there's this massive sort of bias toward oh if something doesn't have Mass Appeal then as an industry we're just not interested in putting it in print at all now the problem is that that skill set around building online distribution is not the same skill set as writing a really really really really really
awesome book we're going to see a Cambrian likee explosion of new books that under the old system would never have seen print I think the author has the compass and the compass is pointing them toward a book my job as the publisher is to remind them that they have that compass and remind them to look at it and not get distracted by
other shiny things other than that Compass make art not noise life is too short for disposable content wello everybody it's Jim oasy with yet another infinite Loops today I am super excited to have on a fellow publisher who has a very very unique way of looking at the publishing industry her name is Ellen fishbine she's the
founder of timira Studios you started as a writing quot coach by the way I had no idea how like famous you were here are the people you worked with as a writing coach David peral Shane Parish Derek cers Coleman Hughes oh my God you even had David Perell say Ellen is like Rick rubben for writing welcome Ellen thank
you for having me I'm really honored to be here and super excited it's really great to have you on did you take the name of your studio from that uh prehistoric cave where all the beautiful uh uh paintings uh are or or or no yes yes I sure did do you know uh the Steely Dan song caves of aliro I do yes I am a
long cely Dan fan I've seen them live a bunch of times and I loved that song for many many years and it and eventually I looked up like what is this song about the caves of alamir like what what are they singing about because it's it's incredible song and yeah it's this like 30,000 year old cave that has these incredible paintings
in it from you know 25,000 years before the invention of writing but it's just this last Testament to human creativity and I thought that was so beautiful and especially in like our day and age where we have so much ephemeral disposable stuff that we're doing this idea of yeah we're all about like a lasting
creative Pursuit and expression just felt like the right thing to do yeah I uh I I love all of those caves there's a bunch of good documentaries on several of them I don't know whether you've seen them Warner Hera did a really interesting one I can't recall the title of it right now but I watched it a couple of times and you know that voice
of is it's very just you just want to listen yeah I can't get it off to that guy so I'm fascinated by what you call the new book deal you you are an incredibly Innovative publisher uh backed by your uh ability to also serve as a great writing coach so tell me a little bit about the new book deal um that you are offering to both the public
well it's actually the writers but the public benefits yeah so the big picture of the really really big idea behind what I noticed from being embedded in the publishing industry and the way that I have been is that there are these blockages to getting things to a small but passionate kind of Niche audience
there's this there's this massive sort of bias toward oh if something doesn't have Mass Appeal or the potential for just reaching you know millions and millions and millions of people then we're just not as an industry we're just not interested in putting it in print at all but the print format is actually really valuable for Content even if it's
sometimes especially if it is directed towards sort of a niche group so we have this thing called the new book deal which is intended to help people harness kind of their first earliest True Believers and the way it works is you pitch me your idea let me know what you want to write about and if I if my team and I think
that it's a great idea then we'll say okay cool you get a pre-order page on our website and as soon as you hit 600 pre-orders we can print your book it's basically that simple and it's inspired by the fact that what I found with you know my initial project the very very first thing that we started printing which was almost like a guinea pig like
an experiment was this book space fairing which I wrote look look look at what I have right in front of me yeah for those who are just listening to us I'm I'm holding up the same book as Sal a great it's great by the way so it's it's a really it's a really interesting thing so I'm a poet at Heart Like that's the
earliest thing that I ever was when I was like even a little kid people would be like oh wow she's like reading Shakespeare and she's like 10 years old and I was really moved by The Poetry of Shakespeare I was moved by the poetry of William Butler Yates and all these people growing up and I started writing
it for decades I've written like thousands of poems and all this kind of stuff and that's where a lot of that writing coaching and editorial ability comes from people sort of a lot of times think like oh yeah you're known for kind of being this business writing coach who's helped all these people with their business
writing projects but poetry was really the wet stone for all of that stuff like having to develop the discipline of being able to say something meaningful in just a few words and putting in the Reps of doing that over decades is how I got to the point of being able to do a lot of the stuff that I've been able to do with
people with helping people write memos of raise like millions and millions of dollars and all this kind of stuff and so I wanted to show people I wanted to give people like a point of reference hey you know this was the stuff that actually got me here and also show people that it's a process of getting better at writing like hey I wasn't as
good in 2016 as 2017 2018 2019 it takes time and I wanted to I wanted to send people my poetry I just wanted to do that and so I looked into like self-publishing on Amazon and I found that the print quality with the self-publishing process on Amazon was just like utter garbage like all of the print on demand books
the way that there were all these imperfections in the quality to begin with and also as a poet I see there's a misconception with with poets and poetry like it's sort of seen as this kind of Dusty like old school thing but in fact like the core responsibility of a poet is to be on the frontier of language and
on the frontier of writing and part of that is doing things like using emojis in your poetry which is something that I do in space fairing but Amazon system like didn't actually allow you to properly display emojis and all this kind of stuff so I was like okay well if I want this thing to be done right and if I want it to be distributed
in something that's high quality that people will pay any attention to at all because most people will actually like pay money to avoid having to read something that that you send them if it's like poetry collection then I've got to figure out how to do it myself so I found this local printer in Texas and
I my team and I learned everything about like book design the covers the Interiors the materials that go into it the lead times what kinds of you know different factors go into being able to produce a book and we figured out how to produce this we went from not having ever produced a book to kind of doing it
from scratch and and when I started sending out this book even to just a few hundred people who were just kind of in my network whose email addresses I had just been collecting I started sending out this book I started just giving it to people sending it to people saying hey do you want this book it was a force multiplier for my
business even though it wasn't like a book about writing coaching or anything like that it was it was nothing of that sort but it was something that was physically present in people's space and it was something that reminded them of who I was and it was something that felt like a gift to them and so just having that small group of people
have a copy of my book it made them like sort of never forget about how they met me or when they met me or any of that kind of stuff so I would have people calling me nine months later being like hey uh yeah your book is like still on my desk I remember we had this conversation about like collaborating on
a writing project so can we do that now and people would just come back they would actually remember me a year later I would like see them at some thing and they would be like oh yeah like I actually read that thing you had this poem about wisdom and I was like really moved by that and thank you so much for
sharing that with me and all this stuff so I saw that like the power of having the print format available to you and having a high quality print having that book available to you even for a very small like Niche group was actually like something that I didn't want to give up now that I had seen it I was like I can
never go back so the idea behind the new book deal the idea behind everything we're doing at all Tamira is to make high quality printing to make that print format high quality beautiful design you know exactly what the person wants for their book available to them even if it's kind of like a niche group and the
new book deal makes it possible without even having to pay money up front because there's a lot of like self-publishing operations out there where you'll pay them like $50,000 up front and they'll you know do whatever you want for your book but the new book deal is kind of like a crowdfunding approach that allows people to get that
even if they don't have The Upfront cash which I think is important because a lot of really really really talented people don't have tens of thousands of dollars in upfront cash so I hope that wasn't too long winded no that wasn't too longwinded at all uh you also note in you have four Bibles and one of them are Shakespeare sonets and
that's something we share when I was a teenager I love poetry I still do uh but I memorized 100 poems and many of them were Shakespeare's sonnets like you know shall I comp yeah shall I compare thee to a summer's day Thou Art more lovely and more temperate R winds to shake the darling buds of May and hours late that
all too short to date the reason I did it was a couple kind of threefold first off I wanted to impress the ladies let's just be really honest yeah and in 1978 there were not many 18y olds who could uh you know do the Love Song of J Alfred Pock and then follow it up with Andrew Marell to his coin mistress so that was that was kind of my
to be honest the the the real motiv but I also had been thinking a lot about memorization and how memorization of anything not just poems poems because I love them right but of of many things really helped you make connections that you couldn't make otherwise right so in conversation coming across a passage
when you're reading Etc you're like oh my God that's just like Elliot you know where he says I have come to tell you all I shall tell you all and she says that isn't what I meant at all and then you just start making all these really cool connections and then the third thing was basically I just felt that I
should I should be able to just like quote something in in its full length because that seemed very very important to me um but you I I was really interested to see you listing the sonnets as one of your four Bibles talk a little bit about why that is because the other ones are a little more obvious to me uh but but tell me why why the
sonnets actually are one of your writing Bibles yeah so it goes back to this kind of poets being responsible for the frontier of language and the frontier of bringing language forward and Shakespeare was one of those poets so a lot of people don't know um I don't know you you may you may know this I maybe
you know this a lot of people don't know that Shakespeare was actually the co-founder of the Globe Theater which is that like big famous theater you know that most people don't know that so that famous theater in London where all of Shakespeare's plays were performed and all that kind of stuff and which is actually still operational in
this sort of like revised format today was co-founded by Shakespeare and his stake in the Globe Theater allowed him to retire like a pretty well-to-do guy to like the British country side and everything and that came from originally he had this group of actors called the Lord Chamberlain's men who he was kind
of traveling with and times were tough there was the Black Plague there was all this stuff going on and a lot of theatrical performances got shut down and it was just a really tough time for actors and writers and all this stuff but Shakespeare was like hey you know what I can write these plays and I can make sure that my theater company is is
the only company that technically like legally has the right to perform any of my plays and if I get together with like five of my best friends and we start this this Theater Company together then it's going to be hard for other people to shut us down or kick us out or give us the boot or tell us to go away or
anything like that and so that's exactly what they did and they had the Globe Theater and they were like yeah you know we put on Shakespeare's plays we're really amazing Shakespeare wrote like all plays for the Globe Theater they put it on they brought in crowds and the thing about it was that that writing was
the core so the majority of the population of England the majority of these audiences that were coming into the Globe Theater were like totally illiterate they couldn't read any words at all but Shakespeare was like I'm not going to dumb myself down for these people instead what I'm going to do and with the sonnets the sonnets were
actually the um primordial soup you could say of a lot of his later stuff a lot of the sonnets were written relatively early he wrote A lot of them before he wrote a lot of his very very great most famous plays and if you're someone like me and you're like a big nerd you'll go and find cross references where like a
decade later he'll sort of quote himself in a play something that he wrote in the sonnets 10 years earlier the sonnets just like what I was kind of describing earlier the sonnets were the wetstone they were the training ground they were the place where Shakespeare learned how to write to be able to create these
plays that then Drew these crowds and so originally he was writing for just this small group of people like the 10% of people who could actually read that was like the audience for the sonnets and then later on he would write for larger groups of people but he never lost that dedication to Quality and that commitment to beauty and to truth that
he veloped in the sonets and so that's why whenever I'm lost um whenever I'm and and kudos to you for digging up that article about the Bibles I think I wrote that in like 2018 or something so I'm I'm impressed um but it's still yeah to this day like whenever I'm lost whenever I'm like confused or anything like that
I can always find guidance there because Shakespeare says all this stuff about how to write and for example like he talks about how a really great use case for writing is creating um creating like an imprint or an impression of your mind so that you can become reacquainted with your mind later so you know this because I know I know
you Jim like you've gone into like some of your old Diaries from like way back and I have the same thing and fact I've like asked my parents to like burn some of them like oh God you know but like you you go and you become reacquainted you you made back then with that writing you you create it was like a handprint that
you left on the page but it was like of your mind you know and you go back and you're like wow I can become reacquainted with this person who was writing this stuff 10 20 30 many years ago and it's like I'm making a new friend all over again and it's like I can I can bring that back to life and Shakespeare had all
these incredible insights about writing along those lines that are just both inspirational and sort of educational that are all just in the sonnets that that's just kind of where he documented all that stuff um so yeah so the sonets have been very very important to me and it also just goes to show I mean there's
154 sonets you've memorized of them that's awesome I love that and they all have the same format it's like 14 lines they've got you know four that have a rhyme scheme four four two that rhyme with each other they've all got the same format they've all got you know 10 syllables per line and the whole thing and I've often compared it
to tweeting like a lot of writers these days get started with writing by tweeting and when the Tweet constraint was really really rigid like when you could never extend a tweet that was like really good the the either the 280 or 140 character is that constraint creates an exercise that forces you to get better at saying stuff within that
constraint and that was what the Sonet was for Shakespeare as well so you can see him like going through the Reps of learning how to handle this constraint and getting better and better at saying something worth saying within this quite challenging constraint of the sonnet form like kind of similar to a tweet so
yeah it was The Proving Ground it was the training ground it was the dojo and so whenever I'm confused that's that's where I go I love it I I I love the fact that uh Shakespeare like I've been down many Shakespeare rabbit holes because I I I am so he's one of my favorite authors of all time and like if
you just go out a list use of new words use of new phrases in vention of words Etc and you look it up well there is good old Billy at the top of the list uh so kind of not just a great writer poet but also an amazing thinker with a incredible understanding of The Human Condition and those tend to be my my favorite poets I I often uh sometime
some people think I'm joking but I'm really not joking um where I say that you know the The Poets uh and philosophers of yesterday year are are basically the rappers and uh rock musicians of today I don't know if you read the lyrics of say Pink Floyd like it read the lyrics read like TS Elliot you know lips that would kiss for
and prayers to Broken stone is an Elliot line and yet when you go through the pink uh Floyd lyrics it's not the same line but it's really really similar so I I definitely think you know people who lament oh you know there isn't the this kind of form available today or or that type of writer not necessarily you might
just have to look elsewhere I want to jump back though to the the new book deal because presumably when you decide on a project right and they give you the outline if they you got write the book right so do you help them with the writing of the book or do you once the outline is approved do you say okay we need a
manuscript before you get to uh the number of people on on on the campaign or or how does that work yeah so my sense the new book deal is still like very experimental I'll be totally honest and it's one of a few experiments that we have going on at Al Tamira because like I like I sort of say a lot you know we're
trying to be at the frontier we we kind of are at the frontier we can't help ourselves um it's very experimental so my sense is that the people who are a good fit for the new book deal are actually going to struggle more with King the pre-orders than with writing the book yeah um we do help them we do definit help them write the book and in
the past and and we still have our writing coaching service and we help people write books all the time we've helped people write extremely successful books and um you know traditional books that kind of fit the cookie cutter thing that kind of Legacy publishing industry likes and all that kind of stuff and
we're very familiar with that stuff the people who are fit for the new book deal they have a they have a vision for the book and they have the ability to write and they have some chops they need some editorial guidance they need a publisher um I'm I'm still I'm still kind of in a way I'm I'm learning in what way a an author really needs to be
served by a publisher um it's it's something about the way I see it is the author has a compass a lot of people say like the author kind of has a book you have a book in you and I kind of can't stand that language I think that's sort of like very bad I just don't doesn't resonate with me at all I think the
author has a compass and the compass is pointing them toward a book and is pointing them towards something that they want to see materialize in the world and I think that my job as the publisher is to remind them that they have that compass and remind them to look at it and not get distracted by other shiny
things other than that Compass so we're providing a lot of editorial support but the authors like for for example Jason Levan who did the new book deal and created this book memes make millions which is really fun um he knew like he really he had a very strong vision for what he wanted and it had a lot to do with like interviewing
these people who have made a lot of waves on social media by being funny and he had a really really strong vision and what he really needed was like someone to say yep we're going to execute on this Vision together we're going to follow through on this we're actually going to go ahead we're going to put up a pre-order page there's going
to be a mockup cover design on the pre-order page we're going to collect pre-orders for it together we're going to promise people that the book's going to come out in such a such a time and we're actually going to follow through on that idea because the vision was there the idea was there but just like
doing it all by himself on Gum Road or something like that um he may he he may very well have followed through with it but the execution wouldn't have been as good and the timing might not have been as good and also it's very easy for people like Jason I think you know he's he's great he had a lot of conviction in his idea
but I think for a lot of people it's really easy to sort of like lose their conviction in their vision and I think I have a good ear for like yeah you know what you're on to something with that like stick with that follow that trust that does that make sense totally um so it it's a bit like um you you you're very helpful in
being able to see oh that should be a book like when you're getting all these submissions memes make millions is a good example um and but you're also so really good at serving as a partner um a lot of people I think lose the conviction uh because they really don't have anyone that's spurring them on that's saying No
this is this really is a good idea you really should continue to do that um and and also your idea of focusing on say short form books and niches where traditional publishing just appears to tread because they so uh risk avoidant uh I it it makes total sense I want to go back briefly to to your Bibles and I
have a couple questions the first is uh have you found any additional Bibles since uh the four that you listed that we found but I also want to ask you about one that really fascinated me when I saw it because it's one of my favorite books and that is hess's glass beat game yeah why is that one of your Bibles for
writing I think I know why but I'd like to hear it from you well it's biblical you know it's funny I don't I don't know if that article is called Bibles for writing or just Bibles like the principle there is like when you're lost you come back to this um I mean it's definitely it's I didn't read it in the original German I like wish I could nor
did I nor did I yeah so whether it's my Bible for writing in that case is a little bit like you know maybe I don't know it's a little hard to say but um I should probably talk to my dad who who can read German but um the the the thing about Herman Hessa okay so I really I really like Herman Hessa because he was in a way with like a lot
of his earlier stuff glass bead game is kind of like his like magnumopus he won the Nobel for that as you know when did you read it by the way did you read it like I read it when I was in my early 20s and I had read s arth when I was a teenager and I'd gotten obsessed with dosm and so my dad who was his first job
actually was as a literature professor at a local college and so he saw me reading uh the Dow a jing and he's like oh you should read and then he hand literally handed me the book uh sidartha by uh pessa and I loved it and so I tend to be uh a little obsessive and when I love an author I try at least to read
everything they've ever written and and so yeah it was in my young 20s okay I love that and it speaks to exactly the point with with Hessa because the way when people have never heard of Herman Hessa what I say to people is he was like one of the very first young adult authors except his audience was young adults who had
fought in World War I so it's a little different than your today's 15-year-old who you know probably hasn't been in a war yet and hopefully never will right but like at that time a lot of his earliest stuff like the book Damian which I love that stuff was all directed toward people who young men who were kind of just getting
out of World War I and just finding their footing like if they were fortunate you know Finding their footing having been Veterans of this war and so it's very it's it's storytelling you know on this really profound like deep soul searching level that helps you figure out like who are you and what is your purpose in the world
and like what are you put on this Earth to do and glass bead game I love because it's you know in certain ways it's the culmination of of a lot of Herman hessa's work it's it's in certain ways it's the least legible and definitely like one of his longest things that he ever wrote but I think that the the premise
is you have this utopian world where like Academia actually works yeah we might put that into the category of H fantasy right yeah I mean like really you know it's like it's like up there with ogres and goblins and elves right like Academia actually work so you have this like magical kind of utopian world where Academia like
actually works and it kind of takes the form of this sort of like monastic Society of people who sort of like hold the intellect to be sacred in this way and they have this metaphorical and and the whole glass bead game is never really described concretely it's just a metaphor for like drawing analogies between different fields and it's like
I just there's so much about that that I love I want to know what you love about it but one of the things I love about it is that herit Hess was just like I'm just gonna go for it I'm just gonna I'm just gonna give it's like everybody who kind of wish it like everybody you know when you're when you're a little kid and
when I was a kid you know I realized I wasn't going to major in English or creative writing at some point that's what everyone thought I was going to do and end up studying economics and math because I realized I could like teach all the English classes and so I'm like you know you realize like oh this system
this kind of education system even if you're a very schoolish kind of bookish kid eventually you realize it's not it's that Ivory Tower is not as beautiful as you sort of hoped it would be but Herman Hess is like what if it were like what if we actually had this like Society of people who really and I just love that he committed to that and
he made that vision and he created this very very sophisticated and kind of like glittering magical metaphor for just combining of Minds um I just I just love that I mean you have so little storytelling that that is so elevated now you know it's it's very rare and so and he has these he has these great piercing insights about how
pseudointellectualism is like all about gravitating toward keywords and like individual little sound bites and this is like in the 50s you know he's like yeah so pseudointellectualism he's got these insights about how people gravitate toward keywords and sound bites rather than being a struck by the magnificence
of like the whole idea and like I love that I I just I just love his kind of vision of the world and and how he continues to be able to that book can do I think for a less young adult you know what some of his earlier kind of more lightweight books can do for for younger adults which is like help you dive back
into like who am I what was I put on this Earth for you know but what about you like how are you affected by it you know I I uh pulled it out to reread after finding it as one of your Bibles and so uh I will be in the uh on un fortunately it is I think number three in the stack um so I just uh I actually checked my notes from that period and uh
I just loved I loved loved loved because got to remember I just finished sidarta and then I read that one and I just thought that one of my notes was God I W and this would be in the early 1980s so a lot of people think a lot of the degradation in writing and everything was something you know that
happened recently well you know it's like the old joke I'm sure it's apocryphal but you know the first piece of Sumerian that they were unable or that they were able to translate was a young poet's lament saying that all the good poems have already been written so but but in my notes it was like I wish I think my exact uh line was
God I wish people could still write like this today and so just just the it what struck me the most about it not only the way he put the ideas together and everything else but just the How gorgeously It Was Written they just like amazing from my point of view which which leads me and I don't always spend
all our time on on your Bibles but this one also intrigued me so we go from that to from zero to one by Peter the yeah so so I when I know when I looked at that I'm like okay I almost made it my first question but I decided against that it shows your range to me at least uh but explain a little bit if if we are we going from the sublime to the
Practical what's going on with oh I'm grateful for that you know it's funny a lot of people like Matt one of one of my friends and advisers Matt learner um he one time like expressed this like sort of feeling of surprise kind of like what you're expressing now he's like yeah it's really interesting that you're
like all about this business writing stuff but you're like also a poet and you're really into this poetry and literature stuff and that like throws people for a loop all the time um but I think Peter so so first of all my my co-founder at altimira as a former paler guy so I have some familiarity with sort of the effects I have I have some
relatively personal Insight on sort of the effects of some of Peter Teal's work and so you know witnessing the culture at Palante tier just kind of like understanding some of the things about Palante tier and seeing that that really was a very is and and was when I kind of met a bunch of people there some years ago a
really extraordinary company I was like I better read this book because I didn't get to work there I actually interviewed there and I tried to drop out of college to join which is kind of a funny story well that would have impressed Peter for sure they basically said they basically they called they actually gave me an on-site
interview but they were like maybe you should like uh finish college and come back when you you're like a age to drink but anyway that was that was basically but but it was it was a good experience actually and so witnessing witnessing that and seeing seeing that I was like oh I better I better like learn a little
more about kind of other stuff related to this and so I read zero to one I watched some of Peter Teal's lectures and all that kind of stuff and I think zero to one is one of the very very best business books that has been written so when people ask me about business writing and like business non-fiction I point them toward that and
I think one of the reasons for that was actually the process by which it was created so like Peter teal and and Blake Masters you know they had this like student teacher type of thing where Blake Masters was taking all these notes and all this kind of stuff and it was there's a sense in which it was
the output of it it was not written a lot of people have so many misconceptions about writing and like writing a book and they think about writing a book and they think about they're like while they're writing the book they're like thinking about Oprah and like the millions of people who are going to be reading the book and all
this stuff but that book was the outcome of a process where there were there were like a bunch of students in a room and one of them was taking like really really really good notes that was Blake Masters and there was this very very personal delivery of information to like people who could be seen and and touched
in that same space and it was this act of communication that was happening within a group of actual people and I think that there are probably a lot of people who have a lot of great insights who could kind of put those insights into a book potentially but they don't have the opportunity or the the the Stars don't line up for them to be able to have a
process that really takes them back to having to communicate to actual people and I think the result was very much related to that and a lot of what we've done in writing coaching with my team kind of rhymes with that in many ways it's like you're going to do your best writing when you are trying to
communicate to someone who you can name and someone whose face you can see or at least call to mind um and so that's one of the things and and also just in general the the overall philosophy of like competition is for losers like you have a Publishing Company my friend Eric jensson also your friend you know he's got a Publishing
Company there's a bunch of people Ben patan there's a bunch of people who have uh publishing companies out there penguin is a Publishing Company Simon and Schuster all these things I do not see you or any of those people as competitors at all I just don't because I have the mindset of at Al Tamira we are trying to
do something quite distinctive we're at the frontier we're trying to do something that just isn't the same thing as what any of the other Publishers are doing and that book was very influential in kind of helping me realize like yeah you know there is I I really do believe that my team and I have kind of like a distinct gift to give to the media world
and it's not about it's not about fighting over kind of the same outcomes it's about thinking differently I love that that uh and and for what it's worth um we we have kind of the same attitude at infinite books we we don't view you as a competitor we don't view uh Eric as a competitor um we'd love the fact that there are all of
these new uh companies trying to reinvent reimagine publishing because I've written four books all non-fiction um and all specifically for the most part about the stock market um and having experienced the traditional route um and being quite dismayed by it to be quite Frank um I I've always sort
of had in the back of my mind gosh it would be fun to start a publishing company and like kind of do things that I think would work much better um which also kind of leads me to your 10 high convictions uh the first of which I if I recall correctly was traditional Publishers and we should get our nomenclature right here traditional
Publishers for our listeners and viewers th those are the names you know right Simon and chuster Penguin Books etc etc and I have a particular point of view about many of them and I think you share it with me uh but um one of the things that you said that really struck me and I really thought about it for a while and that
was they don't really have respect for their smart readers expand expand on that idea and what where that leads to I think the clearest uh the clearest way to understand that the simplest way to understand that is just in terms of how much fluff is in books so there's a lot of things there's a lot of things under the surface that
and I appreciate you reading that tweet thread it's funny it's like it's always the tip of the iceberg of so many things so so here's a here's a great story about my friend Elia um he has he he's a he's a gifted software engineer and he published a book with like a legacy one of these Legacy Publishers right and he
co-wrote it and so he and his co-author and it was like an engineer like a technical engineering book so he and his co-author wrote like a 150 page book or something and they were like here you go this is what we have to say about this very technical topic for other very technical people and the publisher this was not
long ago this was maybe 10 years ago okay the publisher comes back and goes we can't publish a 150 page book you've got to figure out how to make it 300 pages and so what they did because they're engineers and they're like good Engineers so they're lazy what they did is they had this whole like repository of like code
Snippets and like things like that that was just linked that was going to be kind of a digital resource that was going to be linked in the book hey if you need to copy and paste some code you can do that by going to this web page so they literally just put it in the manuscript and it was like 150 pages of
code Snippets that they just printed in the book in the manuscript to make the book meet the page limit I wish I were making this up it's just so funny I wish I were right so so they put that in the book and the publisher said okay great and so so it's like wow it's like just the complete and total it's like forget
about I mean wasting paper is neither here nor there like yeah it's a waste of paper but also what it's like absurd right and so what I what I learned so that was like one anecdote there's all kinds of stuff typically in in a contract with an author the publisher will mandate like a minimum word count that is quite High um
and it's usually like 65,000 words at the very lowest and the trouble is that and and that's exactly why we have all of these books that people who you know people who are smart people who you know read a lot and who love reading um will pick up a non-fiction book that's published like nowadays and they'll start reading it and like 35
pages in they'll realize that they've gotten past all the substance that's in the book and that has a lot to do with just a bunch of rules that these Publishers have about how much they're allowed to charge for a book of a certain length and like how they require these minimum word counts and all this
kind of stuff and to me like a smart person is a person who places a high value on his or her time like for starters right and so if if that that smart group of readers when I say they're underserved by the publishing industry that is one very very clear example like why would I the the real price I'm paying for this book is not
$20 it's you know eight hours of my time or three hours of my time or whatever time I'm going to put in to reading that book and so that's why at alamira typically rather than having a minimum word count in our contracts we actually literally have a maximum word count in our contracts and I worked with these guys who were this book called ask
Aristotle which is a lot of fun and it's 87 pages long and it's an introduction to Aristotle that is accessible and by the way like it's not written in in complex academic language at all like if you paste it into the Hemingway app which I love it will tell you that this is written at a sixth grade reading level
that's not to say it's dumbed down not in the slightest like you have this you know it's not dumbed down it's not dumbed down at all what it is is respectful of the time and there's going to be an audio book and the audio book is going to be like 3 hours and those three hours are going to be awesome and
it doesn't need any more than that and because we're not like a legacy instrument we can actually do that so that's just one example I can kind of go on and on about that um another thing is another thing is it it kind of rhymes with like what Hollywood is doing by and large but I'll just I'll just say one more thing about that kind of
underserved underserved kind of like smartest group of readers they value their time but that you know fact is is being ignored and another thing is that what the Publishers you know they kind of used to be they used to be sort of talent scouts they used to like go looking for kind of undiscovered talent and try to find that and bring it to
Market but now what they're doing is they're scouting out people who have already brought themselves to Market by building like a large social media following and they're going oh okay if you have they're just doing a numbers kind of math game right they're like if you have 200,000 newsletter subscribers then
you can probably sell at least 20,000 books so just as a math you know thing and so we're happy now the problem is that that skill set around building online distribution is not the same skill set as WR a really really really really really awesome book sometimes people who can do both of those things overlap but
most of the time they don't and also there's a lot of really really smart readers who don't use social media they don't use Twitter they don't use these platforms they don't sign up for newsletters because again they value their time they don't want emails all the time and so those people aren't being taken into consideration with
these decisions I completely agree um and one of the things that we believe that infinite books is that uh having good taste uh being incredibly and insatiably curious and finding those folks wherever they happen to be and then uh uh getting in touch with them and saying wow we think you have a great book uh are you
interested you're you're doing the same thing I I kind of think of the traditional Publishers having the mindset of a kind of a medieval Gill system and and the one of your high conviction things which I totally agree with is the idea that there are uh or have become I think it'd be a better way of looking at it because
Publishers used to do exactly what you said they used to take big risks on people that they thought were normous talented and uh they don't seem to do that much anymore and it's a bit like uh you know what it's a bit like they're clipping coupons almost in other words they have this huge back catalog which
you know they're that's where they're making like the majority of their money is on the books that they've already published yes they do the Splashy million dooll advances to Prince Harry or whomever but you know that that I think is just to get attention um like I I I got one big advance for one of my books but that was only because my
previous book what works on Wall Street had inexplicably I must say become a bestseller and I say inexplicably because it was like charts and graphs basically to be honest um like your friends who put all the code in in the book uh th this was of course intentionally done because I wanted it to be kind of like a textbook like a bay
Decker uh okay so everyone says buying stocks with low pees is a good way to invest I want to say well the evidence and that was the uh that was the seed of the idea for what was on Wall Street um but they they have become to my eye just in not only risk averse in seeking out new and bright talent but also in the clinging
to ways of doing things a Playbook that is no longer relevant that doesn't really work anymore and you get these really weird things like uh I I I still remember I just got one uh from my agent right and it was a royalty statement and literally you know what they look like like they're a single line we sold pick
a number which I think is often imaginary we sold 5,198 copies over the last uh half year here's your royalty check and and one of our ideas is is that we we want to be the not only the advocate for the author but we want to be able to handle those things that maybe authors aren't as interested in but would love to know about but don't
have the means to do for themselves so for example one of the things we're going to do is have a dashboard for all of our authors and the author depending on they what they want to do he or she can look at it daily in my earlier days I would look at it daily and now I would basically not look at it at all uh but
uh to see wow I I wonder why I sales 5x in Omaha oh well maybe that's because you wrote a book about Warren Buffett and they just had Woodstock for capitalism and people are buying the book but and I know that that's an idea of yours as well and and the idea to expand on what you said uh a moment ago of the social media aspect I I think
that that can be very helpful obviously but it it doesn't mean just because you have 200,000 followers on Twitter or on Instagram or wherever doesn't mean you're gonna have a great idea for a book necessarily right if you've got a good substack then that's proof of work and I like to see that for sure but social media also tends to like
reversion to the mean is a concept that is very well known in quantitative invest which is my old job um and and it seems like we're seeing that in publishing as well what do you think that's exactly what I say in my tweet thread I say regression to the mean which is what I the way I was taught that phrase means
the same thing right but yeah and what's happening is it kind of goes back to what we were talking about with the Peter teal thing and the zero to one kind of book writing process like what's happening is these algorithms and actually Amazon is part of this and I think Amazon I think the discussion of Amazon is something
that you and I and like everybody in the publishing space should be kind of like into in general but like social media and Amazon kind of contribute to their algorithms are just sort of designed to push people to kind of like take the minimum action so like with social media everybody's familiar with like we can
all see how yeah what's being pushed is the stuff that oh yeah I'll just like that you know it's just kind of like this path of least resistance this snowball that just gets bigger and bigger and just pushes you toward this like smallest possible like action that then makes something look like it's a really big deal but that big deal is
just like the compilation of a lot of like path of least resistance like slightly just ever so slightly oh yeah okay I kind of like that type of action like how often the other day someone actually did make me laugh out loud with a tweet but that's like the exception rather than the rule you know typically stuff
you know that's just kind of mostly just okay and the stuff that does really well is just kind of like a little bit better than average it's not really the most extraordinary most amazing most like mind-blowing stuff and something similar is true with the Amazon kind of system Amazon is optimizing for buying the book not reading the
book so what's happening there is like that's that that action Amazon has brilliantly made the act of buying the book really really really easy right so they're just they're just doing the same thing they're optimizing for that path of like oh buy the book but if you talk to anybody practically anybody like
Kindle completion rates are hilariously low like the number of Kindle books people have and then the number that they've gotten past three % like that is a ridiculous number I don't know exactly what it is but anecdotally it's like 97% of your Kindle books are stuck below 5% completion so yeah it's not good so
that's a big that's a big part of this kind of regression it's like when you're optimizing it's I I tell this story you know it's like I went to a Subaru dealership and like I saw a guy who was like selling Subarus like okay great he's selling Subaru good for him and he had a whole stack of like Legacy books that kind of all looked the same they
were all just kind of carbon copies of atomic habits they were just all like clones of the same exact book they were all the exact same size same color same binding same he had this whole stack of books it was obvious that he hadn't opened a single one of them but he had bought like all 10 of them and so that's
that's what the that's what the industry is optimizing around they're optimizing around people who are going to buy and I can understand why they're doing that because they're like sort of Shackled to this business model that is very restrictive and so this is something you and I kind of talked about um another
time like they're sort of stuck with this business model that's very restrictive where their only real chance of making money has to do with like selling units of books they can't partner with the author to for example like we have authors who are getting paid you know4 to $10,000 to go and speak out a place
and we have the beginnings of some Partnerships with those people where part of the value that we bring to the table is that we make those speaking engagements possible and so we're able to capture part of the value of those engagements now Legacy publisher could like never do that they just can't kind of do that kind of deal at all
so I think it just all speaks to you know the need for for innovation in the industry because there's there's just so much old stuff that's weighing them down I don't remember how exactly we started this uh this trans we we we were talking about the reversion to the mean that social media and the model that traditional Legacy
Publishers follow oh he's got or she's got 300,000 some stack but boy we're going to be able to sell 50,000 copies of that book let's let's do that book without really thinking I love your insight though about uh you know in in AI they call it maximizing the objective function and and I love your idea that
Amazon has maximized the objective function for selling the book it has not maximized the objective function or you know people actually reading the book and or finding it interesting or learning something new now if I was on if I was Amazon I'd say well yeah we're a retailer what do you what else do you expect that we're going to maximize for
and you know I I would actually if they if they actually said that to me and I would had their book guy on here and uh was talking with him I'd accept that and that's why I love what you're doing what we're trying to do at infinite books what Eric is doing at scribe um we're not trying to maximize uh for the
objective function now we that's got to be a part of our plan because we don't want our authors that we spent a lot of time and effort with uh as their partner we don't want them to not sell their books so we we definitely want to also have a really good marketing uh arm for what they're doing but it's not our it's
not our Northstar nor is it yours clearly um and and so that does doesn't mean that you can't uh do even marketing differently so a bunch of things back to that uh dashboard that we are going to have for authors uh we also are going to have on Prem AI uh for our authors they can but it will be to their at their discretion if
they hate AI they can turn it all the way down to zero and have nothing to do with it if they're kind of open to it they can turn it to a like a six and if they love it they can turn it all the way up to a 10 if they had it all the way up to a 10 when that spike in Omaha happened an AI agent would instantly
search for all of the podcasts all of the people in om who might fit that author's being a guest on their podcast it will generate emails to that podcast copying the author Etc and we just think it will be a much more efficient way to put like-minded people together in terms of giving the opportunity to the author to go on a
podcast and and talk about their book um and we also are gonna have it as a writing coach I'm I'm a huge fan of AI but I'm not a fan of AI alone I'm a huge huge fan of the senatur model of AI which is human plus AI I think that's where the winning combination is going to and so one of the things that we are going to offer we don't have it yet
we're developing it right now but uh the we're investors in a different company called W and what it is is a AI uh designed for graphic artists traditional artists Etc but what drew me to it was the artist can put all of their own work in and then the AI Rifts on their work and the the number of graphic artists
we've heard from like this is the most amazing thing that I've ever seen in my life I put my own drawings in the new ones come out I'm like holy I never thought about that that's that's really good then I rip on it and it's called onean by the way because we actually have a physical uh like paintbrush uh that they that they can use and so we
thought why don't we do that with writers as well why don't we let them have a huge window in which they can put an entire manuscript for example and then have the AI work with them back and forth like yeah this is good have you ever think about this what do you think about ideas like that oh yeah I'm a huge
fan of AI and I want to get into actually a use case for AI that a few use cases but yeah totally and I already I kind of when when gpts came out you could start making your custom gpts I did that with poetry like I created a GPT that sort of yeah it writes some poems that are that are definitely
reminiscent of mine it it's is it GPT store I think so I think so um it's called G poet the jeo okay we will make it we will make sure that that goes into the show up yeah but it's I did do that and it it wasn't bad I think so there's a couple things so one use case that we have for AI that we what what we have found
internally is that I'll try to make this as clear as possible so my team and I have a pretty strong understanding of what it takes to like ghost write a manuscript from start to finish right so you have the the problem the ghost writing problem is you have somebody who's got a bunch of expertise in something but he doesn't have expert he
doesn't have expertise in writing right and then you have like writing technicians historically like the ghost writing partnership is like you take one of these guys you take one of these writing technicians and you bring them together and they produce a book so what we have found is that AI can really
accelerate not only accelerate that process but but improve that process and make it much much much much much better than it's ever been before so we've experimented and yeah we don't know everything although we do have a paler guy on our team so we know a little bit about AI but we don't know everything um certainly but we've experimented with
like different versions of co-pilots and you know writing feedback can be can be a use case but this idea of taking the ghost writing process and turning it into something that is more transcription based is the thing that we have found is very very high leverage with AI so when you have somebody like and you've met my
co-founder Bill he comes from like an academic and like Legacy publishing background so he has a really he has this superpower of being able to kind of hold a whole book in his head and kind of outline a book in his head and so he and I together are able to sit with somebody who has expertise in a field but no expert
expertise really in writing go okay how do we take this person's expertise and shape it into a stepbystep outline that will eventually become a book and then what we do is we prompt that individual to respond to fill in each of the modules of that outline so okay like for example Jim like now we need an
anecdote about a time when you made a big mistake with investing and let's talk about a couple of those anecdotes now we need an anecdote about um you know reversion to the mean that you personally exper whatever right so that's just kind of a shallow sort of gesture in the direction of the thing but it's like okay now we need a list of
the essential attributes of this thing that you're talking about now we need your best definition of this other thing that you're talking about now we need all the counterarguments that you've ever heard to your view now we need all the objections that we've ever heard to your view now we need how you respond to
those objections that this that and the other thing so then we prompt the human we use AI transcription and then we use AI to edit that transcript a little bit and shape that material into something that then fits into that outline that we created together like with that person and the outcome there is a
book that in a sense was written by no one which is really interesting um but is but is better typically than something that would be written by a ghost writer where with the ghost writing there's a couple of factors that come into play one is a lot of ghost writers aren't really that structural in their thinking compared to what I'm
describing and also they'll kind of add their own ideas in places where it might not be desirable whereas this really is about like getting this from The Source getting this from the horse's mouth so what I'm really excited about with AI is the potential to bring more people's expertise into this format that wasn't
possible before yes and that is very similar to uh our approach to this as well um I personally think that um having experimented I was a very early adopter of AI um back when they called it machine learning as opposed to AI um and saw the potential across so many Industries uh but um one of the first things I said was oh my God it would
have been so much easier I only wrote one book for the general public um and that was called how to retire Rich which basically took the uh principles of the far more technical what works on Wall Street and made them much more user friendly I guess is the the way to put it and I was thinking about that book
and thinking boy that would have been a better book had I had this tool available to me right now um using it in the way that that you suggest I I definitely think that um that is one of the more exciting changes and tools available to authors today um and specifically to people who as you mentioned would probably not have
written a book uh prior to disability to be prompted Etc another thing that I'm really noticing with AI is people are far more willing to take some like really critical feedback if it's not from another person right you you you mentioned the idea that the Ghost Rider will be like well I know that the domain expert thinks this but I
think it's really this way and then they slip their opinions in uh sometimes surreptitiously and if the domain expert isn't reading very very carefully they might get but the one of the things I've really noticed and I do this experiment a lot um I I will put in something I've written and uh then I always the one of
the first questions I ask is please suggest the uh and enumerate the weak points of this piece of writing and I got to be honest sometimes like they're really nasty and our but I but you're you're willing to be like oh yeah you know what that good for you chat GPT you're right and also the idea that I love that you include in
the way you do it is you really need to steal man your argument that's another thing I do quite a bit of I yeah what like I always try to take uh an argument that I might not agree with and and and put the best piece of it that I've read into a large language model and then say Steelman this for me show me why
this argument is right okay so then it comes up with a pretty good steel man but then I'll say I'll do the opposite and say please point out all of the deficiencies in this particular thing by doing that you really get out of the Hat see one of the things that I just hate although am a very lazy human being I
I'm fully coped to this all the time so I'm very very lazy but this idea of strawman just really annoys me and I've read so many books that are essentially Straw Men arguments and and I think that AI is gonna really really help either dissuade that author from like that's another thing I deeply believe if you cannot write what an idea you're having
or what you think about something if you can't write it you don't know what you're talking about it's an exercise that I've done forever since I was a young person and it's really really helpful because getting the words on paper is like pretty it's one of the best ways to call on yourself I think because it's like I got
nothing then you realize that what that is is a win or an opinion that you just happen to have uh that doesn't really have any kind of support or verification what do you think what do you think uh about the role of Agents do you think that those are going to disappear do you think they're going to change uh because you mentioned that you
are using the opportunity to help your authors get speaking gigs my agent his real business honestly is the speaking bureau attached to his agency um and uh yeah his name is West NE um and uh he he does huge business in the speak speaking bureau I did I did some speeches for him um where you get paid obviously I I was so used to making
speeches on behalf of my company and those you do for free because you are trying to attract clients um right but you know it was never really my gig and he was funny because he was like well you know Jim uh most authors he said it's like musicians they don't make anything for the recordings they make
things from the merchandise and from the touring uh and he said you know authors can make a very nice living you know just doing the speeches um but what do you think do you think the the role of agent is going to disappear or is it going to transform I think that historically agents have been the middleman you that's that's a that's
an that's like more of a publicist role so like your agent is kind of playing the role of both a publicist and an agent historically I would say agents have just been a middleman between Publishers and authors and I think that they're already kind of being largely phased out today a lot of what they're doing is just
helping authors build up a social media following and build up a personal brand that's going to be seen as attractive by Publishers right so I think that in the future you know Publishers are going to kind of continue lumbering along like doing the things that they're inclined to do and sort of doing they're going to continue
lumbering along they're going to continue producing certain kinds of output but I think for those of us who are on the frontier I think a personal connection between the publisher and the author actually talking directly to one another is going to be a lot more productive and a lot more creative than an agent kind
of playing the middleman does that make sense it does I that was one of my simple hypotheses uh when we were looking at all what we term the great reshuffle um and like one of my earlier business hypotheses was we're entering an era where the middleman is going to effectively be cut out um and not just in publishing by the way um in in many
uh areas the the one that quite frankly has surprised me that it's taken as long as it's taken is like that of real estate agents um it seems to me that that's just sort of begging for um uh dis intermediation uh so uh Wes if you're listening I love you I'll keep you as my agent I'm not going to run another book
probably uh because if I do it's going to be infinite books that publish it it so uh anyway just teasing um another thing that you started that I that I really like the idea is this you call it Muse by mail tell us a little bit about Muse by mail because I think it's really Innovative and very clever I'm really
really appreciative that you asked me about that thank you so much that is the latest and greatest experiment coming out of Al Tamira and it's I'm just really excited about it because I had a revelation that led to it and the Revelation that I had was I really love like by the way I love a lot of the architecture that you guys are
building I love a lot of the stuff that I've seen from so many Frontier kind of Publishers in the space and all this but what I've realized and and we you know our first we published our first book almost exactly two years ago now congratulations crazy it's like a wild ride man it's just really just weird but what I realized is
that the focus on what authors need is really really crucial but so is the focus on what readers need and that's the thing that I didn't and I think a lot of Publishers in the space have been thinking a lot about what authors need we've been thinking a lot about the money and the support and that's all really
important but really just as much as authors need to be served differently by publishers readers need to be served differently by Publishers and especially and I think that's going to start with the readers who are kind of a little bit of both the readers who are creative people whether they write or want to be authors or are
entrepreneurs or are creative in any kind of other way so I think that the future for authors and readers is to be brought together by Publishers in a way that's a lot more personal a lot more intimate and a lot more inspiring and so the idea of muse by mail is it is a personalized mail drop for Creative people and you can if you
go to Muse by mail.com you will be able to access whatever the latest iteration of this actually is which I don't even know when this podcast goes live I don't even know exactly where it's going to be but the idea is this I've put a lot of time into writing coaching I've spent a lot of time understanding people who are on a
creative Journey whether it's an entrepreneurial Journey or an author Journey or other types of creative Journeys as well I've put a lot of time into understanding what people need when they're on that type of Journey and at this point people are actually shocked by this but at this point a huge part of the value that I
add as a writing coach or anything like that is just inspiration the ability to kind of give people exactly that dose of inspiration that they need to carry on and so if you sign up for amuse by mail you sign up for these mail drops that happen quarterly the first thing that's going to happen is I personally will get in
touch with you and I will ask you about your creative journey and like what's going on and what you're doing and I will be able to get a sense for the kinds of stuff that will actually help you that will be signal and not noise and I will on a quarterly basis send you a book and also an addition of the
Muse which is this uh this new publication all focused on the creative Journey that's going to be packaged up in there as well as other kind of personalized things it's going to actually be individualized and curated just for you so that's kind of an experiment in terms of serving readers and it's going to be
a combination of the books that we put out as well as books that other people have published as well as just other things in general and I think it's for now it's only launched to people who I actually know personally so I'm really really excited to put it to the test with people who I don't know as well very cool idea and and that I think
ultimately that's what all of this is about um my friend Jimmy Sony made a joke that and I'm paraphrasing but he said you know if it isn't a topic of conversation at a very Swanky Midtown cocktail party most Publishers be like why would we ever even look at something like that right so a very insul kind of old school way of doing it and look uh
all of the people who published my book were traditional Publishers and I got a tremendous amount of uh advancement in my career uh from my books and so you know I I I that was my objective my objective was you know in the old days you you wanted to have a book um uh to sort of precede you so that people would
know and understand your view on the way to do whatever that particular thing is I'm speaking strictly about non-fiction here um but um I I I definitely think that we are at I I personally believe we're going to see a Cambrian like explosion of new books that under the old system would never have seen print would never have seen even digital for
that matter because um of people like you because of people like Eric over at scribe and hopefully infinite books and everyone else who's going to get great ideas to uh to do new Test new ideas ideas in the world of publishing because it just seems to me when you and like I was making the crack about real estate
agents many of my friends are real estate agents I'm not talking about you I'm talking about all those other ones but but the idea that it's taken until kind of now I love seeing all of this activity uh like with with your company and you and Eric and his and and the willingness to just experiment that's what I loved about um
about your Muse in a box right like you can afford to take these kinds of small experiments and just see how they do and I and I just I find that very exciting right because our our point of view is not like you know the traditional if you're doing it with a VC right what would the VC say to you well
but that doesn't scale no it probably doesn't you can't you can't individualize things but what it does do in my opinion is it creates a fan for life right and if you can create I I personally believe that if I would I would take a hundred people who absolutely loved a book that we were publishing and the effect that they
would have on that book and it's sales and everything else I would take that over maybe even the best ad campaign in Legacy Media that that you could come up with because I'm I don't know if you're like me but um I'll use movies uh or books actually as an example so my wife is a huge reader we everyone in my
family is uh but she reads almost exclusively uh literary fiction um and I'm always really eager because she has and I kid you not she has a perfect batting average with recommending new fiction books to me because she's really a tough grader uh you know she graduated Summa Kum La in journalism and actually was the editor of my books um
and I just think I was thinking about it the other I was just talking to her last night she's a book that she's been raving about and she goes but I'm not done with it yet so you can't count this as a recommendation but but you take that kind of person so much more seriously then you take you know this is the great
the you know the blurbs people put uh up online and whatnot a lot of that's just kind of a game honestly and I played it to be honest um and yet I I love the effect of what you're trying to to get across there and the experiments that you're you're trying uh to run I think I think they're really brilliant if you
could give we always try to um uh help our listeners and viewers uh we probably have a lot of people listening and and watching this right now are like boy I would really love to I I would really love to be start on that book or this idea is worth being a book Etc and you're you're also a writing coach and a good
one what do you think the the the best advice you could give to somebody who's just kind of they're close but they're not quite there to committing to getting the ideas on paper or into a recorder or whatever manner they want to do it what's your piece of advice for that person is it just just start is it Nikes
just do it or or do you have something that's piece of advice more nuanced the advice I have is think of someone you love someone you love very much could be your spouse could be your child could be a a really good friend could be a sibling parent someone you love and think about if you had just this one chance to express your love to that
person and to leave that person with something to remember you by what would come out what would you write down I would start there and a lot of times when people do this exercise it's very profound and then I go okay you did that good CU that's the most important thing you could have possibly done now think about just a few other
people in your life the people who you really really care about the people who you want to succeed you want to see them have a great future if you could leave them with just one thing what would that be and somewhere in those two exercises you will definitely find your book idea or the gift that you have
to give to the world and you'll definitely be able to uncover that compass that we were talking about that leads you in the direction of your best creative work um another thing I A lot of times say is make art not noise life is too short for disposable content and um lead by example you know do do and
and say the things that you hope other people will also say um but that exercise is is a great way to kind of unlock the compass that you're following and the gift that you have to give to the world wow I love that because that's the other part people sometimes think like how should how can I write something that's GNA really
appeal to a lot of people how can I you know write something that goes viral and I I agree with you wholeheartedly that you should be doing the opposite you should be writing something very very specific to somebody you know I love the way you extend it from you know that that one special person to the larger or or it's still not a large
group but the the larger uh segment that you want to talk to I think that's a huge mistake that people make and that's why you get some much of the finality and and the you know like oh this one's going to be a thinger what's the thing from succession the meme the all bangers all the time with with the the least
Banger Guy saying that in the meme um so so is that something that you also incorporate into uh tell me a little bit about coaching I know you do that is that a separate line or do you do it with people that you're also publishing it's a little bit of both um when we started it was just writing coaching and
we worked a lot of times with like CEOs who we still do that looking to improve their Communications with their internal team with their investors just with themselves to some degree you know founder CEOs with their visions and stuff and uh we've been you know tremendously helpful a lot of CEOs like speak very very very highly of the help
that we've provided there um so it's like we we work with a Executives who have like no intention of writing a book but who kind of do all this writing in today's business world as part of like what they do and then we also work with everybody who publishes a book with us or people who want to self-publish like
or go some other route we work with people who want doesn't really matter where they want to publish we provide like I mean we're the best in the world at this stuff like when penguin or Simon Shuster have an author who their own internal editorial team are like struggling to help them bring their book to the Finish Line literally they call
us so like we we've helped people create like Amazon self-published bestsellers we've helped people create like Legacy published books that have done extremely well we've helped people publish their books from start to finish so yeah we do that and and we have a very white glove very personal approach to it that's very much like okay if we
love this project and if we love you and if we think that this is something that should be in the world then yeah we we do that that's that's based at writing. coach but yeah I mean we're a tiny team and the whole thing it's just all kind of you know the altimir studio and the writing do coach thing it's kind of all
one it's it's one initiative around you know just goes back to me feeling like my place is just being at the frontier of writing the hardest challenges and you know the most interesting challenges in the writing world that's what I'm looking for so if you think you have one of those then I'm I'm definitely curious about it you know
that was also when I was writing around like what do I see what what might happen with traditional Publishers and that was actually one of the ideas that I had was that what they were going to do was go you know what we really suck at PE publicity we really suck at helping the author with editing we
haven't put the resources into that and I thought like if I was a PE guy I'm not a PE guy but if I was a private Equity guy like one of the things and I wanted to buy a publisher I would probably do exactly what you just described I would I would uh keep the mothership I would get rid of uh virtually all of the
functions that are not so great in it and I'd out sort them to brilliant people like you and I I just I'm kind of surprised I'm happy to hear you say that they're actually doing that um but I I think I'd go all in on that uh because that's the other aspect that is part of our thesis is the internet the interconnectivity the tools that are
available right now there are so many bright Innovative creative people in the world right now and you can find them that's the big difference right like that's why we started our fellowship program because in the old days the G could be born live and died without knowing that they're good at anything
without Ever Getting It expressed and and that is no longer the case we can find and fund these types of people and I think it's a wonderful experiment because it also underlines our r on dethro which is we can create now at a scale that was literally unimaginable even 20 years ago because of the aggregate a aggregating nature of social
media for example uh you've got to use it very carefully right if you if you do it the right way I think it can be an enormously powerful tool the problem is that most people don't do it the right way what are you most excited about right now be it a book be it something you're doing at the company what what do you like when you wake up and you think
oh God it's I'm so glad I'm I've got uh this that I'm working on I would say honestly I'm I'm really excited about ask Aristotle um I I'm really excited about it because every single for now you know it's it's gone out to a few hundred people and every single person who I've actually contacted and talked to about
it has been like this changed my life like this book just totally changed my life I'm now listening to Aristotle podcasts on my drive and stuff like that and we are releasing an audio book soon which will be recorded by a professional actor and we chose him very carefully based on you know thinking that he would
really do justice to this project and stuff like that and I I can't wait for that because both of my brothers are like quite a bit younger than I am they're both like in gen Z and I asked both of them I'm like do you guys ever read books they're like oh yeah we read a ton of books I'm like oh can I send you some books and they were like oh we
we only read audio books and so so I'm really really excited about that and that should be out pretty soon as well I'm I'm just I'm just super pumped I never really realized how big because I'm I'm not I'm thrilled to be on this podcast this was like super fun I love this I never realized how big of a thing the audio
format was and so I'm I'm really excited about that and I think people are going to love how much they get from just a few hours of listening time for that yeah uh it's great book thank you for sending it to me I'm a huge philosophy nerd as well and so I can give you your blurb right now uh for people who wish
they would like some philosophy but just haven't been able to get into it because a lot of philosophers were the greatest writers in the world I could be a little PID and sometimes a little hard to understand this book is really really great well Ellen I absolutely am enamored of you and what you're doing and uh I just think it's such an
exciting time to be in publishing to be doing all of these things new ideas and everything because like I say I honestly think that writing has never been more important I know that's one of David's big David perel's big things but I really agree with him um writing his go on even if you're not going to write a
book right your ability to be able to communicate through the written word has never been more important in my opinion and and so I love what you're doing I love uh all of the chances you're taking I love that this was your and I'm holding up her the book first book that she published with is her
poetry um it's it's uh it's very fresh it's very uh creative and I just think uh you guys are are doing a great job if you've listened to my podcast you know that we do have a final question and our final question is kind of fun because we're gonna wave a w and we're g to make you the Empress of the world you can't kill anyone you
can't put anyone in a reeducation gap but what you can do I think is maybe more lasting and better we're going to give you a magic microphone since this is magical uh in its nature and you can say two things into that microphone and you are going to incept all eight billion plus people on the planet who are going to wake up whenever
their next day is and they're going to think wow I've just had two of the greatest ideas but this time I'm actually gonna act on them what two things are you going to incept in the world's population number one I would say is lead by example and the second one I would say is make art not noise oh I love that
one I'm gonna I'm gonna when I put up that I had a wonderful conversation with you I don't no I don't want to I was gonna say I was gonna lead with that but I don't want people to I don't want to do a spoiler on on such a great line Ellen tell uh people where they can find you and uh alir and your other work yeah awesome you can
find me on Twitter Ellen Rhymes that's my handle and you can find me at writing. coach and ala. Studio perfect well I wish you absolutely the best uh we will keep a close eye and be in contact no doubt over collaborations to come uh thank you so much for joining me I'm really grateful thank you Jim this was so much fun