we've blunted creative flexibility and creative risk-taking because great writers are getting told no for projects that are just a little bit outside of their swim Lane yeah just stick to your knitting like stick to the genre that you do well can you just rinse and
repeat that other thing you did it is worth at least experimenting one of the scariest things you can do is say I'm going to try something completely different Dr Dre released a Tango album at one point it was a spectacular flop what happened after the Tango album product 2001 one
of the biggest selling rap albums of all time the mistakes you make are the richest opportunities to make yourself better if they want you to zag and you want to Zig go ahead see what happens well hello everyone it's jimos shy with yet another infinite Loops I have today one of my favorite people
actually author entrepreneur helper of many aspects of oan Adventures my favorite author who's working today and right in front of me kidding Jimmy Sony how are you Jimmy thank you thank you that that overly generous introduction I am I am great I am happy to be here and as always like
proud to be proud to be on the the short list of people who get the return invite for for the infinite loose podcast that's you know that's a small but distinguished list I I'm like should get jackets made that's what it's you yeah I I agree I think that's probably I love
it you've just given me a new swag idea we're GNA get you know how Michael Liberty loves the patches idea maybe we'll do patches right and you'll get you'll get stripes for every time you're on every time you're on that's right that's right it's like it's yeah it's like it's like you're in the military
and it's like you got a little metal it's like a distinguished service you know metal and then and then we'll be we'll be like those old guys in the old Soviet Union right where they're all standing up they're they're nearly dead they look like they're propped up and they and they've got all of these medals
on their on on their uniform I would love hilarious well we've done so much uh since we last talked but let's let's launch it with uh the Festival of the future of publishing uh I unfortunately got some 48 or 72h hour bug and was not able to be there but I did watch all of the
presentations I thought it was great just want to get your impression not only of the day but also of some of the ideas that were Advanced uh during the discussions yeah you know it was it was it was yet another reminder about how the the future of publishing is is still being written like and it and it
ought to be accelerated right that that actually you had all these smart people in the room and and there were all kinds of folks who are working in different ways to take an industry that has been doing the same thing for 50 years 60 years and to bust it up and to try some
new things and it's fabulous like it was it was a collection of people who everybody from like hybrid Publishers you know like scribe and page two to kind of to to publisher service providers like otter Pine like and you just get everybody in between and then you also had traditionally published
authors you had University press people there but I think like the consistent theme in the room was that same thing that you and I have experienced which is the sort of heads scratching Why Can't This be different or better right and I think for the first time there's
actually energy from people around making it better yeah and and one of the things that we're trying to accomplish with infinite books is you know I love books you love books we're both authors and you know when you and I were comparing notes like nothing had changed literally
nothing had changed what from when wrote my first book back in the 90s the early 90s and then you and I were talking about some of your books and I'm like oh my God like it's almost like we had the same editor and the same PR agent who did basically nothing why do you think
and and listen I've I love books I want as many Publishers in the world right but why why are they so stuck in stasis you think yeah I mean I think look this is a it's it's a it's a mult there's a multi-part answer to that question right um and I what but it for me what it
really boils down to is incentives right like incentives govern this situation so if you have like a big publisher does a catalog of books that continue to make money for you year after year that is like a an annuity right or like a it's a payout every whether you do any additional work to sell that book let's
take a great example uh James clear's Atomic habits I think it has top the charts globally or annually like every year for four years right or it was like first first second first whatever it was a little dip with the second and if you know that that you're going to reliably
get a certain amount of money from a book like that every year you don't quite have to worry that your books that you publish this year the Contemporary year are successful that that's like kind of simple math right like if you know you're going to get $10 million from that book well that's like you
don't have to make 10 million new dollars right whereas with many businesses you are constantly working to figure out how are we going to make the next product better how are we going to make next product better you know Apple doesn't get to rest on the iPhone 7
right Apple doesn't get to continue to bank revenue from the imatch right they have to continue to create new things some of the you the Vision Pro there is no Vision Pro equivalent in the book industry they do not actually have to have new products that incrementally make a lot of Revenue
and that's one of the biggest things is like that incentive is based on the fact that their backlist pays for a lot of things second incentive piece is that if you have one or two hits every year you make your book for the year and the rest of the books that you have can just kind
of be there they can be like like you know they can be fun projects that so somebody describe them online like it kind of vanity plays like you get to you get to publish this you'll feel good about it doesn't matter if it makes any money that'll be maybe they'll win an
award or two and that's it right and so you have a situation where even even getting the value out of every book you're not incentivized to do that and and that you know and that's so like why why worry about whether Jim's book is successful why worry about Jim's appearance on Oprah turning into sales
if you've already like like kind of moved on and Jim's book's doing fine and you're not going to like lift a finger to really help him right uh which is one of your classic stories that you ought to tell yeah uh that that uh if you haven't heard it before Jimmy's referring to uh
the only book that I actually wrote for a broad General audience uh my other books had been more aimed at more sophisticated investors but I had a book called How to retire Rich which was my attempt to take a lot of the learnings that I had done with the more uh technical books if you
will and make it for a broad audience and it sold really well and then I got an opportunity about 4 months after the book had it shelves to be on Oprah and uh this is in the 90s when Oprah was absolutely the queen of uh selling books and even though I was only going to get
five minutes I I was led to believe and I learned later that her influence in moving books was second to none so my agent was so excited he called our publisher and said listen Jim's going to be on opr wi free this date this time I noticed that we're down to you know I
can't remember how many copies were still in the warehouse it was a small number like 9,000 or thereabouts and and my agent West said you got to print more books and they were like eh we've uh you know we've hit the target with how to retire Rich already he was a bestseller and uh you know it's great
he's going to be on Oprah but you know it's it was I I I I kind of try to do my best Larry David uh uh impression why why why why would we do that and then Jimmy this is in the earliest days of Amazon which of course I loved I loved going to Amazon and seeing all of the things that they were
doing and I watched it go after the show appeared literally to number one not just in fin not just in finance but in books it goes to number one on Amazon and then I learned later also through the um physical bookstores like Barnes & Noble and uh that uh group of stores got
sold out in under a week who knows how many additional copies of that book could have gotten sold and it was I I was literally flabbergasted when I was talking when I was talking to my agent I was like Wes are do they just literally have no Savvy or common sense about oh Oprah we
might want to publish another or I don't know 10,000 copies at least but they didn't and and so one of the things that that always stuck with me and then I chatted with you what originally attracted me to you well obviously was your books right you and I have very similar interests and I'm a huge clad
Shannon fan for example and and so I got that and uh and and loved it uh but then when I got to know you better I learned you took a book about Claude Shannon that for those who don't know Claude Shannon father of information Theory the the reason Jimmy and I can communicate
this way VIA Zoom is because of Claude Shannon okay so he he should be as famous as I don't know any of the famous Quantum physicist Einstein all those guys but many many people don't even know about him but what I loved is because you were such an entrepreneurial uh oriented author you
managed to sell 50,000 copies of a book about Claude Channon and I was like I gotta meet this guy I think the other you know I appreciate that and I think part of it let me let me comment on the Claud Shannon thing first and then kind of go back to the incentives things
there's one more at which this operates so the Shannon thing is if you if you're excited about something an idea that is worthy of spending years of your life turning into a book right then I had always in my head said it's kind of a one to one at least a one to one meaning if I spent one year writing the book
should spend at least one year marketing it if I spend two years two years that just seems like like table Stakes like that's just basic right and people like well what can you do what can you do to actually sell book and it's like well find the audience of people that like
the stuff that you like and then communicate them in a way that isn't smarmy right do RIT go on quora figure out where communities are that hang out that talk about the stuff you talk about and let them know you have a thing and I think that's kind of like like like
before that there's also the step of like make sure the thing that you're selling is actually good make sure that the book is actually worth reading right but my view was it was just kind of obvious to me that as an author I wasn't some protected artist to be like kept in
a little in a little place where I did my artistic work no I'd like get in the scrum and actually try to find people who are passionate about my book tell them about my book ask them to leave reviews ask them to tell their friends do giveaways run contests do do everything I could why because I spent
years of my life studying this guy what is the point of of of publishing and then hoping hoping just hoping people pick it up and take it and find it right that's just that's like that's Insanity to me went to your point on that the your Oprah story and my story the one thing to remember and this is in total
fairness to the people who work in big publishing because you and I have also had both like had great experiences with many of these people right I don't this is not conversation where we're just saying here are all the terrible things you never tly public no yeah the point
the point is that the the if my book was more successful than what they had thought or anticipated or what works on Wall Street had a second life where it sold another 10,000 copies or another 50,000 copies there were that money was not going to go directly into the
pockets of the people that helped us make the book successful I think that one of the things that and I'm not you know I don't claim to know fully how salary structures and bonuses and incentives work within the publishing industry but if a marketing or Communications person within that
industry made more money if I sold more books there would be a lot more responsiveness to opportunities that come my way your way other authors way because for me if I sell another thousand books it means nothing to the person who is going to do marketing right it's just another item on their
to-do list I think that is actually one of the things that like when you look at big organizations people and then people do this with government all the time they're like why doesn't the government work better it's like well you said like get down to the level of people and
incentives like it doesn't often have an incentive to run better there's nobody that makes money if the DMV runs faster it actually like is the opposite right in the same way if you sell another 10,000 copies of your M the company makes more money abstractly that lands in the pockets of
people but it is not as though 05% of the revenue of what works on Wall Street is carved out in a sales fashion for somebody who is doing marketing or sales right and that is actually super important because the fire for somebody to want to sell Jim's book like they might like you a lot Jim and a lot of
people do but the fire is going to come from them getting rich if they sell more copies of your book and so there's of this this fundamental Brokenness it's also why by the way one of the biggest things that I noticed that you noticed as well it's why all the Firepower is
trained on launch week for a book like you get one week we're going to launch you like hell we're going to make sure you do well and then after that like good luck to you right it's like have fun we'll like send you in Bound inqueries when we get them and the reason I can respect why
that happens is because I know that after my launch week those those this this place this publishing house has to launch another dozen books and another dozen books and another dozen books after that so I get it they're baguer they are pressed for time and resources
but the problem is one of incentives which is if you know that like week two for a book is going to be better than week one then there has to be a way to make sure that the incentives and bonuses and structures are aligned so you can actually maximize the revenue on books and my my view of this is very
simple which is once I've written a book I'm launching it for the rest of my life right I do I do marketing and promo for my books in perpetuity because why not I wrote them I may as well also it's not that hard and it's super fun to connect with people who want to read your books
Publishers by necessity by Design have to think okay we've got like we're done Jimmy's book get off we like he'll hopefully stop emailing us all the time and annoying us now on to like the next dozen projects we have to do and I can speak from experience here where like some of the editors that do the best
work don't get to be editors anymore because they just have to manage so many projects and then there's not any kind of like like break you're just always on the hamster wheel always on the hamster wheel so you can you can sort of look at organizational design and look at
incentives and say like of course it works of course it works this way of course there's not any attention paid right and so you try to pick your winners you try to get a few lottery tickets you kind of have to just phone it in with the rest of them you maybe get a couple of lucky wins and you know
that James Clear is going to float your business for a while right then like it it all actually makes like very rational sense but the problem is the system as you and I see it is irrationally designed right meaning there could be a better system design and you could
maximize more Revenue out of fewer books and presumably you'd make more money over the Long Haul and authors would be happier as well yeah and the incentive and the underlying structure of the system is so important and I I would emphasize like you did listen I I had uh the great Good
Fortune of having great Publishers for all four of my books and my books materially helped my career so th we are this is not in any way a screed against traditional Publishers it's just hey those systems are maybe not designed the way to maximize outcomes for the author for the
company that's publishing the author for the people who love to read that particular author or about that particular story so so what we want to do with infinite books is do all of that as well right so I come out of the world of asset management where basically what you were advocating for would be what an
asset manager would call books should have wholesalers and and and by that you mean they get compensated by the number of copies that they sell and again there's nothing wrong with that no you you you presumably if we do a really good job of picking and curating right the the right kinds of books that we
want to publish at infinite books then my God we're GNA want everybody to read it obviously yeah and so motivating A salesperson to do that motivating the team to do that makes a great deal of sense the one thing that I would add is you are an amazing entrepreneur as well
right so a lot of a lot of authors and I know lot of authors a lot of authors really do prefer to just do the writing and and they want to Outsource all of that and that's where I think infinite books is gonna have a huge opening because we're gonna take exactly that
exciting spirit that you just articulated but we're gonna institutionalize it we're gonna have everybody at uh at infinite books is going to be rowing in the same direction incented in the same direction and that's nothing but good for the author even for the author who's like you know
I just really want to write my books it would be great if you can do all of this but designing the you the you mentioned the DMV that's perfect right yeah they they're literally incentive not to to more Vision yeah well and I would let me let me let me push back just a bit but
then also like we expand on this it's funny you read my mind I was going to say there there are authors who do not want to do this and there was a time you can find these amazing New York Times articles actually pretty recently where there's like a long feature about how authors are like wait I have to be a
marketer what is what is this what is this marketing Focus I have no idea what you're talking about right I think there's there's a there's both a supply problem and a demand problem sure there's some per percentage of authors who do not want to aggressively Market their books and nobody is saying that
you have to be like me I would bet that the Universe of authors who would do more if they knew what to do or if the opportunities were given to them is actually fairly large right because authors kind of have to like figure it out on their own but people don't people
have actually asked me they said so does your um does your publisher help you get in touch with Elon Musk like did they set up that like it's like you know people don't know and so authors you could imagine also don't know they're like so exactly how do I get this other
stuff done if Publishers just led the horse to water a little bit I suspect what they would find is that authors are actually hungry to say yes to podcasts say yes to Media appearances say yes to any opportunity to sell some books and get their message out there because again they spent years of their life
working on the thing it's not that big of a lift to do an hour or two or three or 10 on like podcasts or any other kind of media right that's one thing the second is it it is the case that part of The Challenge on the incentive design on the author side is because the publisher
takes so much of the revenue it actually for authors the Advance is everything meaning and for those who are listening who may not be familiar with the publishing model as it's run today generally what happens is with a big Publishers you'll get a dollar amount as
an advance it's effectively a loan to you right you get a certain dollar amount it's usually pretty low that's the money you get for writing the book until you get enough sales to make that back you will not see new money on your book right and so that's actually really
important a lot of people don't know that they assume authors get like big contracts and it's very fancy it's really not generally these these sums are very small you don't get new money until the book is what does what it's called earning out it's earn back its advance so with that context what's
important is that because Publishers are generally taking between 85 95% of the revenue on any given sale authors are also kind of just like he what does it matter if I sell another thousand books they're like then what's that going to do for me right and by the way that's
like makes sense the math doesn't really add up you're like th a thousand books what's that I mean minus this plus you take out taxes agent fees what am I left with why would I want to spend my time doing that when I can spend my time doing other more remunerative things so
but again what I just described is not a motivation problem it's an incentive problem because if a thousand books was worth more money you would eventually find a price point where it would be worth it to any author to go and do a thing if it meant more Book Sales right
and so sure are there is there a category of authors who are never going to want to do aggressive marketing maybe I would put that number pretty in in 2024 I think that number is pretty low like authors have and any kind of content creator has become accustomed to the fact that in the same way that
Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Taylor Swift cultivate a direct relationship with your audience you have to cultivate a direct relationship with your audience there's no getting around that anymore right it's not even like the Rock and just be like can somebody else do the marketing for the teila right like he
can't do that like even when Taylor was doing the release of the Aras T her in movie theaters she got super involved in design of the way the contracts were going to work and like here's what we're going to make relative to the theaters creators can't exempt themselves from
this stuff anymore right and and because they have Publishers have gotten away with murder I think for many many years yeah and that's a really good point uh uh in terms of you're you are probably right if the publisher and hopefully we're going to have the design
of infinite books be kind of Ideal along these lines if the publisher has a model that aligns with the author wanting to do all those podcasts wanting to make all of those appearances then I think you're probably right the the author gonna go great of course I'll be on that podcast because
you know I authors are really I don't think I've ever met an author that's an interesting question it just occurred to me I don't think I've ever met an author that wasn't like just really curious in general but also that didn't love to talk about the topic that they spent
years of their life researching writing the book all of that so it is a natural fit as far as that goes what we're doing with infinite Loops of course or infinite Loops infinite books is we are turning that uh Revenue share on its head and going to have a variety of models so that we can be flexible but
basically think author's going to probably be looking at 70% of the revenues that that book generates uh infinite books is going to be looking at a retention of 30% and we're going to do a lot for that 30% we've got great editors we've got great readers we've got great marketers all of that all
again I I this image of I just uh watched the movie Bo the boat so this is on my brain uh was also a good book by the way uh but you want all of the auras going in the same direction and and when I was watching it I was actually thinking about some of the business models we've been discussing for
infinite books and I'm like yeah yeah no you've got to have them going in the same direction and it's funny that you mentioned that book Jim and this is why we do podcast together because you actually literally read my mind on the next point I was going to make and the
point was going to be around that book so it's a wonderful book it's beautifully written I mean it is really it's a magnetic story if you are not a rower you will still love this story from the first page to the last it is just a gem of a book it's also deeply researched so you have this author who
writes this book about rowing that today has sold millions of copies here's what happened when it debuted and there's an article about this in a very so I I do case studies on books I like looking at going back and tracing the history of what made a book successful like you know
what I do in my spare time right um so I went and I looked at what happened with boys in the boat when the book debuted it was critically very well reviewed nothing Burger on sales it actually debuted to like crickets like nothing happened and the publisher was astonished the author was disappointed
everybody was like ah man we thought this thing was going to be a thing oh well on to the next title right for the publisher and the author's like sitting there I don't know maybe he was drinking who knows so here's what happens the book debuts and a little something happens a few months in rowers start
telling other rowers about the book six months in more rowers start telling other rowers hey this book captures what we do it is like it is the Bible this is this is like a rowing Bible for us and it's a beautiful story and it's about America defeating the Nazis and all this
stuff so rowers start passing even more copies to each other I think it was eight or nine months after boy in the boat debuted it earned a spot on the bestseller list well after launch date well after the publisher had cared about it what happened people were going into
bookstores saying hey do you have this book boys in the boat and they're like uh I don't but I'll order it for you other people were telling other people and nine months later the book becomes a hit so it's a sleeper right it and because it's a historical story who cares when it made the list or who cares
when it became successful it became Bloody successful that's amazing that's a perfect example of another thing that I have often and you have often talked about with respect to publishing why is it that the window for success is like a week maybe a month right especially when
we know that for example like boys in the boat is one example another is um you are a badass by Jen Shero Sino that book took five years to be to hit the numbers that it hit right and so you have this universe where you're like you also probably have entities products
that books that Publishers have published that could be successful but that no one's paying attention to they are orphans right they are orphans that were published two or three years ago there's some random community that could get excited about them and somebody just
needs to make that synapse fire but it's funny that you mentioned boys in the boat and the rowing metaphor because that book is actually a perfect example of what we are talking about that book like was going to be successful who knows how much more successful and how much sooner it would have been
successful if the publisher had done a little bit more to help out but it also just reveals that you can have books that are published and an author can get super discouraged and maybe the author gives up right but like there's just that little bit of pushing that could make it successful I'm sure those are
not the only two examples by the way but it's one that's glaring to me yeah I I didn't know that story so that's really interesting to me uh because uh like you I thought it was a beautifully I'm not a Rumer but I thought it was a beautifully written book and in fact when my wife
and I were looking for something to watch that show that popped up and we're both we both read the book we're both like let's watch this right and and I I also the idea it's kind of like the way we do hiring at asy ventures right instead of like the old way is you do an
interview right you do one interview you do you go through the CV and then you do the interview and then you call the references and then you let that one interview determine whether you want somebody to be a colleague of yours I think that's insane because I've had really bad days you know and I can just
imagine imagine if I was going to try to get a job with another company and I had a bad day they're gonna go yeah this guy his CV looked great but he was a real yeah he's a real dud so what we do at Osan C Adventures is we generally speaking put somebody on a consultancy and we work with them that
gives us instead of a snapshot we watch a movie and then once the once the ups and downs because we all have ups and downs right it's just a Act of life but if you see somebody who's consistently consistently good and you're you're really vibing with them then finally
after that we go we really want you to come and work for us full-time and and it's just so funny that it's not just books it's not just hiring it's like everything unless you unless you're talking to somebody that you in another context know by the way why do you think
one of the best forms of getting a job is weak associations not necessarily strong ones but weak in other words your network expands dramatically but it's the people who know you well enough they might not be your best friend but they know you well enough to say hey you know
what you guys really need to talk to Jimmy Sony because I've I've met him several times he's got great ideas about this and that so it's kind of like this this ER pattern that is down here that from which all of this stuff Springs and it amazes me that we don't understand
this better not just in publishing but across all ways of doing business right yeah so yeah it's it is it's also like it is what you just described is also a a talent identification issue that's endemic to the book publishing industry right like and it and it operates I think at two levels one is there's
there's just obvious things baked in around like if you live in New York you're probably more likely to get a contract for a novel right uh because you're sort of going to the right readings and in the right scene and I don't know that there's like there's nothing about the city that necessarily
makes for better novelist if I mean if anything it makes for Worse novelist but but but the other part of it is like and I think this is one of the thesis that we're testing with infinite books is how many projects are turned away or rejected that should have been accepted
how many we we are in the we are talking to a a very prominent author who wrote a book that's a little bit out of the genre that he's accustomed to writing in but we have very good instincts about him and we think that switching into this style of writing could be amazing and we think the book would be amazing
and he's been told by his agent which we also means by his publisher just stick to your knitting like stick to the the genre that you do well don't don't don't swim outside of this We're Not Gonna that's not going to happen right and you have that happen time and time again
where my bet is that that's not the only story of that kind that there are other authors who have done one thing very very well and then they're just like n can you just rinse and repeat that other thing you did like we don't want a memoir from you we don't want a kids
from we don't want anything else from you just stick to this this thing right like dance just dance do that dance for us and to me that's really that's like artistically depressing because here's what happens when that happens you get get Hollywood which is just sequel after
sequel after sequel after sequel before you know it we've got 13 Fast and the Furious night movies I'm like God knows how many different franchises of superhero things and you get maybe one Oppenheimer right or you get one Barbie you get one thing where someone says I'm G to color Outside the Lines a little
bit we're going to take some risks it might cost some money we're gonna have to figure it out that to me is actually one of the other problems which is you got to believe there are editors at a big publisher that have wanted to really like take a chance on a project but they
just weren't able to because of economic in ctiv or internal like dissension or something right and that's the other thing about this it's the reason you and I are actually more we're more than just passionate about this it's like it comes through a deep place of like we're a
little bit angry we you know it's like I'm angry that someone got told no when they should have been told yes because of some goofy Quirk of the industry that says hey why don't you just like not do that thing and we don't want to take a chance on it it feels a little risky for
us the the thing about the risk is the risk might have been bigger in an era where you didn't have print on demand and an era where you didn't have digital publishing but in the cont in contemporary times even if you didn't think that an author's book would be successful why wouldn't you just say to
them let's do it straight to audio we'll go straight to audio with you we won't do a print run but if you think you're right and we think you might be right we'll put the money in to do the audio book we'll make the book good and if we lose at least we didn't lose big we
didn't lose across all our formats like let's run that test and then see if we should go back and do a print version I can't imagine apart from authors who are too precious to say yes to a deal like that if you have a passion project something you're really excited about
why wouldn't you like why where why wouldn't you take that deal nine times out of 10 absolutely and the idea what of uh a very well-known author who we are talking to uh who's got a track record that is killer for all the books he's written he's written a somewhat different book and his publisher said no
and immediately when we started talking about that I thought the same thing is going on like over on YouTube audience capture in other words I got it in in the in the case of the well-known kid who got so fat because he was trying all the different foods and he got captured
by his audience only wanting to see one thing from him and and and the idea is no no no no I mean you've got a talented person a really talented writer as you say it is worth at least experimenting let's just try an audio book or a print on demand or any of those and then if they hit Go full uh
full across the field with uh actual physical books with audio books the whole thing I think by just to Riff on this for a second is it's a bigger topic Than Just Books right and it's like one of the nice things that connects you and I as we think about this across different
disciplines across different genres you know it's a big scary creative act for somebody like an author a filmmaker a musician whatever a f a finance person let's say you know you've been doing one thing one way and it's worked super well it's one of the scariest things you can do is say I'm gonna try something
completely different and like I might get egg on my face but I have to right that's already hard enough without people telling you we just SK like the seventh installment of the other thing because after we know it's going to make a million dollars like that'd be a lot
better right creative risk-taking is in short supply around the world and it gets to be an even shorter Supply when Gatekeepers say don't try this new interesting thing right but what you and I know is that in addition to creative risk- taking being in short supply taste is in short supply
and so if you are somebody where we know that your books are good and we like your taste why wouldn't we take a flyer on you for an interesting project if Morgan howel came to us today and said I want to do Jim I got a crazy idea I want to do a book on parenting I know I'm like a money writer I know I've like
written about that stuff and I'm really good at it and my list loves it but like honestly like I want to write about like parent right I you and I thankfully was prob like that's like amazing I because I know that the lens through which you view Finance is not a lens and you like
take off when you look at parenting you're probably going to say super interesting things about parenting so like let's give it a shot and if it fails who cares right like who re like what's the failure there it might be a failure of a little bit of money but money that can be made back in volume
it's actually it's unlikely to fail financially because your fans will just buy it because you made it right so in a way you've actually drisk the finance piece is it a risk creatively sure but why not why have that person do yet another installment of the thing right
and so to my mind this is actually it the incentives also atrophy creativity in a way that is really is is challenging because here's the thing Jim if you're publisher let's say rewind the clock 15 20 years ago your publisher would have been smart to say hey Jim you
know like you're an interesting guy and you've got some interesting thoughts about Wall Street but you're also like you're a dad you know you you've got like like a like a whole life you've built you do share like you have other topics other ideas things you want to like write about that have nothing to do
with Finance you would have only been too happy to jump at the chance to do it I think there's both a problem of like now you you would have never had that conversation but you also would have been told no if you had gone to them and said I want to do book on Art because I
love art and I'm passionate about it and I know something about it and I can tell people something about it that that an amateur like me would would had to get smart about right it's hot and that's that's not going to happen and I think that's the other the other thing here is
like we've blunted creative flexibility and creative risk-taking because great writers are getting told no for projects that are just a little bit outside of the swim Lane and a publisher as we've already talked about isn't really incurring a huge amount of risk for a
lot of these projects yeah and that's a really great theme to Riff on because I think you're absolutely right because a book often sometimes can beget a movie or a documentary or a podcast from that author on that particular topic or you know fill in the blank right and when
you are blunting somebody's creativity as the other point you bring up that I really have come to understand much better because I I'm I'm kind of like I'm a weirdo in that like Risk I I love risk and and I it took a good friend of mine in Manhattan to convince me that uh
Jim you're very unusual in your love of risk he said most people really really hate risk so that risk aversion and of course Danny kenman who died recently basically uh uh posited it and and had ample evidence to back him up that people are risk seeking when things are going bad but risk averse when things
are going really well so it's this asymmetry in other words we have to have two and a half times the gain on something to make up for like we need two and a half dollars to gain to make up for $1 of loss that's why when we're when things might not be going our way we're like oh what the hell let's let's
roll the bones Let It Ride yeah let's let it ride and see how it goes but when things are going our way again this is from Wall Street right what is of the biggest things that people do they sell their winning stocks too soon yeah they hang on to the losers because they're
like what the hell and and they sell their winners so it's the exact inverse of the way things should actually work and what's really interesting as I've done this this brand new company doing completely different things from Asset Management to see all of the things you
learned over there having really direct applicability over here is really interesting to me I love the point though that you know anyone listening watching if you've got a project that you really feel passionate about you know what Jimmy says it I will reemphasize it it's scary doing
something like that is scary but now you have so many ways you can do it that like in the old days I could definitely see I remember when I wrote my first book and best like the best literally I went to Bard ERS book shops which no longer exists and and I picked up a guide to all the Publishers and hped out
on my computer obviously the query letter because I'm very lazy and I didn't want to write the book because it was non-fiction uh until tell I actually had someone say they would publish it but I I sent I sent the query letter to I think a hundred Publishers I lost the
rejections I'm so sad that I did because they were some of them Jimmy were hysterical like like one came back like why would you ever dare send a copy of a finance book to us don't you know anything wow so they were indignant they weren't just like yeah yeah they W they weren't
disappointed they were angry you know they were angry but but the point is you don't have to do that anymore you don't have to you don't have to send query letters and and uh suffer the slings and arrows of 98% rejection rate right I sent out a 100 query letters I got two
offers right and and so that's not a big percentage win but who cares right and and I think that sometimes cultural lag affects us all because we're all running human OS course and and for and for those listening and watching The Fear Factor has gone way down and you know
take the chance then send your query to infinite books we will definitely take a look but you have you make another really good good point I think that one of the functions which I believe is a legitimate function of so-called gatekeeping it's grown to be a a negative word to most people but there
was a positive function to it originally and that was quality right right good good taste right and and so Michael Liberty and I were chatting the other day and I'm like I honestly believe the taste is going to become an amazingly marketable thing to have because if you
can if you have good taste by the way and for all readers if you love to read we'll work out a deal with you where we'll actually pay you to read things uh from infinite books because the the world of today is just so different than the world of just like 10 or 20 years ago and and and it often takes and I
include myself here it often takes people a while to kind of catch up to oh wait a minute I don't have to be afraid to submit this to infinite books because like I can print it myself if I don't want to which leads me which leads me to well what do you think like we embrace all kinds of publishing but I'm also
seeing kind of a a trend right now among many authors that I follow a particular type of author who is who is kind of like going aox on all Publishers just just self-published what are your thoughts on that I think it's a good fit for a certain kind of author um you and I know
some of these people their books are quite good in some cases here's the challenge I think which is quality control is hard when you're the only person looking at something right that's one thing is like when you don't have somebody else who's who is not on your
payroll but is on someone else's payroll and can be independent you kind of lose a little bit of the hey like let me let me take you to task here for this sentence this paragraph hey how do we restructure this you have been less if somebody has less invested in the success of like actually making your
thing good and being able to give you honest advice about it right that's kind of one quality control piece and you also notice that quality control in the quality of the the pages the type setting the design of the book The look and feel of the book many people like
you get a self-published book and often just it just feels a little off there's something about it feels a little Dusty feels a little something there's just a a certain there's a certain look and feel that is missing in some of these self-published operations um it's also the case that like part of what a
publisher does in a good way not always but often enough is they slow you down and they get you to take a breath and they get you to say okay let's like take three extra months and make the book really really good not just like okay and I I think there's a race in some
self-publishing Industries in particular genres to like get a book out every day or get a book out every week because volume matters and that's how you're going to make your bones fine that's like a certain Book for a certain kind of person but if a publisher can encourage you to slow down and take a
breath just a little bit that is a valuable service that you cannot really get in sellp publishing if they have a lot of discipline to say to yourself I'm gonna I'm you know it's just much a problem of like speeding up as it is slowing down you often do need to let
ideas marinate you need to sit with them you need to actually like do something I think the other piece of it that's a little tough is your your incentive alignment is only with yourself right so you're the only person that's going to really do well if your book is successful but it it actually takes it
so that there's no other institution that has any incentive to help you out or to do anything right and like it actually does help to have somebody else that's going to get rich if you also get rich right or even if it's even if we're using the metric as like not financially
rich but let successful the books a success like one of the things about infinite books we want our authors to be successful right because it'll make it's like makes us look good makes us feel good all that stuff and so there's a way in which it's like oh actually there are
some incentives when they're aligned that help to like the some of the parts is greater than the whole right and that you do Miss with self-publishing you do actually lose some of that in self-publishing now no knock against by the way people who decide to go that
path I think it's a great path for a lot of folks but there is still a relationship with a publisher that can help that is short of what the big Publishers do that is different than what the big Publishers do yeah and you know as you were talking it it one of the things that I posited you know in
this whole great ruffle series that we're doing is it also is reflective of kind of a zero sum mindset a scarcity mindset vers an abundance positive sum mindset right and in that I mean like why not right why not try to get as many people working together if the everybody's going to benefit right and
and you don't want to necessarily and I'm kind of thinking when you were talking I was listening and thinking Stephen King remember the book that that he wrote uh about the guy went back in time what was it 1920 1963 something like that okay so I read that book and I gotta tell you at
the end of it I thought it was a great story I really did I thought the story was great they turned it into a miniseries and all that but at the end of it I was a little bit mythed because I'm like this book would have been so much better had just a regular standard issue editor come in and said stepen oh
my God no no oh you've got to kill at least a couple of Your Darlings right and so if that could happen to like one of the most successful authors of all time decides to yeah who decides to self-publish I mean it's like I would be nowhere luckily my wife was my principal
editor she has sumacum La in journalism and like without her man my books would have really sucked I'm I'm happy to say that because the set of eyes were really really helpful and then when the third set of eyes in the form of the Publishers editor came on she and in a
couple instances he gave me really good suggestions right and so yeah I I my stance is hey if you are the type who could self-publish sure that's great but the the having a team to bounce things off having people who have done it before have really good taste like we're publishing two science fiction titles
and and both of our authors uh who are really great writers by the way um you know have said both publicly and and even more emphatically privately wow if I didn't have Dylan editing that book that Dylan who's one of our editors at infinite books um if if he hadn't done
this this book wouldn't have been nearly as good so I I definitely think it's not just the marketing side it's also on the creative side where you can like I would hate to be able to or not be able to like bounce ideas off of you yeah bounce ideas off of Liberty bounce ideas off of everyone
else that uh I talk to all the time like that's how that's how these things marinate that's how they you know they build on each other and and I'd like it that way I think the other thing is like in the same way we were talking about the universe of authors who want to do
no marketing is probably really small the universe of authors who want to do all the marketing is also very small that's probably an equivalently sized group if you're looking at one to five% of authors maybe one to 10 don't want to do a thing one to five% of authors probably want to run the entire
publishing Gauntlet by themselves right yeah that's a that's a hard road to Ho right it's like you got to do the cover design you have to find somebody to do the copy editing you have to find somebody to do the layout you have to find somebody to do the distribution
there are a bunch of steps to making a book A book and it's not one thing and people only see the end product they don't see the million things that go from A to Z and that's a lot to do on your own and the reason isn't because people don't have the will it's because they don't may they might not have the
time what you're doing when you work with a publisher big small medium whatever is you're basically buying back your time you're saying cool copy editors you've got that great I don't have to think about that now layout great I don't have to think about that now I can go focus on the thing I do
well I think I think the difference between contemporary publishing and and times past is that you can dial up or down the level of Outsourcing those things to other people and then figure out the economics in a way that actually makes sense as opposed to just saying
I'm giving up all control I'm giving up the like the copyright I'm giving up cover design I'm giving up the title I'm giving up royalties in excess of 75 80% I'm giving all of that up and I get no say I think that's the other thing that's a little bit different is that self-publishing and there are great
people who do it by the way it's a lot and you have to want to take that burden on and there are some rewards but there are also very good reasons to not want to do the entire thing yourself it's a lot yeah I agree and the the thing that I'm most excited about with all of our
vertical and infinite books uh as well is why not just experiment experiment experiment like we've talked about what why should it be that a book can't be published simultaneously in all languages y like we we now have the capability to do that we're doing uh you know how I do the two
thoughts thing on Twitter every day right and we we're turning it into a book and just watching that process really underlines what you just said I mean the number of meetings that the various team members have had on just that book alone but then we're going to say well okay shouldn't it also be be
published in Hindi should it also be published in Spanish French German Etc and in the past you would have it was a very arduous and difficult and timec consuming uh way of doing it uh artificial intelligence is getting better and better and better but we're
not just GNA say oh we'll just have ai do it what we're gonna do is we're gonna have Indy Scholars who have like phds in Indie saying yeah this is a good translation right tested small on the experts and then compare it to the AI if the AI is good enough then great if not go back to square one but
the point is it just seems to me that there's just so many different things we can experiment with another great example is your own book like with Founders like like Founders the audiobook you could have the you could have you could include all of your taped interviews or part of the taped
interviews all of those things and actually that kind of book can be like a living book like if you do a podcast exclusive like the one you just did I love by the way on bounders um like that wouldn't it be cool if that could but that's what that's exactly what we're doing with two thoughts you're gonna
have conversations with some of your most interesting brightest friends and folks on each of the themes so that the audiobook becomes more than the book itself and I think that's that's the biggest the biggest thing to me and I think to you and to a number of people
who have been a part of this conversation who are and to get back to your original thought about the future of publishing like we're simply asking the question what if like what if Jim's two thoughts book was not just a narration of the book two thoughts what if it was instead a series of
conversations in addition to the narration if you're if you're coming for the book great and if you want to say for the conversation great we're asking the question what if you could have a broader release that's in foreign languages that's done more quickly than waiting for a foreign publisher to
translate your work we're asking what if you took chances on authors who maybe didn't have a track record but had a really great project you were excited about I think that's the the exciting thing is that it feels like we're at we're at like fresh snow like there's
fresh powder right and that there are all these grooves and all these paths and other places that the publishing world has done but there's enough evidence and data now that people can use Smart digital tools and a little bit of hustle and some creativity to create
new book type products in the world and that to me is actually like what's most exciting is that that wasn't true 5 10 15 20 years ago and it opens up the aperture for people to publish all kinds of cool things like I'm excited about the next generation of books that emerges because it's going to look and
feel so different than what we have today yeah and like again the what if I love that framing of this because a lot of the answers are going to be we're going to find out that didn't work that way right and so no big deal like I've always approached uh failure and or things not going the
way I wanted them to go or hope they would go as that's there's your huge learning opportunity right there it's like you know is it Ryan holiday the the uh the uh the limitation is the obstacle is the way yeah I mean and I I want to know something ironic about Ryan I think
he talked about this publicly he he got a he got a good size advantage for doing his first book trust me I'm lying then which is a book about marketing and about his life as a marketer he comes back to the publisher and says hey I have this book about this topic called
stoicism it's about philosophy I have a philosophy book in me and it's this thing this kind of like this ancient system that I use it's called stoicism and if I have my facts right Ryan feel free to correct them I think his Advance was much much much lower on obstacles away they basically did it as a Faber
they said trust me I'm lying your marketing book did so well we don't think this obstacle the way think going to do anything so but we'll give it to you we're here that we'll take the chance we'll roll the dice and obstacles away crushed crushed I I know it's outsold trust me I'm lying but it is a huge
success and a deserv it success and it did so so well and that was exactly the kind of project that you and I are describing which is risk as it was like a moment of risk aversion he managed to overcome it he wrote a great book and it became successful how many obstacles
obstacle is the way type projects got got killed because the author was like told no by either their agent or their publisher right and if you're that author and you're listening send send us your stuff if you want to sell publish send us your stuff exactly and you know that's the
whole problem with label thinking that's actually an oxymoron because once you label something you stop thinking you just you just put everything in that label bucket and like Ryan for example no no man you're you're trust me I'm lying that killed it was an amazing marketing you're talking about [ __ ]
stoicism what are you talk about what the hell is that like no way so absolutely I think the other thing just to get back to some some bigger themes too you know there there is this there's a there's this challenge of like you you can look at a creative life and if one
person's done one thing one way for a long time and they've been successful it's tempting to say like that's what you should do the creators I admire are the creators who went through periods and different things that they were testing and playing with and there there's a lot of value in looking at
their lives as well the most probably the most famous contemporary example who still you obviously like try trying new things all the time is Taylor Swift because of her era literally the tour is called the eras tour highest grossing tour in music history and it goes
through all of the different eras of her music which we people don't remember she started as a as a 14-year-old country music Star right uh like doing country music and people told her you should stay in that lane and she said no I want to Branch out and do pop then people
told her that they should only should only a certain kind of pop music and she ran out and tried something else that was a little darker and slower and this and that but if you look at like a career even like Dr Dre's you people don't know this Dr Dre released a Tango
album at one point he had a Tango album it was a spectacular flop what happened after the Tango album brought at 2001 one of the biggest selling rap albums of all time right and so I think that there's something to be said like here's another by the way let's go you're like oh music doesn't work for me Jimmy
that's not a good example Michael Jordan left basketball to play baseball and it didn't go as exactly as he had planned right you a bunch of reasons why and then the baseball strike happened and he starts playing with the bulls again he comes back to the Bulls that to me is
actually not a story about him getting back to the thing he was good at it's a story about somebody who had the courage to try something that they thought they might fail in and that's amazing he was the best basketball player in the world maybe the best as one person put in that
last s documentary maybe the best person to do anything ever in anything right and he says I'm going to abandon all of that and I'm gonna go do this thing because my dad always thought that I should be a baseball player I love my dad and I love baseball I'm gonna try
that and he puts on a white sock uniform and he almost makes it and that like talk about the courage it's you have Nike contracts you have the world is watching you people admire you literally the entire planet thinks of you as like an icon right and you're like I'm goingon to go play baseball I mean
that's like it blows my mind and it makes me think like boy like maybe I'm not taking enough creative risk like I like I'm good at history I've gotten pretty good at doing the biography thing but like I that's like very limiting in some ways and so that are I think my message and hopefully your message and
is don't don't let these industries like ground that out of you like do the Tango album go play baseball right stop being a country music star there's actually lot of value in that creative risk totally agree with that and you know I'm I'm thinking of the uh the documentary
by Dr Dre and Jimmy uh Jimmy iine yeah iine yeah uh and I watched that not too long rewatched it not too long ago on your recommendation I think and I just like that so got me so charged up that like I love Dr Dre I I love all of the Dr Day produc uh albums like on the on the rap and
hip-hop side right right I I I I must admit I didn't know about the Tango album uh but I think I think he'd prefer it that way I think a lot of people didn't they weren't thrilled about that but what I found just so inspiring about it is just what you just said like
the ability to say you know what no I'm gonna not only am I GNA pivot I'm gonna really it and see because that's how you grow that's how like you know we've talked about Steve Jobs going on to next that was potentially a pivotal time for him that was the reason he was able to make
apple a big deal when he returned people we always tend to you know what what's the great quote life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards we we we tend to put that in you know like Michael Jordan well he is X or uh Dr Dre he is the best producer of
this a lot of these people experimented failed experimented succeeded but then they tried different things they went different places and and I think that just the inspiration of that getting out of the rut of just like one thing and this is what I do right and and so I I I
love I love all those stories and I think look you have Jim I mean I'd be curious for your thoughts I'm like you have had multiple career arcs in your life what is the feeling like let's say like the the day after you've had a success and now you have to figure out what to do right or you want to try
something new I think it would be good for people to hear from from you about this too because you've lived this it's not it's not academic for you you sold oan Capital man you have to start something new there I there are other businesses other projects I'm curious for how did you manage the psycholog
ology of trying a new thing after you had a success so in my case it was always so I was best known in finance for uh quantitative investing what works on Wall Street published by mcra Hill made my career uh literally after the book got published $600 million and that was
a lot more than it is now back in the late 90s came over the transip we had no upgoing calls that book literally drove calls to us people said I've read your book I want you to manage our money and literally 600 million and one of the guys who worked for me said that one of
my earlier hirers was arguably the most highly paid uh operator uh in the world just literally taking the calls but then you know we experimented with a bunch of stuff and we got the same push back no no no no you're you're Quant you're Factor investing that you know don't don't think about other ways of
doing it and of course I ignored most of those people and but you know that's how I got interested in machine learning right because I was kind of thinking well I think you know we've mined all of the gold that we're going to find in the quantitative vein because we're all
using the same data right so we got to look elsewhere we got to find other things but I always had a bunch of other interests at the same time like I I've written fiction treatment since I was in my early 20s and we're going to publish one of them in with infinite books but really
in in my own experience it it just made me like supercharg to do the new things right like one of the things that I you can call it sort of saturated Intuition or would you see the same pattern again and again and again what some people forget is that sometimes is applicable
in other Industries right not always let me hasten to say you don't want to think because I'm good at X I'm gonna kill at y right generally not true but when you are in a thing that is kind of as the reason I was drawn to Wall Street in the first place was because I kind of thought of it as the Olympics of
business right you you had to know about everything you had to know uh I don't know about psychology I don't know about Evolution and evolutionary biology and psychology and all those things and like I loved all that kind of stuff so it was kind of perfect for me but it also led
me to a bunch of different things like art and music and all of these things so for me this I call this my my third act hopefully a four act play and and so I just thought well you know when my wife and I were talking about it she she's likew you'd never retire would you and
I'm like no are you kidding I said first off you'd kill me after a week if if I retired but secondly I'd be bored tears and so but it was really easy for me to say well okay what do I love and so and and also what do I love but what do I think I can make a difference in because
there are some things that I love that I'm not going to be able to make a difference in right right but but I kind of looked at the if you look at the verticals of oan Ventures those are all things I love right but there are also things where I think that working with a fantastic group of like-minded people we
can make a difference in those particular things I see a lot of Arbitrage opportunity in publishing in film making in uh media be it YouTube be it substacks be it podcasts Etc and and so for me it was kind of like I was like a just giddy it's it's not that I didn't love what I did I did I I was obsessed
yeah right I I did the first RW Works on Wall Street I had to do it year by year by hand oh wow because there there was no software that was uh up to stuff in terms of getting it right right yeah so but yeah in my case it was like okay let's go try this let try great and you know it's it's funny
because like I'm sure that I'm just going to [ __ ] up a ton of stuff and yet I'll learn from that and iterate and iterate and iterate it's just like if if I could get people to understand just kind of one thing about it just given my own life and my own history is the mistakes you make are the
richest opportunities to make yourself better and a lot of people say but don't you care what people think about you well generally I really don't but and I'm kind of like lucky that way right but but the other thing I did I did much more when I was younger right like that
that's normal but one of the things and it's a great quote I can't remember whose it is but it's like as you get older you realize that you care less and less what other people think about you and one of the reasons for that is because you realize they're not thinking
about you not think about you at all that's right yeah so it's it's it's hard because that's something it's it you can't it's like wisdom you can't teach wisdom you can teach knowledge you can give information you can do all of those things but you can't like turn a key and say now you're
wives it takes the experience it takes the joy and and and heartache of going suffering pain exactly if if you're not signed up for all it's just not going to work right because that's what it takes to to to get there and you know it's that's why I love people like you people
like all of the other people on the OSB team or in our orbit they they are just relentlessly curious really really willing to give lots of different things to try because that's how you learn that's how you grow one of the first things that one of the first OSB meetings was I said look we're going to
crawl walk run and and you can't run before you how to crawl right and and and it's it's a it's a bit like people get impatient and or it would be like me saying yeah I'm going to do asset management but I'm going to just change what I did just a little bit like boring
is that I've done that yeah well and by the way just and you know we're coming up on time too just to get back to somebody that you and I admire that we kind of kicked this conversation off Claude Shannon is a perfect example of what happened when you mix Brilliance with an
indifference to other people's opinion because what did he do after information theory was ahead he could have been a scientific celebrity he could have been a Fineman he could have gone on the lecture circuit and he gave up his position at bavs moves to MIT and begins a life as a tinkerer and he builds chess
playing computers and he builds rocket powered Frisbee and he builds with Ed Thorp the world's first uh device to be a first world world's first wearable computer which was a device to try to game the casinos of blackjack they they go to they go to Vegas and they test it
out they almost get arrested and kicked out and they get the attention of the mob in a bad way right and so there's all of this stuff about his life and part of his life is just deciding that you're going to pursue your curiosity wherever it takes you and as far as it can take you and that it's not going to
like be a thing we like well Claude Shannon the serious information Theory MIT Professor Guy what's he doing rocket power fris like what's he and he just didn't care right there was just not an ounce of his being where he would have said you know probably right I should
probably like devote myself to more serious things for him I was like no I'm going to make a flame he made a flame throwing trumpet for his kid right with his kid Andrew and you can see it in the documentary it's amazing and it just shoots out Flames because he had once
had an idea he said why don't we make a flame throwing trumpet that that'd be pretty funny yeah I I just I've been experimenting with this uh uh interesting person from history on on Twitter right and I have chat I have chat GP writ it uh because the the objective is just to hey maybe you've
never heard about this person right it's just really short and then it I I view it as kind of a jumping off point right like if you read and I just did one on Virginia wolf and I'm gonna get the quote wrong but it's along these lines it's like the eyes of other people if
you care about them imprison you and and why would you let that happen right because like they're you think they're looking at you you think they're judging you no not not only do they not care they're thinking about themselves right they're thinking about oh wonder what you know
and so we just get it all wrong well listen man I could talk to you forever and and and often do but now now you get a two more inceptions my friend remember you are the emperor of the world you get to incept two things you can't put anyone in a re-education camp and you can't kill anyone
but you can we give you a magic microphone that you get to speak into and you can say two things into it and everyone in the world all 800 eight billion plus people are going to wake up whenever their next morning is and they're going to think to themselves I've just had two of the greatest ideas
at this time I'm gonna act on both of them what two things are you going to incept in the world I think the first one and this is just appropo of our conversation is every single person you think is successful also believes they are the impostor is that is totally it's a it's
a fact of life like when you go and really peer into the lives of the people who are the greats and the the people who thought they you you think they've got it all figured out maybe not now but at some point in their lives they thought they were gigantic imposters and some of them still do right and they
still do it anyway so that's dog one and I would say thought two is do not let an institution or an industry that has been doing one thing one way tell you that you can't Zig if you want to if you want to that if they want you to zag and you want to Zig go ahead see see
what happens I love it both of those will definitely lead towards higher agency and I think greater happiness and fulfillment in people's lives Jimmy thank you so much for joining this was such a pleasure was so fun always I'm like I'm I'm fired up was great all right until next time my friend