooked in and roped in, then I know that this is where the interview is singular. This is where it is something that I’ve never heard before. And I will normally start asking along the lines of that. I’ll start putting my finger on that. Normally it’s a struggle that the person’s gone through. If you can find somebody’s struggle, you will find a plot.
David Perell:
Yep.
Brandon Stanton:
Find what this person is pushed against, find what this person has overcome, and you will have a story with a plot. Then you will also have transformation. You can’t push against something, battle against something, chew on something, think about something for an extended amount of time without being changed by it.
So you have plot, you have transformation, and then you also have wisdom. If you find somebody’s struggle, you can find their genius. This is the thing that they’ve thought about the most. This is the thing that they’ve chewed on the most, that they’ve read about the most, that they’ve wondered about the most.
When I’m looking for something singular that this person can tell me that I’ve not heard from anybody else, normally it comes as a result of something that they’ve gone through. A lot of my questions are challenges somebody’s gone through or struggles that they’ve overcome.
David Perell:
When you say questions, my idea of you being in an interview is they talk, you respond with a question. How much do you think following the heat comes from questions versus, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been through that,” where you’re engaging with them and basically trying to bring out their story?
Brandon Stanton:
There’s something beneath all of that, which is energy. It’s probably the most important. It’s the very most difficult to put into words. I’ve had journalists follow me around, and they have interviewed the person that I just interviewed. The energy shift between the interview that I just had and then the interview with the journalist is remarkable.
One of them has a motive. One of them, the person, has a list of questions that they’re trying to get to fill in spots in an article that they are writing that they can kind of see in their head.
I think, I like to think, that when I’m having a conversation with somebody for Humans of New York, I’m just extremely present, trying to understand what it is like to be this person. That involves zero preparation, an extreme amount of active listening, and just a level of presence that I think people aren’t used to. When you have somebody being that present and that engaged with you and trying to figure out your life, I don’t know what it is that it unlocks.
At the beginning of every interview, I tell people, “Anything you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to answer. Anything you tell me that you don’t want to share, you don’t have to share.” You would be amazed at how little that option gets exercised. I like to think it’s because we’re all trying to figure ourselves out. When you have a partner there with you that is equally motivated to figure you out as you are, then there’s such an internal force, an internal magnetism, I guess, to help that person understand you.
David Perell:
How do you think about presence and intensity? There’s a kind of presence that’s like I’m completely locked in. Many years ago, I was with a friend, and he was like, “When we have a conversation, you’re too, your gaze is too intense, and I can’t think.”
I think it was Bill Clinton. Somebody once said about him, and he had just mad rizz, just really had a way with people. It was like he’s very present, but he had this soft gaze that then allowed people to open up. So how do you think about how to cultivate a presence that leads to connection and openness rather than defensiveness?
Brandon Stanton:
That’s a great question. If anything, I am too intense. I’m tough with people. I will call you out if you’re contradicting yourself. If you said that your mother treated you horribly, and then 15 minutes later in the interview you tell a story about your mother that demonstrates an element of her personality that was compassionate, I will challenge you. I will say, “You said this earlier, how do you explain that?” Because I want to get to the truth, and I really want to understand it. I have had people stop and be like, “Man, you are intense.”
I think I kind of just modulate it, but I’m also an emotional guy. My audience feels emotion because I felt emotion. “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” I am very much there feeling that person’s story. When we get to those spots, I am very much with them in their emotional world as well, what they are feeling. When it’s funny, I will belly laugh. I’ve got this large, obnoxious hyena laugh that people can see from across the street. I know an interview is great when that comes out.
Yes, it is intense because I take it very, very seriously. I take every person in front of me deadly serious, and that’s part of the power, I think. There’s just so many people walking around out there that are living amazing lives and just quiet acts of heroism and self-sacrifice. Single mothers in the Bronx and Brooklyn, the weight of their world is on their shoulder, and what they are accomplishing every single day is no less impressive or requires no less energy than people who create Fortune 500 companies. It’s just not written about as much.
To have somebody in front of you taking your story and your struggle and your accomplishments that deadly seriously, it can be intense, but I think the intensity is honoring in a way. I haven’t fully unwound that.
David Perell:
The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, “I’ll remember that later.” No, I mean, there’s so many times when I’m listening to a podcast, I want to save something, and I just never end up saving it because typing it into the phone is just too much work.
Well, I found a great solution to that problem. It’s called Podcast Magic, and they’re the sponsor of this episode. So what you do, super easy, say you’re listening on Apple or on Spotify. If you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and then email it to podcastmagicublime.
Brandon Stanton:
App.
David Perell:
If you email it, like, a minute later, you’ll get an email back with the transcript, the context, all the information that you need. That way you don’t need to write down all the information. So if you find something in the conversation that you really like, check out Podcast Magic. All right, let’s get to the interview.
Brandon Stanton:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I’ve spent so much time talking to people, talking to writers, and basically trying to encourage them that they, deep down, have something to say that is worth reading. I can’t think of a better proof of that than Humans of New York.
Now, there’s two major caveats here, okay? The first is you need a good editor, and I think you’re the editor. They’re giving you tens of thousands of words, and your task is to find the one thing. The other thing is, you gotta stop lying to yourself. You have to push past the cliche, and this isn’t like a lying to yourself like I’m trying to lie to yourself. This is just what you were saying. This is how we operate. We have a story, we have mantras, things that we keep at the surface of our minds that we use as armor to move through the world. What you’re doing is getting deeper than that.
Brandon Stanton:
It’s like to protect ourselves from the world and to protect ourselves from ourselves.
David Perell:
How about that?
Brandon Stanton:
We carry these stories around with us that serve ourselves in our own mental health, in our own sense of place in the world, in addition to marketing ourselves and in addition to presenting ourselves in a certain way.
In order to explain some of your behavior when you were a teenager, in your early 20s, in order for you to be comfortable with the person that you are in your own view of yourself, you might need to believe that your father was a more unnuanced person than he really was, was more of an asshole than he really was, because that is the only thing that would justify your behavior towards him. Same thing with your mother. Same thing with so many people around you. We craft these, and you have to be careful with yourself. I’m guilty of the same thing. Everybody is.
We have these stories, and we arrange these memories, this infinite selection of memories into our head. We’re all editing our own stories. Our brains will grab onto this one and remember this one. Why do you remember the 300 memories that you remember? A lot of times it is to serve a story that you are telling yourself about yourself that helps you move through the world with the perception that you are a good person, that you are living correctly and that you were doing the right thing. It’s not always truth. It is a truth, but it’s not always truth.
So so many of these interviews, like getting to the bottom of people, it’s not just me getting to the bottom of them, it’s us getting to the bottom of what happened and through very pointed follow up questions which ask a person to explain contradictions, explain where things don’t really match up, maybe arriving at a new synthesis, a new interpretation of things that happened that hold a deeper resonance than the story that would come out right off the tip of the tongue.
David Perell:
So much of what other people do for us in conversation is... I think of the mind as basically this mansion, but there’s a lot of trapdoors and little Pandora’s box chambers that we actually lock. We keep those things locked for trauma or whatever it is.
Over time we begin to follow like a narrower and narrower and narrower path throughout our lives. It’s like we’re almost dying and experiencing less and less. A lot of what you’re doing when you’re editing, when you’re pushing yourself deeper, when you’re in conversation is basically tools for getting us into the parts of our minds that normally we have locked. Often it’s very painful to go to those places.
Brandon Stanton:
But it’s not always, you know, one thing that I love, and this happened over and over and over again. There are so many people out there that are so self denying and live so much for other people, mainly mothers living for their children, that they close.
David Perell:
The doors to their own, to their.
Brandon Stanton:
Own heroism, to their own accomplishments, to what they’ve carried and come through. And so it’s not just people closing the doors to versions of themselves that make them seem less admirable.
It’s also selfless people closing the doors to themselves that make themselves seem more important or more admirable or more praiseworthy. And there’s so many times where I’ve run to people who’ve just been living their lives in service of other people, or they’re just too stressed because of finances, because of anything to think about themselves. They have to be self denying just to get through the world.
And sitting with them, unpacking their lives, rearranging it into a form of the story. So this person can see their life in their hand and say, I started here and I came here.
And seeing the pride and what it gives that person to be able to get that distance. And then it has a chapter two when it gets posted later on that night.
My audience is a very kind, self-selecting audience. You know, I always say, if you don’t like people, you get bored with Humans of New York and you move on. And so the people who stick around are people who are empathetic and they like people. And so there’s a chapter two where people get through that vulnerability, that discomfort of sharing, and then they share it, and then they just get affirmed in a very big way.
It was really cool for me because I did an art installation at Grand Central a couple weeks ago, and it was kind of like a Mecca for everybody that’s been on Humans of New York. And there have been thousands and thousands and thousands in this city. And having people come up and tell me what it was like, because I just met them and I moved on. You know what I mean? And they moved on. And so having them come up to me one at a time, over 100 people that I’d photographed and hadn’t seen since and tell me the experience of what it meant to them afterwards was very meaningful.
David Perell:
I got goosebumps for that one. Tell me about these ones. These like, this might not be the best example. So if there’s another one, let me know.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, it is. It is a great example. I love that one. We’ve got girls. Well, we got one.
David Perell:
There’s a story here. And that’s what I want to call out.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, what’s the story there? So we’ve got girls. You get one. So they’re talking about, they are talking about.
David Perell:
I love how fast you could tell a story, too.
Brandon Stanton:
But then also, look at his shirt.
David Perell:
I’ve got mad love for my mama. Yeah.
Brandon Stanton:
It’s like there are these little coincidences and there’s these little moments happening that don’t need adornment and they don’t need. And I think that’s one beautiful thing about the book.
The book freed me from the algorithm. There are very certain things that work in the algorithm. It’s like, I’m sure you know them. I know them.
They’re always changing these days. You can’t do really short texts. It’s all about the amount of time somebody spends looking at a post that decides how many people are going to see it.
So you can’t really do these very short kind of poetic quotes and have it get distributed. Beautiful thing about that book is 75% of those stories were not posted online. So I really disappeared for about two or three years.
Like, if you look at my rate of posting over 15 years, it stays very high. And then there’s a massive dip when Dear New York was written because I wanted to write a book, I wanted to write something outside of the sculpting, the subconscious sculpting mechanism of the algorithms. And that allowed me to do things like that, which are kind of shorter, less direct quotes, more nuanced, that have a little poeticism to it. And that’s something that doesn’t work on social media.
David Perell:
Well, these short ones, they kind of remind me of music. You know, I was talking to Roseanne Cash. She was sitting in that chair.
Brandon Stanton:
Oh, yes. A friend of mine.
David Perell:
And we were talking about one of her lines: “A feather’s not a bird, a rain is not the sea, a stone is not a mountain, but a river runs through me.”
I was like, I don’t know why that. That’s great. You know, that really resonates with me. And I go, what does it mean? And she goes, you really want me to tell you what it means?
Brandon Stanton:
Yeah, yeah.
David Perell:
And I was like, well, I’m not sure. She goes, well, you have in your mind what it means, but I would kind of rather you have that than me tell you what it means.
And so there’s something two-way about a short quote where now I get to think about, okay, what does this mean? What are all of my interpretations? And it actually might be less accurate but more meaningful.
Brandon Stanton:
Right, right. And it’s that two-wayness also carries forth into the interview. I ran into a woman in that—let me see if I can find her here.
So, this is one of the women that I, this is one of the people that I ran into in Grand Central Station. She came up to me because we had like an hour-long conversation, and she came up to me and she said it was interesting to see the parts of me that reflected you.
David Perell:
Whoa.
Brandon Stanton:
Yeah, and there’s the truth to that. It’s like there are certain things that I latch onto and certain things that I dig into in a person’s story. So, in a way, all of these have just a touch of autobiography in them.
David Perell:
More than just a touch, sure. Some of them, I mean, think of my relationship with my sister. I bet everyone’s like this. There are aspects of David Perell Perell that only come out with Sabrina, you know what I mean? And they’re nowhere else, they lie dormant.
Brandon Stanton:
That is true. And even in talking with a young male on 182nd Street and an 80-year-old woman in Jackson Heights, two completely different me’s, you know what I mean? It’s just like the moving, you ask about energy. Moving between masculine and feminine energy is very important on the streets.
It’s like you have got to have a different tone, you have got to have a different conversation when you are talking to a group of young males in certain areas than when you’re talking with an 80-year-old woman, you know what I mean? To be able to switch between those two energies is a big part of why this work works.
I think one of the things that I take pride in is the ability to get into what some people would describe as dangerous places. I’ve done this work in war zones around the world. I’ve done this work in every single neighborhood in New York City.
You get into those places with this energy, but then what you do is you get into those places with this energy, and you find so much life being lived in this energy, you know what I mean? Being able to go back and forth between those two, that’s what’s allowed me to reflect so many different types of lived experiences.
Yes, there is this Brandon Stanton, and this is the Brandon Stanton that built Humans of New York. But this is the Brandon Stanton that learned the stories and told the stories, and being able to go between those two is a huge part of it.
She said that I was interested in finding the part of you that was reflected in me, and her quote is, “Creation is different than production.” We’re talking about these two energies right now. Creation happens on the mountaintop where the world doesn’t matter, where you reach into the depths of your solitude for a gift. Then you come down here to the marketplace. You come back to the mortal world and let them know that there are mountains to climb if they choose.
David Perell:
That’s a normal person saying that?
Brandon Stanton:
Well, she’s no, none of these people are normal. Helen’s a genius. Here’s her backstory.
David Perell:
What I mean is just the number of geniuses is so high. It comes back to that point about the editing and diving past the cliche. I’ve just spoken to so many people who feel like they have nothing to say over the years.
I never used Humans of New York as an example of, look, all these people have something to say.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, I prefer the people who say that they have nothing to say because they’re the people that you get to those true moments. It’s like everyone has something to say if they’ll tell the truth. The bad interviews aren’t the people who have nothing to say. It’s the people who have so much to say, but none of it is very deeply earned. Do you know what I mean?
If I had a choice between two different people—somebody who’s extremely confident that they’re going to tell me something interesting and somebody who’s extremely insecure that they have nothing interesting to say—I will take the insecure person every single time because that is the person who is not so puffed up that they’ve created a false version of themselves.
I’m entirely self-taught. I flunked out of school. I was reading Nietzsche since I was 14. It was an intellectual ascent, but a spiritual descent. Nihilism comes from the same root as annihilate. When you begin to question the conscience, you start to believe that morality is a false construct. You break whatever laws you need to break to subsidize your addictions.
I bottomed out in this park when I was 24. I was emaciated, my skin was gray, I was missing a few teeth, my hair was falling out. I was gone. I came to this park to die and even death didn’t want me.
When you wake up in a pool of your own vomit and there’s a rat chewing on something you regurgitated, you don’t cry out to Nietzsche. You don’t cry out to Kant. Van Gogh can’t save you. The poets can’t save you. A real reckoning goes on.
I knew my soul was no longer my own, and even if I didn’t believe in God quite yet, I began to believe in the devil. I knew there was evil, and I knew I had to fight it.
These deep, deep human dramas are going on everywhere around us.
David Perell:
I like that point you were saying about the earned truths. It is a good prompt: what are the things that I’ve earned?
Honestly, sometimes you’re kind of blind to those things. Then there are these other truths that are very packaged and regurgitated that you’re just picking up from the culture, from books you’re reading, whatever else. But you can hear it when somebody is saying an earned truth because there’s a necessary originality, freshness, singularity to what they’re saying.
Brandon Stanton:
Boom.
David Perell:
You just hear it. How do you think about inspiration and how that functions into your work? I ask because you were pretty persistent about doing this every day, like four posts a day for years, no matter what. Talk to me about that and the role of discipline in building this.
Brandon Stanton:
With writing, it’s everything. I flunked out of school. When I was in college, I was somebody who never really did my homework in high school.
I tested very well. I had a lot of innate abilities which allowed me to read the back of a book right before the test and flip through and get like a B or an A minus, not like I was getting A pluses, phoning it in.
I got to a point after I graduated high school, even though I had a high school degree and a couple years of college, I realized I wasn’t really educated because I just floated through. I told myself I was going to read 100 pages a day.
I did that for several years. It started out with nonfiction, then it moved to a lot of fiction.
David Perell:
There’s a lot of biographies, right?
Brandon Stanton:
A lot of biographies at first, because I was a history major—a lot of biographies and a lot of history. My most recent season, I read about 150 to 200 works of fiction. That was over the past few years because I was trying to become a better writer.
What’s more important than the types of books that I was reading was that, yes, I finally, after 20 years of not being disciplined, established discipline in my life. I stopped judging myself based on my abilities, like, “Oh, I’m a good writer,” or, “Oh, I’m smart. I have good thoughts.” I’m somebody who can do work and show up every single day, taking my inner— I always say the one thing that you can be proud of without ego is the amount of work that you do, because that is something that is freely available to everybody. It has nothing to do with genetics. It has nothing to do with privilege.
The amount of work that you do every single day is something completely democratized. So, I decided I was going to root my identity in how much I worked and the amount of work I did every single day.
It started with 100 pages a day. Then when I got the camera, it just came to: I was going to photograph every single day. It was 30, 40 people a day. I was trying to get up to 10,000. Then when I started interviewing people, it became four interviews a day, and I did that for years, not missing a day, just every single day.
So much of Humans of New York, but not only the output, all of the inspiration, all of the iteration, came out of being there and doing it every single day. It’s just like, whether it’s this latest art installation I did at Grand Central— I mean, Dear New York, the prologue was run through 180 drafts. I’m not somebody who just has a bolt of inspiration and writes it out. I’m just somebody who shows up every single day and iterates.
That was all of Humans of New York, everything that I’ve ever written, the Grand Central installation that I just did. It was taking this big dream, this big goal that I had, and breaking it down into a set of behaviors that I could repeat every single day and just holding myself to that.
David Perell:
When you said that you wanted to become a better writer and you did it, reading nonfiction and fiction, what are the things that you identified that then you brought into your own work?
Brandon Stanton:
I used to be a massive reader, but it got pushed out of my life by photography. I read 100 pages every single day until I began Humans of New York. Then Humans of New York just took off so fast that I got away from writing. So, I went into this period in the last three or four years where I just read tons and tons of fiction.
What I was probably taught more than anything is that anything is allowed if you do it well. If I look at this season of reading that I did, I’m sure there are titles of books that I don’t even remember. I was just going wide, wide, wide. You can write in second person. You can write with punctuation. Anything is allowed if you do it well.
When you start to view the tools of writing as these weapons that you have to create a singular expression, that’s very freeing, as opposed to rules and constraints, paths and lanes, ways and genres, and all of these things, like, “This equals quality.”
That’s where art school and MFAs can be so dangerous. You come out of there with a very rigidly defined idea of what is quality and what is not. Not only does that lead away from singularity, it leads away from experimentation, it leads away from innovation.
It’s so helpful to ground your creative process in the act of creating every single day and not some act of what is good and what is correct. It is through showing up every single day and writing for an hour that you innovate, that you discover, that you run across things.
It might take longer to get there. It’s kind of a scenic pathway. But if you commit yourself to discovering your own path and discovering your own route through the process of showing up and doing the work every single day, as opposed to studying what is correct and studying what is right, when you do finally get there, hopefully it will look unlike anything else that anybody else has done, because you’ve earned it.
David Perell:
One of the things I noticed is the rhythm in your writing, and then lists. Maybe it’s just because of the stuff that I was reading, but rhythm and lists.
I think it shows up in this quote if you want to read it.
Brandon Stanton:
New York is humanity itself. Every type of person is here: every culture, every religion, every viewpoint. And all of us crowded onto the same narrow sidewalks, the same one way streets, the same subway cars. With all of these differences packed into so small a place, it’s a miracle that this city works. Yet somehow, despite the honking, the screaming, the shoving, the cursing, we make it work.
So much of what has become my writing, and again, you look at the path of Humans of New York. It went from single quotes to paragraphs to 33 part stories to this prologue, the first thing I’ve written in first person, and that’s 12,000 words.
It’s gradually moving towards longer and longer formats and pushing up against the thing. But I think one thing that I cannot escape from is the oral tradition.
All the stories that I have shared were told to me by voice. Hemingway said that you can write spoken or you can write written. I’d like to do both well, but I think in my head I’m always coming back to the rhythm and cadence of spoken word because that’s how stories were shared for millions of years and how they’ve been shared with me for the last 15 years of my life.
David Perell:
Well, you have a fun tool that you can use in that if you’re writing about New York. Anyone who writes about a city can basically use all of these examples.
Boom, boom, boom, that really brings something to life. All of us crowded onto the same narrow streets.
Brandon Stanton:
Boom.
David Perell:
The same one way streets. Boom. The same subway cars. Boom.
You could just think of all crowded restaurants, crowded concerts. You can keep adding these things. When you write about a city, you can just have these vivid examples, flashpoints that all of a sudden we can get a sense for the feel of the city.
Brandon Stanton:
What’s the singularity? What’s the one thing that I’ve done that nobody else has done, that might allow me to say something that nobody else has said? I’ve stopped 10,000 random people on the streets over the past 15 years and I’ve learned their stories.
If you look at the prologue of Humans of New York, there’s an entire section where we’re on a 7 train, and I’m bouncing off and forth between about 30 different people and their lives and their lived experiences and creating this summation of the city through its individual parts.
New York is the most diverse city in the world. Other cities have tried to claim this crown with cherry picked statistics, with every gauge of measurement except for the eyes and the ears. Fine cities, all of them. But whatever diversity they might claim, they have not the density to exhibit it fully.
Nowhere are there more types of people packed into a smaller place than New York City. And whatever thin walls separate New Yorkers above ground, dissolve underneath in the subway. Every type of person is pressed together in every arrangement like jigsaw pieces, back to back, chest to chest. Sometimes, yes, sometimes, not by choice, by the demand, the decree of this city, ass to face.
David Perell:
No, that’s what I mean. You can hear that oral spoken word tradition in there and you have the buildup. There’s kind of a clinkety clang to that rhythm. I definitely noticed what you’re doing with rhythm throughout the writing.
Brandon Stanton:
Yeah.
David Perell:
What’s crazy is I felt it immediately. That line about New York’s humanity was right at the front of the Dear New York exhibition at Grand Central. I walked up to it, and I was sucked into the exhibition because of the vibe of that first paragraph.
Brandon Stanton:
I appreciate that.
David Perell:
And New York even itself has that rhythm.
Brandon Stanton:
What is it that spoken word has that written word doesn’t? Lack of ornamentation.
You know what I mean? Lack of very carefully distilled, organized thoughts into something that just kind of flows perfectly uninterrupted. It’s more stilted. It’s more jumping around. It’s more repetitive. A lot of repetition occurs in spoken word that does not occur in a standard piece of writing.
So these are the elements that I think make a story feel so real when it is told on Humans of New York, that this is something being spoken to you for the very first time, as opposed to something that somebody went into a room and wrote to be the most distilled and polished version of their thoughts possible.
David Perell:
Man, that’s a good point. I feel like I hear a story. I don’t read a story.
Brandon Stanton:
Yeah. I mean, that’s how I’ve heard all of my stories. And so trying to maintain that, I think.
Again, as a prologue for Dear New York, this essay, I wanted it to be of a piece with the other 500 stories that were in there. So even though it is first person in my voice, I wanted it to have the same kind of texture and fabric as the other stories in there.
David Perell:
Are you deliberate about theme? You know, we’ve talked about you’ve found the right story, but how do you think about the theme of this? The theme kind of goes between the photo and the story that you’re writing. Is that something that you’re thinking about?
Brandon Stanton:
More so now than before. I just have more canvas because it started out with very, very short quotes. Then they went, and Covid is where I really started pushing the writing.
Covid was actually kind of a golden era on Humans of New York because I opened it up to people. I had like 22,000 submissions. I opened it up to people around the world to tell their stories. I would interview them remotely. And so, for the first time, I had unlimited amounts of time with people. I wasn’t trying to get whatever I could in a short amount of time.
That’s when I really started working on my writing. And I would interview people for a long period of time and then try to present their story in a way that was more them and had much more of an arc and much more control.
Then that went into multi part stories, five part stories on Instagram, then culminating in Tangeray, and actually culminating even further with a 54 part story I did last year, which are very controlled. You know, they are very architected.
This Dear New York prologue is very architected. Whether or not it is not your but anybody’s taste or whatnot, it was very difficult for me to write.
That’s because it has many different threads that kind of span out. It starts with the baby, and then it has many kind of threads that go out, and then they all kind of come back together and they weave back together like into that very final scene. That was very hard for me to control and very hard for me to keep of one piece, which is why I had to go through so many drafts.
David Perell:
It’s crazy your craft. You’re a biographer, but most biographers, just like Robert Caro, is going to spend 45, 50 years on Lyndon B. Johnson.
Brandon Stanton:
He’s a big person in my mind. I’ve read all his books twice.
He was very inspiring to me at a young age. Somebody who was able to take a real person’s story and imbue it with such literary form that it almost felt like fiction. So he’s always inspired me, even though he is much longer form than I am.
David Perell:
Well, it’s crazy that he’s all the way over there. 5,000 page biography of LBJ once it’s done. And then you can capture the essence of those two boys.
We get girls. Well, we got one. And that you can be a biographer with one sentence and one photo.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, I think also when I started to branch out and go longer, I was always. It’s great training. It’s fantastic training to have to tell things in short form because you learn what’s essential. It’s a whole process of learning what the story cannot do without. Because I think that if there’s anywhere where I help people tell their stories, it’s when you live your own life, everything seems important and everything seems essential. It’s the editor.
Identifying what pieces of a story are absolutely essential or will not hold together gives you an education in the bones of storytelling and the structure. Then you can take those bones, and you can build a much bigger body of flesh around it, having learned what it is that a story cannot do without. I think that’s where I am right now if I continue down writing.
David Perell:
Tell me more. Get concrete with the stories and what you’re learning about how to tell a good one.
Brandon Stanton:
One thing about good writing is you learn that you don’t need anything. You don’t even need to be linear. There’s a way that you can do anything in an interesting way. So, with that caveat put forward, there’s got to be stakes, and there’s got to be plot.
Aaron Sorkin taught me that. I learned a lot from Aaron Sorkin. He describes the plot of a story as the clothesline that you can hang. The clothespins being all the things that you love about writing: the exposition, the character building. If you don’t have that through line, if you don’t have that plot, if you don’t have those stakes that have the audience leaning forward or the reader leaning forward to learn what happens, then there’s not going to be a mechanism to carry somebody’s interest through the story to where you can wow and you can dazzle them with so many other things.
So, as far as having a character that knows what they want, having a character with a goal, having a character with needs that then can be either fulfilled or, in a good story, disappointed many times before it is eventually fulfilled, that will give you the forward momentum that which you can then drape upon all the writerly things. There’s the poeticisms, the views into life, the wisdom that you love. But without a character who has a need, a desire, something that they want, there is no forward track to move along.
That was a very important critical lesson. Again, you can go avant-garde, and you can say that linear storytelling is for whatever; that’s the old way or whatever. I like my story to move forward. I think that was a big realization that, underlying everything, there’s got to be a plot. The plot has got to be a character whose desires can serve as a proxy for desires in the reader, for yearnings in the reader that will attach the reader to that story and then carry them towards the end.
David Perell:
Yeah. How do you think about that desire? Is it care? Because it can be simple things. I think sometimes we think of desire as these grand whatevers. Sometimes it’s, “Man, it’s been a long week, and my relationship with my mother and my relationship with my son hasn’t been great. And I really want him to enjoy this pasta tonight.” You know, like the simplest things.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, there you go. In Humans of New York, even though I talk about writing, this is when you’re pushing into long form. Humans of New York is a mix of one-paragraph quotes, and I’ve done about 12 or 14 longer form stories, and that’s when plot comes in.
With Humans of New York proper, which is in this story with all these hundreds of very short interviews on the street, then you don’t need a plot. You can have a thought, a belief. The plot is what carries a reader through pages and pages.
So that is a mix. Yes, in Humans of New York, things can be very simple, but even for the longer ones that do arc within Humans of New York, it can be something like getting your first girlfriend. A lot of times, it’s getting sober.
I would say that’s probably the most common story because addiction is probably the one thing that people struggle with the most in different forms. It’s not always these loud accomplishments or these mountain peaks that people are going through, but there’s got to be something that somebody wants and that somebody needs because that’s the basis of the story. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about what happens to a person unless you know what it is that they need or they want to get some sort of resolution.
David Perell:
The word empathy is so overused that sometimes it feels trite, but that is a lot of what a good story is. Humans in New York is, here’s a person. I met them, had a conversation with them, and at some level, I found it worthy enough to share it with you.
So your job, I think, is to say, what can I write to bring you in here?
Brandon Stanton:
After living a few years in the city, you have had so many stereotypes overturned. The moment you think someone is this, they will surprise you. This too.
You have encountered so many assholes and so many saints of every color, class, and creed. Not only this, but depending on the weather, the lunar cycle, the train schedule, your blood sugar levels, and the hours of sleep you got last night, you will have been that saint, and you will have been that asshole in the lives of so many other people.
When you meet someone new, no matter how different they are from you, you might have at least a sneaking suspicion that had you been born in their shoes and walked their path, you might be a lot like them. That if you had been born on the small island of Leguan, in the middle of the Essequibo River, near the northern coast of Guyana, to a mother who told you on the day you left for America to hold on to God with all your body, all your soul, then you too might be shouting the gospel, as the woman is currently doing in car number two, three inches away from a man in a Spider-Man suit.
Empathy is not being like, I am like this person. It’s if I had lived a life like this person did, which was so remarkably different than all of the inputs that I went through in the process of putting together this personality, then I might be a lot more like them than I currently am. You need to understand one, what it’s like to be the person’s eyes, behind their eyes, and also where they came from.
Maybe that person’s a little harder around the edges, but that’s what happens when you grow up in a trailer with two heroin-addicted parents that are fighting nonstop. It’s not that, oh, I’m the same as this person. It’s if I had gone through all of these same things that this person went through, I would be a lot like them.
David Perell:
That’s so funny. I was trying to express something like that, and you’re just like, here we go. This is the thing that I had written. What a cool conversation.
Brandon Stanton:
Thank you. I enjoyed it. I appreciate you asking these questions.
David Perell:
It really hit me as we were talking of you, you move here from Philly, you don’t have money, and you just go out and you’re just gonna take four. You’re just gonna publish four posts a day or do all these interviews. There’s just such an insane persistence that’s part of the story.
Brandon Stanton:
Well, that’s where it gets to the creation of any sort of art. You have to believe that it’s beautiful, or that it will become beautiful, for so long before anyone else agrees with you.
If you worry about the amount, I’m not talking about content. I’m not talking about things that fit into the algorithm, like you’re never going to believe what he just said, or this homeless person has their life changed by me giving them $100,000, but like art.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Brandon Stanton:
It’s such a long and personal journey that if you root it in anything outside of your control, like people’s reception, you will just run out of gas before you get there. You have to root it in the doing of it.
If you want to be a musician, you have to root it in playing an hour a day, or four hours a day. If you want to be a writer, it’s writing a certain amount of hours every single day.
That’s the only way I know how to do it, because it’s too torturous, involves too much doubt, too much insecurity, if you’re judging yourself on anything else. You got to judge yourself by showing up.
If you wrote for an hour a day, you’re a writer, congratulations. And if you’ve won Pulitzer Prizes, but you haven’t written in a year, there’s a 16-year-old girl writing in her journal that is more of a writer than you are.
It’s the process of doing it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to judge myself on, because that’s the only thing that I know 100% positive I can control.
That creed and that viewpoint has carried me to the top of some very tall mountains, but the entire way up, I’m looking down at my feet. Pete, I can take one more step today. I can take one more step today.
David Perell:
Good to meet you.
Brandon Stanton:
Thank you, David Perell.
