How David Perell's Podcast Generated 3.1M Views in 6 Months, Posting 17 Clips Per Day on Autopilot

The Introduction:

David Perell founded Write of Passage to help people learn how to write and think more clearly online. His podcast, How I Write, extends that mission by pulling back the curtain on how the world’s most influential creators actually work. Each episode features a deep, unfiltered conversation with guests like Sam Altman, Robert Greene, and Tim Ferriss, often running 60 to 90 minutes and packed with insight.

The content was exceptional, but the format came with a tradeoff. Long-form depth builds trust with existing listeners, but it limits how easily new audiences can discover the show.

The Problem:

How I Write had already built a loyal audience of more than 500,000 listeners across Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, but most potential fans were never seeing the show. The podcast’s best insights lived inside 60 to 90-minute episodes, while modern discovery happens through short-form clips on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts. Turning each episode into social content was possible, but the manual process took six to eight hours per episode, created constant posting delays, and still surfaced only a handful of moments, leaving dozens of highly shareable clips buried in the long-form archive.

The Strategy:

In March, David’s team decided to rethink the workflow entirely. Instead of treating social clips as a manual afterthought, they partnered with Overlap to build an always-on content engine powered by AI. The idea was simple: let AI do what humans are bad at doing consistently, watching entire episodes, finding standout moments, and turning them into platform-ready clips at scale.

With Overlap in place, every new episode of How I Write was automatically analyzed from start to finish. The AI identified engaging, quotable moments, generated clips of varying lengths, formatted them for TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, added captions and visual elements, and published them directly to social channels. What once took days of manual effort now happened continuously in the background, with the team stepping in only to review and approve.

The Results:

In the six months following the rollout, How I Write transformed from a traditional podcast into a viral content engine. More than 3.1 million video views were generated from podcast clips alone, introducing the show to entirely new audiences. The social presence grew by over 50,000 followers, and more than 3,000 clips were created, averaging 17 new pieces of content per day, the vast majority of which never would have existed under a manual workflow.

Beyond the numbers, the biggest shift was operational. Manual clipping was eliminated entirely, posting delays disappeared, and every episode now produced 30 to 50 clips instead of five to ten. Moments that would have been lost deep in a conversation, whether a key insight from Sam Altman at minute 52 or a quotable takeaway from Robert Greene near the end of an episode, were surfaced automatically. How I Write proved that creators no longer have to choose between depth and reach. With the right system, one long-form conversation can become hundreds of discovery moments, all working together to grow the audience around the clock.