in an age where there is so much created curation becomes just as important as creation if not more important originality is absolutely a false god and you'll be a better artist if you just embrace the steel go back and see that all the spart people of any era tended to believe that they knew
everything there was to know guess what guys it was almost entirely wrong think of how much better we are now than starving medieval peasants or slaves building the pyramids these leaps in progress can continue we are Universal explainers and connectors and creators get the capital into the hands of the
builders and the technologies that can really change the world with capitalism technology and friendship we can save the [Music] world well hello everyone it's jimo shy with yet another edition of infinite Loops today I have actually one of my favorite people the quadruple threat guy
ericon oh man I don't even know where to start Eric you're the CEO of scribe since August of 2023 we're g to talk about that you're the author of two of my favorite books I've got one of them right here which you so graciously sent me even with the little yellow stickies that that's a that's a trick I'm going
to ask you about uh and you are the host of smartphones podcast as you mentioned before who went on air between us we probably have five 600 podcasts and we still did not operate the mics and you are also a venture capitalist in a rolling fun Eric welcome thank you for having me it's an honor to spend some
time with you I we always have a good time we always do so I thought the first thing that we could chat about because I think you did such a good job with it was the talk you gave at money 2020 which was kind of a howto for people who want to join the Creator economy um and like so I think for our
audience in particular um this is going to be really useful because we have a lot of people listening who are already in the Creator economy and doing very very well some are are there and and struggling a little bit and others are really interested in in in joining so if you don't mind uh why don't we just
start out with like you did a great list in your talk of how creators scale and and it was I loved it because it our motto here is crawl walk run and and it really resonated with me because of the way you you did the list so if you don't mind please yeah this is let me I'll try to do it off the top of my head but if I
go astray correct me because you may have more noes closer to hand it was a little bit of a weird talk to give to that audience I me if money 2020 is the biggest fintech conference in the world like what am I doing there talking about creators and I was really there kind of trying to be a trojan horse to bring
more money more Brands more attention into the Creator economy as sponsors and supporters because I think I think creators have so much room to run and such a disproportionate impact in the world of how purchase decisions get made right if you're just looking at the Creator economy for a bre
perspective there's a huge Arbitrage I think yet to to take advantage of that mirrors the growth path that creators go through so uh what I think the ladder that you're alluding to is the kind of you know you start out you have no audience you have no business model you're just creating some media and then
maybe the lightest weight way to start to monetize is these like permissionless revenue streams um YouTube like platform ads on YouTube is one then you got like Amazon Affiliates things like it doesn't take any coordination it doesn't take any leap of faith to get somebody to bet
on and you could do it at any scale you might be making $5 a month on Amazon Affiliates but that gets you started starting to offset cost then you start to get big enough and maybe it's a few thousand uh followers or few thousand concurrent listeners where it starts to become worth the overhead to do individual
brand deals um where you get advertisers and sponsors and things like that and then you've got more deeply integrated Partnerships um where you get a few Brands and you have much higher longevity with them and then as you go higher and higher you'll see creators at the top levels actually not just
investing in businesses but starting their own businesses and like I think creators belong on the cap table and at the very highest levels where you see people who know that they can bring in an audience like the rock like Ryan Reynolds like the Kardashians sort of they know they have
that sense of Their audience that they know they can make anything successful if it aligns with what they're already doing and so they are birthing businesses into the audience that already exists and that's the like highest level of this kind of Creator economy but businesses that see that and start working early to
co-develop products or services or marketing campaigns with the influencers who are sort of coming up you know um and I think there's a lot of examples in a lot of different stories and I'm sure we could go through some of the ones that are in finance but I think one of the things I said at the end of that
talk was like the next Susie Orman is not on TV like she's on YouTube and if you are a fintech brand or an raia or a finance like start working with those people early and if you can help them if you are a business who can help them level up and invest in them early like they will that will pay dividends so
long so far into the future um it's a really it's still really early in this Trader economy like and the extent to which those things those people and those relationships are actually where trust lives now and how purchase decisions are made is still I think very underappreciate it yeah I I agree
completely I I came at it from the other way because I'm an old uh but I kind of saw what what I'm calling the great reshuffle starting to happen with all of the old models kind of collapsing and the old playbooks just not working anymore and you know the result was of sha C Ventures after we sold uh USI
asset management and uh everything you're saying we are seeing you know absolutely in line with with what you're saying you said something else that I thought was really interesting and that I subscribed to as well and that is the I mean Miriam uh Webster picked uh authentic as their word of the year
um and I I thought that was really fitting because authenticity by its very definitions to something you can't fake and it seemed to me I I love your point about Susie armont right she is absolutely not GNA be on CNBC or Network TV she's gonna be on YouTube because what happened is
people finally began to admit I think they knew a lot longer before everyone started saying okay this isn't the overt window we talk about it but the phoniness of corporate speak the phoniness of marketing departments the absolute you know just aats nature of so much that was done according to the
corporate Playbook you know the passive voice it was decided you know who who the [ __ ] decided it will you tell me that and and one of the things you said that resonated very much with me is marketing departments are out what you got to have is a media Department if you wouldn't mind elaborating on on that yes
um marketing departments are now media departments like if you have a the the sort of initial conceit of a marketing department is that it gets to operate at a loss to bring in attention for the sales department right like it is it has a budget that spends to bring in leads and marketing in my mind is now
competing directly head-to-head for attention and trust with media companies basically whether that's Netflix or an individual Creator and the Tik Tok algorithm like how are you as a brand gonna buy ad time like gonna buy authentic attention and interest from your audience when you're competing with
somebody who's winning the war for attention based on pure Merit and based on someone either paying to spend their attention with you or choosing to spend their attention with you so I don't think the you know to your your point about the old models I don't think the old model of like people show up and
watch TV and spend 30% of their time watching ads and you just get to purchase some of that attention builds trust builds intent Works towards a purchase I think it is so much more the brands that we see that are much more successful especially from their early days you know mimicking apple right now
doesn't do you much good but the brands that are successful from their early days are the ones that are building that often building media departments or starting as media departments um and I think something really interesting that we're seeing is you know you you came at it from you had
a fund and you worked backwards into becoming a Creator Building A A True Media Department I think that's what you would call you know this podcast it's what you Patrick would call invest like the best that feeds the Venture fund that feeds the other businesses and then you have people coming at it the other way like uh Kevin
is speu of Epic gardening he started with a YouTube channel and that or I started with a Blog actually because it's cheaper to start with a Blog so you started with a Blog that blog became monetized he used that profit to reinvest in a YouTube channel he used that Community to kind of grow an
e-commerce business that e-commerce business then bought other businesses and what started as a small media company has expanded into this hundred million gardening conglomerate that I think is is buying some of the incumbent businesses in the space and it it's the same story with um my partner's business Missouri Star
Quilt Company started with a YouTube channel now $100 million quilting Empire like that owns a whole town in Missouri these are crazy stories and they're starting they're out competing the incumbents because they're starting with media departments not marketing departments and so you have this this
like entirely profitable Media company that is then paired with a profitable e-commerce business that doesn't need to spend money on marketing it makes money on marketing because it has a media Department not a marketing department and if you make your marketing department stand on its own in terms of
gaining attention and giving value and creating trust that's going to benefit your other businesses significantly it's the right mindset to go into that attention Marketplace that war for attention with I think yeah and uh you know we're going to talk about uh publishing later
because we have a mutual interest there as well but you know when I was starting my career I I sat and thought okay like nobody knows who the [ __ ] I am what do I got to do and this is back in the Dark Ages pre- internet and so the first thing that sprang into my mind was well I got to write a book and back then uh
you you could you didn't have the uh plethora choices that the scr and infinite books to give a flood to our own little Endeavor there uh in place and and so literally I I was like out on a walk and I came back and I said to my wife yeah you know I'm gonna write a book and she kind of looked me and went
oh okay um you you do know honey that if you're gonna write a book that somebody has to be willing to publish it like the details details but you know so so it did look it was at least we were thinking along those terms back then but in a very different way because the the whole idea behind the book was back then the book
was your imperator look mcar Hill thought highly enough of me to publish my book Etc um but it also now is one of the reasons why we give scholarship to our mutual friend uh David perel's write a passage I think honestly writing and media is more important today than it was back
when I was first writing my book and and I think that um the the Playbook that you developed in this speech that I'm GNA ask you to kind of walk us through next um it was very very helpful so talk to Alissa well I I meant to ask you about that actually I know what works on Wall Street was your first book correct
second that was your second which was the first invest like the best oh okay that's where Pat Patrick got his name from his podcast yeah he he it was he said Dad I'm I'm gonna do an homage to you and I went oh really because we're very close and like we talk all the time and I I I didn't know whether it was a joke or
actually what he was doing but that's how he got the podcast so what was the what was kind of the before and after for you publishing that first book because I think a lot of people have the perception that they can't write a book until they have this career inflection point and I tell many authors that often
they have that causality reversed like things start to happen for people when they write a book and it just only appears in retrospect like they waited until they made it to actually write something without question um when I wrote invest like the best I was little down uh and you know
uh had spent a lot of time on what became uh to the public Factor investing and quantitative empirical uh style investing and that was really the subject of the book basically it was hey you can clone your favorite fund manager because back then everything was mutual funds uh by putting their portfolios on
a database huge database of stocks looking at the biggest deviations their portfolio had from the average stock in the universe and then turning around and using those as screens to get to a portfolio that looks acts and most importantly performs like your favorite manager and so it was a pretty good hook
and Forbes Magazine picked it up that was before they moved to pay to play um and you know had actual writers that were uh uh writing things that they found interesting in but uh they picked it up Nam it one of the best books of the year um and then I kind of leveraged that into the book that actually did
make my career which was what works on Wall Street okay so but but for for folks uh who are contemplating now and maybe even people who've already started you you you you did a you gave a pretty good playbook on on how you can build this out in terms of you know what's your
objective and then here's how you do it so if you wouldn't mind filling in just a little bit of the hints and and ideas that you gave on the Playbook around creators that would be helpful about how companies can use partner with creators both that but also speak to the individual who wants to be the Creator
that that company uh partners with yeah I think um I think it's a it's a difficult kind of mutual problem right like you as a Creator there is someone out there I think it's important to start with something that's authentic to you so that you have the sustainability and the
connection with the audience but if you're being authentic to who you are there is almost certainly a business whose values and product jives with who you are collecting and the message that you're giving them and whether you want to own that business or start that business or just partner with them or
sell ads with them like there's a lot of different ways to engage in that kind of like crawl walk run way to just become more and more deeply integrated um so I think it starts with authentic it starts with looking at who are you already using as a customer that you really like um looking at their business models you
know uh you want somebody at least in my case you know when I look for partners um with a high a relatively high price service um and a sustainable one that leads to just a more valuable relationship and easier to track than a ton of small one-off purchases those tend to not sustain the kind of budget
that you might need to have for a long-term partnership with a company um just being sure that it's something that you can honorably represent and stand behind and speak to on the Creator side and then just be willing to kind of give first prove your worth um maybe start by just referring customers then
get compensated for referrals then maybe move to a you know a paid placement if that makes sense then maybe a longer term committed partnership then maybe purchasing some equity in the business or something like that right that's kind of the like progression that might take
place over a few years and I think it's really you know the default option that most people stumble into as a as a Creator is like oh I've got to sell every ad spot I've got to just take what comes in or hire a broker or something like that to fill ad space and I think that the more successful people actually low
dramatically lower their overhead and make their lives simpler by making a few you know we're talking like three to 10 very long-term committed Partnerships with a company that that can compound and and can compound in trust and results and returns and you want to be that person you know I got a text the
other day from somebody like Athena is one of those for me um it's a ea service and I use them I recommend them I've done episodes with you know some of their team I've gone and met you know all the crew in the Philippines and met my EA and I've just like gotten deeply integrated um and I woke up to a text
the other day from a friend and big podcast he's like hey I think I'm ready for Athena he like I've been talking about it for two years you know like that's one of those things that just happens slowly over time um so I think that's the Playbook and then if you're on the custo or on the company side
looking at how do I partner with creators because one of the last things I say in that talk is like become a Creator which refers to the build a media Department not a marketing department partner with a Creator or you will end up competing with a Creator right one of these guys like U Al at
Missouri Star or Kevin at Epic gardening like if you are an incumbent you will have a Creator who is like the fish who starts eating the whales and if you don't sort of take that media pill early you may find somebody sort of rising up to to meet you um so I think the Playbook there is find create a long taale like
build a kind of a stable of people like find a niche that represents that's already collecting the audience that you want to speak to just flood that Niche start working with a ton of different creators and especially if they're smaller earlier or younger in their Journey like you can have a huge impact
if you bring half your marketing budget into that space and say like look we want to buy all your ad space for a year we want to explore a big partnership we want to do with 20 or 50 people at once sometimes these are life-changing contracts for these early creators and you can really create a great
partnership there um and then just identify the stars and the people who are growing and bring them further and further into the tent maybe develop new product lines maybe white label just get creative with things um and think long term you know imagine that one of these 20 people is going to be the main
spokesperson for your firm over the next 10 years and just see where that mindset takes you because you know you may if if you help the next Su Orman get to you know get to her position and you've been supporting each other all along it's a great that's a great partnership to have that's a great way
to support each other and something that'll pay dividends for both of you for a long time to come sometimes I get frustrated when I'm talking to to friends who are of my generation and it's like to me this is just so incred obvious and and and like it there does seem I I hate using generational uh
generalities because they're they're mostly wrong but this is one that I have noticed enough so that at least I have to think about it a little bit and and and it is it seems to me that like they almost get mad at me when I start telling them this stuff well what do you mean like that is the way it works uh
you know they they that creative they have to do what we tell them to do and and they have to be true to our script and like it would be a disaster how do you control all that I'm just like chill you if you do it that way no one if you're G to become ultimately as you go along you're G to become more and more
bony more and more can you believe it's like what I say about the world economic Forum right like with the you will eat the bugs you will live in the Pod you will own nothing and you'll be happy right they're spending millions of dollars creating essentially just memes for people making fun of them right yeah
and and it just boggles my mind that they are so toned dep and it's like somebody a friend of mine said well how would you solve the problem I said I would fire everyone who's doing their content and I would hire a bunch of kids basically and and and let them just do their thing what why do you think
there's this reticence that it doesn't have to be generational by the way because I have talked to some younger people who are also more much preferring the old Playbook what do you think yeah I mean I think humans are resistant to change or anything they perceive as a threat or um and it's it's hard to
appreciate something that if you've spent your career doing that and perceive it to be working when someone says actually the opposite is better like that's hard not to see that as a threat to your whole world view and identity right and and both things can be true right like these different
playbooks can work for different people in different Industries my view is obviously very similar to yours right like you're not going to write better ad copy than the Creator who is speaking who already has collected the audience you know like give them your bullet points and let them use their voice the
voice that already brought the audience there in the first place and that Creator is the bridge between the audience's problems and their interest and your product or service and you want that bridge you're paying for that bridge let it exist nobody at Square would have written you know Joe Rogan ad
copy saying the goddamn [ __ ] cash app but if you just cut Joe Rogan loose and let him do it he makes some memorable stuff and it helps it grow right like are you trying to solve the problem or are you stuck with like forcing Your solution and juicing that your one idea for all you KS so I think
there's something to yeah decentralize this like run 20 experiments without having to ideate just assemble a stable of creators and hitch them up and let them you know not all of them are going to succeed individually but something interesting will get yielded from that and you'll see your product or your
service in ways that you may not have ever had the perspective to see before yeah and one of the things that I always say about uh my own career and and watching uh company succeed and fail was that it one of the things that really became apparent to me was agility right and
open-mindedness were very very high on the attributes of the companies and individuals who succeeded um and and and uh that isn't the way it's done here mentality those are all the dinosaurs like most of those companies like they're gone and if they're not gone they're on their last legs um so I I think that um right
now as you point out we're in the early Innings right very it's an interesting skill how do you suppose you improve your open-mindedness or your your agility it's it's one of those you think of it as fixed or you think of people as that way but you know I'm not sure um I'm not sure anything comes to
mind if if I'm like how do you actually improve that well I think there's a lot of ways to actually I I did one on ideas that I put up on Twitter called The Thinker of the prover which uh essentially uh outlines how hey a lot of the ideas that you think are yours aren't actually yours
they're your mom and dads they're your siblings they're your friends they're TV their books you read their movies and if you're open to that right and you start writing them down and start asking like do I really believe this or no right because the the the simplification of the article was basically The Thinker
can think anything it wants right it can it can say capitalism is God's gift to humanity look at it what it did for the most successful countries in the world or you can think no capitalists are evil and we have to have equality and we have to go with Communism or socialism and you can think what ever you like but
once you kind of land on something then it gets shunted over to the prover and the prover has one job Eric and that job is to prove your right and so essentially what it does is it your reticular activating system goes to work and it's like does not agree with what I believe make it truly invisible like
literally truly invisible and only show you things that reinforce what you do you know confirmation bias Etc the easiest way to do this I think is to look at other beliefs or people who you don't agree with and then watch watch how it happens with them it's clear as day when you're watching something that
you don't agree with right but it's like when you know I often start I hav watch TV news because I think it's poison it's propaganda on all sides by the the way I'm not playing favorites here I don't care whether you love fox or whether you love MSNBC they're all propaganda in my way
of looking at the world and the but the but the idea that I would go with friends of various political persuasion let's say I had a friend who loved MSNBC right and and I would say you do my spiel about propaganda and all that and they were like you know that is so true
of fox but MSNBC they get it right and then of course you ask the F the fox offici andado same story right and and it's tribalism and there's evolutionary reasons for it I get all of that but I think that if you if you work at it you you can in fact become more open-minded and you know the Thinker one
way to do it another way to do it is to intentionally expose yourself to things that you think you really disagree with and then the real fun task is and you write a steel man for an argument with which you totally disagree yeah because if you can do that that is going to almost out of necessity
make you more open-minded make you more willing to say you know what uh probably none of my beliefs are 100 % correct I always say I'm sure most of my beliefs are wrong right if you if you look at the beliefs of somebody from 500 years ago I mean we laugh at them right but that but we insist our own beliefs are
correct we always say it's like on rinse repeat okay my mom used to say to me that um you go through life you start out naive as [ __ ] you don't know anything you're just an idiot and then you learn and if you learn learn well you start getting a bit smarter and if you get a bit smarter then you actually
get the real prizes you get a bit wiser and then my mom's punchline was and then you die it and and the whole thing starts over and over and over again so I think that maybe that those are ways that can you know help you at least open your mind to the fact that hey I might be wrong here
and let me let me check this out this other thing out and you know this leads perfectly into your two books right because the guys that you uh write about are Fascinating People just in and of themselves uh what what led you to to the first one which you did about noal which was great um and I know you had a
lot of success with that what what we did an episode on that one yeah I know I I know I I I am the S I am the s reason why that took off right you you made it successful no the tweet in the podcast episode we haven't sold one copy since that episode a one week after that episode came out that was I I I am
susceptible to flattery so it'll get you everywhere I owe you my life so so uh bagie talk to me about the were were you just listening to him reading some of his stuff what what led you to like okay I need to do an anthology of everything he's talking about yeah he he so after the noal book
came out there was really a short list of people that I thought so a few things were clear one that the format was really well received the people were really uh really enjoyed the book really appreciated the format and that there's a real value created in pulling these gems out of these ephemeral media like
Twitter and podcasts that are just sort of subcultures you know like they're hugely valuable and bullish on both I enjoy both I do them all but there's something about a book that is that sort of transcends time and culture and just like enters the discourse and reaches just a much broader set of people so
there's a transformation between the medium and there's also just like really really aggressive and high effort curation that goes into them where you start with like a million or two million words of source material and you just distill that down and concentrate it and organize it and tighten it into this
like 50,000 words of someone's most important ideas so that format became really it's clear that the format was valuable I loved the process I was blown away by the response to the Nal book I was like man there's maybe like four or five people that I can imagine also doing this for that I would enjoy and
that I think people would would benefit from and there's a specific type that actually like that it it fits right somebody who's a prolific creator online who's well followed but perhaps not perfectly understood and you know apology was was high on that list and a bunch of people said like oh my God please do one
onology please do one onology and so B and I started dming about it and he was uh receptive and wanted to be supportive and you know that counts for a lot so we started working together on it and you know that kicked off another three year project um of of organization and curation and just diving deep on all
these and I think his worldview is so interesting you know he just sees around so many corners you he's he's a very broad thinker he's a futurist and I actually think he is misunderstood or discounted by a lot of people who only see him on Twitter remarking pretty like aining pretty
strongly about very many of wide variety of very contemporary things and it's easy to kind of get turned off I think if you're like oh he's just he's just like prophesizing he's just predict he's just like a pundit and I think he's so much more than that and has just really quite a
unique worldview that you're not going to agree with everything of course not but we'll show you will'll stretch your thinking right like even if you don't agree it'll make you a little more open-minded make you a little better at seeing around corners and thinking maybe 10 or 50 years into the future instead
of one or five which is what most people tend to stop at yeah and you made a point there that was a question of M like um what how how did it work when you you like he really believed in something right and you kind of were like yeah I'm just I'm not feeling it uh what' you do well apology
put this in a good he talked about this book in his Network State conference and said which I think is a generous but a useful way to put it which is like this book is as much Eric as it is biology um you know Jim you might have written a book about biology starting with the exact same Source material and chosen a
completely different set of ideas to profile um even if we were tempting to set off on the same format so I I never really my filter for ideas is not whether or not I agree with them there are ideas the final book that I disagree with actually but what I try to filter for and what I try to put in these books
and what I think a book should be is the most Evergreen applicable useful sort of and broadly useful ideas that you can incorporate into your own life this is not a like hey here's what bology thinks about a bunch of stuff this is if you sat down to dinner with bology one-on-one and you had four hours
to ask him all the most thoughtful questions you possibly could about how he could help you think and learn to think like him or just get just ask selfish ideas about how to build your business or where the world is going to go or what technologies to invest in or where the Frontiers are and he was at
his best and you were at your best and you transcribe that that might be what this book feels like so I hope I hope that that's how it reads you know so so much of it came from conversation that I think it keeps this conversational tone and Pace covers a lot of ideas and come out feeling inspired informed um educated
like and a little like adding a new lens to the world to to how you view the world I think is how I put it in introduction yeah and that that is something that uh me and our team at infinite media continually going back and forth on it's like we think that this idea we call it kind of a curation
Au uh effect right and I think it I think the future of curation is huge I think because of everything coming at us like and and here's what where where we always get hung up like taste good taste is going to be very very valuable and then we're like okay how do you define good taste would you take a crack at
it I don't know how to define it I know how to appreciate it and I know how to encourage people to trust their taste um I think everyone I think everyone has a taste and if you have the courage to act on it and put it out into the world you will see who responds there's so many
people out there right it's easy to it's easy to not believe that you have a unique taste or that your taste wouldn't be appreciated but I don't think that's true like I think there's just I mean eight billion people in the world and the internet lets you reach almost all of them so if you act on your taste if
you embody it and it'll develop and it'll improve it'll change it'll get better um but I think you have to trust the response to your taste and not self-edit too much um you know there's I I'm blown I get compliments on on my taste in curation but I'm not sure that you know I don't know that I'm
special in any way I've just like consumed a lot of stuff and I'm comfortable with like forming an opinion and putting it out into the world and I've I've been through that Loop of like I think I like this thing so I'm G to publish it and people appreciate it and so that confidence sort of builds
iteratively through through doing it um but I think to your point exactly like curation is so important in an age where there is so much created curation becomes just as important as creation if not more important and it all exists on the same scale you know there is originality is absolutely a false god
you know that is it is an idol that is worshiped for no reason by sort of try hard creatives that are artists that are trying to do something like purely original and you'll be a better artist if you just embrace the steel like I was not going to write a better book than noval had already written his words are
beautiful his ideas are crisp they're thoughtfully distilled I could have taken all that out and tried to rewrite it in my own words and it would have been worse so I'm just going to use his words and I'm going to use his phrases and I'm going to package that up and give him all of the credit for coming up
with all the good ideas and just provide the service of of curation and editing and taste and putting it together but I I don't I think a hundred other people could write it could build an evolve book could curate it and it would still be valuable because it would be different and it would be their taste
instead of mine and it would appeal to different people um I think the world needs a lot of different kinds of taste and that that's a good thing I agree and and that's pretty close to where we ended up we ended up with um write something or produce something if you're doing or a podcast
uh and have the types of guests on that you're interested in and then as you say see who shows up because it gets back to Miriam Webster picking authentic right like if I suddenly it I have nothing against Sports I'm just not that into sports my grandson if he were here would be just shaking his head in dismay
yeah but but like it would be like me changing over to only having Sports people on from obscure teams right like I have no interest in that and and you you would be able to tell instantly oh man this really sucks what why what happened at Jim right but I'm sure because I know several of these people
that there are people that's their passion and you know what I bet that podcast or that substack would be fabulous because their passion is authentic and it just shows through and and so our uh our ideas I think are very sympatico in in that regard what what were what idea of ques impacted you the most like which
one had the most profound effect on you as you were writing the book this is an easy one because I made it the entire first section of the book um it it is like the value of technology and the moral importance of it this is is something that I intuited like I always thought science fiction was cool
and like appreciated it it wasn't not it was not until sort of like deep diving on this and B's worldview and how he articulated it that made me be like oh like I now have words for this and I have a framework for it and I have historical context for it and I can see I just think technology is so so so
important and I now appreciate I see this like s gigantic Gulf between what is possible if we really leaned in and appreciated and respected and cultivated technology very intentionally as a society versus what's happening now which is like what we mentioned before which is to innate human fear of change
and new and oh my God regulated somebody please stop it it's going to take my job like the moral good that is the ability to do more for more people with less resources that is what technology gives us and that is the reason that we are all safe and fed and warm and not killing each
other for a scarce amount of resources and the fact that we are constantly sort of generating this Frontier of new potential Technologies and punching ourselves in the face as a society by not rapidly urgently investing in dispersing and replicating and building these new technologies and supporting
more research and it is just once you take this pill and see the world this way you're like oh my God we are just [ __ ] the bed on compared to how much progress we could be making and it's really pushed me it's pushed me much farther as a as an investor into like [ __ ] this SAS for dog stuff like let's
let's go battery chemistry Investments let's go you know non-invasive mind controlled robotic limbs let's go drone construction companies new nuclear reactors like we cannot Venture Capital has lost its way in the pursuit of it much of business has but like Venture Capital especially has just lost its way
it's supposed to be this like technology risk first kind of systematic drisking of unlocking massive new markets with technology not like we only invest in software like like you're supposed to be out at the frontier you're supposed to be doing crazy stuff you're supposed to you know
have a poor outcome ratio but truly insane outcomes um it's just become a muddied word and a lot of people refer to themselves as Venture capitalists that aren't actually taking technical risk in big markets anymore and that's frustrating so it's refined how I how I see the world um it's certainly refined
the opportunities that I find exciting it's refined it's it's madebe a way more uh annoying like political discussion because I'm like the best example that we're living through is is self-driving cars right like 10 years ago when self-driving cars were like announced as a concept everybody was over the moon like oh my
God millions of people die in senseless car wrecks every year thank God this technology exists can't wait till it's available every death between now and then is this really you know incredible tragedy that could have been prevented now we have self driving cars very smart
Engineers been working very hard for 10 years to build these things we have them we have Cru we have weo like they are in the streets there's videos on Twitter of people taking self-driving cars and all you see in the media is headlines about how self-driving cars need to be stopped they're unsafe there's people
vandalizing them breaking them and trapping them in San Francisco I do not understand in this world of you like who are these people who see this world changing life-saving technology and set out with a Sledgehammer to go break it I find that view very difficult to Steelman you know back to your point um
but it we it happens at all levels of society and government and Regulation and um man yeah if if this book can uh show a few people like One the optimism that comes from just seeing the progress that's coming from new technologies but let's respect the value that technolog has brought into our lives already the
Innovations of the past and really look hard at how we can support the innovation of the future because we owe it to all the future generations to build on what was given to us not just not not hold us back or push us backwards or not let the next evolution of compounding take place that would be
that'd be an absolute tragedy and that's where we're heading in a lot of directions um but it doesn't have to be that way and a man you're preaching into the choir here because uh you know I have the added benefit I've always been an early adopter of techology because that look these are tools to extend our reach
right and and these are tools in the example of self-driving cars are you kidding me like they they they are going to be so much safer than I know I know we are the problem right the old Pogo cartoon we've met the enemy and it's us we humans and hey I love humans I am a human but if we can
have a technology that mitigates and and decreases these senseless deaths like how are you opposed to that and it just it drives me crazy but now I have the added benefit of having five grandchildren and I desperately want the world they live in to be the world that I see as possible and it's it's it's as
you make the point self-driving cars are here right now are they perfect no they're not perfect you know horses weren't perfect either either early early early regular cars weren't far from perfect I mean like I was this I have to be very careful because I can go on a tiate here but like the the the
idea that uh one accident and they take the whole Fleet off line is inane it's like you try to come up with like oh so if there's one accident in this particular model of car or this uh this human made a mistake we're going to make everyone stop driving Cruz had plans to for a rapid Fleet scale up over the next few years
that are now paused because of that one accident and end of like end the media specific response to it but how many tens or hundreds of thousands of people died in human caused car accidents that same day that the data shows clearly the self-driving cars are safer um it it is deeply it's deeply frustrating and that
that delay is going to cause hundreds of thousands of more unnecessary deaths um and it's just stupid man it's just stupid um but but it seems easy to see from that perspective um and that that's why I I sort of this why I think this is the most important idea in the book this is
why I think I hope that getting it out there and people recommending it and and reading it to each other gives them language and gives them framework to see to see all these opportunities to see the trade-offs that we make between you know safety and progress or regulation
and Innovation and the cost that we've put on ourselves um just the the huge price that we pay for this like system encroachment of you know bureaucracy or safety or Cru or whatever you want to call it um yeah it's a really it's an interesting position we find ourselves in an interesting problem to try to solve
yeah and I think that you know it it's it's a lot of things right it's the precautionary principle and and people don't understand that if you look at the history of innovation like this is always the reaction by a significant minority which happens to be very vocal and unfortunately in our new regulatory
environment they can also be in control of those regulations that's where I get the most disconnect right like fine if you're over here and like I don't like electricity fine like candles knock yourself out man that's great but if you're a regulator saying I don't like electricity therefore you don't like
electricity because I'm going to make it illegal that that the retardation of the advancement of our S as a species is like suddenly coming into play yeah and here's like it sounds um I I worry sometimes that I come across as preachy when I go off on on this but like you should want this for the most
selfish reasons right like if you are only listening to this podcast because you want to build a more successful business have a more successful life have the country that you live in succeed and Thrive and Advance your own tribe fine great most people are there and I do not begrudge that at all technology will
help you technology is your friend there's a huge advantage that comes from just being the first person to pick up a new technology in your industry or in your area and your I think Jim your career shows this prominently right like you were at The Cutting Edge of new technology in the in the world of Wall
Street and that like there's there's an example in every industry and you're an exceptional one I think think because you've been an early adopter of whatever was new for years many years well thank you um and you know I I often make the point that the only reason I got to write what works on Wall Street
was because Ben Graham didn't have the computers to do it right like I I I am under No Illusion that it was me and my magnificent idea oh I know what I'm gonna do come on if if Ben Graham had access to the stuff I had I was lucky to be born when I was born right and and computers and the data and all that
being available if Graham had that that book would have been written it would have been absolutely from you know 1930 forward but I bet the same is true today right there's somebody who was born today or is entering the workforce today he was lucky to be born in the era of
where AI is new and there's a new opportunity because of a new enabling technology this it's true historically it's true in the future I was reading a Twitter thread today about um a guy who said you know in regard ards to the AI sort of Regulation that you know the Middle East when the printing press came
out thought it was a huge threat to the CL and like this protect this uh the class of scribes basically went to The Regulators of the day Emperors or Sultans or whatever and said please ban this technology it's a threat to our livelihoods and so they banned it and so they jumped behind on a new technology
and it impacted the whole culture for many generations we have the we did that with nuclear energy for the last 50 years we could have embraced it and said we over regulated it we are at risk of doing the same thing with self-driving cars with the risk of doing the same thing with AI
like we have to we have to believe that every new technology has the potential for more good than harm and yes we should try to avoid and reduce the harm but we have to embrace the good as soon and as aggressively as early as we safely can um and I I hope that more people develop that mindset even if they
only do it selfishly for their own careers that'll add up to great things for the civilization amen and uh you know I think that part of it is just the way that we've got these kinks in human OS right and and one of them is we tend to believe that we know everything there is to know right and what's really funny
about this is if you're a student of History you go back and see that all the smart people of any era tended to believe that they knew everything there was to know and so very humbling yeah it really is and I'm a huge fan of David deuts and his book The Beginning of infinity because he builds the
Scaffolding in a way that makes it really understandable and you know he has this assage in there when he's saying hey what were physicists uh opining about the internet back in 1900 or quantum mechanics they weren't because there was no internet and the quantum mechanics was it's infancy right
and and so it seems this natural tendency of human OS to think okay well they were all idiots and they thought that leeching and all this stuff was great but we know better we are the Smart Ones and then of course you can see that going back as long as we have written history right and so I think
that the the the Trap we fall into is this idea of forgetting that how do we know what we don't know we don't and and and you've got to be willing to understand that that's the Brilliance of our us as a species right we are Universal explainers and connectors and creators and what we create these
technologies that we create give us leverage right our comedies give me a lever and I can move the world it's still true today and and yeah our levers however are just getting a [ __ ] ton more powerful and beneficial for a greater number of people on average it doesn't mean that I think oh you know I'm not
Pang glossing about this at all are we going to not have like I'm very involved in AI right so is AI not going to cause problems oh it's going to cause tons of problems and the the problem that that you know this this either order mentality doesn't work you know when we created fire really great because it
created we started cooking our food and it gave us the prefrontal cortex would allowed planning and thinking about the future and the past but it also was really dangerous we didn't say we're Banning fire we said let's get a fire department and a fire alarm and a fire escape and you know all of these things
are fire extinguisher and and you know will we create problems yep and my expectation is that most of them are going to be better problems now not and also just again to underline I'm not panglossian some we're going to be really scary problems like uh oh I don't know an autonomous drone that has my DNA
in it and the horrible evil person who sets it free to kill Jim o shamany that is something we're g to to get countermeasures to very very quickly but listen we in it's a one of the reasons why I'm so in favor of Open Source rather than proprietary closed Source I don't want just a few hands
telling me that they know better than everyone else and they're going to determine what is right and what is wrong open I mean Sunshine is the greatest disinfected right and also cognitive diversity like there are things that I'm just not going to think of there's things you're just not going
to think of and if you're open source that allows for all of the people who are interested and very diverse in the way they look at the world why do you think Linux runs the web Linux R runs the web because the most creative minds with a lot of diversity of thought made it the best thing to do that so I I
think that this you know I I will definitely be gifting this book because um you do a a really really great job uh reflecting what I also find to be uh the most important message which is almost the moral imperative to seek progress we owe that to our children and our grandchildren and our
great-grandchildren and uh they did it for us right they did I mean you imagine being born before the Industrial Revolution like compared to where we are now uh imagine living through it like that's what I find the most exciting is we have the potential to live through another Industrial
Revolution we are between AI nuclear and nanotech we have the makings of another 100 or thousand X in the standard of living potentially in the next 50 years if we hustle maybe it'll take a hundred um but it's you know we haven't seen anything really crazy since new computers we've seen a lot of Inc
drastic improvements but we haven't seen you know imagine living through electrification or flight the first moon landing things that truly changed what you thought were like the laws of physics basically um and how mind expanding that would be and how much that would make you optimistic and
question all of what else is possible I think seeing that a little bit longer zoomed out Arc is really helpful and if if you don't mind there's a like a short passage in the bology book that I think like summarizes this well um so this is bology says it better and I don't want to paraphrase so here's the quote the
future I Envision is much better than how we live today how much better think of how much better we are now than starving medieval peasants or slaves building the pyramids future humans will look at today's living standards the way we look at those living conditions these leaps in progress can continue we can
Ascend humans expanded Out of Africa to the rest of the world Oceanic navigation L us cross oceans when we created submarines now we can go underwater after inventing airplanes we could fly that's the transhumanism of the past all of those added to the human capabilities the current constraints will fall away
too we can expand to the Stars we can live underwater and who knows what will come next I love it and and the thing that's great about that is you know uh uh let's take the navigating the Seas right uh we we started being able to do that because of toy right and his astronomical uh navigation system guess
what guys it was almost entirely wrong it was almost entirely incorrect that did not make it any less useful to the humans who were using it then right what happened was verticus and others came along and they're like H you know all these circles that you're drawing around all of them but maybe if we just move
the sun here and the Earth here well all the circles disappear but the point is even though it was wrong it was incredibly useful and so it's like there's no like the I'm sure there's a bunch of stuff today that is incredibly useful but it's going to be in need of improvement that's part of this way of
thinking if you think that we can forever push forward even if we're dealing with imperfect systems even if we're dealing with imperfect knowledge we can still make huge advances if you open up your willingness to embrace change embrace all of these things that lead to a better future I I love that
passage well I we could talk about this all day long but I want to get over to your your new job which I love the way you put it you manifest it into uh into being as the CEO of scribe book publish now scribe uh Char Ventures full disclosure we were interested in it as well uh in terms of a potential
acquisition or investment um and uh we because we loved we loved what scribe does uh we ended up uh not not participating delighted that you ended up as the CEO but then for people who don't know tell tell us how that happened yeah it was a it was a it's a crazy summer um so I this my
relationship started just with scribe as a customer you know I was tweeting that I was writing this book and Tucker Max is the founder of scribe reached out and it's like I'm happy to help you know let me know let me know if I can offer any guidance and so he really sort of showed me the landscape of the publishing world
and helped me get the almanac and noal published through scribe which did an amazing job I had an incredible experience as an author and absolutely changed my life um you know it's I don't think it's an overstatement to say that everything that's happened for me in the
last three years is Downstream of that book in some form or fashion you know people I've met the you know Financial opportunities I've had and this job um and the podcast like everything um which is a kind of a wild thing um so I I was probably through publishing my second book The Anthology biology with
them over the summer and I started hearing rumors that they were getting into financial trouble or could use a new buyer some you know just smoke um so called the CEO and sorted looking into it and yeah or that there was an opportunity so I sort of brought it around to a few friends that I know who
are interested in the industry or who buy companies um and yes osv was high on that list um so what ended up happening was you know they had a loan and the bank foreclosed on the business and enduring Ventures was under Loi with them so they bought the assets um hired on a bunch of the team and essentially
revived scribe as a new company and then came and hired me um they were like we we bought this thing and we needed to figure out find somebody to run it and you brought us the deal and you're a happy customer and you basically sold us on it and Ken seem to stop talking about it so like maybe that should be you I
was like maybe it [Laughter] should well congratul yeah yeah I so so so um I think that we broadly agree that um the future of publishing is going to be very different than the past um which leads to kind of like all sorts of questions in my mind and I want to get your view on this and kind of a
Chesterton Spence question here what okay and for those who don't know that uh analogy you the Chesterton Spence is basically you might want to ask the question why they put that fence up in the first place before you rip it down right yes and and so but I haven't gotten a good answer yet to why what I
view as one of the most obvious Industries ready and needing so needing disintermediation and re uh rethinking recreating it's the publishing industry why do you think it still holds this real because they still really hold big publishing houses still have real power and Prestige what do you think's going
on there yeah I think there's there's a number of reasons to it um I think it's I tend to use the education analogy a lot where it is such a in areas where Prestige matters a lot and areas that are perceived as very traditional where tradition also matters that the brand is it's just slower to disrupt it's slower to degrade that
Prestige that tradition carries so much weight it drives there are so many authors I talk to who are very openly and knowledgeably candidly telling me they are like I know this is an irrational decision based on perception and Prestige and I'm going to make it anyway and I'm like okay like what else
can you say to that right um but I think increasingly it is becoming clear that I mean some of these publishing houses are are old 200 years old like there's great tradition and prestige in them and they have helped a lot of authors and I think the main attraction for a lot of authors is to just be among
the authors that respect and so I think that there's a kind of a flywheel or a um self-perpetuating effect there to kind of and I'm very happy to kind of Steal man traditional publishing because I do think it has a lot of Merit and value and there are authors for whom it is the right choice
right I'm very happy to be open about that um and I hope many authors s of make the decision on which path is right for them to this kind of series of triaging questions of what's more important to them what outcomes they want what their goals are so you know if if you need an Advance a big Advance if
you are a huge name and you are going to get the best of the best treatment um like those are good reasons to go with a traditional publisher but the context around a traditional publishing agreement has changed right a hundred years ago you needed a huge capital investment to print the books in the
first place no longer true we have self-publishing uh second you needed Central you needed access to distribution you needed to be on book stores or your book couldn't get want now no longer true some 90% of books are sold on Amazon anybody can list whatever they want on Amazon third you needed those direct
relationships to centralized media like TV and news in order to get any attention on your book no longer true now people just recommend books to each other on social media and it's much more of kind of a meritocracy of ideas and you don't necessarily some people still need that advance to write
but many don't publishing a book Now does not cost nearly as much as people might think and you don't necessarily need that huge upfront capital investment in a huge print run in order to access the book market and you don't need the marketing resources of a traditional publisher to sort of enter
that idea of meritocracy you just need little bit of elbow greef to like get your name out there do some podcasts send send out some copies um if you increasingly people already have built Their audience and refined their ideas and they have a channel to sell their own book they don't need to give up what
is often 80 90% of the lifetime value of their book and creative control to a traditional publisher because they've already done a bunch of that work so I context has change around traditional publishing they have this innovators challenge but at the same time there's this incredible Prestige among authors
really it's kind of like Venture Capital where like entrepreneurs want to tell other entrepreneurs that they got money from you know sequoia or this big name customers don't give a [ __ ] they don't even know where your money came from nobody reads A book because it was published by penguin random house but
they want to tell their author buddies that oh I I'm in one of the big five it's like or tell their grandmother like who gives a [ __ ] right like did you make a great book are people reading it are they recommending it to each other are they going to recommend it still in 10 years like that's what matters um not to
everybody and that's fine so yeah I I think um I think authors deserve a greater we are the beginning of a much broader set of options and a great flexibility for authors to sort of compile their own bundle of what makes sense to them you know you can get really professional publishing
Services through somebody like scribe you can get somebody to sort of help you finance your book through o infinite books or osv without um hugely compromising your Creative Vision or the impact that you want to have so I I think there's a really a lot of fascinating sort of emerging
experiments happening and occasionally even new genres of book be created in this new context that are still going to be wildly successful sometimes by traditional metrics and sometimes by totally new metrics that traditional publishing houses don't care about because they only make money on book
royalties but you you can you can build a very successful business on the back of a book if the book doesn't make you any money at all I tell others this all the time your book does not have to make money to make you money right it's it's an incredible back to you know how the best like the best and what works on
Wall Street impacted your early career right it's your it's your premature it's your introduction to the world it's this little beautiful clone out there like collecting your people and sharing your ideas and um preceding you building your reputation it's an incredible incredible
asset yeah and I I share your view by the way about uh traditional publishing um and uh the author being being the source of uh the wanting to tell his buddies hey yeah you know I uh I I'm a penguin how about you um but and and there and we also I agree with you there will be a place for everyone I think but
like the other area where you you're doing a great job and where we're going to lean in with infinite books is just like real simple so for example because of the new tools and platforms and everything that we have access to the economic Arrangement doesn't make any sense as it currently is uh being uh
used in traditional publishing what we're going to do at infinite books is the author is going to get 70% of the royalties we're going to get 30% uh we're going to give the author dashboards so that they can see where their books sold how many copies they'll it will we're going to lace it with AI
and so it'll highlight where your sales went up to x 3X and if you want we're not going to get there day one but we're going to have an AI agent in there like let's say all of a sudden Seattle sees a 10x on your book would it be kind of cool if there was an AI agent that found all the podcasts and substacks that were
tangentially related to the topic of your book and like inte uh interacting with them getting you on a podcast Etc all these tools all these tools are here right now they're they're not like Dreams they're here now and so uh we're we're going to add to that mix though by
we have a stable of incredible writers and editors and so people we're publishing several science fiction books right now and the authors are incredibly creative they're amazing writers but like I've heard from both of them who've been working with our editors saying you know my book is really much much better
because I had this opportunity to work with Dylan or work with Ed and and so you don't have to do that if you don't want but like all of the things that are are that we find easy around having the tools for marketing for helping edit for all of those things well they they should be in place you know a friend
Jimmy Sony who I love his books as well we we were in a conversation and he quipped that if it isn't being discussed by the chattering classes at a Manhattan cocktail party they don't know it exists it's a bit harsh but it's a bit true too that's why it's funny and that's why we laugh about right and so I
wonder what do you think are we are we gonna with our new publishing uh divisions are we G to be the new Gatekeepers I like I like my position at describe because I'm explicitly not a gatekeeper like we do not make editorial decisions right we help every author make the best possible version of their book in their
Vision we are we are essentially a Professional Services firm more so than we are a book publisher right you could come to us with a book about you know knitting knitting your best yamaka and if you want the best version of that book to get out into the world like we will help you we will proofread
the hell out of it we will Design you the best cover we know how to we will iterate on that cover we will get you broad distribution we'll help you Market it it's not on us to decide to try to read the market and decide what's going to resonate and it's certain about on us to decide for you that you can't publish
a book because we don't think it's going to sell enough copies there's people who come to us and say look there's this Mission that's really close to my heart and it's preventing teen suicide and if I have money and I have time and I will spend years of my life and as much money
as I need to and if I save one teen from committing suicide then I will consider this book a success I don't care if I make any money I don't care if I give away 10,000 copies that's my metric metric of success in a traditional publisher as much as they might support that mission that's not how their
business Works um you know and we can say look we will help you publish the best possible version of this book we can we will help you support your mission and we have people who come to us with missions like that we also have Miss people who come and say this book is not going to make me any money but
every copy I give away gets me one set closer to earning $10 million on my Consulting business and there's people that give away a thousand copies of their book and make much more money on their sort of related businesses and you know the reputation or the speaking gigs
or the consulting or or raising Capital like whatever it is um a book is just sort of a step in their process and you know we we are able to provide authors with just maximum flexibility so I I love I I was I lose zero sleep over like am I am I keeping the gate well right like I know the gate is open like I'm
there to help everybody walk through it because I do think publishing a book is absolutely a transformative portal like writing one is an incredible experience and Publishing was is an incredible experience and I want to pave that Highway and make it as wide as I can help as many people as who possibly can
go down it and I think you have a very similar Mission we share a similar ethos similar worldview that we want to help create media that can sort of support that um and our our purview is just like as broad as can be it is like help the world make great books help anybody who can you know get their voice and
their message out in this Timeless format yeah and that that's the other thing that a lot of people don't get like somebody asked me they're like oh you must be bummed that like Eric went the describe as the CEO and that you guys didn't participate I went quite the contrary I'm delighted that somebody who
thinks like I do about this is at the helm over there and you know we'll find Opportunities where we where it might not copyright for infinite books and we're going to give it to you right I think we have a lot of opportunity to collaborate actually like I think we are much more
um we are sort of much more yin and yang like two sides of of the coin than we are trying to do the same thing um we we have similar you and I have similar sort of personal missions uh but we have like organizations that are very complimentary in terms of like what they're capable of doing I'm excited
about that and I think uh yeah I think there's lots of game left and we'll find some really interesting ways to work together yeah and and that's the other thing that you know the the the other mindset that I think people need to at least be open to thinking about and and that is like zero sum games lead to just
strictly competitive sometimes darwinian competitive behavior and and if you can change over to an abundance mindset you find yourself being much more Cooperative oriented and listen but 100% believer in free markets 100% believer in uh you know the freedom to do as you will but in in a different mindset you
start looking at things very very differently and you just start seeing like I just mentioned we're GNA do far better scribes going to do far better from us cooperating and working together in most instances than being like oh no scribe got that and we didn't get it oh I've already been referring people to
your team like we and we you that is so funny I mean that but that's the way it should be right I think that uh because there's so much as as someone who's written four books and loves books and um you know they are so near and dear to my heart and to My Life um there's just like there's so many possibilities that
we can do with the tools we have right now right like the ones I mentioned already but then think about audiobooks they're not doing anything with audiobooks why can't you push a button and order your audiobook in any language you want well guess what with AI translation that's next year and it's
yeah it's very close I I've seen some demos that are truly wild like up record with a half hour recording of my voice they can replicate me reading an entire manuscript and in such a way and these are like in development so they're not perfect yet but they're iterating at a
software Pace with clicks of a button and it can take Direction so it can say emphasize this passage emphasize this paragraph regenerate the entire thing make it more emotional slow it down speed it up like and then to your point exactly actually make it Chinese they have a transcript or a recording of by
voice reading the language I don't even speak it's mindblowing like thank you technology um and I've seen uh I think it's European there's there's a like an audible app where you can basically choose your narrator because it's like live generating different voices and so you can just like swipe through and it's
like oh there's Morgan Freeman reading it to me there's Scarlet Johansson there's Jim o shanesy like it's yeah the voice cloning thing is wild and going to be really fascinating and and and there's just so many of these tools that if you're even just a slight bit creative like oh gee I wonder if people
might like the ability to have that book in mandaran or in Spanish or in Greek uh or read with a happier Voice or a more serious voice but but then there's all sorts of other things like um uh back to Jimmy Sony uh when he wrote the book about uh the PayPal Mafia he did a lot of interviews why aren't those available
on the deluxe audio version right yes and and it it just seems to me that as you look at it I'm just like shaking my head thinking I can't believe I can't believe that there isn't at least one Legacy publisher out there going you know what we're just G to completely rein invent book publ Che don't tell
them Jim we're coming for him your your interview with Jimmy Sony was amazing by the way um you had a great Series this summer like uh with Liberty RPF and with Jimmy Sony where you talk a ton about these different like future of publishing sort of ideas and it was it's um I resonated with a
lot I recommend those to people who have' enjoyed what we talked about for the last 20 minutes or so that's a great Next Step thank you and as you know Liberty is our head of infinite media um and and again it's like how did I find him I found him by finding him on social media then subscribing to his newsletter
then listening to his podcast I'm like this guy is really good right and and uh then uh I again when you think about how these relationships start it many of them simply would not be possible in a world without connectivity right and and and people we take it for granted that
you and I can be chatting and you're somewhere and I'm somewhere else and and yet we're able to see each other and have the conversation now is it better in real life yeah it is but this is not a bad way to be able to do it as well and having access like to the that's what osv has predicated on the idea that
I can find all these great mindes everywhere in the world all I got to do is look right and in the past that simply was not the way things worked and and thus the Manhattan cocktail parties uh with the chattering classes well I think you're going to do a great job as the CEO over there and I'm delighted
that uh that the company uh is in its new Incarnation uh I think it's going to do super super well well I didn't even get to venture cap so I'm going to have to have you come back on because you're doing a really interesting thing Adventure again that is like uh very very um resonating with the way we're
looking at the world through our Venture uh division but um the uh I I my my nanny that is my executive assistant inag gon she she uh she texts me I'm not going to show I'm not GNA show what she said is she giving you the hook she is my she's my hook she's like because and I know that other teammates
put her up to it it's like you know uh the last draw feed we got of Jim we're talking to somebody like that he really likes like Eric that was way too long and so now she's like oh don't worry about it and see literally Jim you're at an hour and a half you're over an hour and a half right now
you like the president that's so liberating to just be able to talk until like go until the last minute and know that somebody else will pull you out that's fantastic that's right yeah she she enviable position she is the H well as you know because you've been on uh you get another chance to be emperor of the
world uh you you can't kill anyone as you know you can't put anyone on a re-education gap but you can we're going to give you a magic mic and you're going to say two things into it and those two things are going to incept the entire population of the world all 8 billion people whenever their tomorrow is are
going to wake up in their tomorrow and think to themselves I just had two of the greatest ideas and I'm gonna act on them right away what are you going to incept no be sweet to yourself and all those around you and that with capitalism technology and friendship we can save the
world God bless you I I agree with both of those and you know you you You' gotta first understand that to be kind to others you've got to start being kind to yourself first um and being kind to others is something that I think makes the world a much better place um and that free markets will in fact set you free so
Eric man I love talking to you I always like I always leave energized I always leave like God so really really great to talk and we'll we'll have you back on and we'll we'll we'll mix it up about BC because man I agree with a lot of what you're what you're saying on that side as well
and all yours yeah I think it's a it's a responsibility we both feel to like get the capital into the hands of the builders and the the technologies that can really change the world um and I admire the hell out of what what you're doing at osv too so it's it's always a pleasure I'm honored um thank you and I you Eric