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People don't remember books, they remember sentences.
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When you told me that, and I remember you did tell me that, I was like, that's it.
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So much of good writing is not what you say, it's how you say it.
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Everywhere you look, it's best story wins.
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It's not the best idea, it's not the right answer, it's the best story.
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Gets people nodding their heads.
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Are there mantras that you think about as you're trying to write a story?
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Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
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It's a tongue in cheek quote, but it's like, it's so true.
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When you're writing, you should pretend that every word costs you a hundred dollars. Oh, that's right.
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And when you're doing that, you'll be like, do I need this word? Do I need this sentence?
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The major lesson of doing this podcast so far has just been everything works, but you need to just be really, really, really, really, really good at whatever it is that you do.
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How has your writing changed since you moved here?
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My writing hasn't changed at all in 17 years. Nothing. Nothing.
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I don't want, and I think that's, and it's not to say that there's no improvement, but I don't want to be like, this was one of the lessons for when I started writing Psychology of Money.
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I wanted to like reinvent myself.
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And I was like, oh, like I always write blog posts, but now I got to write a book with a capital B. Yeah.
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And I got to write long chapters.
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And I had no experience doing that.
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And I shouldn't have just pretended that that was the same thing as blogging. Right. Because it's not.
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It's a totally different thing.
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So then I just owned, like, I'm a blogger.
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And I'm, I have a skill at writing 1500 word blog posts.
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And I'm not going to try to break that.
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I'm just going to own that in the book.
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So they're going to be short chapters.
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They're going to be blog length chapters.
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Like each chapter is a long blog. Yeah.
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That's kind of how I feel about it.
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That also made the process more digestible.
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Because if you sit down and you're like, I'm going to write a 75, 000 word book.
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It's really daunting if you think about it like that.
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But if you're like, okay, I need 20 long blog posts, even if it's the same thing, it's a lot more digested.
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It's you look at it and you're like, okay, I can do this.
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I can tackle, I can knock that out.
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Are there writers who have done a good job transitioning formats like that?
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Because even Seth Godin, Seth Godin has an amazing blog, but his books are these mini blogs, just like what he writes every day.
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It's like people have these lanes and they get really good at They have their hammer, and they get good at looking for the, for those sorts of nails, and then their books are exactly what they write normally.
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I'm trying to think of someone who can, who has really done both.
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And a lot of the really good book authors, Bethany McLean, Michael Lewis, all those people, a lot of times they write for magazines.
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Both those authors I mentioned have written for Vanity Fair. Yep.
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And when they write a magazine piece, It's a book chapter.
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It's a long book chapter and in fact several Michael Lewis books like Boomerang have been based off of Vanity Fair pieces that he wrote.
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So even those people who are like, oh, they write books and they write online It's actually like what they're writing online is kind of very similar to what they would write in the book It's just online you get one chapter and a book is ten of them and so I'm trying to think of people who have you know, who can write really good 400 word blog posts and And a great 75, 000 word book in a long form book format.
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I'm sure they exist, but I actually think it's great that people kind of own what they do.
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Um, remember 10, 15 years ago when Joe Weisenthal was writing a lot at Business Insider, he was literally doing 10 blog posts a day.
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And his blog posts would be a chart and three sentences.
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And that was his, that was, that would be his blog post.
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And he was, he was the best in the world at that.
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And like, could Joe write a 75, 000 word book? Probably.
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And it would probably be great.
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But I think so many people just own that format.
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Like, what are you good at? Just do that.
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And don't pretend like you have to be somebody else.
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Have there been moments in your career where you feel like you've...
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You've wanted to be somebody else, you've tried to be somebody else, and you've said I'm not that person, I'm not going to do that anymore.
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I tried it with Psychology of Money.
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When I set out to write Psychology of Money, I said I'm going to write a new book from scratch.
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It's going to be 10 chapters, each chapter is going to be 6, 000 words.
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That's what I set out to write, which would be a pretty normal, structured, long, uh, non fiction book.
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And I started writing it, and I wrote two shitty chapters.
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Neither of which made it into the book.
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They were both 6, 000 words.
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And I sent it to a couple friends of mine whose opinions I really value.
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And all of them independently, and I'm glad they did this, they wrote back and they said, What is this? This is not you. Who wrote this? This is not good at all.
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And it was because I had gained, what I liked doing, was writing a 1500 word blog.
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And you can think in your mind, Okay, I'm good at 1, 500 word blogs.
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I'm just going to start doing 6, 000 word chapters, and you can think like, oh, how hard can it be?
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It's a completely different thing. Completely different.
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It's the equivalent of like, you're really skilled at jazz music, and then you're like, I could do heavy metal. It's music.
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It's the same thing, right?
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Like, that's so different.
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So when I tried to do that, it was, and what I did is pretty foreseeable. I just rambled.
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And rambled and rambled and rambled and rambled.
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And I was like, I gotta get to 6, 000 words.
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Throw in a couple more examples.
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Throw in a couple more stories.
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How can I just extend this idea?
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And so in the end, it was, you know, what I was really wanted to do is just be like, what's the point that I'm trying to make in that chapter?
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Make that point, wrap it up, move to the next chapter.
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Wait, but explain this to me.
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How about how all this happened in Psychology of Money, which are both longer pieces. What happens there?
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Is it that they're, that idea, a long idea is now ready and you can just go there?
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And sometimes you can do that, but now when you need to write like 12 of those, that's when it really breaks down?
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Well, the blog post Psychology of Money, that was, that was the origin of the book.
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It was like 10, 000 words, right?
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But yes, and it was broken up into nine, I think it was 19.
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Little segments in the blog post, how this all happened, which is kind of about, it's just, I think it's 6, 000 words on the history of the U S economy that was all broken up into about 10 different time periods.
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So even within that blog, there's like 10 mini blogs within there, the psychology of money blog post.
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I, that too was kind of based off of, I was like, okay, what articles have I written in the past?
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How can I basically condense those points?
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So each, each point would have been about 500 words, something like that.
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And so, so even when it is a long form.
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It's very, it's broken up into little bits.
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How about in the piece that you wrote about your friend who passed, uh, the one when you were skiing, that one was a little bit different.
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That was probably about 3, 000 words or so, so it's not that long.
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And since that was a very clear, there's one story to tell, uh, you know, that, that came out a little bit more, but even within that, thinking about it, that's really broken up into three pieces.
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It's like, here's our background, here's what happened during the avalanche, and here's what I learned from it.
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And it's like three distinct sections. Yeah.
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In terms of writing really good stories, is that something that you've worked on?
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Is that something that you feel is just very intuitive?
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I'm sure you're thinking about it all the time, but how have you gone about improving that?
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I think it was, it was, you know, if you write online, the, the hardest part and the best part is that if you write something bad, People will tell you in no uncertain terms how bad it was.
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Like the feedback, you, you need a thick skin, but if, but the feedback is so great that you are constantly learning.
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So if you're publishing every day and you're getting feedback on that every day, and you do that for years or decades, you'll, you are forced to see what works and what doesn't work.
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And so I, you know, if you were, I, I've always been a finance writer and particularly back in the day, I was very much, I was writing about the stock market every day. This was Motley Fool. Yes.
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Three, three articles a day. That's like. What's 700 a year?
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Uh, I think I was in the Mollie Fool for nine years and I wrote 3, 500 articles when I was there.
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So whatever that works out to, it was a lot and getting, and getting critical feedback by hundreds of readers on every single one of them.
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And I realized that if you want to stick out as a writer, it's competitive.
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There's a lot of other writers out there writing about finance, that if you are just writing.
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As a data person, you're, you're not, you're, you're, you're never going to stick out.
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If you write, Oh, the Dow went up a hundred points and here's the stock, you're, you're never going to stick out.
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There's 10, 000 other people doing that.
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So it's like, okay, well, if you can tell a story about finance, you might actually stick out a little bit because a lot of the other data writing was. Boring too.
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It's just like charts and numbers and it's just not really, but if you can tell a story, that's how you stick out in finance.
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So I started realizing like that's, that's the way to survive as a writer.
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If I want to, it was never about like, how can I get better?
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It was literally just like, how can I keep my job?
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How can I survive as a writer that I need to start telling stories about things.
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And I also thought it was just more interesting for me. I enjoyed it more.
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I was not going to enjoy a job where I just woke up and just lived inside of Excel and dumped charts on the page.
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But if I could get in the minds of people.
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Then I was really excited.
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And from a investing perspective, I was never that interested in picking stocks.
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I was never interested in doing, you know, uh, discounted cashflow analysis.
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I just wanted to figure out what was going on inside of people's heads.
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It was just like, how are you, like, what are you thinking?
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How are you making decisions?
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And so that lent itself to telling stories versus doing analysis.
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So it was those two things.
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It was just more interesting.
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And I thought it was a way to survive as a writer.
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Did you, Read and write a lot as a kid? Virtually zero. So when did that change?
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Well, I started as a writer for The Motley Fool out of desperation. This is 2008.
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Yeah, I started technically in 2007, but the economy was already starting to crack by then. Got it.
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And so if you were a finance major, if you're looking for a job in an investment bank, forget about it.
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By summer of 2007, everything was shutting down.
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I was interning for a private equity firm in summer 2007, and everything started cracking.
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Cracking, which in hindsight, we didn't know at the time, but in hindsight, that was like the preamble of the financial crisis in 2007.
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So I needed a job and, um, in 2007 and virtually no one was hiring.
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And I had a friend at the time who was a writer for the Motley Fool.
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And he said, Hey, you're looking for a job.
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You're interested in investing. Like they'll do it.
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And I remember thinking, Hey, it was, I don't believe this anymore, but at the time I really felt like it was.
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Humiliating that like I'm, I'm a writer, I want to be a hedge fund manager and now I'm a journalist.
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It was, I, I really viewed it as like, ah, this is like, I don't know how this feels, but I need a job.
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So I thought, okay, I'll do this for six months until I can find a job at a hedge fund, become a trader at a hedge fund.
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But I, I, I didn't, and it was, it was not enjoyable at first.
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It felt the first year felt just like a job.
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Like I'm just doing this for a paycheck.
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I can crank out a couple of words, but then I started really enjoying it.
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I think it was once I started telling stories.
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Versus like, let me just do some analysis about the stock.
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Once I started telling stories, I was like, Oh, this is kind of fun.
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Actually, I kind of enjoy it.
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And then I really started enjoying it.
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It took probably five years before it was like. Oh, this is what I do.
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This is not just a, you know, a temporary stop until I find another career.
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This is what I'm going to do.
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That probably took five years.
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Was there like a post, a comment, a moment where you were like, I got game?
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Um, my very first, I had been at the Molly Fool for like a month at this point and it's late 2007 and I wrote an article and I'm so embarrassed to say this because I would never use this title anymore.
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The article is titled the impending destruction of the US economy, which at the time, I think at the time, I honestly didn't know how much, how many people were reading.
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I didn't really think about that.
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That kind of headline is going to get people's attention, but it was late 2007.
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So the economy hadn't collapsed yet, but it was definitely starting to weaken.
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So I think that got to a lot of people, a lot of people were like, yes, that's how I feel too.
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But, um, and in hindsight, actually, I think my analysis was totally wrong.
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Like the economy did collapse one year later, but not for the, like, not for the reasons that I'd, that I foresaw, but that was the one, it got a lot of attention and other press outlets picked it up and stuff.
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And I'd been there for a month.
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So that was kind of a point where I was like, oh, this actually is. It's kind of neat.
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I'm not just writing into an echo chamber here. Yeah.
11:39
And as you were getting started in your writing, who were you looking up to?
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I think the honest answer is during that first year, nobody.
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You just needed to get stuff done.
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I just needed, I just needed a job. I needed to work.
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It was not like, oh, cause like I said, I was not a reader or a writer during that, but definitely not.
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I was an economics major in college, which is just like, as long as you can write your name on the top of the test, that's all they ask out of you.
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So I'd really never written anything when I started as a writer for The Motley Fool.
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And I remember my mom, who's been so supportive of everything in my life, I called her and I said, Oh mom, I got a job as a writer. And she went.
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Morgan, like, do you, do you know how to write?
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Like, what are, like, what are you doing here?
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And I remember being so disappointed.
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I remember just being like, oh, you're, because she was right.
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It's like I really had no, no business doing it.
12:29
Um, so I really didn't have any writing heroes that I looked up to.
12:29
Because I would casually read here and there, but really not that much.
12:34
I, I do now, but when I started I was not much of a reader either. How do you read now?
12:39
I read a lot less than I used to.
12:43
I definitely went through a period.
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Five or ten years ago where I was like reading for sport.
12:48
It was just like how many books can I read per month?
12:48
Yeah, and it was just a game and I think I liked telling people.
12:53
Oh, I read nine books last month But then you look back and you're like you're just doing it for the numbers Because when you blow through books that quickly, you're not thinking about it You're not reading a book and then like, you know, meditating on what you've just read and thinking about the points.
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You're not stopping a chapter and being like, oh, how does that apply to me?
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You're just like, how can I get through it as fast as I can? So I stopped doing that.
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So now I read maybe one, sometimes two books a month.
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But I read intentionally slower and a lot of times I'll read a chapter or even I'll read a paragraph and I'll be, I'll stop and be like, ah, let me think about that. Is that true? Yeah, I think it's true.
13:26
How does that apply to other people?
13:29
Oh, I think that reminds me of this other thing. It's funny.
13:32
I've gone through the same transition.
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I feel like also early when you haven't read a lot, you're just getting started.
13:36
A book can just shake your world view, you know, it's quake books, people call them.
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And like, I remember I read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media, and I was like, Oh my goodness, this is an entirely new way to think, and then I sort of read all around it, and I feel like I spent five to eight years just reading and reading and reading, and just basically building up the receptors in my brain for new information.
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But then I kind of got to a place where it's like, I don't really need new receptors.
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I sort of know what I'm doing with my career, I know what my interests are, and now I'm just kind of slowly trying to take one aspect of my worldview and really deepen it, another aspect of my worldview and really deepen it.
14:18
And now I just, I don't read for sport anymore at all, but I used to do like an entire Saturday Sunday where I'd do like an audiobook. Read most of one.
14:22
I would read another hardcover, and it was like just like what you said It was like I got my gym routine.
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I got my reading routine, and I'm gonna be disciplined and dedicated about this I remember I remember I read I heard one time that when Bill Clinton was in college There was one summer where he read a book a day for the entire summer Geez, I never really thinking that I'm being like god. That's amazing.
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That's why he's so smart That's why he's like so and now I look back at it, and it's like no That's that's reading for sport and I guarantee you He didn't learn that much that summer. That's the irony of it. But I don't regret it.
14:53
I think it's good to go through that.
14:53
And maybe that process, because I think a lot of people do that in their like early to mid twenties, the reading for sport period.
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And actually what might be happening is you're like training yourself to read. I think so.
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I think that's what it is.
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So now that I read much slower, but I think you pick up some reading skills when you just get, just bury yourself in the words.
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I think you also, I mean I remember I had an internship In college at this company called skiff, there was a travel news and data company.
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And I had been in university and my university wasn't super rigorous.
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And now I'm in New York city in Manhattan at like a real startup. And I just realized.
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In that summer that I knew nothing.
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I say that with no humility at all.
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Like I just knew nothing. I had nothing to value.
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Or nothing to offer the world.
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I had nothing of value to give.
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I just didn't know anything.
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And so I remember coming back to school and I found Stratechery, I found Keith Rabois stuff. I found Marc Andreessen.
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I was like, okay, I'm going to learn all about startups.
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And I just read and I read and I read.
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And I feel like I had to go through this explore exploit type thing.
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Where I had to figure out, okay, what am I even interested in?
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And so a lot of the reading maybe wasn't about learning stuff, but just trying to figure out what do I want to be reading in the future.
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And now I feel like I can walk into a bookstore and just say, okay, I know exactly what sections I like, I know exactly what authors I'm looking for, and I know exactly these little circles of interest for me.
16:18
I feel like, too, another skill that I picked up from that is just being able to skim a little bit more effectively.
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So there's a lot of times, even the great books that I really love, sometimes you're reading, even sometimes an entire chapter and just be like, this isn't working for me.
16:28
Let's move on to the next.
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But even within a chapter, you can be reading and you just kind of tell like, uh, that paragraph's not relevant. Ooh, this is a good one.
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Just kind of skimming like that.
16:37
And I think that's an important skill that you pick up during that period.
16:39
How did you find Frederick Lewis Allen's work and how has it impacted you?
16:44
I don't know where I first heard of Frederick Lewis Allen.
16:44
I don't, I can't think of the moment when it was because he's pretty obscure. Yeah.
16:48
He was a, he was a historian, did most of his writing.
16:54
in the 1930s through 1950s.
16:54
And he's my favorite historian and one of my favorite writers. He wrote three books.
17:00
One is, one is on the 1920s, one's on the 1930s, and one is How America Changed from 1900 to 1950. Yeah. Uh, he's just so good.
17:10
What I think, what I really love about him is that most historians, almost all historians, Write about the big figures, the presidents, the generals, the entrepreneurs.
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Frederick Louis Allen writes about average people.
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He's just like, what was life like for the average middle class American in the 1920s?
17:23
And it's just so, you can just relate to it so much better than if you're reading about Winston Churchill or something. Right.
17:29
That's what he's so good about.
17:32
And, um, a lot of that historic writing, even if we're talking a hundred years ago, like not that long ago.
17:37
A lot of it's hard to read, it's dense, it's very formal, it's, but Frederick Louis Allen is like a, a chatty writer.
17:41
You feel like it's easy to read.
17:46
I feel like in 1930, he was writing like somebody would write in the 2010s, which is pretty rare.
17:51
A lot of those books, you're like, Oh, this, this book written in 1920, even if it's a famous writer.
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Ernest Hemingway or something.
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You pick it up and you're like, this is just not how people write anymore.
18:00
It's, it's good in its own way, but Frederick Lewis Allen is just very readable, which is so rare for that period.
18:07
Is he a good storyteller or was it more the data and the facts? It's both. It's both.
18:13
He gets these data and facts about what life was like back then, but it's, it's easy to read.
18:18
I'll tell you the opposite of that.
18:18
If anyone has ever read, read John Maynard Keynes, you can't, you can't do it.
18:20
You try to read one paragraph and you're like, uh, my, uh, I've no, I read, I understand what these, like, I know what that word is, but I have no idea what you're saying here.
18:30
It's not readable at all.
18:34
Frederick Lewis Allen was the opposite of that.
18:36
One of the coolest things that I remember is we were talking at this point, half a decade ago, and we were talking about something that was going on with how unemployment rates were calculated in America.
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You were just like, dude, just go on the St.
18:49
Louis Federal Reserve website and just start playing around with FRED data, and you'll realize that there's so much BS out there, and you will find so many things and learn so many things by just like skipping around on the site.
19:05
And that was a great piece of advice.
19:05
Fred, it's called FRED, which stands for Federal Reserve Economic Data. Okay.
19:08
Um, it has literally thousands, I forget the exact number, but it's thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of data points on the U. S. economy.
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Everything you can think of, like how many chickens were harvested in this county in Kentucky.
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And it'll have that data, it'll have a chart with that data going back to the 1920s.
19:27
It's like the most obscure you can think of anything.
19:32
And it's a really good tool to like manipulate data so you can see.
19:32
Um, you can be like, all right, GDP divide and then like divide that by the population of California.
19:41
You can get like any statistic you want, which is really good, but then you realize you can get any statistic you want.
19:46
What do you want to prove?
19:46
There's enough data there that you can prove it and find anything that you want.
19:50
And so it's an amazing tool.
19:50
I think it's a great, it's a great public resource.
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It's all free of course and it's just very usable.
19:59
You don't need to be an economist to figure out what you're doing.
19:59
Anyone can just go in there and type in unemployment rate and it'll show you.
20:02
Every different kind of unemployment rate broken out by gender, age, education type, going back to, in some cases, the 1920s.
20:12
It's a great, it's a great piece.
20:12
Are there other tools like that that you like to use?
20:15
The one that really sticks out, when I used to live in Washington, D. C.
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, I used to go to the Library of Congress a lot.
20:19
And they have, it used to be just on microfilm, but now it's all digitized. Every edition.
20:23
of many, many newspapers going back to literally the 1700s.
20:33
And I just think it was the coolest.
20:33
So I used to go in there and just kill time and be like, without any objective, I would just go in there and be like, I'm going to read the New York Times from a random day in 1922.
20:42
And I loved every second of that. It was so cool.
20:48
Even the most benign things of just like, there would be an advertisement for like women's coats.
20:52
And you're like, wow, like a high end women's coat in 1922 across. 19 or whatever it was.
20:56
This is all these little things.
20:56
But it's also so interesting to read history when there's no hindsight bias.
21:02
And when you read a newspaper from 1922, they didn't know what was going to happen in 1923.
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They didn't know how it was going to happen in 1929.
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So you really get to see, like, what was going through people's heads at that time.
21:15
Which, every history book, That's written with hindsight bias shapes the story.
21:20
When you know how the story ends, it shapes how you write about it.
21:25
So I love reading that kind of history when there's no inherent hindsight bias involved.
21:30
Yeah, I was watching an interview with David McCullough and he was talking about writing his book about the Brooklyn Bridge.
21:34
And He was asked what is the key to writing good history, and he said exactly this, he said a great historian will have you reading it, remembering, feeling that the people who are experiencing that moment didn't know how history was going to pan out.
21:51
And it's really fascinating if you're talking, if you're reading about a period, like, In the middle of the Great Depression or the middle of World War II when they did not know how it was gonna end.
21:57
We know how it ends now, right?
22:01
And every book written about the Great Depression knows that it did end.
22:05
But in 1932, they didn't know that it was gonna end. Mm-Hmm. .
22:05
And you realize there's all these, um, alternative histories that could have happened.
22:09
Like we think of, uh, dictatorships and autocracies kind of as in, in a very negative light today, as, as we should. Mm-Hmm.
22:21
in 1932, they by and large didn't.
22:21
And when that was the fascists, when fascism was sweeping through Europe, a lot of Americans were like.
22:30
We should give it a shot too.
22:30
And when you are in the depths of the depression and unemployment rate is 25 percent and the stock market fell 91%, a lot of people who would never consider that in 1922 are like, Capitalism broke, let's give something else a shot.
22:40
And so when you read how serious they were about it, and these were smart, educated people, it's pretty shocking.
22:51
And the only reason that they were saying that is because they did not know that it was going to end.
22:54
In their view, it might not ever end.
22:54
This might be truly the end of America, so we might as well try something else. Wow.
22:58
Are there mantras that you think about as you're trying to write a story?
23:03
I think one that comes to mind that is always like a little bird on my shoulder chirping away is What's your point?
23:13
Make the point and get out of the way.
23:13
Like, it's easy to underestimate how impatient readers are.
23:18
And I see it with myself.
23:18
Not just in writing, but watching TV and watching movies.
23:23
It's just like, what's the point? Get to the point.
23:23
What's, what's the point?
23:23
My, my wife is the most impatient TV watcher.
23:27
So if there's a great series, like, Oh, like my friend told me this is the best series, we gotta watch it.
23:35
We'll start watching the first five minutes of the first episode and she'll be like, bored, moving on.
23:39
Just got like you got to catch people's attention.
23:39
She's extreme like that in TV, but I think most people are like that for writing.
23:42
You got five seconds to catch somebody's attention.
23:46
If you didn't catch them with the headline and you didn't catch them in the first two sentences, they're done. They're gone.
23:50
A lot of the reason why online writing became snappy, snappier than print writing, is because with online writing came a lot of tools where you could track and see how far down the page the readers made it. Yep.
24:03
Which you can't do that in a paper book or in a paper newspaper.
24:03
So once these publications started realizing, Hey, we thought this piece was really good, and a lot of people clicked on it, but the average reader made it to the third sentence before they closed the tab. Right?
24:16
Then you, or you can really track it, you're like, oh, they actually made it down to 60% and then, and then they dropped off completely.
24:19
Well, what happened at 60%?
24:19
Oh, you're clearly rambling, and as soon as you started rambling for three seconds, they're gone. They're out.
24:27
How often when you're writing, do you feel like you have the story?
24:33
And then you need to find the point versus have the point and then start looking for the story or is it just like this epiphany that you have, you write it in a sentence, you email it to yourself and you run from there.
24:41
I think it's always the first. I find the story. Is that right? Always.
24:44
And then you're like, how can I, what's the lesson here that I could apply to something broader?
24:50
And I can't think of one time when it's been the former. What?
24:54
When it's like, oh, I want to write an article about competitive advantages and I need to find a good story that fits that.
25:00
It's always, it's every single time it's been the latter. You're so good at it.
25:05
I mean, I just off the top of my head, I think of so many Morgan stories that you just nailed.
25:08
I love the Steamboat Willie one with Walt Disney. Oh yeah, yeah.
25:13
Well, so Walt Disney was, when he was a cartoonist, early in his career when he was a cartoonist, um, he was very good at making cartoons and they were very popular.
25:23
And, but he had no business sense whatsoever and all the cartoons he was making were not.
25:28
He was not making any money.
25:28
So there's a period when he had made all these cartoons, all these like cartoon shorts, and he was on the verge of bankruptcy. It wasn't working.
25:35
And then Steamboat Willie completely changed everything.
25:39
It was, no, it wasn't Steamboat Willie. It was Snow White.
25:39
Snow White completely and utterly changed everything.
25:44
And like by several orders of magnitude, it was bigger financially than everything else he had ever made.
25:48
So at that point in his career, he had made.
25:52
Dozens of cartoon short movies, and none of them mattered except for Snow White.
25:58
And that was the movie, he made so much money from that, that he built a new studio, and hired a bunch of people, and paid off a bunch of debts that were about to put him into bankruptcy.
26:06
So I use that as an example of Tales.
26:06
Like, he had made, I don't know, 30 movies, and only one of them mattered.
26:09
And that is like a distribution that applies to so many things in life.
26:14
Of, if you do 30 things, 29 of them are going to be irrelevant, or 29 of them are going to be failures.
26:20
And one of them, hopefully, if you're good, will completely change everything.
26:27
How does that show up in your writing?
26:27
Oh, I mean, of the, you know, I bet at this point it's...
26:31
Pushing 4, 000 blog posts.
26:31
I think I'm really proud of like 10 of them. Oh, wow. That's probably true. Maybe 20. One a year? Yeah, yeah. No, I always said that.
26:36
You know, I write a lot less than I used to.
26:41
But even at The Motley Fool when I was writing three articles a day.
26:44
So, you know, several hundred a year. I'd be proud of five.
26:47
And I think, I think, I think if you do that ratio, that's pretty good.
26:52
If you can come up with one thing per year that you're like, Um, this is good. I'm really proud.
26:57
And even within that, I can think of one.
26:57
per decade, where I'm like, that was, that's, that was what I would really want to hang my hat on.
27:06
So it's never going to be the case, but I think it's true for musicians and whatnot. And it's true.
27:10
I always use the example, Stephen King has written like 50 books and the huge majority of his fame and I bet his income come from like three of them. Yeah.
27:15
So even the very top writers, Mark Twain is like this too.
27:22
The Ken Burns documentary on Mark Twain is so great. He wrote so many books.
27:22
That sucked and nobody cared about and nobody paid any attention to and you've never heard of them because it never became famous But as long as you have Huck Finn that you can throw in there and Tom Sawyer to throw that none of it matters Yeah, how do you feel about that now about to publish a second book that's coming out?
27:41
Does that scare you or is like hey, this might be a flop scares the hell out of me Yeah, I but I think you have to accept that as a writer that if you're gonna write several books if you are very lucky If you're extremely lucky, one of them will be great.
27:51
And I don't think there's any exceptions to that.
27:57
Michael Lewis falls into that.
27:57
There's a lot of Michael Lewis books that I bet even Michael Lewis fans have barely ever heard of. Uh, The New New Thing.
28:06
Most people have never heard of it.
28:06
Even some of his more recent books, The Fifth Risk. Yeah. And The Undoing Project.
28:11
Um, I'm sure they're great books.
28:16
Well written, very insightful.
28:16
But it's never going to be the case at everything you do.
28:20
How many games has LeBron James lost? In his career.
28:20
Like, like a lot, a ton of games.
28:25
So no matter what you're doing, your hit rate's never going to be anywhere remotely close to 100%.
28:30
Is it worth trying to get it up?
28:30
Or do you think that you're making real sacrifices by trying to get it up?
28:34
Or is it just like, you can't even think about how to increase your hit rate, it's a fool's errand to even try to go for it?
28:38
I think it's probably closer to the latter. Yeah.
28:41
I mean, it's not to say you can't do anything.
28:41
You shouldn't just throw crap at the wall and see what sticks.
28:45
But you got to be prepared for the fact that there's going to be a lot of losing in this and that's hard That's hard to do particularly for new writers when they're like, I just started a blog I'm just gonna see how it works and I wrote ten posts and like people hated eight of them Yeah, that's actually a pretty good ratio, you know, but that's that's hard for people to stomach Tell me about your office that you write in here.
29:07
You always write in there, right?
29:07
Yeah, and I travel a lot for work, but I can't I can't write anywhere else but here. You can't? Can't do it. Can't do it. Really?
29:16
Even in a hotel room by myself, perfectly quiet. I can't. I just can't do it.
29:21
I don't, I don't really know why it is.
29:21
I think, because I'm not that sentimental of a person, I don't know what it is, but I, I write everything just from, from this office down the hallway here, yeah.
29:31
So tell me about the office. Uh, it's small.
29:35
Besides your perfect bookshelf.
29:35
I walked in, it was all perfect hardcovers and you were like, every, it's like a perfect line on the shelf. It's really deliberate.
29:40
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm very, I'm very precise about my bookshelf.
29:46
What matters in a home office. Yes. Yes. Um, I like it. It's where I do.
29:50
I spend the majority of my life in that office.
29:54
Cause even, you know, I, I don't write that often.
29:54
There may be one day a week that I'm actually typing words out and the rest of it is just kind of unstructured, hanging out, reading, thinking, talking to friends.
30:04
And that's where the real work happens.
30:11
But actually typing is a pretty, it's was one day a week now.
30:11
And the rest of the time it's.
30:15
Scroll on Twitter, watching a YouTube.
30:15
I was just watching a YouTube documentary about FTX that just came out.
30:21
And it's a lot of just unstructured wandering, which is what I like doing, and it all, it's all in that room. Oh, wow. What do you do? Kick your feet up? Drink coffee? That's it.
30:27
Feet on the desk, hang out. Smoke a cigar? Drink coffee. Drink coffee. Uh, interesting.
30:32
I didn't realize that you only typed one day a week.
30:38
Yeah, it used to be, you know, I was at the Motley Fool's every day, every single day.
30:43
Um, because I was publishing every single day.
30:46
But now I publish about once a week.
30:46
And normally it's like, okay, it's Monday.
30:46
Like, alright, like, I gotta think of something to write.
30:51
Well, what am I thinking about?
30:51
Oh, I kinda had this idea, like, I don't know if that's developed enough.
30:56
Well, I was thinking about this other thing.
30:59
Oh, that might, let's see where that runs.
31:01
Like, oh, let me think about this idea.
31:01
Okay, now I'm gonna go for a walk.
31:01
And I'm thinking about the, oh, it kind of reminds me of this other idea.
31:06
And oh, remember I read that book a couple years ago?
31:09
I think that has an example that I could tie in here.
31:09
And it's usually like two days of that.
31:13
And then it's um, one day of writing.
31:17
I'll knock it all out in one day.
31:17
And then I'll usually sit on it for a day and kind of stare at it.
31:21
It might change a sentence or two and then, and then hit publish. Okay. There's a lot there.
31:26
So when you're out walking, you talking to yourself, you thinking to yourself, like walk me through that process.
31:31
I'm listening to music or listening to a podcast, but it's really common that on a walk, I'll send myself 15 emails and I, it's an email that I sent to myself with just a note in the subject line.
31:41
Uh, and it'll be like, Oh, you know, I, Oh, like I'll remember I read this book five years ago and has this example.
31:49
And I forget what the example is, but I'll write like, Oh, this was the book.
31:49
Like, I think there was something about the guy who did X, Y, and Z.
31:54
And I'll just send that email to myself.
31:57
And all those ideas come to me while I'm walking.
31:57
It'll never come to me when I'm sitting at my desk.
32:01
So you're just standing at the street corner, you're just typing? Yes, yes. Looking down?
32:03
And it's usually, it's usually, sometimes the emails will be two words to myself.
32:05
Just a little reminder to think about this thing.
32:09
What was your recent one?
32:09
What did I write recently?
32:09
Um, uh, a few laws about getting rich. Yeah. Yeah, That one crushed. Yeah, thanks.
32:15
So how did that piece come about?
32:19
Uh, I was on the treadmill upstairs here, in my gym upstairs.
32:22
And um, This is always how it is.
32:22
It's never when you sit down and try to force creativity.
32:28
It's always walking or on the treadmill or in the shower or something.
32:34
I remember being on the treadmill and I remember stopping and sending myself an email called Laws of Getting Rich.
32:37
And I had no idea where I was going to go, but I remember just thinking like, Oh, that'd be a good, that'd be a good title.
32:40
Let's do something with that.
32:44
And so it just started with the title, but no idea of where it was going to go.
32:48
And then I think when I started writing that, it was kind of like ideas on how to get rich.
32:52
But then I, very quickly, I was like, nah, this is not, not going to work.
32:56
So then it was like, uh, well, I just started jotting down ideas.
33:00
And I noticed that a lot of them were like negative.
33:00
They were like, oh, here's like the downside of getting rich, which seems like the craziest idea.
33:04
Like downside of getting rich.
33:08
Tiny violin bullshit is this, but I realized like once you start putting them together, it's like, oh, it's like, oh, that's actually like a common theme that might be kind of a unique article, right?
33:14
What are people who want to get rich or do get rich?
33:18
What are they overlooking?
33:18
What are some of the more subtle downsides of wealth?
33:22
And so after, after that treadmill, there was probably a walk or two where I just started throwing, you know, piece and ideas together. How long are your walks?
33:30
Um, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, something like that.
33:30
And if I'm, if I'm really trying to think of an idea, it'll be two or three a day.
33:35
And then I, I run every other day, usually for an hour.
33:39
Um, so that's, that's more time of just kind of, it's the same as walking, just throwing some ideas around.
33:44
Tell me about your business model, speaking, collaborative fun, books, like how do you think through that?
33:48
Yeah, a couple different, you know, avenues of it.
33:53
Um, Collaborative Fund I've been at for seven years. So that's, that's great.
33:57
That's kind of, I've always felt like that's kind of my core, my home base.
33:59
Speaking is something that I picked up in 2016.
34:03
It was the first time that I got paid for speaking.
34:03
Um, that has become a big thing of what I do, speaking at conferences, books was something that I never in a million years thought would be a thing, but now has become the biggest driver of, of the business of what I do.
34:19
And then I'm on the board of directors at Markel.
34:21
This is another thing that's kind of like, if I look at my career, those are the pieces, the different, different elements.
34:24
So walk me through the business of speaking, the business of books.
34:29
The business of speaking, I remember it was 2010.
34:29
I was at a conference in Vancouver.
34:34
Um, I was, I was just a guest at a conference.
34:38
I was just in the audience.
34:38
And I saw Barry Ritholtz speak.
34:38
And I had been reading Barry Ritholtz for a while, but I never met him.
34:43
And it was, it was the first financial conference that I'd ever been to.
34:47
And I watched Barry get up on stage and just absolutely own the 500 people in the audience.
34:54
Just had them, just crushed it.
34:54
And I remember sitting in the back and being like, I want to do that.
34:59
That sounds like a cool thing to do.
35:02
And I had no idea how much he got paid, I still don't.
35:02
But I remember being like, you can get paid to do that?
35:06
Like that's, I want to do that.
35:06
It was not like I'm going to do this anytime soon, but it was like, that seems like a really cool thing to do.
35:15
So when I was at the Molly Fool, I did a couple of talks when I was at the Molly Fool for pretty big audiences, three, four hundred people.
35:19
completely scared out of my mind, literally like not sleeping the night before, drenched in sweat as I was walking up to stage, just so, so scared.
35:29
But I actually kind of liked it.
35:32
It was actually kind of fun.
35:32
Like I actually enjoyed it.
35:32
And then, um, the first time I got paid to talk was 2016.
35:37
It was at the University of Arizona. Yeah.
35:37
And so, and then it kind of grew from there.
35:44
I think 2018 was the first year that.
35:44
First time I did international stuff, I went to South Africa and Australia, uh, and India.
35:53
And it kinda, it kinda just took off from there.
35:53
It definitely kinda snowballs.
35:53
Once event planners know that you, that you're a speaker, it kinda just snowballs from there.
36:01
And how do you think about the relationship between writing and speaking?
36:01
Well, definitely what I speak about is what I write about.
36:05
And a lot of, like, the stories that I might tell on a blog is just a story that I will narrate on stage.
36:08
And, and, and the, you know, most of the talks I give are three or four short stories.
36:12
Usually the stories have nothing to do with investing, but have a very clear Financial takeaway embedded in them.
36:21
Which is kind of the structure of my writing.
36:21
What makes a good public talk?
36:21
So much, what I always try to do is when I give a talk on stage 90 percent of the words I've memorized and is effectively verbatim from the previous talk.
36:33
And 10 percent I will intentionally Adlib, because it's very obvious if you are just doing 100 percent memorized words, it's, it's, you realize the skill that actors have because to, uh, speak memorized words and memorize and not sound like a robot, it's very, very hard to do.
36:56
So that's why like actors are so incredibly talented because they can memorize the words and come off as like, they're just spitting them out, uh, adlib.
36:59
And so I, I always intentionally 10, maybe even sometimes 20%.
37:04
I'm just kind of making it up as I go.
37:04
But that's within a very structured talk in which I've memorized at least 80 percent of the words I'm saying verbatim.
37:14
I'm always, this is one of the core things we talk about in Rite of Passage.
37:16
I'm always amazed at how speaking can so quickly add structure to thought and how good the mind is at compressing ideas in speech.
37:22
So, if you give your average person 3, 000 words and they have a 3, 000 word essay.
37:28
You're like, Hey, condense this to 500 words.
37:32
They're like, come again. Yeah, I can't do that.
37:38
If somebody has a five minute talk and you're like, okay, hey, say what you just said, but now say it to like Uncle Joe in like 20 seconds.
37:44
They're actually pretty good at doing that.
37:49
And there's something natural and intuitive about speech in terms of your ability to compress and distill an idea that I really like tapping into.
37:58
One thing I really love about speaking too.
37:58
Um, I, I read recently that Mark Twain used to read his work out loud to his family and he would watch their emotional reactions and when he could tell that his wife and kids were getting bored, he'd be like, Oh, got to cut that section.
38:11
And when his wife and kids would like lean forward in their seat, he'd be like, Oh, I'm onto something here.
38:15
And I think it's very similar when you're giving a talk on stage where the audience, you can really tell when you're boring them and you can tell when you've got their attention and you don't get that feedback when you write.
38:26
So there's a lot, there's been several times, I can't think of specific examples, but I can remember times when I could tell, oh, this portion of my speech I've given before, everyone looks bored when I say this, this portion, I can literally see eyeballs, like pupils increasing when I say this, this thing.
38:39
So you, that kind of feedback you don't get when you're writing, that's really valuable when you speak. Mm hmm.
38:43
Um, how are you going to teach your kids to write?
38:47
I don't know if I will, because I don't want, nobody taught me to write.
38:52
And if they pushed me to do it, I absolutely would have rebelled. Interesting.
38:57
So it was such a serendipitous discovery for me, this career path. It was never planned.
39:01
And like I said, when I started doing it, I was actually like embarrassed about it.
39:05
I didn't want to become a writer.
39:05
And I think that's a very healthy way to enter a field.
39:10
I think particularly if someone pushes you into it, if your parents say, here's how to do it, and here's why you should do it, like you rebel.
39:18
The other thing is that if, you know, I think a lot of my writing was just figuring it out through trial and error.
39:22
And I don't think you can, It's hard to sit down and say like here's the structure of it and definitely early on in my writing if I go back and look at what I wrote The Motley Fool in 2008, 2009, I was always experimenting with different voices and different styles and before I kind of settled on whatever the voice and style is now.
39:41
But I think if someone tried to say, here's how to do it, I never would have experimented with different things before I finally found out my own one.
39:48
Tell me about those experiments.
39:48
I think it was a lot of it is when I did start reading a lot.
39:53
Probably after I had been a writer for a year or two is when I got big into reading.
39:57
I would read, um, you know, a guy named Bill Bonner who works for, um, he wrote a newsletter called the Daily Reckonings, his financial newsletter.
40:05
And I just thought his voice was so good. What about it?
40:05
It was so short and snappy.
40:10
And you could like, you could just sense the emotion in it, even if it was just a, it was just a digital newsletter.
40:15
So there are periods where I tried to write like him and like, it didn't work, but I just, I would experiment with it.
40:19
Michael Lewis has been a lot, uh, Felix Salmon, if people remember him, he was a writer for Reuters.
40:28
I remember trying to copy his. style.
40:28
I think that's a really healthy way to find your own is just like, who do you look up to? Like try to do that.
40:34
And I bet if you were to look at my style today, I bet if I wanted to, I could piece it apart and be like, Oh, actually that I learned from Felix Salmon that I learned from Bill Bonner that I learned from Bethany McLean.
40:46
And like, it's, it's all, you're just a big mix of the people who you've looked up to over the years.
40:51
Can you share some of those lessons that come to mind of Bethany or Felix Salmon? Are there any?
40:54
Felix Samuels was always very blunt and to the point. No pussyfooting around.
41:00
Whatever his point was, he was just going to slam it in your face and hit period. Yeah.
41:05
That was, I think, really clear because a lot of other authors are just like, they're just going to mosey into it. Yeah.
41:11
Felix Samuels was just like, when you read his piece, there's no, there's, there's no mistaking what the point he's trying to make. Right.
41:15
That was really powerful.
41:15
Robert Curson, Michael Lewis was all just storytelling.
41:20
It's just like, you gotta, you gotta draw in emotion by telling somebody's story.
41:24
Bethany McLean, I think, is one of the greatest writers of our time.
41:29
And because she is as smart as any hedge fund manager, any banker, any lawyer, and she's as good of a writer as name whoever you want.
41:37
And like those together, it's just like, she's just such a gem.
41:42
It's barely an exaggeration to say that she like single handedly cracked the Enron case.
41:47
And she was like in her late 20s at the time.
41:52
And you look back at that and it's just astounding and what the Enron management did to her kind of like trying to Scare her out of writing these stories.
41:58
She was a writer for fortune at the time and she was piecing together that this company that everybody loved Enron she was piecing it together and being like none of this makes sense You know, this is a big thing that for a certain kind of writing that I think really leads to quality is the courage to see something with your own eyes and to trust it. Yeah.
42:24
When everything that you're reading from somebody else says the opposite of what you're just looking at.
42:28
And, And you ever see those studies of, they're the three lines.
42:34
And everyone in the classroom is like, Oh, this line is the longest one, and it's not the longest one.
42:38
And it's like, this line is the longest one.
42:41
And a lot of people will be persuaded by what other people are thinking. Yeah.
42:41
And they just won't trust what they see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears.
42:47
And I think for a certain kind of writing, like what you're saying with Bethany, it just comes down to, no, I'm going to trust my senses and to hell with what...
42:59
The social world thinks there's gonna be, it's gonna take some courage, but this is just what I'm seeing, and I'm gonna say what I'm seeing, and there's a real simplicity about that, but actually with the way that humans are so social and fearful at times about being excommunicated from the group, it can be really hard to do.
43:17
Yeah, and I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I remember a story that she told that was something along the lines of.
43:21
She would sit down to interview the CEO and CFO of Enron before the company collapsed.
43:25
And they would say something along the lines of like, Little girl, you have no idea what you're doing here.
43:33
Like kind of take it and to have the courage to be like, No, I'm going to publish this. I'm going to do it. Is, is so incredible.
43:36
The other thing she does so well is that she has the financial and accounting skills to piece all this together, but she also perfectly understood and wrote about the personalities of Ken Lay and Andrew Fastow, the management of Enron.
43:51
Have you been surprised by the popularity of audiobooks?
43:54
Oh, it completely blows me away.
43:54
The audiobook version of Psychology of Money outsells the physical version two to one.
43:58
And never in a million years would I have thought that because I'm not an audiobook guy.
44:02
I think everyone just assumes that how, how I consume content is how other people are going to consume content too. Right.
44:10
Um, but it's, it's not the case.
44:10
There are so many people who don't have the time to sit down and read a book, but they'll listen to an audiobook on their commute.
44:13
Or at the gym, or while they're doing dishes, while they're cooking dinner, then they have the time to listen.
44:20
So that's been, it's been the biggest growth by far of the book industry over the last 10 years, and it's explosive.
44:25
Um, and, you know, it's, it's growing by the year.
44:30
It's bigger this year than it was last year. It's huge.
44:30
It's not only, it's not this little bit player.
44:33
What's interesting is that when Kindle came out, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago, I remember thinking, The physical book industry is gone.
44:37
Why would anyone buy a physical book if you can read it on Kindle?
44:42
That was my view at the time.
44:42
And Kindle is, I mean, it's not tiny, but it's a pretty insignificant portion of the whole book industry. But audio is enormous.
44:52
The margins are low on audiobooks though, right?
44:52
Doesn't Amazon or Audible take like 70%? It's a lot. It's a lot.
44:57
You would think that they would be higher margins because there's no physical inventory.
45:01
But that gets made up by the higher, higher fees on that end.
45:04
Is that a monopoly thing, you think?
45:04
I, I don't have the skill to have a, an opinion on that.
45:10
But when you see the numbers, it's, it makes you rise an eyebrow. Interesting. Interesting. International.
45:14
You've crushed internationally. Yeah.
45:14
What of, so Psychology Money just passed 4 million copies sold.
45:23
And I think at least a million and a half of those.
45:23
Or outside of the United States, maybe more, maybe 2 million of those are outside of the United States.
45:28
So from your first 1 million copies, I'm not sure that this is totally accurate, but I did some back of the napkin.
45:37
440, 000 international, 250, 000 paperback, 75, 000 e book, 200, 000 audio.
45:45
Does that sound about right?
45:45
Sounds right, sure, yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
45:45
If I had thought of the makeup when it published, I would have thought it would be 98 percent physical.
45:49
One percent audio, one percent Kindle.
45:54
That's what I would have thought, but it's nothing remotely close.
45:57
And also never in a million years thought about international, what that would be.
46:01
Um, it's, it is true that the U. S.
46:01
book market is, even in per capita terms, bigger than almost any other market. Americans read a lot. Oh wow.
46:10
Versus other countries, but there's obviously a lot of other people out in the world. Yeah, totally.
46:15
You read a lot of interviews.
46:15
Yeah, that's a big thing that stands out from your end notes compared to other ones.
46:20
And I think that's where you get all the good stuff, is when you sit down like this and you start prying into someone, you start getting their story.
46:28
That's like, all of the information is a commodity.
46:28
All the numbers are a commodity.
46:33
He's just like, what's the story that you can get?
46:33
That's where you really learn a lot of the stuff.
46:37
And so many people have been, so many big, famous, successful people have been so generous with interviews.
46:40
Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, all these people have given great, amazing interviews that you can learn so much from.
46:50
Everyone knows the famous Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford. Of course.
46:50
If that's the only thing that you ever read of Steve Jobs, you'll learn like the majority of what you need to know, of what you need to learn from Steve Jobs is given there.
47:01
So a lot of these interviews or similar formats are just like, they're just gold mines of information.
47:05
And I think it's also, what I've tried to do too, is I think it's really important as an author.
47:09
To rather than you, the author, trying to be the credible resource to quote other people, quote people who are more qualified than you.
47:18
And a lot of authors don't want to do this.
47:18
They want to be like, no, I just, I don't want to, you know, give the spotlight to somebody else.
47:21
I want to be the one who's speaking on the page.
47:25
And I've always been the opposite.
47:25
I just want to quote as many people as liberally as I can.
47:29
Because if I say X, Y, and Z is true, you might believe it.
47:33
But if I says, according to Warren Buffett. X, Y, and Z is true. You're gonna believe it.
47:37
So I just, I try to quote these people from their interviews as liberally as I can.
47:41
Yeah, one of my favorite examples of when you do this is in Selfish Writing when you're talking about the interview with Ritholtz and Howard Marks. Yeah.
47:48
Howard Marks just wrote his memos for like 10 years and nobody Nobody read them. Nobody read them.
47:54
And then Ritholtz was like, what are you doing?
47:54
And he said something to the effect of I'm just writing for myself and I'm imagining you're sitting there reading the interview.
48:03
You're like, ha, selfish writing. That's what I do.
48:03
Hey, this is actually a concept. So tell me about that. That's exactly it.
48:06
I mean, so Howard Marks, his memos are read by a zillion people and they turn them into a book called the most important thing that's sold a zillion copies.
48:14
Like Howard Marks is he's a billionaire investor and he's a very talented, successful writer.
48:18
And he tells a story about when he started writing his memos, I think it was 1990. Nobody read him.
48:22
He would write his memos and send those clients and his clients back then he was snail mailing them to his clients And he talked to his clients and they'd be like I threw it away No, we don't and it didn't bother him the slightest because he was doing these memos to crystallize his own thoughts They were for him.
48:37
They weren't for other people It was like his diary that he just happened to mail out to other people and he talked about how doing that the process of writing would crystallize.
48:44
He would have these vague hunches, but then when he went down to write them, he would really clarify like, Oh, that's, that's what I mean.
48:53
That's this feeling that I have when I put it into words.
48:56
Either one of two things happens when you put it into words, you either see how ridiculous it is.
49:00
And you realize that that gut feeling is just something that you want to be true, but it's actually not true.
49:05
Once you put it into words or you'll be like, Oh, that's what it is. I kind of had this.
49:08
Feeling this hunch, but now that's now it's clarified and I can do something with it.
49:13
now that's now it's clarified and I can do something with it. So he was writing for himself And he did it for years and years before they really started getting passed around and people were paying attention to them and I you know, I um My version of that it was hopefully not
49:28
that I write and nobody pays any attention to it You know, that was true early on but I want to write for myself, too I feel like everything I write these days including both of these books are just i'm trying to figure out my own problems Trying to figure out my own life. And I call it selfish writing because I want
49:40
And I call it selfish writing because I want to be a selfless person, but in writing, you're going to do your best work, and I'm going to have my best work if I'm just trying to figure out my own problems and do things right in a style that I enjoy, about topics that I find interesting.
49:52
And I think know your audience turns very quickly into pander to your audience.
50:01
It's really hard to know when to stop and when know your audience turns into pandering to them.
50:05
And I never want to write something where it's like, oh, I already know this, but I need to explain it to you.
50:09
I only want to write things that I don't know and I'm trying to figure out myself.
50:12
You know what I always think about?
50:16
It's funny, I feel like this is really cool.
50:16
To do in music and totally encouraged, but not cool to do in writing.
50:20
I always just one of my favorite things about going to a live show is to just imagine what it is like.
50:25
When you're a musician and you just love your music. Yeah.
50:32
Like, you have created a sound that just gets you going and you're like, yes!
50:37
But something about writing that isn't encouraged.
50:37
I, I, I always love, I know I'm onto something when I will write something.
50:42
I don't think anything I write is funny, but there's sometimes I'll write a sentence and I'll laugh out loud.
50:45
And that's when I know, if like, if I'm enjoying the piece so much that I'm gonna laugh at what I just wrote, I'm like, this, that, that's when it's onto something.
50:51
Rather than being like, oh, other people will think that's funny.
50:54
Be like, no, I think it's funny.
50:54
That's, that's when you know you're onto is when you like it.
50:58
This is, it was, I think it was Kafka.
50:58
Kafka used to laugh so loudly that he would keep his neighbors up.
51:04
And it's not just humor, but Tom Stoppard, the comedian said, laughter is the sound of comprehension.
51:14
And so I think that you're laughing when you have an epiphany too.
51:14
And so when you're learning things and you're seeing.
51:18
You're making these connections and the connections just feel obvious.
51:22
And they're like, you're laughing.
51:22
It's like, how didn't I know this?
51:22
That is where the laughter comes from.
51:27
So I think the laughter comes as much from an epiphany as humor. Yeah. Yeah.
51:31
So I think it's just like a, like a chef of like, well, does the food taste good to you?
51:34
Like if it doesn't taste good to you, it's not gonna taste good to anybody else.
51:38
You might as well enjoy it. Yeah.
51:38
The other thing that I think you and I both have is like an extreme impatience.
51:41
Like I think our brains are just like, go, go, go.
51:44
And one of the things I've been thinking a lot about. Is that right?
51:48
Or thinking is, is horizontal and writing is vertical.
51:48
And so I'll tell you what I mean by that.
51:55
Like, if you're out on a walk, what are you doing?
51:59
Like you're sort of making connections between different things.
51:59
Like the brain likes to skip.
52:02
I've done some meditation in my life.
52:02
And like, what I find is I'm going from this topic to this topic, to this topic.
52:04
like, what I find is I'm going from this topic to this topic, to this topic. But what writing does, is it just like, In almost this torturous, torturous way, it anchors me to an idea, and now I'm stuck on this idea, and all my brain wants to do is just go, go, go, but I'm like
52:20
trapped on the idea, and so all I can do is go down, and what I find is, when I'm writing, I'm like perpetually frustrated, I'm angry, I'm pissed off, I like wanna go do these other things, my brain is like, you cannot stay this still, but I get to the end, it's been
52:36
a few hours, or it's been a few weeks, I've been working on a piece, and I'll, Go to the bar with a friend or I'll go to dinner with a friend. I'll be talking about, Hey, this is what I'm working on. And they're like, how do you know
52:41
I'll be talking about, Hey, this is what I'm working on.
52:41
And they're like, how do you know so much about this?
52:45
And I'm like, Oh, I guess I've, I've really thought through this because the writing has like anchored me to the topic.
52:52
And like in that pain, in that frustration, I've really done this like giant deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep dive.
53:03
And then I just come up for air and.
53:03
I've had a real shift without even realizing it. Yeah. No, that's good.
53:07
Um, I, I, I always feel like there's sometimes where I'll just get into themes.
53:12
And it's like, even if it's a different topic, you know, for, you know, when I was writing in 2008, I was writing a lot about real estate and banks and whatnot.
53:20
You just get into a theme.
53:20
So if you're writing different things, you're kind of like, usually every six to twelve months you're kind of like in this kind of zone.
53:24
For me, it's just been, I think, Behavioral finance has been the big one, but that didn't come until five or seven years ago that I really got interested in that, but that's how you can like drill down on topic two without being onto like one specific topic, but it's like, yeah, it all kind of falls under this umbrella.
53:40
How are you thinking about the story or book?
53:43
So you got psychology of money.
53:43
Now you got same as ever, like.
53:43
How do you think about how your books play together?
53:48
How are you thinking about, I mean, everything from both books are basically exactly 200 pages worth of content.
53:52
It was all bound to the word count.
53:56
I think psychology of money is 48, 000 words.
53:56
Same as Everest, 47, 500.
53:56
It's almost the exact same word count.
54:01
Did you try to go for that?
54:01
No, it was just kind of how it ended up.
54:05
Yeah, I mean they're both, they're both short books. Yeah.
54:05
Then you sort of committed to the same sort of general title, uh, or same general cover. Yes.
54:13
Right, so they sort of play well together. Same font, thank you.
54:13
There's words for this, font. That's right. Ha ha ha.
54:17
Font, not the same title, same font.
54:17
Um, do you think of them as sort of like sisters?
54:24
Do you think of them as...
54:24
Stylistically, they're almost identical.
54:29
They're both, they're, you know, chapters are a little bit less than 2000 words each.
54:32
They're all, almost every chapter is a story that has nothing to do with the broader point here, but it's a story to get a point across of like, this is how people think.
54:39
And then it goes into, okay, here's the lesson that we can take away from that.
54:43
Stylistically, they're identical.
54:43
I really think of psychology of money as like the psychology of you, the individual.
54:49
And same as ever as the psychology of us, the collective. Oh, like what is this?
54:49
What does society keep doing over and over again?
54:54
I think that's how they're.
54:54
different and psychology money is obviously a finance book and same as ever is much broader.
54:58
There's a lot that's about finance that's in there, but it's broader topics.
55:06
It's just how people behave and how they respond to risk and greed and fear and those kinds of things.
55:10
You know, one of your chapters in here is trying too hard and the subtitle is there are no points awarded for difficulty. Yeah.
55:14
And I think this shows up in your writing.
55:19
Like you refuse to write pieces that aren't coming easily to you.
55:23
You're just like, I'm not going to work on this.
55:23
You have that great line.
55:23
Writing for others is hard and it shows, writing for yourself is easy and it shows.
55:26
And I think that one of the things, one of the ways that you stand out as a writer is you're just like, I'm just going to follow the flow.
55:36
And if there's no flow, then we're done.
55:39
We're done, because you know what, the idea is probably not great. Yes.
55:39
Every time I've started to write a piece, and it's from the get go it's tough, I'm done.
55:43
Just close it down, we'll try something else.
55:49
If it's not easy from the get go, From the first sentence, you're, you're done. We're done here.
55:55
But you still have moments of difficulty. Yeah, yeah.
55:59
So how do those two things play together?
55:59
I think usually when I start writing, you can tell really quickly.
56:04
At least when you've been doing it for a long time, you can tell.
56:07
After you've written a couple sentences, you can be like, Oh yeah, this is really starting to click.
56:11
Or you can just, you can just start and you're like, this, this is not, I mean, it's almost like a first date, you can, first date, you can tell, you can tell them five minutes, like that's not going to work.
56:18
This is not going to work here.
56:18
So it's, it's when it's hard from the beginning, but there's plenty of times when, you know, the first half is good and then it really starts struggling, but you can usually fix that.
56:26
Whereas if it's hard from the beginning, you really can't fix that. Right, right.
56:30
Let's do, uh, Let's play, I'm going to go through different chapters, same as ever, and we're going to take out the writing lesson. Uh, best story wins.
56:40
We'll start with an easy one. Yeah.
56:44
It's always the case that it's not the best idea, it's not the right answer, it's not the correct answer, it's the best story.
56:48
Gets people nodding their heads.
56:48
I'm a big fan of Ken Burns, who makes documentaries.
56:53
One of the things that's so amazing about Ken Burns is that...
56:57
There is very little, if any, new information in his documentaries.
57:01
Everyone knows about the Civil War.
57:01
Everyone knows who fought, how it ended.
57:06
Everyone knows the details of the battles.
57:06
What he did, better than anyone else who's ever existed, is told a good story about it.
57:10
And his other documentaries about Vietnam and World War II and everything that he's done.
57:17
He takes information that people already know.
57:17
And he tells a ridiculously good story about it.
57:22
He has this interview where he talks about how important music is in his documentaries.
57:26
And he will literally change the script of his music, so that a specific word that's being narrated matches up with a specific beat of the background music. No way.
57:35
And he will literally go through and be like, we need to cut eight words out of the script, so that when the narrator says this powerful word, there's a boom in the music behind it. Nobody else does that.
57:44
No other historian is doing that.
57:44
But that's why, that's how he sticks out.
57:49
And the craziest statistic is that when his documentary on the Civil War came out in 1990, more Americans watched it in 1990 than watched the Super Bowl.
58:00
And this is about a topic that is, everybody knows about.
58:02
It's like the most documented thing in American history.
58:02
Everybody knows about the Civil War.
58:06
But he tells a story about, you can't, I, he, his, he came out with a documentary a year or two ago about the Holocaust, and I watched most of it on a plane, and I, Cried half the time.
58:15
It's embarrassing to sing when you're on a plane. You're like 37 ages.
58:19
He is so good at just pulling at the, you can't, you can't feel.
58:26
You can't help but feel the emotion in his work because he's a storyteller.
58:26
What is it about the New York one that you love so much?
58:31
The New York documentary is actually done by his brother, a guy named Rick Burns. Oh, is that right? Ken Burns brother.
58:36
It's a story about the law, the history of New York City, starting from when it was first settled by the Dutch through modern times.
58:44
And it's, I think, 18 hours long. And it's the same thing. Very much.
58:49
I, I don't know what, what was in the drinking water in the Burns household growing up, but it's the same thing. It's the emotion of it.
58:55
It's the background music.
58:55
It's, it's, it was really incredible to me to watch this Ken Burns, uh, interview.
59:00
It was actually on the smart list podcast where he talks about this, where he talks about how important music is to the documentaries, the background music that he's, that's, what's really tugging at your emotions and getting you into this moment.
59:11
And I just think about it from the sense of Ken Burns is a historian, but there's literally not another historian on the planet.
59:15
Who's thinking about the storytelling as much as he is.
59:19
And that, that's why he's so popular.
59:24
But that lesson applies to a lot of things.
59:24
Even like a product design.
59:24
Like the famous Steve Jobs when he came out with the iPod.
59:28
Thousand songs in your pocket.
59:28
He could have just said digital music, MP3 player, and it would have come out, but no, no thousand songs in your pocket.
59:38
Like you can relate to that. You can feel that.
59:38
So that's, I think it's in when, if you have a technical job.
59:42
If you're into finance or you're a, you're a code or whatever it would be, you think analytically.
59:47
And when you think analytically, you're just like, what's the right answer?
59:50
If I find the right answer, I win.
59:50
And for almost everything in life, it's not the case.
59:54
Even I would say someone like Warren Buffett, like is he technically minded as a stock? Of course.
59:58
But one of the things that he's done so ridiculously well since he was in his 20s is he's so good at explaining what he does.
1:00:08
And why he's doing it that early on his career, he had all of these rich people in Omaha who were like, he would, the Buffett would sit them down and say, this is how I pick stocks and value investing.
1:00:17
And they'd be like, I buy it. Here's a million bucks.
1:00:17
And he was able to raise money and hold onto money that he would manage for other people because he was such a good storyteller.
1:00:24
And I think that's true through today.
1:00:24
in his annual letters or when he goes on CNBC.
1:00:27
I think a lot of that done is for a strategic purpose of like, he tells such a good story that people trust him because it all makes sense.
1:00:37
It's so clearly explained in a folksy manner that people just like, Oh, I get it.
1:00:43
I'm going to give you my money and you just go do your thing now. Bezos is the same way.
1:00:46
I just saw his book in your office, and he always has, it's day one at the bottom of every shareholder letter.
1:00:51
And he has basically said to his investors, hey, we're going to think really long term.
1:00:56
And while so many other companies have had to go quarter to quarter, he's just done a, been super consistent about saying this, I'm going to run the company. And this is.
1:01:05
One thing that I really have appreciated about the investing finance industry is they figured out how to use writing to attract capital, to get the right shareholders, to really align thinking and coordinate people, and I feel like is very far ahead in terms of using the internet to to write and get stuff done because of it. Yeah.
1:01:28
And you can see why people would, if they have the quote unquote, the right answer and they're not getting ahead, it's because that you, that's not how you get people's attention.
1:01:35
It's all just, it's always everywhere you look, it's best story wins.
1:01:35
You were talking about that Ken Burns anecdote, and that is a great category of anecdote, which is insert great person.
1:01:47
What is something that they do that people who aren't in that field would be. astonished that they do.
1:01:52
So we do a fun one at rite of passage that is, that has really been a big shift.
1:01:58
So in our fifth cohort, we call us, this was the COVID cohort.
1:02:04
So we were stuck and we had this giant cohort.
1:02:04
And that's really when things began to take off because no one had anything to do.
1:02:15
And so Will, who co founded the business with me, we were chatting and we got to the end of a live session and we were sort of annoyed with each other because he was trying to communicate something to me and I wasn't really getting it because I was presenting it and we were like, ah, you know, we need to, we need to come up with something.
1:02:32
And one of us goes, you know what, let's just start an iMessage thread and you'll just put your iMessage right at the bottom and you'll present.
1:02:37
And so now we go back and forth and we have like six people on iMessage.
1:02:42
So if there's something happening with slides or something happening with music, there's live chat feeds that are getting streamed to me.
1:02:49
And I'm just presenting and I have six people on the team who are feeding me things.
1:02:49
Hey, go faster, go slower.
1:02:55
Hey, you need to gain energy, lose energy. And then for.
1:02:55
One of our more recent cohorts, we went from keynote slides to pitch slides and on pitch.
1:03:01
com you can live update speaker notes.
1:03:07
So last night I was teaching and Will had a sense, my co founder, had a sense that I just needed to pause.
1:03:17
And so I look at the speaker's notes and sort of this teleprompter and he goes.
1:03:17
pause in italics, which always means don't read it.
1:03:21
That's like a, yeah, that's a speaker note. Pause.
1:03:25
Our students just need to chill.
1:03:25
And then just, he goes, wait five seconds.
1:03:25
And I'm speaking and I'm like two seconds away from it. And I just pause. I just wait.
1:03:33
And it's all just moving at the speed of the internet.
1:03:39
And we'll get comments like, Hey, how do you deliver presentations like this?
1:03:39
And I'm like, Oh, we're doing things behind the scenes that come from running 200 live sessions in the last five years.
1:03:49
The pause is, the pause is good.
1:03:51
There's a lot of that for public speaking. Yes.
1:03:51
Everyone's intuition is like, I gotta speak, but like the pause is sometimes the most important, powerful part of it.
1:03:55
Just like let something, if you say something and then pause, it gives the audience time to think about what you just said. Yeah.
1:04:03
But if you move on to the next topic, they're just like, Oh, I'm trying to keep up here. That's good.
1:04:06
Do you ever think about quitting? Oh, yeah. All the time.
1:04:10
I was more worried about getting fired.
1:04:10
I was more worried that just I didn't have the skills to do this and the economy was so weak and if I got laid off, nobody else was hiring.
1:04:18
That was my fear at the time, particularly early on when I was just like, I have no business doing this. I'm not a writer.
1:04:22
I really don't know what I'm talking about here.
1:04:25
So you combine that with the criticism, like deserved criticism that the readers were giving you the pieces.
1:04:31
Like that was a, I'm not going to say it was a stressful job.
1:04:34
There's a lot of jobs that are harder, but it was, it was not easy at the time.
1:04:38
What was the nature of the criticism?
1:04:38
Uh, either you're wrong about the topic that you're analyzing and half the time they were right. I was wrong.
1:04:45
Or just the, the style sucks. Didn't make any sense.
1:04:45
I specifically remember this comment.
1:04:50
This is probably 2008 or 2009.
1:04:50
Now forget the article, but it's back when we had comment sections and the comment was to the effect of what is this writer even talking about?
1:04:59
I don't understand any of his points here.
1:05:03
Like I got to the bottom of the article and I have no idea what this article is about.
1:05:06
I remember, I remember reading that comment and being like, he's right. And that hurts.
1:05:10
Like, I remember that was like a low day of just like, what am I doing?
1:05:10
I'm pretending to be a writer.
1:05:14
I have no idea what I'm doing here. That was hard. Yeah, of course.
1:05:17
I think because the barriers to entry are low in writing. Anybody can do it.
1:05:22
Anyone can start a blog tomorrow, which is a beautiful thing. That's a great thing.
1:05:26
But it also means that a lot of people who are doing it in a formalized way don't have a ton of experience.
1:05:31
Whereas if you are doing open heart surgery, You only, the first time you do it, you know what you're doing. You've been trained. I hope so.
1:05:39
You've been trained for probably a decade at that point. To get to that point.
1:05:43
Whereas anyone can just throw a blog together. Which again, is great.
1:05:43
Because you get so much content.
1:05:47
You can practice and what not.
1:05:47
But it makes it so it's easy to start without really having a good idea of what's going to work and what's not going to work.
1:05:53
Probably a good thing that you didn't publish your first book then for...
1:05:59
What, 12 years after you started writing? Uh, 14.
1:05:59
I'd been a writer for 14 years before Psychology of Money came out.
1:06:06
And that was, that was, that was great.
1:06:06
I look back, and we were talking about this earlier with my wife.
1:06:10
She says it was just laziness why I waited that long. I think that's true. Um, and I'm so glad.
1:06:13
If I had written this book in 2010, A, I, I could have.
1:06:17
And B, it would have sucked.
1:06:17
It would not have been any good.
1:06:23
So I'm so glad I waited as long as I did.
1:06:26
I was not in a hurry at all to get it out.
1:06:26
Along what axes did you improve the most as a writer and how?
1:06:31
I think brevity and storytelling.
1:06:31
I think if I look 10 years ago, there were not as many stories or they weren't very good, and I would just ramble.
1:06:37
I would take a thousand words to what I would hopefully use a hundred words now.
1:06:45
So it's those two things, which to me, pers for The reading that I like to do, that's what I like the most.
1:06:50
I like stories and I like people who get to the point.
1:06:50
Brevity too doesn't necessarily mean that it's short, it just means it's to the point.
1:06:55
I always use Doris Kearns Goodwin as an example, the presidential historian.
1:07:03
She has written books that are 900 pages.
1:07:03
And every single word needs to be there.
1:07:03
In 900 pages, there's not a single word of fluff.
1:07:09
So brevity doesn't mean short.
1:07:09
It just means that there's no rambling.
1:07:14
So I think that's, that's what I've tried to improve the most.
1:07:18
Of like, can I catch your attention with a story?
1:07:20
And can I make sure that I don't lose your attention once I got it?
1:07:20
What do you think you needed to learn in order to get brevity?
1:07:25
Uh, I think a lot of it was just thinking hard about what I like to read.
1:07:31
And just kind of like, oh, I really like this book.
1:07:31
Well, what do I like about it?
1:07:36
Well, it got to the point. I was never bored.
1:07:37
I kept turning every page and I'm like, why did I do that?
1:07:37
Well, because there's a great quote, I forget who said it, but he says, when you're writing, leave out the parts that readers tend to skip.
1:07:45
And I think that's like, it's a tongue in cheek quote, but it's like, it's so true.
1:07:50
And everyone knows when you're reading an article or reading a book, parts you tend to skip.
1:07:54
You're just like, ah, this section's not doing it for me. Okay.
1:07:58
So when you're writing, leave that part out. Just don't do that. Just cut it out.
1:08:02
And I think so it was, it was analyzing what I like to read and trying to mimic it in my writing.
1:08:06
And tell me about this Google doc that you have of all the stuff that you've deleted and you have this giant Google doc or something. Yeah. And it's now.
1:08:13
It might be close to like 100, 000 words, like the equivalent of two books of things. It's called Scrap Bits.
1:08:18
It's a Google doc called Scrap Bits.
1:08:18
And it's things like when I'm writing an article or a lot of it came from book writing, I would write a section, I'd write an anecdote, write four or five paragraphs.
1:08:31
And I would think like, Oh, that's pretty good, but it doesn't fit here.
1:08:31
I'm going to save it for later. And it's so often.
1:08:34
It happens so often that I'm writing something and I'm kind of stuck on the article and I'm like, I can't think of, I can't think of the example here or the story that I'm like, Oh, I think in scrap bits, there's actually this little anecdote that I can plug in here that I wrote five years ago and it didn't work for that piece, but it works perfectly for this piece.
1:08:51
So I think saving that, you know, cutting room floor scraps is really important.
1:08:55
You'll, you'll be surprised how often you can recycle it.
1:08:59
Do you write your books in Google Docs?
1:08:59
Yeah, we just have a giant Google Doc called same as ever and you're just like I have it all there that you got the little chapters on the left side and I and I back it up in about 17 locations because I'm so paranoid about losing it. Oh, that's good.
1:09:12
I can't imagine like being just about done with the book and then you Lose it somehow.
1:09:15
Your, your, your, your Gmail account gets hacked or something.
1:09:20
There's something uniquely horrible about losing something you've written. It's, it's terrible.
1:09:23
I back it up so much, particularly towards the end of the book.
1:09:27
I will back it up in multiple, multiple locations because I'm so paranoid about losing it.
1:09:29
Oh, here's a fun question. All right.
1:09:29
Give me 10 chapter titles for your book, The Psychology of Writing. Okay. And you're writing...
1:09:34
Stephen Pressfield style book on writing.
1:09:40
So what are the ten chapters? How would you think of?
1:09:45
Alright, I don't know if I'm going to get to ten, but I'll spit some out. Cool.
1:09:46
Number one, what's your point?
1:09:46
What are you trying to make?
1:09:50
Number two, get to the point.
1:09:50
Number three, move on to the next point.
1:09:50
There's a, there's a, I forget who wrote the book.
1:09:56
The book's title is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit. Stephen Pressfield. Is that Pressfield? Yeah. And it's true.
1:10:02
Like even if you just read the headline of that book, that lesson, nobody wants to read your shit. Yeah.
1:10:07
Have that idea in your mind the whole time and just be like, look, I also heard, I forget who said this, but they're like, when you're writing, you should pretend that every word costs you 100. Oh, that's right.
1:10:15
And when you're doing that, you'll be like, do I need this word? Do I need this sentence?
1:10:20
Not, is this a good sentence? Just, do I need it? Do I need it?
1:10:25
There are a lot of good sentences that are like, oh, that's a well crafted sentence.
1:10:28
Yeah, but you don't need it. It's just rambling.
1:10:28
I know it's a good sentence.
1:10:31
I know it's kind of clever, but you don't need it. Get rid of it. Yeah.
1:10:33
And I think if you do that, that would, that would definitely be in there.
1:10:36
Um, selfish writing would be a title because I think it would comply to most people.
1:10:41
Write things that you want to read in a style that you enjoy and don't think about anyone else.
1:10:46
The other reason that's good is that particularly when you're a young writer, if you're thinking about the people who are gonna read this, you'll get nervous, you'll get shy, and you're like, ah, I don't know if I'm brave enough to say that to other people.
1:10:56
So, okay, just live inside your own head.
1:10:56
Just pretend this is a diary.
1:11:00
And then when you hit publish, don't think about it.
1:11:02
That's, I think that's, that's really the only way to do it.
1:11:02
That would, that would be a big one.
1:11:05
Best story wins would definitely be right up in there. That would be good.
1:11:11
Um, I, I always, I always, uh, when I'm reading any book that makes me emotional, I'm Kind of an emotional person.
1:11:17
It's not that hard, but I know I always kind of stop and be like, what, what was the paragraph, the word that got me to tear up here that like really tied all this together?
1:11:26
And I'm like, oh, that's, that's got, try to pay attention to those moments of like the, the really emotional, like how did the author do this to me to bring me to this point? Who's done that well?
1:11:35
me to this point? Who's done that well? Uh, the Ken Burns documentary that I talked about, I, I like a lot of, uh, military history, so a lot of, if you're reading about World War II or the Holocaust or whatever, there's quite a bit of, I think the reason I like World War II history is that the widest spectrum of emotions took place In that six
1:11:54
year period that has ever existed, not just the most amount of suffering, but the most amount of elation and joy and weight lifted off your shoulders when the war wasn't like the whole spectrum of emotions, uh, took place in an, in a, in a magnitude that was unprecedented and shoved it into the six year period. So I like read, some people will like World
1:12:11
So I like read, some people will like World War II cause they like, you know, I don't know, military history, like military strategy. I just like.
1:12:19
Thinking about and studying and trying to think about what it would feel like to be in that vast range of emotions that people felt like.
1:12:25
In the vast range, everyone thinks about, of course you should, the suffering and the pain that took place.
1:12:34
But I think the happiest day... In all of U. S.
1:12:34
history, where everyone in the country was happier than they had ever been, was V J Day in 1945, when Japan surrendered and the war was done.
1:12:46
And the famous picture is from Times Square.
1:12:46
So like, there were a lot of emotions that took place in that period that are just like...
1:12:53
off the charts, happy and joyful.
1:12:53
And so the range of it is like, there's so much of that.
1:12:59
Uh, when you're reading about the topic where it's just like, it's an emotional rollercoaster.
1:13:03
Is there a particular emotional frequency that really resonates with you?
1:13:03
Um, I think it's One of the things that sticks out, that's a good lesson for a lot of things, is how resilient people are. Mmm.
1:13:15
So, the people who've been through some heavy shit, and then you realize how they pulled their life back together and kept going.
1:13:23
It's not that the scar was, was, was gone.
1:13:23
The scar is always there, but learning about resilience is, is really important.
1:13:28
I think there's a lot of good personal lessons in there of like, people can, people can adapt. better than they think.
1:13:32
And it's easy to extrapolate the, the, the hole that you're in and be like, I'm in this dark pit of despair right now and it's going to be like that forever.
1:13:43
But a lot of those lessons are pretty telling about how people adapted after the war, even the people who had really been through a tough experience.
1:13:51
I want to ask you the same question that you asked me to ask Steven Pressfield.
1:13:54
How has your writing improved through your entire life?
1:13:59
Has it peaked or plateaued?
1:13:59
I think there's a chance.
1:13:59
It's, well, I think it's plateaued.
1:14:06
And I think it may have peaked. Really? Maybe. I hope not.
1:14:06
But I don't want to pretend like you can keep growing forever.
1:14:12
That would be great if you could.
1:14:12
I think maybe if it's not improvement, it's just, um, evolution.
1:14:16
So I would, I would suspect that ten years from now I'll be writing in a different voice.
1:14:23
But it might not be better. It'd just be different. Mm hmm.
1:14:26
And I think everyone, when they write, they're just kind of, it's a reflection of who you are.
1:14:30
And I'll be a different person in 10 years. My kids will be older.
1:14:33
I'll have different desires.
1:14:33
Uh, I'll be a different phase of life.
1:14:37
So of course I'm going to write differently.
1:14:37
And the, my first article with Motley Fool that did well, the impending destruction of the Osaka, I was 25 at the time.
1:14:41
So I was like, I was naive and immature.
1:14:45
I would never write that today because I'm a different person.
1:14:49
So it's just an evolution, even if it's not improvement.
1:14:49
You know, there is a real One sidedness almost dramatically so way of writing that I had when I started that was like This is how the world is everybody else is wrong.
1:15:02
Here's my super same sort of you had impending destruction of the US economy I wrote a piece called what the hell is going on?
1:15:12
All the universities are gonna die. It's all over.
1:15:15
The whole thing is a sham And you really get humbled by how incorrect some of your super bold predictions are when you start.
1:15:22
And you look back at that, you scratch your head a bit. You're like.
1:15:26
Okay, the world is a little bit more subtle than I gave it credit for.
1:15:31
I think that's, if you're, if you're writing for a living and you're always just trying to analyze the world around you, and you're doing that 365 days a year, you don't have to do it for that long of a period of time before you're just humbled about all these things. Yeah.
1:15:41
And then when you have, or you hear a big idea, you're like, eh, maybe. Probably not. I don't know.
1:15:45
The world's really nuanced and nobody has any idea what the hell's going on. Yeah. Yeah.
1:15:49
In what way do you find yourself analyzing the world?
1:15:55
Like for me, I am very attentive to like super details.
1:16:01
I think, I think I'm the opposite.
1:16:01
If you're at the ground level, I'm 30, 000.
1:16:01
For level always and the details like when I go to a restaurant, I'm usually just hungry.
1:16:10
That's all I'm paying attention to, but I'm much more, you know, back to, you know, when I started as a, we were writing about finance, everyone else was like, well, how much cash do they have on their balance sheet? What's the PE ratio?
1:16:18
And like, it was like, very detail oriented.
1:16:21
And I was just, I was just interested in like, well, like, what are people thinking?
1:16:25
How are they like, what's going through their heads?
1:16:27
Are they, are they scared? Are they overconfident?
1:16:27
Just like a much higher level, broad view of how people think.
1:16:33
So a lot of the technical details of what's going on in the world, even outside of finance, so just politics and social trends.
1:16:37
I'm usually, I'm usually stuck at 30, 000 feet.
1:16:42
That's, that's where I like to hang out.
1:16:42
Yeah, that's, that's, that's my, my, my, my cruising altitude of just trying to overview.
1:16:46
And I think a lot of that comes from the fact that.
1:16:50
The lower you get to the ground level, the harder it is to figure things out.
1:16:55
If you're trying to figure out like the extreme details of what other people are thinking about what they're doing It's really difficult to do but I think at the 30, 000 foot level you can try to put the pieces together a little bit Cleaner.
1:17:06
bit Cleaner. It's funny because when I look at the arc of your career, I feel like you start off Doing that of what's happening now, very news oriented, and then psychology of money is, like you're saying, the psychology of the
1:17:17
individual, and this is much more the psychology of societies and how societies function, and this is much more about stepping out, looking at history, literally looking at a guide to what never changes, whereas what you're doing at The Motley Fool is much more a guide to things that are changing. Things that happen today. Right. That's really
1:17:33
Things that happen today. Right.
1:17:33
That's really what it was. Yeah.
1:17:36
So it's definitely, and even when I was at The Motley Fool, I started moving. Thank you. away from that.
1:17:40
There was a period, a pretty distinct period in 2010.
1:17:44
So I'd been at The Molly Fool for like three years at that point.
1:17:44
And I told the editors, my boss, who was a good friend of mine, I was just like, I'm not, I'm not a stock picker.
1:17:52
I'm a, I'm a big picture guy.
1:17:52
And that's what I want to write about.
1:17:52
That's all I'm going to write about now.
1:17:56
So it was 2010 when I realized that 30, 000 feet was my, was my cruising altitude and I needed to stay there.
1:18:01
And I'm glad I, I'm glad I figured it out and put my foot down and just be like, this, that's what I wanted to talk about.
1:18:08
But I think a lot of that too was like, I always felt like, and I still feel like a lot of the people who are picking individual stocks and analyzing fine details about what's going on in politics, like I just thought a lot of it was BS.
1:18:16
And the track record was not great.
1:18:19
So it wasn't that my track record at figuring out the high level was necessarily better, but I was just like, this isn't, at least for me, that's not interesting.
1:18:28
And it's not interesting because I don't think anyone has that much ability to do it well.
1:18:33
And so that's why I wanted to get a much broader sense of what was going on.
1:18:33
In your acknowledgments of Same as Ever, you have a really nice line where you say that writing is a social profession.
1:18:42
What do you mean by that?
1:18:42
Just trying to observe your fellow humans and trying to figure out what, what's going on.
1:18:45
I think that's what, it's just the, the analysis and the survey of just what the hell is going on out there.
1:18:49
How do these people think?
1:18:54
I always think it's interesting that we only know about other people, what they've said and written down, which is maybe one percent.
1:19:03
If, if it's a fraction of one percent of what's actually going through their heads.
1:19:03
And so however complex and messy you think the world is.
1:19:08
It's a thousand times more messy if you give you if you it could actually go into eight billion people's heads And see how they're justifying decisions what they're thinking and look the one the the point zero zero one percent that they have verbalized And written down is crazy enough.
1:19:25
It's completely bonkers, but the spectrum of what people think Is a thousand times wider than what, than the craziness that's actually out there.
1:19:30
So I think that's, that's an interesting thing of like just trying to figure out the, how big the spectrum of crazy thoughts there is that goes through people's heads.
1:19:40
I think that's, that is true for me.
1:19:40
You know, the, what I write about and verbalize is like, The center of my thoughts and there's some crazy stuff over here and some crazy stuff over here, but I'm only showing you this Center part.
1:19:54
So I think attuning yourself to the other Parts of how people make decisions and what they're thinking about is what's enjoyable to me We danced around editing earlier, but we didn't really get into it.
1:20:03
How does that process happen for you sitting at the computer?
1:20:06
Yeah Yeah, you just read it over and over and over.
1:20:06
No, I see, I almost do the opposite.
1:20:11
I don't know if this is the right thing to do.
1:20:11
I don't know if this is, this is probably not good advice.
1:20:14
But, pretty much when I get to the bottom of the article, I just hit publish.
1:20:19
And I don't go back and read the whole thing again.
1:20:22
But what I do do, is every sentence that I type, After I type it, I'm like, all right, is that good? Let me read it again. Is that good? Can I change this word?
1:20:28
Oh, I might use, this is a better word here.
1:20:30
So it's like very, it's just like editing as I go.
1:20:34
Whereas I think, I think a lot of people will just like, let's just smash out a bunch of words, and then we'll go back and edit each line.
1:20:40
Where I'm like, no, let's just do every line as carefully as we can.
1:20:40
So by the time you get to the bottom, you're like, yep, okay, it's good. We're done here. Wow.
1:20:44
I've never met somebody who writes that good.
1:20:47
I don't know if it's good.
1:20:47
I don't know if it's, it's probably terrible advice.
1:20:50
It's clearly working for you, so.
1:20:50
I think here's why I think a lot of it too, is that.
1:20:54
You will never get to a point where you're like, great, doesn't need to be edited anymore, this is perfect, hit publish.
1:20:59
You will always be able to do another pass.
1:21:02
So because you can never be done, you might as well just come to a spot where you're like, alright, good enough.
1:21:07
I learned this a lot when I was, I was a columnist at the Wall Street Journal for a couple years. That's right.
1:21:13
And during that period, for a big publication like that, six or seven editors would go through the piece that you wrote. Wow. So I would write it.
1:21:20
And then I would write it again and I would be like, in my mind this is perfect.
1:21:23
And I'd give it to another editor and they would be like, shh, shh.
1:21:26
Okay, and they would mark it up and then in their mind it would be perfect.
1:21:30
And then they handed it to another editor, and that editor would mark it up, and then in their mind it'd be perfect.
1:21:36
So everyone who took a...
1:21:36
Stab at this when they were done with their work, said, all right, this is perfect.
1:21:41
And then the next person would say, Nope, I'm gonna change 80% of this.
1:21:44
So you're never get, there's, there's no objective.
1:21:44
This is not math where there's an objectively right answer.
1:21:48
It's all just like, whatever you think is perfect, somebody else will be able to slash to pieces.
1:21:53
So, you got to get to a point where at the bottom you're like, yep, that's, I think it's good enough and I'm not going to drive myself crazy. Because you, you can.
1:22:00
The hardest thing about writing a book relative to a blog is that blogs can be changed after the fact. Right.
1:22:05
And there's plenty of times when after I publish a blog, someone will tell me, oh, I got this wrong. There's a typo here. I misquoted this person. You go and fix it. There's a book.
1:22:12
Once you, once it goes to the printer, forever hold your peace.
1:22:17
That's very, you're, you're done here.
1:22:20
And so, that's, you really got to get to a point, like, you'll drive yourself crazy, particularly in the last few weeks before it goes to the printer.
1:22:28
And there's so many times, this for me, for Sam as ever, this was about two months ago, of laying in bed and being like, oh, that paragraph in chapter eight.
1:22:33
Do I need, is that, is that right?
1:22:37
I don't think that's right. I need to go change.
1:22:37
But you gotta get to a point where you're just like, it's done.
1:22:40
I've done my best, and I gotta let it go.
1:22:42
And I think I, for my writing, I try to let it go sooner than other people, for better or worse.
1:22:45
There's a lot in my blogs in particular, 'cause I don't have an editor too, it's just, I'm a one man band here. Right.
1:22:50
Almost every blog that I publish will have a typo in it or, or several typos because I'm not going through with a fine tooth comb.
1:22:58
I kind of just get to the end and I say, all right, I've, I've done my best here.
1:23:01
Let's send it off to the wild. I'll tell you why.
1:23:05
That would never work for me.
1:23:05
And it is really revealing, thinking through why, of how my brain works and how ideas flow for me.
1:23:10
For me, an epiphany, the seed of an idea, is an extremely emotional experience.
1:23:15
It is a, from my body, it is like this roar of like lion like energy that comes into my brain and I just need to Get it out.
1:23:22
And I speak it out and I just have to like, it's like a dramatic experience.
1:23:26
It's sort of like, if you're in a big fight with a significant other, you say all these sorts of things that you don't mean to say, but like there's a kernel of truth in there that is like really true.
1:23:40
And whatever that thing is.
1:23:40
That would not have come out in like a sober state. Yes.
1:23:43
And so I feel like my first draft comes from there.
1:23:48
And so if I were to get to a place where I get to the bottom and then I publish it, it would be so far off. And so I need to...
1:23:51
You'd be cancelled the next day. Totally.
1:23:57
Or just, I'd be cancelled or I'd just say something ridiculous.
1:24:01
And so then I need to get to a place where I'm in a sober state and I just need to look it over.
1:24:04
Because my first draft has... No logic in it.
1:24:04
It is just raw, unfiltered, animalistic, and I just need to step away and be in a sober place because otherwise, yeah, I'll be canceled and that'll be the end of that.
1:24:18
So I feel like in terms of being the opposite of that, I feel like I truly write.
1:24:20
One sentence at a time in terms of I'll write a sentence and I'll stare at it and then I'll be like okay and then I get up and like go do the dishes.
1:24:30
Whereas I think a lot of writers truly just like smash it all out in one go, whereas mine is just one sentence, go do something else, another sentence, go do something else.
1:24:37
Well, credit to you, your life really allows you to do that.
1:24:37
You know, you have, what's this line, there's a The secret to doing great work is to always be a little bit underemployed.
1:24:48
ICU is very underemployed.
1:24:48
You sort of just do one thing, you got a bunch of free time, and so you can do that.
1:24:53
And I'm now beginning to see how your schedule and the structure of your life is integrated with your And so I've worked from home my entire career since 2007 before it was fashionable to do.
1:25:03
And I feel like that was so important because the secret to good writing is doing things that don't look like writing.
1:25:08
It's just kind of like sitting on the couch and thinking about a topic.
1:25:12
Going for a walk and thinking about a topic.
1:25:15
Doesn't look like writing.
1:25:15
So if you're in an office, your boss won't let you do that. Right.
1:25:19
When you're in an office, your boss wants you sitting at your desk, hitting keys.
1:25:21
That's what work looks like.
1:25:21
I feel like it took me a long time to convince my wife that when I'm sitting on the couch in my sweatpants... Staring out the window.
1:25:30
I'm working, working real hard right now because it doesn't look like work.
1:25:34
But that's, that's where all the good ideas come from.
1:25:36
And the thing that does look like work, like actually typing is like the smallest part of the job.
1:25:42
It's the, it's 2 percent of what's actually taking place in that.
1:25:42
So yeah, I couldn't imagine, you know, and bless them.
1:25:47
There's so many good ones who do this, but the people who are like.
1:25:51
Formal journalists working in an office, working for Reuters or Bloomberg or the New York Times, like that's a very hard thing to do because I think you are required just by the culture of the office to be hitting keys or talking on the phone at all time.
1:26:06
And you can't necessarily sit on a couch and just kind of daydream about the topic that you're writing about.
1:26:11
Yeah, good ideas can't be scheduled. Can't be scheduled.
1:26:15
A lot of people disagree with that.
1:26:15
I know Ryan Holiday, great writer who I look up to, I think he's great.
1:26:19
Uh, at least a partial, if not a full rejoinder to that, in which he would say, no, like you can create an environment that will foster creativity for me.
1:26:30
At least it's never the case.
1:26:30
And if I were to be like, okay, at 10 30 on Monday, I have a calendar thing in my calendar that says time to be creative. Like, forget about it.
1:26:38
It's always, most of my ideas will come on the weekends when I'm not even ready. Pretending to work.
1:26:43
I'll be going for a walk with my kids.
1:26:47
I'll be pushing them on the swings and I'll be like, Oh, I got it. Like, that's the idea.
1:26:49
Or if it's not on the weekends, it's like, like I said, it's on the treadmill. It's in the shower.
1:26:53
It's driving to the grocery store.
1:26:58
There's so many times I'll be in the middle of a conversation with my wife about something else. It's not about work.
1:27:02
I'll be in and I, and I'll stop her and I say, I'm sorry, I have an idea I need to write down.
1:27:05
And it's just like in the talking about where we're gonna go on vacation next summer, I'll just get this idea about like, oh, laws of getting rich. Whatever it is.
1:27:12
It just kind of comes to you in these random periods.
1:27:17
And every time I've tried to force it, the ideas suck. They're always terrible.
1:27:20
You know, one of the weirdest things for me about writing and trying to cultivate a process. I need to sleep a lot.
1:27:24
So I did a writer's retreat this summer and I was alone for four or five days and I was just cranking through ideas and what I would do is I would wake up at like 6 30.
1:27:42
Get some coffee, have some breakfast, write, nap, write more, nap, go for some walks.
1:27:42
I take like three naps in a day, go on like two or three walks while I'm walking, sort of speaking to my phone, and I love the voice transcription now with Whisper, the GPT technology. It's so good.
1:27:58
And then I'll sit down for like.
1:27:58
An hour and a half to two and a half hours at a time, just crank stuff out.
1:28:03
But like the cognitive intensity of that experience, I just need to pass out.
1:28:09
How often do you feel like, you know, where you're going when you're working on a writing project, do you feel like usually you have the idea and you just sort of go with it?
1:28:18
We talked about, sometimes I reject it, or do you feel like sometimes you sort of follow these trails and you end up in these.
1:28:20
Places that you never expected at the beginning.
1:28:24
I think it's always, every single time, the latter. Really?
1:28:28
And when I start an article, I have no idea where it's going to go.
1:28:28
And a lot of times the reason I start it is because I'm like, I want to learn about this topic.
1:28:36
So I think this is, I think that's actually pretty common.
1:28:36
And a lot of people will think like, oh, this author wrote this book.
1:28:39
And they imagine that the author had all of that information in their head.
1:28:44
And then they just like regurgitated it on, onto the paper. Right.
1:28:48
The process of writing is what teaches you.
1:28:48
And so all of, every one of these articles, when I start writing it, usually it starts with, it often starts with this, a title, a headline.
1:28:57
I remember, I specifically remember having lunch with Patrick O'Shaughnessy in 2017.
1:29:02
And he said, what are you working on?
1:29:02
And I said, I want to write a blog post called the psychology of money.
1:29:07
And he kind of said, what's it about?
1:29:07
I'm like, I don't, I don't know, but that'd be a cool, that'd be a cool title, right?
1:29:10
Like it's a catchy title. I think it'd be good.
1:29:12
And so I had the, the title in my head, but I had no clue what was like, what am I going to fill it out with? Like, I don't know.
1:29:17
I'll figure that out later, but that's, that's always how it works. And.
1:29:23
And literally every single piece, when you start writing it, you have no idea where it's going to go.
1:29:27
And sometimes, where it ends up is like, sometimes the opposite of what you thought.
1:29:32
Because you start learning about these topics and you're like, oh, my thesis was this, but as I learned more, it turns out it's actually the opposite.
1:29:40
But the opposite's pretty cool, so let's write about that.
1:29:40
So I think it's always, um, it's just a learning process for me.
1:29:45
And that gets back to selfish writing, too.
1:29:45
Like, I'm just trying to figure out the world for myself.
1:29:49
And if I can tell a story that I like, written in a style that I like, I take a leap of faith that other people might be interested in it, too. Mm hmm.
1:29:58
What's interesting about you is, you love sentences. You love sentences.
1:30:01
I think you remember sentences.
1:30:01
I think you say, I write in sentences. Yeah.
1:30:05
It seems like that is your...
1:30:05
Your thing that you're just so focused on is like, what is a great sentence?
1:30:12
Reading that, writing that, and it seems like that is like the atomic unit that you're orbiting around.
1:30:19
I think, even in books that you love and have a profound impact on you.
1:30:19
If someone said, Oh, tell me about that book.
1:30:24
You probably remember from the 70, 000 word book, you probably remember three or four sentences that you can actually recite from heart.
1:30:30
And those are the books that like meant something to you.
1:30:36
And I, I, for a long time, I gave you credit for this, but you tell me you didn't come up with this phrase.
1:30:40
I didn't come up with this.
1:30:40
People don't remember books.
1:30:40
You can still give me credit for it.
1:30:43
I, I, I'm just going to keep doing it.
1:30:43
I think what happened is that you did tell me it, but maybe you were quoting somebody else. Okay.
1:30:48
People don't remember books, they remember sentences.
1:30:48
When you told me that, and I remember you did tell me that, I was like, that's it.
1:30:53
That's, that's what it is. You remember sentences.
1:30:58
So if you think of your writing, whether it's a blog or a book, as just a collection of good sentences.
1:31:01
Hey, that's like, that's kind of obvious.
1:31:04
Like, of course, that's what every book is, a collection of sentences.
1:31:04
But when you think about that, it really pushes you towards, like, what I just wrote. Is that a good sentence?
1:31:11
If it's not, let's get it out.
1:31:11
Let's get another one in there.
1:31:11
And you always just want to make, I mean, this is another like obvious statement, but it's a, it's, it's, it's had a big impact on me.
1:31:19
I've just, that sentence that I just wrote, would somebody highlight that in Kindle?
1:31:23
Is that a sentence worth highlighting?
1:31:23
If not, like, let's move on.
1:31:26
Like, let's try to get the highest density of highlightable, memorable sentences in there.
1:31:31
And if you can improve that in density, even if you improve it by 10%, like, you're gonna zoom up the ladder of the quality of the writing.
1:31:40
You know what the number one highlighted book is in Kindle history? 4 Hour Body. Is that right? Number one.
1:31:47
And I think that's, I think Tim is a great example of, uh, very quotable. Very quotable.
1:31:54
If Munger, if Charlie Munger wrote a book, You would highlight the whole thing.
1:31:58
Because he is just a machine of one liners. Yep.
1:32:01
And if you, once you tie those one liners together, you get beautiful writing. Mm hmm. Yeah. See, I love phrases. Never ending now.
1:32:07
It's kind of the same thing though.
1:32:07
Yeah, well, I would say Close.
1:32:14
I think that I like the thing that you get in a phrase more than a sentence is it's it's less complete But I think it's a little bit more catchy and there's more alliteration and like playing with the words and I think that that I think it can be, yeah, it's slightly different, and I'm trying to figure out what that speaks to, that I like one liners so much.
1:32:35
I don't know what it is, but maybe it's that I can get away with it not really making sense, but being memorable.
1:32:39
Like, there's something very artistic about it.
1:32:42
I think it's, I think it's, I think a lot of people like that.
1:32:42
I heard this recently, I forget where I heard it, but...
1:32:46
Larry King, I didn't know this, but back in the 80s had a column, a newspaper column.
1:32:53
He, apparently back in the 80s, he did everything.
1:32:53
He was like TV host and journalist.
1:32:53
And because he was so busy doing all the other things he was doing, his weekly column was just a collection of random sentences.
1:33:02
So the example was like, he'd be like, and it was just someone recalling us.
1:33:08
I'm sure this isn't like verbatim what he wrote, but he'd be like, I really love Princess Diana's new hair.
1:33:12
And the next sentence would be like, I can't believe Ronald Reagan did this.
1:33:16
It was just a random collection of sentences of just random observations.
1:33:20
And, but people love that.
1:33:20
People love a collection of good sentences.
1:33:20
And the idea that, of course, if you can tie all that together in a long form narrative, that's great too.
1:33:29
But a collection of great sentences is. I love it.
1:33:33
One of my favorite Nassim Taleb books is his least well known, it's called The Bed of Procrustance. So good. So good.
1:33:38
It's a collection of aphorisms. And people love that.
1:33:43
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
1:33:43
It's a collection of aphorisms.
1:33:43
People love short and snappy to the point.
1:33:47
And it's almost like, it's a form of poetry, and in poetry, like, you cannot reduce it to what it's been.
1:33:50
If you can get an idea reduced to one great sentence, that's, that's a form of best story wins.
1:33:56
Hey man, there's another book called Everything by Aaron Haspel, and it's just like Beto Prokosty's. It is so fun to read.
1:34:07
I love flippin open books of aphorisms.
1:34:07
You read it for like three, four minutes at a time.
1:34:11
Kevin Kelly's recent book. Yes!
1:34:11
It's just a book of quotes, and it's lovely. It's so good.
1:34:14
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
1:34:20
I say that all the time now.
1:34:20
Don't be the best, be the only. Yeah.
1:34:26
Other people have explained that in ten thousand words.
1:34:30
And he's, he does it in, you know, eight or whatever it is.
1:34:30
And that's like, that's, that's the, that's what's really good.
1:34:34
He has another one like, enthusiasm is worth 40 IQ points. Yeah. He has another one.
1:34:40
I'm sure he's making this up, but he says, if you don't smoke before age 25, you will never start.
1:34:43
And if you start smoking before age 25, you will never quit.
1:34:49
Like, I don't know if that's statistically true, but just as a sentence, you're like, Oh, there's actually a lot of meaning in that of just like the accumulation, compounding effect of habits.
1:34:56
So he's, but that's another example of, and I know when you turn something like that into a publisher.
1:35:01
Most publishers will say, can't do it.
1:35:05
You need to tell a story that's got to be connecting.
1:35:05
These are all random points.
1:35:05
How do they tie together?
1:35:08
And my thought is always like, no, they don't.
1:35:08
I got a lot of that feedback from Psychology of Money.
1:35:13
Every single publisher in America turned it down.
1:35:13
Every pub, and we sent it to every publisher.
1:35:17
Every single one of them rejected it.
1:35:17
And the main reason why, there are lots of reasons why, but the main one was, it's just a random collection of essays about money.
1:35:26
There's no connecting theme.
1:35:26
And my response was like, yeah, that's what's good about it.
1:35:30
It's just like, rather than rambling on one topic, I would just want, like, I got these stories and I think they're good.
1:35:38
And I know that Chapter 7 doesn't relate to Chapter 12 in the slightest.
1:35:38
They're not connected at all.
1:35:42
But I think they're both good.
1:35:42
But the publisher said, no, every chapter has to be about a connecting theme.
1:35:48
And I thought that was bonkers.
1:35:48
I think it's the opposite.
1:35:53
I think books like Kevin Kelly's, or Nassim Taleb's, or to some extent, Psychology of Money.
1:35:57
Cover a wide range of things, but if it's good writing, people will like it.
1:36:00
Yeah, I mean, the major lesson of doing this podcast so far has just been everything works, but you need to just be really, really, really, really, really good at whatever it is that you do. I like that. Yeah.
1:36:11
And in some ways that's obvious, but it's, it's easy to overlook.
1:36:16
But people are always like, hey, how should I do it?
1:36:20
You can do whatever you want. Yeah.
1:36:20
But you gotta be really good.
1:36:20
You gotta be really good at it.
1:36:24
You gotta be really good at it.
1:36:24
Yeah, no, that, that's actually really good advice.
1:36:27
Because there's a million ways to write. It's an art. It's not a science. Yeah.
1:36:32
And like in every form of art, there's infinite number of ways to do it.
1:36:35
As long as you're good at it.
1:36:35
What have you taken from Bill Bryson?
1:36:40
He, uh, in a similar way.
1:36:40
to Ken Burns, writes about topics in which he is not discovering any new information.
1:36:49
He's writing about topics that have been written about by a million people before him who are more qualified and understood the topic better than him.
1:36:59
But he will, he's a better writer than everyone else.
1:36:59
So his most recent book is called The Body.
1:37:03
It's an anatomy textbook where he starts with the hair and he moves down to the toes and he talks about how the human body works.
1:37:08
And he goes into grand detail about How your gallbladder works and how your quadriceps interact with different tendons and whatnot.
1:37:17
But he tells it in such a captivating storytelling fashion that it was like one of the books of the year when it came out.
1:37:23
And that's when you can take a topic that seems so dull and boring and that it's literally a textbook of a topic and be like, Oh, I'm going to tell a good story about this.
1:37:33
That's what he's so good about.
1:37:36
You know, what's really funny about this?
1:37:36
How many writers don't write because they think Everything that I would want to say on this topic has already been said before.
1:37:47
So much of good writing is not what you say, it's how you say it.
1:37:47
And the proof of this comes from your high school English class, or your high school science class, whatever it is.
1:37:55
Our favorite teachers, they weren't there coming up with new information. Yeah.
1:37:59
coming up with new information. Yeah. No, they just had a way of communicating it that brought it to life and they made it fun or they made it engaging or they created a moment of suspense and tension as you were sitting there and you went from being bored to being
1:38:13
mesmerized and that teacher really fired you up but there's something about we start sitting down to write we're like Oh, I need to make sure that none of these ideas have ever been shared before and people just drop themselves out of the race before it begins. I would say it more forcefully and say, there is nothing new to write about. Hmm. And everything
1:38:26
I would say it more forcefully and say, there is nothing new to write about. Hmm.
1:38:26
And everything has been written unless you're talking about the news of today, but even that, it's like these, there's, there's nothing new.
1:38:34
Everything that needs to be said has been said before.
1:38:38
It's not to say that we haven't discovered every form of science or like there's no more innovation, but there's almost no new topics to write about. Right.
1:38:45
You're just writing about it in a slightly different way than everyone who came before you.
1:38:48
But there's a tremendous amount of Value in that and and potential in that if you can tell a good story about something that is up until that point been left to The textbooks the boring numbers and data that don't catch people's attention.
1:39:04
There's infinite opportunity in that you know the other lesson from Bill Bryson is the way that you can expand and contract ideas In this just magnificent way, right?
1:39:09
He has what a short history of nearly everything. Yes.
1:39:17
We're just talking about the history of the universe.
1:39:22
Literally the history of the universe too. 1927. There's, there's, yes.
1:39:24
I mean, he writes about everything because his skill is writing.
1:39:30
His skill is not astrophysics.
1:39:30
His skill is not 19, 1920s history. His skill is writing.
1:39:35
And he could write about anything.
1:39:35
He could write about the history of a fireplace and it'd be a great book because he can just tell a story.
1:39:42
So that's, I think when that's your skill, the opportunity for him is. Infinite. It's endless.
1:39:47
Do you have a good way of thinking about conclusions?
1:39:47
I think the most important part of any article is probably the first and the last sentence. The last sentence.
1:39:56
Because the first sentence hooks you in, the last sentence is how you, how you, the last feeling you're going to have with it.
1:39:59
So I try to, I try to think about that quite a bit, uh, in there.
1:40:04
Uh, the very last sentence in Psychology of Money is the title of the first chapter.
1:40:11
So the title of the first chapter is No One's Crazy, and the last sentence of Psychology of Money is No One's Crazy. So that was intentional.
1:40:16
I don't know if anyone noticed that or if it had any impact, but that was, I think you should always put an excessive amount of thought, an abnormal amount of thought into the first and last lines.
1:40:27
Do you have any way of thinking about it, or is it just like a very intuitive sense?
1:40:31
Like, there's something there, right?
1:40:31
Closing the circle where it began.
1:40:31
I'm going to open it somewhere, I'm going to close it somewhere, and it's...
1:40:34
It's going to be this circular...
1:40:38
The worst that you could do, the absolute worst writing, is that your last sentence is, in summary, comma, like that's, that's, that's when you know you've, you've, you've lost it.
1:40:47
It should be some sort of emotional like, boom, just leaves right there.
1:40:50
And it hits you at the end of like, that's, that's what it is.
1:40:54
Robert Caro writes to the last sentence.
1:40:54
So he knows what the last sentence is.
1:40:54
And the entire book just leads, and leads, yeah.
1:40:59
He's, he's his own beast.
1:40:59
He's a, he's an amazing writer.
1:41:06
And in such a different way from you, like, he's an obsessive researcher.
1:41:10
Like, he's just flipping through files, turning every page he always has.
1:41:14
My favorite Robert Caro story is when he was working on the research for one of his Lyndon Johnson books.
1:41:19
I don't know how many he's written, but he's interviewing Lyndon Johnson's old chauffeur.
1:41:23
And Robert Caro says, hey, when Lyndon Johnson was in the back of the car, what was he doing?
1:41:27
And the chauffeur says, I don't know, I wasn't paying any attention.
1:41:32
A week later, Robert Carroll says, hey, I gotta ask you again.
1:41:35
When Lyndon was in the back of the car, what did he do?
1:41:35
The chauffeur says, I told you, I don't, I was never paying attention. I was driving.
1:41:39
I don't know what Lyndon was doing.
1:41:41
Carroll asked him like five more times at different interviews, what was he doing in the back seat?
1:41:46
Finally, the chauffeur says, okay, you know what?
1:41:46
He would always talk to himself.
1:41:50
Lyndon Johnson, whenever he's in the back seat, he would talk to himself about how the day went.
1:41:54
And he'd literally say to himself, ah, Lyndon, at that event today, I said the wrong thing.
1:41:58
And I make sure you don't.
1:41:58
And Robert Crowe was like, that's the most fascinating.
1:42:00
But he says he had to ask this person five or six times before he finally got to it.
1:42:05
And most interviewers after the first answer, they'd be like, all right, well, there's nothing there. Move on.
1:42:11
But when he had an intuition that there was something to dig on, he would just keep chipping away at it until he finally got to what he was looking for.
1:42:15
I like this line that you have in, uh, Same as Ever right at the beginning.
1:42:19
It's none of the chapters are long and you're welcome for that.
1:42:23
Yeah, that's how I feel as a reader.
1:42:26
I'm kind of saying that back to like selfish writing.
1:42:26
I'm saying that to myself.
1:42:26
I don't like long chapters.
1:42:29
People like getting to the end of a chapter because it feels like they're making progress.
1:42:33
They're kind of, it's like in the video game.
1:42:33
You're like, oh, I beat the next level.
1:42:36
The person who does this the best and who is just like shameless about, uh, short chapters is Eric Larson.
1:42:40
Who's written many, many books.
1:42:40
His most recent famous one is um, Splendid in the Vial.
1:42:45
Splendid in the Vial about the London Blitz bombing.
1:42:50
And some of his chapters are, are a paragraph.
1:42:50
You know, in his average book he'll only have like 150 chapters. Oh wow.
1:42:55
But some of them, most of them are a page or two.
1:42:59
And it's just, it's almost impossible to put the book down because you're making so much progress.
1:43:03
And the opposite of that for a lot of readers.
1:43:03
You get to a chapter and you're like, oh, let me see how, oh, this chapter is 40 pages.
1:43:07
A lot of people would just be like, ah, you just feel like you have this giant burden in front of you to try to plow through.
1:43:14
So if you can keep people going, keep them feeling on track, and keep them feeling like they're, they're winning the next chapter, that's really important.
1:43:20
And I think at the micro level of like how long your paragraph is, it's kind of daunting when you see a page and it's just a giant uninterrupted block of text.
1:43:29
Whereas if you can really make it just like, just break up your sentences.
1:43:32
It's fine to have if every paragraph is two sentences, but you just keep people going.
1:43:36
It's a much easier way to read and it's less daunting.
1:43:41
And because it's less daunting, you're more likely to keep the person on the page rather than being like, I don't have time for this.
1:43:44
I got to go do something else.
1:43:44
Two nights ago, I picked up a 19th century commentary and I looked at it and it was a big book and the way the pages were laid out was it had the whole paragraph going all the way down and then on the same page the whole paragraph going all the way down and across two pages so up and down four, the four times was all one paragraph. It is so intimidating. It was. I was just like.
1:44:10
But also like for reader comprehension.
1:44:15
The reader's not gonna, like the amount that they're gonna absorb from that is so much less than if you broke that up.
1:44:19
So a lot of writers don't think about that.
1:44:19
Just like what does the paragraph look like and how do the sentences break up?
1:44:26
The other thing is that if you have a standalone sentence as a paragraph It sticks out more and you're like that's an important line.
1:44:33
Yeah, like the paragraph that preceded it I'm building up to this grand point that you need to pay attention to right before I move on to the next I think a lot of writers underestimate how the way that your paragraphs are broken up is actually a signal to your reader So if you have paragraph Break paragraph break like sentence sentence sentence sentence and all these super short paragraphs.
1:44:55
You're actually Screaming to your reader. I want you to skim this.
1:44:55
I don't want you to take this seriously.
1:44:59
Yes, and If you just have these long choppy blocks It's just going to be too much, like overwhelming.
1:45:06
And so there's actually like, It's important to, to balance it out.
1:45:09
There's a way to think about this.
1:45:12
And as you structure your paragraphs, you're just telling your reader, This is how I want you to read my work. Yeah.
1:45:16
And I don't think a lot of writers think about that.
1:45:16
I think, I think a varying length of your sentences too. Of course.
1:45:21
Some sentences will be three words.
1:45:26
Others it's fine if they're 20 or 25 words.
1:45:29
If every one of your sentences is 10 words, it's very robotic and monotonous.
1:45:29
You gotta, you gotta splice it up a bit.
1:45:33
Bill Bryson is really good at this, of having a really long, almost rambling sentence, followed by a three word sentence.
1:45:37
And that just, it makes it kind of like a musical form of writing, of when there's like, there's a beat to it, that's really, that's really fun to read.
1:45:46
I'm working on a, uh, It's a fairly serious, heavy piece, and I have an 123 word sentence that I think is frickin hilarious, just to like break it up.
1:45:57
And part of it is just like, I want to have fun as the writer, but I was like, how long can I make this sentence?
1:46:02
And it was just sort of going, going, going, it's all over the place.
1:46:06
And what's fun is, you sort of build up these short sentences before it, and then you can just let it go.
1:46:09
And when you have a long sentence like that, I even wrote it so that it would have, be paced so it goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
1:46:18
And I feel like as I've written more and more, I've given myself more and more liberty to just do something because I'm, because it's going to make me laugh.
1:46:27
One thing that, like a sentence that sticks out, actually people remember sentences, I forget what book this is, so I'm not going to give it accurate credit here, but it was a book about D Day during World War II.
1:46:32
And the two sentence that I remember, it was All of the young men, it's talking about U. S.
1:46:42
soldiers going into D Day, all of the young men knew that they might die in battle.
1:46:42
And the next sentence was, Most of them died in battle.
1:46:46
And it was, I remember that just like, so that just like, four words or whatever, it's just like, you can create so much emotion with a super short sentence.
1:46:55
It doesn't need to be a long, rambling explanation.
1:47:00
Just four or five words, you can really stop the reader in their tracks.
1:47:00
You ever heard this Gary Provost thing on sentences? No.
1:47:03
Alright, this is gonna be a little long, but I think it's, it's fun doing.
1:47:07
So, my favorite part of every Rite of Passage cohort is performing this, like I'm about to do. So, here we go. Okay.
1:47:13
This sentence has five words.
1:47:13
Here are five more words.
1:47:18
Five word sentences are fine, but several together become monotonous.
1:47:18
Listen to what is happening.
1:47:23
The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones.
1:47:23
It is like a stuck record.
1:47:27
The ear demands some variety. Now listen.
1:47:27
I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings.
1:47:32
It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony.
1:47:37
I use short sentences, and I use sentences of medium length.
1:47:37
And sometimes, when I'm certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length.
1:47:46
A sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo.
1:47:50
The roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals, sounds that say, Listen to this. It's so good. It is important.
1:47:54
So write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences.
1:47:59
Create a sound that pleases the reader's ear. Don't just write words. Oh, that's brilliant. I love it. Write music. That's so good! So good.
1:48:10
And I don't know what to call that, but I love it when people show what they're trying to say as they're making the point in the same, the same thrust. Yeah, that's good.
1:48:22
But the other thing that sticks out for me is like what percentage of writers think that deeply about their work.
1:48:26
Most of them are just like, throw on some words together as much as they can.
1:48:30
But how many think about the art of it?
1:48:30
Back to Ken Burns, like nobody thinks about the music lining up with it.
1:48:32
He's just the only one who puts in that much effort.
1:48:36
How many writers think about varying the length of their sentences?
1:48:40
Like if you could just, there's actually a tremendous amount of opportunity by just putting in a little bit more effort than other people. Totally.
1:48:47
That varier sentence length is the number one piece of writing advice that I think about.
1:48:55
If there's one thing that I think about is just vary the thing that I'm doing.
1:49:01
So the sentence length, the word length, the paragraph length, and it's so simple and intuitive, but somehow it just sort of. Mine would be brevity.
1:49:07
Just getting to the point. What's your point?
1:49:12
Tell me that point and move on. Get me back to my day.
1:49:12
I don't have time for your bullshit. That would be mine. Yeah, exactly. No patience. No patience.
1:49:21
You ever heard the Kanye line on Rick Rubin?
1:49:21
He's not a producer, he's a reducer. That's good. That's really good. It's fun, right?
1:49:27
I forget who says the advice of like improve your writing by deleting every word.
1:49:31
By deleting every other word.
1:49:36
You've heard the The Ken Burns Maple Syrup story. Yeah.
1:49:36
So Ken Burns, I think, lives in New Hampshire or Vermont. Yeah.
1:49:45
And he said that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.
1:49:51
And that's the same as for a video.
1:49:51
That's the same as video and same as writing and same as any communication, right?
1:49:54
Like, this is like your scrap heap document.
1:49:59
You know, so much of good writing is just writing a lot, not having the pride to keep everything and saying, And you know what?
1:50:03
I'm going to go kill those darlings and I'm just going to be left with.
1:50:11
The stuff that's good hard to do hard to kill your your darlings There was a there was another chapter in same as ever that the publisher said and they were very polite about it But they said that chapter is not gonna work and as soon as I said, I knew they were right
1:50:25
But I had spent a lot of time on it I had spent a lot of time crafting every sentence and it was hard to put it out of its misery Maybe it'll be, it'll be resurrected in scrapped bits someday and I'll use it for something else, but it's, it's really hard, it's easy to have sunk costs in writing and say, I've spent a lot of time on this. Yeah, but the reader doesn't care how much time you spent on it. Reader doesn't care
1:50:42
Yeah, but the reader doesn't care how much time you spent on it.
1:50:42
Reader doesn't care how much angst it caused you. It's not good. So get rid of it. They just don't care.
1:50:45
I mean, I've, something I think a lot about the paradox of creativity is Creative work is only done when the consumer feels like it didn't take a lot of work. Yeah.
1:51:05
Which means that they'll never appreciate how much work it took.
1:51:05
The other thing I think about is you never know what sentence took the author an hour and which, which.
1:51:09
Paragraph just fell out of their head. Ain't that right?
1:51:15
They all look the same, but sometimes, and it's not even the most profound, it's usually not the most profound sentence, but there's one sentence in there that took 80 percent of the time to make, to make that point.
1:51:27
It's always, it's always like that.
1:51:27
But as a reader, you have no idea which one it was. Totally.
1:51:32
I love this line where you talk about Seinfeld.
1:51:32
You have this graphic where you talk about different TV shows and the graphic shows how TV shows when they end earlier, they tend to, the average season tends to be rated much higher.
1:51:47
Once you stick around a long time.
1:51:47
Like The Simpsons just goes and it's not rated well.
1:51:51
The best show of the 1990s. It's still on air.
1:51:51
Most people don't even know they're still making it.
1:51:55
And the ratings for the recent, you know, decade are in the toilet.
1:51:55
So that I always look at that and it's like you should have quit while you're ahead like Seinfeld.
1:52:04
Seinfeld was on top of the world when they ended in 1998 and he said no we're done we're out of here.
1:52:09
I know we're on top of the world that's why we're quitting.
1:52:09
And Jerry has this quote where he says the only way to know where the top is is to experience the decline.
1:52:13
And I have no interest in that.
1:52:18
So when things, when he was going parabolic, he said, that's the time to quit and quit while you're ahead.
1:52:23
I've always really admired that in athletes and business people, people who just remove themselves from the system.
1:52:27
I didn't realize this until recently, but Cameron Diaz did that. She doesn't act anymore. Not because she can't. Of course she can.
1:52:36
She just said, I've had enough.
1:52:36
I've achieved everything I wanted to.
1:52:39
I'm sure there's more to it.
1:52:39
Maybe the downsides of acting, whatever it would be.
1:52:42
But it's so rare that people quit on their own terms.
1:52:46
But I think it's fundamental to your happiness because there's almost nothing else that's going to make you unhappier than being forced out.
1:52:50
Having your show canceled or the equivalent of that in your own career. Yeah.
1:52:54
It's gotta be really hard.
1:52:54
So I've always really admired people who quit while they're ahead and I hope I can do it someday.
1:52:57
I feel like one thing that you are particularly good at is just having a keen sense for whose feedback you're going to listen to and who's you're going to ignore and reject.
1:53:13
And I feel like you've just been very good about saying, yeah, that person doesn't think this is right, but I disagree with them. You know what?
1:53:19
I got my own style and I've really watched you orbit into your own style and lean into it more and more since we've gotten to know each other.
1:53:30
I think, I think to some extent though, I incorporate all the feedback.
1:53:34
I'm a firm believer that you cannot take the praise seriously if you ignore the criticism.
1:53:40
And so unless you are rejecting.
1:53:40
You have to accept at least some of the criticism and that's hard to do and it's it's it's fun to accept the praise But then if you reject if every time you have a critic you say I don't know your time I'm like, no you should pay attention to some of it You have to learn how to incorporate the phrase without it breaking who you are though But also feedback is a giant power law like I have ten people in my life if they tell me something I listen. They know. Yeah.
1:54:05
They know, and their sense of where I'm at sometimes is far better than where I am.
1:54:13
But then really just thinking in concentric circles about this. Yeah.
1:54:17
And I think that as your style gets more and more distinct, I think it's important to have a group of people whose feedback you really value, but know that, hey, the average person might not like this, but that's the price I'm willing to pay so that.
1:54:32
The people who I'm trying to serve love this.
1:54:36
Wasn't it Derek Thompson on, on this, on this podcast who said, Find someone who cares about you and wants you to succeed and is willing to give you critical advice.
1:54:42
I think he phrased it differently, but I think that's really true.
1:54:45
Because the troll on Twitter doesn't want you to succeed. They don't care.
1:54:50
But your best friend wants you to succeed, but they're still willing to tell you when you're wrong.
1:54:53
And that's the person who you want to listen to. Amen.
1:54:56
You have a chapter, Wounds heal, scars last.
1:55:03
What do you feel is a wound from your career versus a scar? Oh gosh, great question.
1:55:03
I don't know if I've, if I've started, if I've thought a lot.
1:55:10
I mean, most of the criticisms were wounds because they healed.
1:55:10
Particularly early on in my writing career, my wife used to walk in the door and she would just look at my demeanor and she would say, bad comment today.
1:55:19
it would just eat away at me when there would be feedback on my blog. Me too, man.
1:55:25
Because I felt like my career was, was one criticism away from ending.
1:55:30
It's how it felt because it just felt like it was a fragile career and I had thinner skin back then when I first started.
1:55:34
So those, those are all, um, you know, wounds that healed.
1:55:39
Scars that lasted, I actually think starting my career in 2008 when the economy was a mess and it was really like, If you lose this job, there's probably not another one for you.
1:55:50
That was actually really good in hindsight.
1:55:56
Caused a lot of stress and anxiety.
1:55:56
A lot of nearly sleepless nights.
1:55:56
But in hindsight, it was like, we really got to figure make this thing work.
1:56:01
This is not just a luxury.
1:56:05
Oh, let's see if this writing job pans out.
1:56:05
Like, no, I got to take this real seriously.
1:56:09
And I'm not going to think of this as just like a temporary job of this like, oh, let's play around as a writer.
1:56:13
Like I got to find out how to become a professional writer and I got to do it right now.
1:56:16
I mean, one of the chapters in Same as Ever is about when the magic happens and it's about the biggest innovations in society take place when the world is on fire during pandemics, during wars.
1:56:25
Shit gets real and the stakes are really high.
1:56:30
That's when people figure problems out.
1:56:30
And I think starting your career in 2008 did that for everybody.
1:56:33
It was like, I got this job and there's not many others out there, so I gotta, I gotta figure out how to make this work.
1:56:40
That was, I think that's a, like being scarred by that is actually really beneficial.
1:56:45
That is something that's striking about talking to you is for how long you've been writing and for how well you do it and how many books you've sold.
1:56:50
You talk about it like you've been doing this for a few years and you're still in double A baseball.
1:56:54
I think if you, if you don't, at the moment that you lose that, you're done. You're finished.
1:57:01
I mean, I tell a story in Psychology of Money about Mike Moritz who runs Sequoia, the most successful VC firm of all time.
1:57:04
And they've been the best VC firm for 40 years.
1:57:10
And Charlie Rose asked him, he said, what's the secret to your success?
1:57:15
And he said, we're always scared of going out of business.
1:57:19
And he says, we don't ever assume that the success we had yesterday is gonna transfer to tomorrow.
1:57:22
They wake up scared every day and I think the moment you lose that it's, it's done.
1:57:27
You can count the days to the end of your career.
1:57:27
And so I, yeah, I feel like I, part of it's just my personality. I'm a worrier.
1:57:34
I'm a worst case scenario guy.
1:57:34
It's not that healthy of a personality, but I've always been like that.
1:57:38
So I think always realizing that no matter what you've achieved in the past, you can be toast tomorrow or the next, the next book you write can be garbage.
1:57:43
Always remembering that kind of keeps you focused on it. Keeps you in gear.
1:57:49
Yeah, do you feel like there's a stability and a longevity to your career writing books that you didn't have writing articles?
1:57:55
The funny thing is like, um, One of the reasons why I didn't write psychology money for 14 years is I didn't see the point.
1:58:05
I was like, I write online, who cares if it's in between two pieces of cardboard?
1:58:09
What difference does it make?
1:58:09
And now I realize that that's, that's not true.
1:58:12
They're like the, the format of a book makes it a distinctly different thing than just a blog.
1:58:16
And so, um, you know, I hope there's longevity in the style.
1:58:21
I mean, just by the theme, same as ever, it's like things that will always be true.
1:58:25
I never understood writers who wanted to write things that were constrained to a time period, you know, writing about the best stocks to buy this year.
1:58:33
Well, by definition, nobody cares about that article next year or writing about, you know, a book about the top trends of 1999.
1:58:37
By 2001, no one's buying your book.
1:58:43
So I've always been like, if it's not timeless and why, why do you even doing it?
1:58:43
It's so part of the reason is it's so hard to sell books.
1:58:47
People don't realize that the tail distribution of how hard it is to get someone to pay 30 for content that they're used to getting for free is very, very difficult.
1:58:57
So if you're going to do it, give yourself a fighting chance.
1:59:02
At writing something that people might buy next year and 10 years from now and 50 years from now, like at least give yourself the opportunity to get there.
1:59:06
So I always want to write, if I write something that's not going to be relevant in 10 years, I don't see the point in writing it at all.
1:59:15
So what moves the needle? In book sales? Yeah.
1:59:20
I always say 90 percent of virality is luck.
1:59:20
If there's anything that takes off a blog post, a tweet, a book, a business, anything that has just, you know, four standard deviation success.
1:59:31
The more outlier the success, the more luck played a role.
1:59:31
And it's not that luck was all of it.
1:59:36
Of course in successful businesses or successful tweets or books, there's some skill in there.
1:59:40
But there's a lot of things that have to go right to have that extreme outlier success.
1:59:44
And I think the proof of that is that there are a lot of good books, great books that didn't sell that much.
1:59:49
And that's, that's what it is.
1:59:54
And there's a lot of books that sold a lot that aren't that good.
1:59:56
And so that's, I think, and it's true for music. It's true for tweets.
2:00:01
It's, it's really unhealthy that if you experience outsized success to say, I, I did all of that.
2:00:08
That's, I achieved four standard deviation success because I'm four standard deviation smarter than everyone else.
2:00:13
That's an utterly wrong mindset, uh, and a very dangerous mindset.
2:00:18
Well, we had a fun texting thread a few months ago where I texted you about, uh, author who had just spent a bunch of money on marketing and you were just like, doesn't work, doesn't mean anything. Dude, who cares? It's like.
2:00:28
You know what my marketing strategy is? Write a good book.
2:00:31
Yeah, that's my marketing strategy.
2:00:35
Jason Zweig in the Wall Street Journal is about a week before Psychology Money came out and we were talking about marketing books and he said, Morgan, if the book is good, you don't need to market it.
2:00:44
And if the book is bad, no amount of marketing is going to help.
2:00:48
And I think that's like 80 percent true. I like that though.
2:00:52
But it's definitely, it's definitely 80 percent true.
2:00:52
It's not 100 percent true.
2:00:56
I think there is marketing that works.
2:00:56
You need to give the book a push when it first comes out.
2:01:00
You got to go on the podcast.
2:01:00
You got to get, you got to make the world aware of it.
2:01:04
But once they're aware of it, if it's good, it's going to go.
2:01:07
And if it's bad, it's going to die.
2:01:07
And you just got to accept that that's what it is.
2:01:10
Well, one way to think about it is, how high is the pulpit that you're shouting from? Yeah.
2:01:14
So marketing, you're just shouting from a higher pulpit.
2:01:14
And so you can reach more people.
2:01:19
But then the question is, do the people that you reach turn around and share it with two other people?
2:01:22
Or do they keep it to themselves? Yes.
2:01:26
I mean, there's like nothing is good.
2:01:26
There's no marketing that's going to sell books other than word of mouth.
2:01:30
For any significant period of time.
2:01:30
Like you can, you can go on a lot of podcasts and maybe get like a, an excerpt in the New York Times or whatnot.
2:01:38
Nothing is going to move the needle more than every person who buys your book.
2:01:38
Text three of their friends and say, you need to buy this too.
2:01:43
That's the only thing that, and that's the only thing that gives it the long tail.
2:01:46
If you, if you go on a lot of podcasts and you, you're on the Today Show or whatever, you can sell a lot of books for a month.
2:01:54
But if you want to keep selling books for years, it has to have word of mouth, same for products, same for everything.
2:01:58
The iPhone sells, not because they have a good marketing, it sells because it's a good product that people want to use.
2:02:02
And when they buy it for the first time, they tell their siblings and their parents and their friends, you should go buy this too.
2:02:09
Nothing works more than that.
2:02:09
Yeah, you know, speaking of products, I feel like one of the things that you do really well is you Think through what is the user experience of reading my work and low friction.
2:02:20
I want to make it fun I want it to be brief and you know, there's other writers who would say to hell with it You know, this is it's art let it pour out of your soul and stuff like that And I think that you really appreciate a good UX as a reader.
2:02:37
So you try to deliver a good UX as a writer I'm just trying to have empathy for the reader And having experience as yourself as a reader.
2:02:43
I know what I like to write and I want to, I want to mimic that.
2:02:48
I know what I don't like to write and I want to stay away from that.
2:02:52
So I think it's just respect, empathy for the reader that pushes you in that direction.
2:02:57
All right, Morgan, this was good fun.
2:02:57
Thanks so much for having me.
2:02:57
Thanks for coming to my living room.