a rejection from a traditional publisher in the modern era is utterly utterly meaningless you could upload it to Amazon right now and publish it you could work with scribe Media or page 2 a hybrid publisher you could record the audio yourself and upload it through ACX to audible you don't have to have a book contract to do a book people had no choice
right it was some oligopoly and people with big printing presses and trucks you had to go through them Dear Mr O'Shaughnessy I do not understand why you would have in your wildest dreams thought that we would be in the least bit interested in such a boring and you know awful topic somebody in the organization doesn't particularly like a book or like a
concept and they'll just say nah it's not for us the extra tragedy is all the books that never get written because of this system the pendulum is swinging very hard back to the Creator's favor I'm holding up an old BlackBerry I think that they're even behind this there was an ERA where if you got your book proposal rejected a dozen times you just stopped we are not in
that era anymore go publish it find a partner upload it to Kindle write it distribute it foreign you caught us in the middle of our chuckling and laughing because today we are going to talk about some easy maybe maybe potentially easy industries that are just begging to be disintermediated if you go to our website at osb.llc you will see a lot of verticals and that might give you a timing
hint about which Industries we think are going to be disintermediated improved upon a new playbook my guests today are two of my favorite people Jimmy Sony who's written three of my favorite books Jimmy I mean my God you had me with Claude Shannon and then like the founders and I'm gonna and Liberty will still call you Liberty Michael although this will probably be
released after people know that you are now on the team at osv yes it feels weird because I still have to keep it a secret for now but by the time this comes out it should be official indeed hi everyone as our lead for the infinite media vertical because Michael has literally one of the best eyes that I've ever seen in terms of finding things that
are both incredibly useful and Incredibly interesting and saving all the rest of us who are incredibly lazy like me hundreds of hours of our time so I you know I pay virtually any price he was chat gpt3 before there was definitely it was baby with foreign so so today we're going to talk about the publishing industry we are working on as
part of infinite media a uh division infinite books because I love books I have written four books but I think that the publishing industry if you're watching this as opposed to listening to us I'm holding up an old Blackberry I think that they're even behind this I don't think any of my Publishers back in the Paleolithic 90s even had these when they were broadly available
and I'm going to be the one to kind of start this out because you guys have such great ideas about this but my experience I've written four books with three separate Publishers and I'm not going to name names but I'm going to tell our audience that in my experience back when I was publishing books you literally there wasn't an alternative really you had to find a publisher
and so you needed the imperator of a publisher to even get your book out there that's changed dramatically but after finding a publisher you or at least I was incredibly excited oh my God this is great I'm gonna have an editor I'm gonna have people doing PR for me I'm gonna have a marketing plan for the book this is awesome ah spoiler alert that didn't happen at all Jimmy
I don't want you to say anything negative but have you gotten just as has the publishing industry just magically transformed and it's completely different today because after all I haven't published anything for a while yeah let me let me let me talk about the maybe the the positive you know the the kind of positive inverse of what you're saying is
authors today are even more on the hook for all the things you described they're required to be vastly more entrepreneurial they I mean I I will I tell myself and I tell friends who are in the book business you really do need to think of yourself as the CEO of the publishing operation you are also the CMO the CEO you know all the Seas you're the entire c-suite you have one product it's a
book three iterations digital the audio and the hardcover and it's on you everything's on you and you know again like I've had my share of traditional publishing experiences but I have found that if you have an eye to like how the internet works how digital publishing Works how promotion and marketing work you know you can do a lot if you're an author that
a traditional publisher might not think to do and I think the head scratching part of it is wow why hasn't traditional publishing adopted a lot of what you know has made certain books take off or a lot of habits that you are native to the internet that you just feel like oh this is sort of obvious why aren't we doing this um I'll say more but let's start with that as the
appetizer I I think that's a great appetizer and you know audiobooks spring to mind and I'm going to steal a lot of your ideas uh but it seems to me that in a digital age and I guess this would be true for the digital copies as well of books in a digital age my vision and I'm going to ask Michael because he enunciates it better than I do but my vision is that books should be living things
um and audiobooks are have taken off because uh people consume books differently than they used to right they listen to them when they're commuting or when they're exercising or whatever and you had some great ideas that I'm not going to steal I'm going to let you I'm gonna let you tell the world and then I'm gonna have Michael talk a bit about the living book but my point
of view is that I think publishing even when I was doing it back in the 90s it was a very um listen I think New York is the greatest city in the world I I do I I love it I live here it's amazing but it can be incredibly parochial and you made a comment that I'm going to ask you to jump off on some of your um on some of your ideas about audiobooks because
they think they're great and we are definitely going to steal them all for infinite books but um you you you had a observation that I share with you that is if like people at cocktail parties in Manhattan aren't talking about a subject it doesn't exist and it made me think of the old Pauline kale who used to be the uh film critic for the New Yorker um she after Nixon won the
presidency she she in earnestly said Nixon won how how could he have won I don't know a single person who voted for him Jimmy what do you think yeah no I mean look this is uh we're we're the three of us are likely in agreement on a lot of these things and sometimes what I want to do when I'm in a situation where we're all in agreement is to to act like to to make sure that I get my points
across but also to Steel Man the arguments that might come from the publishing industry and then sort of think about how do you square them with the reality here but here's what I would say this is this is a challenge of any big organization in any industry which is when change happens big organizations have a really really hard time adapting it's why the Netflix transformation
story is so amazing it's why Apple's Renaissance and continuing to innovate is so amazing because they are big super tanker organizations and they're able to meaningfully like change direction when I first got started in publishing I had somebody tell me oh audiobooks like don't aren't a thing don't worry about it it's basically just like a carbon copy of your book they'll get some
actor to read it and no big deal it'll be on CDs and then there'll be some digital file on this tiny little service called audible all that nobody uses and you know you can call it a day right this is sort of when I got started like probably over a decade ago I haven't seen much movement in the
in the direction of changing that mindset within traditional publishing despite the fact that today full transparency for the founders I have more audiobook sales it's the plurality of my book sales it I sold it's outsold hardcover and it's outsold the ebook and there are very good reasons for that right but like given just the units you would think there would be more innovation in
that delivery model and I'll give just so people don't think we're talking in abstractions let's just like talk about a book that I assume at least some number of listeners have have gotten if you buy David Goggins is uh can't hurt me the actual physical book and if you buy his audiobook you will notice that the audiobook is not just like a dry rereading of the actual book after every
chapter of the audiobook David and his his author uh whose Name Escapes me but his author and David sit and basically have like a chat about the chapter they just read right and it's really cool cool because you get stuff in the audiobook that you are not going to get in the traditional book and what it what did they do there they innovated with a model that is open for Innovation
experimentation where the cost of doing that is much lower let's take let's let's like play it out the other way you could you could see how a publisher might not want to do a little Chit Chat thing after every chapter in a printed book it would add to the number of pages it would add to the weight it might make it seem like impenetrably long on audio this is a few extra minutes and it's
like David having and it's co-author having this like amazing discussion but in spite of that I find the traditional Publishers are still very locked in on this idea that audiobooks should just be carbon copies of the original book with no real room for Innovation and iteration let me give you a second example this is hours old I was on the phone with an author who's about to
publish their book I was just asking for advice kind of like you know let's talk shop see what you can do and she said I offered to the producers of the audiobook to read the audiobook she's doing doing a book about crypto and she said the person they hired doesn't have familiarity with a lot of this lingo and when she reads it it sounds like she doesn't have familiarity with a lot of lingo
now I'm not going to name names either but that's horrendous to me right the idea that like someone is volunteering to do it they could go into a studio like in a city and record it they have written the book and they're willing to take hours away from their professional life to do this and the publisher is saying now we were good we have a way we do things right I would say that's like
the tip of a massive Iceberg of potential for audio that is different that has a different life that has a different texture flavor feel than the actual book but traditional publishing has a very particular way they want to approach this and I have to tell you like as an author it's something
that I just see as a massive missed opportunity right like why wouldn't you if you if you get if you can get somebody to buy the hardcover and then they get interested in the product and then they want to buy the follow-on product the audio because it's a little bit different why wouldn't you try to get the two for one in that situation and by the way many of us know people who will
either buy the hardcover then buy the audio or buy the audio then buy the hardcover whether as a gift or for themselves but why does everything need to be a copy of itself right like it really doesn't have to be we're talking about a totally different format we're talking about a format that honestly is more about like the Rhythm and texture and feel of podcasting which you guys do
really well that doesn't have to be exactly like the book right like it really doesn't you could introduce whatever whatever you want and I think look there may be some good reasons people may say well the production schedules and this and that and like you've got to stick to a deadline and it
gets crazy if the author has a million ideas yes and like mass produced audio that is cheap and easy to do is the way our world operates these days like you've you've we've got the tools to do it there should be more effective mechanisms by which the audiobook is a totally different entity and what's really interesting by the way on the economy I'm excited this is there was an era in
which Publishers as you know Jim totally ignored audio audible came around they sold a bunch of deals right they bought a bunch of Rights because Publishers like forget audio and now now knowing what audio is worth you can't actually carve out your audio rights anymore and Publishers are for sure going to own them because they know that people for books like mine or books like any
books there's like this plurality of sales that are coming through audio and yet despite that there's just not the same like like you're you're always kept at arm's length from that process I I suppose I would ask the question why like there doesn't seem to be a good reason all right thanks for coming to my tattoo rant over I'll let you guys get a word in this is clearly personal so
so that actually just so many great jumping off points and I'm just going to flip it to Michael Liberty uh because we've talked about this extensively about all of the ways that the new tools that the internet that AI Etc make these kinds of the Innovations and and I just to make it easy for my own chunking of memories think of it as the living book Michael you you want to take
us eloquently through this idea of a living book I'll do my best I I feel like an outsider as the only person on this call who hasn't published a book but I've been writing online for 20 years and I'm a great fan of books and and what Jimmy said is is bring so true right it feels like every medium has its pros and cons its characteristics it's it's ways to innovate
and the Legacy publishing industry seems to be trying to fit everything into the mold of books which is what they've known for decades and now audiobooks have to fit into that mold and ebooks have to fit in there and everything needs to be there and they also seem very keen on keeping the relationship with the reader right rather than the the the writer having a direct relationship with
its readers or listeners or whatever the case may be so it feels to me like the the the best thing to do would be to use the advantages of every medium right so for example with the audiobooks there's all kinds of ways to have extras in there that wouldn't necessarily fit into a book but what about if at the end when you reach the end there's a way to click or to subscribe to the authors
podcast and you keep the relationship alive right because every time you write a new book you kind of have to let your audience know about it but what if you have an ongoing relationship with the audience as a Creator that's what I would want right same with the written book if you have a paper copy in your hands maybe there's not an easy way to change it but maybe there's
a way to link off to something digital elsewhere either uh you know if the writer has a newsletter a podcast or something but there may be even a way to have this this living version of a book online that may be written first online like chapter by chapter on some kind of newsletter where you get feedback from your your best readers in some ways right because the people most interested in
you or in the topic are probably be are going to be the early adopters that get in that find you even before the book is announced and is out and these people can help you shape the thing and be your kind of initial kind of focus group and as the book gets built maybe at some point it's kind of like okay it's mature enough there's going to be a printed version and this is V1 but
in the same way that you can add to audio with a podcast maybe even on the website you can have as a kind of user format where you have this direct link with readers well I wrote this chapter about X and now there's a bunch of updates I've had new ideas and there's these kind of addendums that
could be added to to Chapters and the book can keep growing and living right and you keep your relationship alive and maybe that's the second edition that's better enough from the first that some people will buy it again right the biggest there's all kinds of ways of keeping the thing more alive and creating this ongoing relationship with readers I don't feel the publishing industry
is really doing and I feel like there's probably also a way to have a kind of funnel where people get aware of you they become aware of you and the idea and maybe a book is too much for them at first right they don't know if they're gonna like it well maybe you have a two minute video on YouTube that kind of gives the general idea and that sounds interesting and that moves
you to the book but maybe in between there's a 45 minute podcast that you record that's kind of like more goes more in depth right gives more detail but it's not quite the book and you can kind of move people to different levels right and some people may just be interested in the first part and they stick to that and that's fine but you've already started a relationship with them and maybe
they'll come back and maybe they remember it like that's that's part of the kind of online marketing you can do uh with this direct relationship and and but it feels like like going from zero to a book is a hard sell for a lot of people and so that's why the audiobook is so popular people can
listen to it while walking the dog and that that reduces friction but there's all kinds of other ways of reducing friction so anyway I'll stop there but that's some of the ideas I feel like are kind of obvious in this zero cost distribution world where you know Publishers are not doing it yeah and it's you know one of my uh ideas is that the peer-to-peer networking is just gonna explode
I think uh we given given the innovations that we have today not only AI but things like sub stack I saw the the piece where the guy was going to write his next entire book on substaff yeah um and and and it just seems to me to cry out for a b testing right it doesn't it doesn't mean we're going to get everything right we'll like I've said many many times we'll make a lot
of mistakes that O'Shaughnessy Ventures we hope that they're going to be novel mistakes so that we can learn from them in the Shannon sense Jimmy I'll give you a nod then um but uh these are not costly Endeavors they when when you're dealing with digital assets for the most part it doesn't matter if you try a million different things right the cost to you is remains de minimis it's your
time and it's your effort right and and so one of the things that we talked about last when we were not recording a podcast is the idea of why not experiment with variable pricing why not why not um I don't want to give up the the the book that you're currently working on uh Jimmy unless you're willing to but like you when we talked offline you have all these amazing well let's let's
actually make it about the founders let you know your book the founders you have all of these um amazing interviews with come on some of the most interesting people in the world why not why not uh an experiment where you can release some of the interview tape with that person's uh approval yeah
and not being crazy here am I no no no you're not and and it's the kind of thing that I would say is is a hard sell at a big organization a traditional publisher where certain things are done a certain way you know I mean it's one of these things that like it's a question that I these are various questions I have asked myself over the years what I would say let's let's shift slightly uh not let
me let me let me frame it differently because there are probably people listening who want to write books and they think that the industry and the process of writing a book is opaque and it's hard to get through and if you're not working with a traditional publisher you're host and one way to reframe our conversation is to say you're actually not like if you have a great idea and you already
have it done you could upload it to Amazon right now and publish it and if you have an audience you could sell it to millions and millions of people you could work with scribe Media or page two a hybrid publisher that these days there's sort of no distinction between them and any other publisher with the exception that you pay them for services right you could record the
audio yourself and upload it to Ray CX to Audible and make that happen on your own I think one of the interesting things about book publishing is it's like they're in the information business but they're a remarkably opaque business right but I think for people listening who are motivated who want to do books just know you don't have to have a book contract to do a book I and I will speak
from personal experience and be very very candid I am talking to authors who regularly almost weekly I have a call with a fellow author and we are talking about how we're going to do our next book either hybrid or self-published because the other part of the industry that people don't appreciate is that even if you get some money from a publisher you're not getting
Prince Harry money first of all second of all they're going to take 80 to 90 percent of your royalties so you only get new money when you've earned back whatever the advance is the advance is also subject to taxes and agent fees so the truth is for a lot of authors in fact I would say for the majority of authors if you can sell your product you are far better off doing
self-publishing or hybrid publishing there's actually very little benefit these days to a traditional publisher in that sense like maybe at the margins maybe if you're writing a politically sensitive book or you feel like you get sued and you need some big entity behind you if you get sued but the truth is for a lot of authors and people listening if you want to do a book you
can find a way to do a book and it and you will probably be better off financially if you do it on your own and I think that's because of digital tools it's because of on-demand printing it's because of a million things that have happened that have made this process easier but my my view is like there are still things that for for my purposes traditional publishing has done very
well but what's happening is that their their moat is eroding right like they're not actually going to be able to make an argument that says oh you need to work with us or else there's no other way to publish a book that's just not true anymore I'm I am I have done several traditionally published
books I am actively thinking about whether or not I will be with a traditional publisher in the future and I'm not the only one they're authors who have sold millions of copies who have basically walked away and said hey this is crazy you take 85 percent of the the take you give me a meager advance I don't get full operational and creative control you don't allow me to a B
test covers you don't allow me to a B test titles you're not running search ads you're not running social ads what exactly is it that is like being provided here as a service especially when I can pay for all that on my own and then take that 80 on the on the back end as well and again I'm not like I've had really good I've had a lot of luck with my traditional Lee published books I've had
great editors the copy editing at traditional publishing houses I mean it's Second To None it's like anything it's like nothing I've ever seen the level of attention to detail is crazy but if traditional publishing does not start to do these things the audio Innovations we just talked about literally testing covers to see what covers are best rather than just trying to Define
what works right testing titles doing more foreign rights translations figuring out where you can get into foreign markets like an authors over time will have no incentive to go with a traditional publisher because all of the incentives will be in the direction of hybrid or self-published yeah and incentives uh like tell the tale right it amazes me how many people don't get that I
have had conversations in other Industries where literally I will be sitting at a lunch table with somebody and they're trying to convince me to get person X to do something for you know compensation why and and I take out my iPhone and I and I use the calculator and I and I show them and I said
and the number is like 10x what they're offering and I say this is what you're competing against do you understand that and and it seems like what's the old Upton Sinclair quote you can't get somebody to understand something where his salary depends on him not uh understanding it and I get these blank looks uh Michael jump in because you probably know more about what's out there what's
available in the the form of tools that could be used you know we're going to package up a bunch of those tools at OSB and infinite media but like extend Jimmy's argument a bit if you would you mean as far as platform and Alternatives oh all of all of those things there's a lot and what's interesting is that these things are moving targets for Publishers right
because Publishers are not improving very fast you may even say that they're deteriorating the mode is eroding meanwhile I joined sub stack which is my my main platform for publishing about two and a half years ago and in those years they've built so many features so many great things that have helped me as a publisher right and in the meantime others have come up like beehive like ghosts that
are all improving corner there's all these platforms that are competing with one another to be as good to creators as possible right and when Jimmy talks about Publishers keeping like 85 or 90 of the revenue well on sub taxes the inverse right they take 10 and there are some stripe fees and everything but I the the Creator keeps about 85 percent and to me that sounds a lot more fair
because like the Creator basically does all of the real high value work the rest is important it helps it's distribution it's copy editing it's all kind of stuff but it's not I like it's not the most differentiated part of the creation right if if publisher 8 doesn't want to do your book well publisher B can probably do a fairly equivalent job but if the writer doesn't want to do it the
book just doesn't exist right that's the that's the differential part and that feels to me very wrong that 85 percent of Jimmy's Revenue that he's earning right people are giving dollars to read Jimmy's word not to buy the book from publisher X that they're going to someone else so this is something that it has to change somehow like it's not it's not sustainable it it feels like a
model that exists because you people had no choice right there was some oligopoly and people with big printing presses and trucks you had to go through them uh but now the the Ted yoya post that you mentioned about how he's going to publish his next book done sub stack he gives 10 reasons why right
um I I think we should put it in show notes I I can't give um made Justice to the whole thing but as someone who's been working inside of that system I think he makes a very very good case that he's gonna have a direct relationship with his readers he's gonna make a lot more money he's gonna have a lot more freedom because now a lot of contracts with publishing contracts seems to
include all kinds of other Clauses where it's like well if you if you make a fast on social media if people start being mad at you like we can drop you like you can do this you can do that you can talk about this like it's starting to be almost dystopian right and how they try to control people all of the greatest books of the past hundred years like how many of those would
have been written by someone would get canceled today right or couldn't get that contract so it feels like we're on this inflection point where like the power is going to go back on the creative side because that's where most of the value is and now the distribution has been commodized but that's just my guess and and of course that that was the whole reason for us Adventures right yep
we see or our thesis is that the pendulum is swinging very hard back to the Creator's favor uh because uh the the whole I used to joke that the reason that the Catholic Church works so well uh for you know centuries was because they had the best distribution Network right they they had churches and priests in every part of the [ __ ] world and there were no books
that people could buy and it is not a big leap to understand that gutenberg's printing press is what made all of the other versions of Christianity possible right because oh wait a minute I can nail something to the church wall here and I can write a book and I can publish the Bible in somebody's own language like all of this is if you look at it in terms of distribution right
we still think in terms of the old distribution but it's not that way anymore Michael if I can add something and something that's very very dear to my art right and and we talked a bit about this with David Center on their last podcast but the real tragedy to me is right yes it's hard for for writers they have all kinds of you know like I wish things were a lot easier for Jimmy and
he made a lot more money and but the extra tragedy is all the books that never get written because of this system there's all kinds of people with great stuff to say out there Geniuses and people or people just doing something else with their lives and if it was easy enough and it pay well they'd take a sabbatical they'd write a great book the world would be a better place because of it and
then they'd go back right but it's so hard to get publish and go through all of these jump through all these loops and it takes years and years finding the agent and this and that that I feel it's the it's what we're not seeing that's the greatest strategy it's all of the missing books in the same way that some systems like you don't get startups so you're missing all of the innovation
in the businesses but in this case it's it's it's uh the Icebreaker concept that we talked about is like Jimmy's an icebreaker right he tells me about how like he's gonna wake up at four in the morning and right until eight and then do other things during the day and I he has he has a calling for
it he's gonna do it Whatever It Takes right but most people could have great ideas but may not be willing to to just power through anything to get it done and so that's that's the real tragedy well and I let me let me jump off in this one because this is actually really important it's one of those things that like I try to always think about the ways that my work can encourage other people
to create things right broadly defined like whatever your thing is I hope that some part of my work like actually leads people to want to like create stuff right and what I would say is this there was an ERA where if you got your book proposal rejected a dozen times you just stopped you just gave up you put the proposal on a shelf you never came back back to it we are not
in that era anymore so if you are listening and you have written a book proposal and you took it to an agent and the agent took it out and they couldn't sell it screw them go publish it find a partner upload the Kindle write it distribute it you have more tools available now than an agent who maybe sent your proposal out to 20 places and then decided when it wasn't accepted that it
wasn't good enough and I will speak from personal experience over the last four weeks where I I had a project I was working on with someone I know I encouraged her to find a new agent we did end up selling it but it was rejected the first time around it was accepted the second time around and there's still no sort of I'm a reason to this process right it's not like the proposal
meaningfully changed we just sent it to a bunch of different people's email addresses what I would say is for people who haven't had if they think they have a great idea and they really know their Sparks there right or even if they don't just get it done publish it ship it and see what happens
it's actually you're right of it one of the great casualties is like I've met so many people who write a proposal get those first set of rejections get super discouraged but you now have in 2023 Avenues to getting things published and you know what if you get rejected you kind of have a chip on your shoulder too you've got something to prove which is even better you've got a little rocket
fuel to say listen up Random House you didn't like the idea fine I'm gonna go sell a million copies and you see if you like it then we all know or we know the work of Morgan housel I think you two know him more personally he's a perfect example psychology of money how many people have how many people rejected that book right and he got he got a contract from Harriman house it sold over
2 million copies right we on and on examples like this Tim ferriss's four hour work week JK Rowling rejected by 12 Publishers accepted by the 13th in 2023 what I would tell the young JK Rowling write the book make it great upload it to Amazon and if it takes off you are going to be the one who profits from this not some publisher right then it takes by the way it takes nothing like
I know Publishers have only a limited number of books that they can publish but I increasingly find that some of those decisions aren't made by real criteria they're made by artificial criteria somebody in the organization doesn't particularly like a book or like a concept and they'll just say nah it's not for us without any real like wait hold on like why are we rejecting
this right is there a real reason and I would it's like the most important thing I would say and I like need to underline this point a rejection from a traditional publisher in the modern era is utterly utterly meaningless it means nothing get the book done you will find a home for it and and uh my first book and best like the best uh my wife my long suffering wife uh is very practical
whereas I tend not to be and uh we were out on a walk and she and I looked at her and I go by the way did I tell you I've decided I really have to write a book to put my name on the map here and she's like okay uh what are you gonna write the book about and I said well I'm going to write it
about how you can clone any money manager using a large database and create these uh these clone portfolios that should do just as well as the manager okay and um you you do know you have to have a publisher right Jim and I went of course I know that and if there was no internet right guys you probably you guys can't even Envision it but there wasn't so I went to a bookstore we used to
go to them regularly with our kids that was our weekend event and I just bought one of those big books with all of the Publishers um addresses and everything in it I had to do it the old-fashioned way on a typewriter I sent out 100 query letters and like I used to have and unfortunately it got lost I kept all of the rejections I sent out a hundred query letters I got 98 rejections
all I needed was one right and so I kept the rejections because some of them were really hysterical like Dear Mr O'Shaughnessy I do not understand why you would have in your wildest dreams thought that we would be and the least bit interested in such a boring and you know awful topic we have no interest in your book please don't contact us again
it's like that scene from that Adam Sandler movie where he's like uh like I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul right I think it's like all of us in this room are Dumber Brad unless you do you my Awards you no points and may God have mercy on your soul and then out of 10 was like a simple wrong would have been fine it's not even a rejection it's like they're
trying to double reject you just to make sure oh totally and you know my first editor uh at um at McGraw-Hill was a lovely young woman um who who uh really did not take the right tact with me um in that she was a very school marmarish marmish and like you can't do this you can't do that you must do it this way and so literally I spent I burned an entire day just coming up with
the funniest letter that I possibly could write where I made sure that I made every grammatical error and every other error that you can make within the 10 exclamation points and oh did that go well yeah so let's let's play the the the the the opposite part of it because this is the other part that will be educational for the audience so if if somebody's listening
they might say well this is all well and good you know Michael Jim and Jim like fantastic but then what does a traditional publisher do that I should replicate or find a way to create the scaffolding for infrastructure for myself and I will offer a few and then you two should dive in as well one exceptional thing that traditional Publishers do that is super super important is accountability
right meaning a lot of people in the world want to write a book everybody and their brother says I got a book in me I want to write a book but the thing is until you sign the contract to do it you often don't have either the motivation or the fear to get it done and the truth is one of the things
that Publishers do is they set deadlines they set timelines they create a calendar and they actually force you to get the work done now it sounds minor except like we know it's not like that can actually have a very powerful forcing function once the wire transfer hits your account you sign a piece of paper that has a bunch of legal stuff on it you get kind of scared if you don't deliver
and that's that's important because it actually is the kind of thing that might prevent like someone from doing the book which is the lack of clear deadlines and a process and everything else so that is one thing that like to their credit traditional Publishers are exceptionally good at saying if you're working with us like we're only taking you on if we think you can plausibly finish
this project and we have a timeline because we have a sales cycle that will require you to finish it along you know x amount of time I don't think that should be underestimated that's benefit one benefit two I have had editors particularly my last editor who see the forest for the trees on
a book meaning they take a look at all the words and junk I put together and they say Hey you gotta dial it back here or nip and Tuck here or you haven't made this clear to me now I benefit like I had the benefit of an amazing editor Stephanie if you're from Simon you're sure if you're listening you're amazing kudos to you because she went in and was a real Hustler and read every page and
called me out when necessary and sort of forced my head back to where the chapter should say or this paragraph should say not all editors do that in contemporary publishing in fact there's a lot of places where you'll just hear stories about authors like I just sent my manuscript in and that was it that was all that happened why does this matter for somebody who's not working with the
traditional publisher because you probably want to go on upwork or like some other freelance site and find someone to pay to edit find a second or third or fourth set of eyes because you can pay for that now in a way you couldn't 20 years ago and you could have the same kind of rigor brought to to the process which is by the way again a good thing the traditional Publishers do is they bring
that rigor third thing they do and then I'll stop because I got you know we want to be we want to be fair like I want to be fair I am regularly and to this day like amazed at what the copy editing teams within traditional Publishers will find that I could not have found myself even though I'd read the manuscript a dozen times a copy editor will find an apostrophe that's out of
place or an M Dash that shouldn't be there or a sentence where I didn't cite something or run on and it and I'm saying this to somebody who's a pretty insanely obsessive about my writing like it still blows me away when they find mistakes because they're just that good some of those copy editors are hired freelance so for anyone listening who doesn't have a traditional
publishing contract hire yourself a really insane obsessive English teacher style copy editor who is just gonna beat your draft up to Oblivion and get it into a better place because it is one of the things that traditional Publishers do really well final thing and then I'm gonna stop traditional Publishers do a good job of unifying and creating a sense of occasion around the moment
to publishing they publish the Kindle audio and traditional books on the same day super super important because if you're promoting you want as many bites at the apples you can get because of the way they organize their operations they are very good at that I have found that some self-published authors like totally forget to do audio or they'll do the ebook and the audio
but they'll forget that some people want to read physical books or they'll under index on like one of those three dimensions traditional publishing is very good about unifying it and creating one event out of all three products that again is something that if you're a self-published or hybrid published author you can control but it's the kind of thing it's worth paying attention to
it is the reason why there is a little bit of an elevated or like kind of like a quality to the process is because when you go to the Amazon page on the Tuesday your book publishes with Simon Schuster you will see all three versions there and it's like weirdly important not that hard to get right if you're doing it on your own but something to pay attention to and and let's
jump in at the the last part uh in terms of the having an imperator of a publisher still matters in certain circumstances right why on Earth would we be doing infinite books at uh osv well because we're getting better and better known I now have colleagues and teammates like Michael who is in
my to my mind one of the best curators alive today and having a great curator having a great thinker who could be your colleague and partner in the process of writing the book I think that's going to add a tremendous amount very much like your copywriters that you mentioned at the traditional uh Publishers and and the rest and also just the amplification of the book right if if if we as a
team do a good job of providing a ton of value to people and and they love our recommendations they love the books that we talk about Etc then we're doing our job in a win-win type way in other words we're providing a lot of value for and much less than we're extracting but that also works not just in publishing it works in movies we're doing a film division it works in in podcasting and and
sub Stacks we're going to put together a family of those but obviously now we've got to do a good job right if we don't do a good job then our imperator is worthless but if you do have a very worthwhile curated platform that really delivers and you have teammates there that can help with that uh project that the author then you're getting into kind of home run territory as far
as I'm concerned as far as Morgan goes like I love Morgan I try to hire Morgan way back way back when um and uh he of course looked at me Jim you are out of your [ __ ] mind that would never work for you [Laughter] good move Morgan but by the way but you know Morgan's book just is a small example of
like traditional Publishers take note if you open up the page of psychology money you see a link or a message that can send you to a specific site where for free you can download his ebook right meaning and it's a genius move it's giving him two bytes at the content at Apple where he only had one and that's Harryman House who we actually are still talking to about uh doing uh some sort of
partnership with we're talking to them and others and Jim your Point's really important just to your earlier point when someone else is invested in the success of a product it really does mean something it is the reason why like teams can scale it's the reason why multiple like like I for all of my like
wish I think you know wish things were different it I did have a group of people who were invested in the success of the book not as invested as I was because they were publishing a lot of books but if you are starting from scratch and if you're trying to build this on your own you will have to find a way to like construct that investment that's hard to do like where top to bottom the
company says we're gonna choose you you're going to do a good job we want you to be successful that's a real thing like and it's not to be discounted and and it you know and both of these thoughts by the way can coexist we can praise the traditional publishing does well while also critiquing the places they can do better and I think what we're trying to do is give like a hand
a hand up like a like a helping hand to some of the people who might not have been able to break through traditional publishing but are looking at new models and I want to like make sure that they know that like look you could do the work on your own you could do it in a closet share it with no one publish and maybe you publish the world's most brilliant book ever you're far more like
to be successful if you're like in touch with Jim and he's like no I want your book to be successful we're going to publish it at infinite books and here's like the team that's going to help you and you're still on the hook you're still the the quarterback but we've got some people who can help you with various components of this and help you think about it a little bit differently there is
value to books being team sports not individual sports totally Liberty one analogy I'm thinking of and if I look out and like the end state vision of all this may be a kind of unbundling in the same way that if you're starting a company today and you're doing a startup you have access to all kinds of apis right okay I can put my stuff on the cloud here and I can use this API
to do this part so I don't have to reinvent the whale right and you you couple all this together and you you build on that right but you focus on what you do best and what you what creates the most value what's different and [ __ ] about you and everything else that someone else could be doing better you kind of Outsource there I feel with creators a lot of the same could be possible
uh to take a step back I used to be one of the early editors at Wikipedia in like 2002 or 2003 and I don't know if they still use that phrase but at the time one of the things they always said was Wiki is not paper and what they were trying to tell us was that a lot of the stuff that applies to like a paper encyclopedia doesn't apply to a website with Infinite Space right uh I feel
like with Creation in the digital world we have to start thinking like that I'd much rather have a million books being published every year and then the cream of the crop Rises to the top and the absolute number of good books increases and the the median level of those good books is even higher right because you're picking from a larger pool than to have a bunch of Gatekeepers that make
sure that only 20 000 books are published a year and oh they're the ones who are going to tell us which ones are the good ones but I don't feel that's the right I feel like I'd rather make it much easier for everybody to create with a book a sub stack of podcast anything and then um these people can use some of these other resources right so so I'm glad Jimmy that you
were talking about how there are uh like you can hire your uh a copy editor or editor or there should be like project managers right we'll keep you on schedule for people who have trouble every function like this could be outsourced to a an independent person and the funny thing is that I would guess that these people if they're good they're gonna make a lot more money being uh in a
kind of marketplace online and building their own reputation and direct relationship with clients than if they're part of a publisher where it's all of the Publisher's name right that's on the front door and so you could hire like an editor a fact Checker uh I don't know someone to call you every
Friday and ask about how you're doing and how it's getting how it's going right anything you need to get it done you should be able to find and then on the other side uh standing for the readers or the the listeners or whatever I wish there were tons of curators right it could be like I'm writing myself like I'm trying to point to interesting stuff right and that's a service
osv is going to find tons of great stuff and we're going to point people to it we're going to help it exist sometimes if the person was wasn't didn't have all of the password we can help give them all those pieces so that the machine can start but I wish there were lots of others that did this curation and everybody can get best at what they do best rather than have this old
monolith that was born 60 years ago or something trying to do every part of the job and kind of you know the whole thing kind of has a bunch of bottlenecks and old old ways of doing things that doesn't produce a a good result in the digital world right maybe when you only have so many printing presses and you're limited by trucks and bookshelf you have too you only have 20 000 books
a year but like the internet does not paper 100 and and it is the cultural lag of adoption that fascinates me now we are adopting faster I mean all you have to do is look at chat uh GPT gpt4 uh the number of people using that the number of people who use are stable diffusion for artwork um we we were flabbergasted by how quickly after we released the first uh stable diffusion model
last August in 2022 how rapidly it was adopted but also how rapidly other uh innovators creators used it as a base to build apps that we didn't even think about I I have an anecdote for that um speaking of copy editors I don't have a copy editor and I write three times a week right so if I had more time I could reread and do more passes but what I'm doing these days I pay for an app
called barely.ai it's it's co-made co-founded by one of our friends Trung fam and in the morning when I do my final pass I use I use this this app which interfaces with gpt4 now as an AP EI and I do it grammar correction on my stuff and it captures a bunch of stuff that I didn't see and that's that's my copy editor right now it's a robot basically right so some of these tools
are going to make a lot of that more accessible and I feel like it's gonna also amplify the the talent of the very best right the very best editor the very best copywriter will use these tools to do 80 of the drudgery and the make work and then it'll free up their time the the 20 that's left is
going to be leveraged for much higher value work that's going to make a bigger difference to your book or your podcast or whatever right so I I I'm already living a little bit in there but I'm sure I'm gonna find more tools over time totally Jimmy do you make use of those tools extensively 100 yes um with it for a few reasons so I'll give some specific examples for for the for the founders
book perfect example is even before some of the Contemporary AI tools took off there was this service called otter.ai and otter.ai does does AI driven transcriptions of audio there were services for this where they'd pay a human being but the cost is so prohibitive for somebody who's a solo
Creator or a solopreneur right with otter AI I could pay 9.95 a month and I was getting pretty good transcriptions of the hundreds of interviews I did for the PayPal book and I it allowed the people that I was that I was like it allowed me and a fact Checker to go in and very quickly make sure that I had quoted people accurately and so that tool was like a total blessing I mean it
was crazy I recommend it all the time I have no affiliation with them at all but I recommend it all the time for people doing interview heavy books because it's the cheapest way to get transcriptions and you're not using a service where you're going to pay by the minute right um there are plagiarism checkers online I'm by the way way I still laugh anytime there's like a
plagiarism Scandal within like publishing because I'm just thinking to myself like you just gotta upload the manuscript to these Services they like check in against like a million sources it's not that hard and it's only gonna get better because of AI there's some long article recently about some novel that created a stir within publishing and it was like there were big passages lifted out
of other things and I just thought to myself like there's this literally a service like they this exists so that like college professors can check their students work you just gotta upload the PDF and you can check it against that right I there's a service called pick Foo I don't know if it's
like pick fu.com or pick food whatever it is take feu.com is the cheapest service I've ever seen to test cover Arc so when I got a bunch of different Renditions in the PayPal cover I wanted to make sure the one that we were going to go with was going to work you can pay it's a couple hundred bucks and you get not just like numerical feedback for what people will choose but actual like
written responses from people and are you gonna get like precise peer-reviewed data no but is it going to be directionally super accurate yeah I've tested it again and again and again I use um Service is like I mean it's not a service it's a piece of software called scrivener that's a much it's like Microsoft Word like how does it always described it's like Microsoft Word went to
the gym for 10 years and out emerged scrivener and it's just a really good tool for long-form kind of writing I use Google Docs to collaborate with people I read all like the cool thing about Google Docs is not what people expect people think that the value is the cloud yeah that's part of the value the real value is you can edit on your phone so I added all the chapters of my
books on the phone because it's a very different experience editing than when you are editing on the computer and so many people are reading on like a tinier form factor whether that's an iPad or whatever it's actually a good idea to like see if you've like written your way your book in a way that's not phone friendly right so I am all about authors using tools like this to to like
do what they can to speed up the work to make it more efficient to make it more accurate and I'm like I mean I could go on for at some length I would say that chat gpt3 is a great example of I use it to brainstorm everything now like why not like having another brain by your side and you can say hey I hear someone title yeah I used it today this morning for some chapter title ideas
for something I said here's a couple words can you come up with 20 chapter titles first for a thing right and why not because it maybe like shakes loose a word that I hadn't thought of I I'm very you know I'm one of these people I still believe there's like real value in the book form like you know somebody listening could plausibly ask like why do a book I still think there's real value
in the length the rigor the the kind of the The Taking of all these ideas that are all over the place and sort of stitching them together into this compressed volume there's still value in that but that can live alongside the view that tools can make your work easier connect you to new audiences speed things up make things cheaper make things more efficient like I don't like
there's no contradiction in that for me right uh like it's like one of these like very basic realities that if you are a writer you have access to more resources and you're you have access to pay more resources than even your publisher does when it comes to figuring this stuff out let me give you a really specific example this is funny this just came back to me I was doing
the notes and the bibliography for for Founders which as you both know was super extensive right so I looked online because I was trying to figure out like how am I gonna have to write all these citations manually how am I going to make sure the formatting's all whatever because there's really specific formats for citations there's a site I think it's called zbib or something it's
like zbib and z-bib is like a bibliography service and it made everything super super simple I could type in a website like an Amazon website for a book and it would it would create the the notes entry it would create the citation for me right it was amazing and I like save me I mean hundreds of hours right and I sent it along to my publisher and what
I said look I'm in the I'm in the business of helping other authors if there are other cyber industry authors that have a lot of notes or endnotes or citations they should totally use this service it's totally free service and it saved me time and time again because it just made things simple and it made things accurate so I am like very Pro digital tools to help authors
um and I think they can they're just gonna lead to the creation a better work and and and again this just dovetails so beautifully with what my central thesis is for going forward here people are are now specifically people are freaking out about AI right now but let's just put all of these into categories of incredibly powerful and useful tools and you know Archimedes lever right right
I passionately believe that the Centaur model of AI which is human plus AI is going to work better than many of the other models at least for the foreseeable future and and if we just think about it in those terms these are all just levers but they're incredibly powerful and they save as you just pointed out that's a great example I remember writing the the notes for what works and like bro
I I was literally just spent you know you couldn't even see straight after trying to find all the citations and Link them back to the academic paper that I did gotten it from and of course it was all paper it was all you know okay so here were the notes from chapter one here then okay then here's
the paper that they that I that I got those from oh my God what I would have given for that tool alone because that was weeks that was literally weeks of my time and you know I was fortunate in that my wife graduated summa [ __ ] laude with a degree in journalism and and she was my editor right so I realized how fortunate I was to have that happen now though with the plethora of both
people uh and tools and people United with those tools like it's just going to make the ability to get back to both of your themes where by we we should be able to see a million new books a year right I'm very much into the whole idea that for most of human history Geniuses were born lived and died they didn't know they were genius nobody else knew they were a genius and and they
were Bound by their geography by their religion by their sex by fill in the blank right and that's gone that is gone we can find all these people in the case of investing we can fund them we're doing that with the fellowship program we're doing it with the uh Adventures uh Venture arm but like to me this is like what an exciting time to be alive and you know I have a lot of grandchildren
and I'm just looking at them like your life is going to be so great Liberty yes they're 100 with you I think it's an exciting inflection point in all of this right and I have so much respect for for both of you for writing books uh like uphill in the snow both ways because I'm a short form writer and I can't imagine working so long on the project without much feedback right I write
them 15 minutes later I start getting emails and oh he got this wrong guy like this and working for years on the book going through all of what we talked about today and then having something great come out at the end must be I don't know it feels like the metabolism of writing books is something
that it's hard enough on itself we should remove as much friction from it as possible to get as many good ones as possible because I can't even imagine that anyway just tip of the hat to both of you for writing books but you know I appreciate that although there's also a part of it where I'm
envious of what you do with like the consistency with which you're in touch with your audience and I think what Jim was saying to get back to his original point about a living book I suspect that there's a way to blend those styles of work I mean I know creators who are doing it already right you mentioned the person who's publishing his book on sub Sac but my sense is that there's
a way there's some Middle Ground by which you know you'll be able to take advantage of short form engagement interaction translated into the book I mean there are a bunch of people different people who've done well in that kind of thing what I would what I would say is there is still room for long-form projects that are book length like the interesting thing about the industry is
like for all of the shade we kind of sort of just threw at it like the public industry's been having a banner a few years right it wasn't because of the pandemic I mean they've been making a lot of money and audiobooks in particular very high margin one digital product zero cost of distribution no need to ship it to a bookstore and you you're trading on Audible credits I mean
it's like a nobody wants to talk about this but it's a massive business and it's growing like gangbusters and it's like one of those places where like the models just keep getting better the more people that get iPhones the more people that get phones in general the bigger the audience the potential for translating content is huge right which is super untapped foreign
rights foreign markets like one of the places I'm gonna Focus this year is like figuring out like why isn't my book in Turkish you know like why isn't my book in you know insert the language and that to me like it's like one of the things that excites me also is that this is not not an industry in Decline like they're It's actually an industry that's growing and that's great like the
the trend line is moving in the right direction and I would just hope that listeners more people as per your comments Liberty like more people decide they're going to do it they're going to do it at length they're going to take the time to put something on a paper they're going to invest in the quality of it and they're going to find a way to bring it to life whether somebody in
New York at a you know Publishing House says they should or shouldn't and there's clearly no demand problem right tick tock is selling tons of books apparently book talk is a thing and and a bunch of Publishers get their book featured in some viral videos and people do summaries of books of stay we the demand is there it's almost like the industry is successful despite a bunch of its
problems and if we could just fix some of the problems it would be even better right if there are a million books and the absolute number of good books is higher and the number of niches of Interest niches that get get a great book is higher more people are gonna read them right it's it feels like we have to improve the supply but the demand is there a lot of the time um it feels
like what's been keeping the supply Down has been like friction right before audiobooks a bunch of people would have read read but it was just too much friction removing all of that I think we will will make us realize that there's much more demand than we ever thought yeah I also think that Jimmy you may know this better but there's a lot of consolidation happening within that industry
like the penguin Simon Schuster merger or whatever didn't happen but like it's only a matter of time before the conglomerates get big and I you know look there's a new model of publishing that crops up every day there are people doing the kind of experiments that you're going to do it what I
would say to your point Liberty is I don't think that traditional publishing is necessarily going to change or it's not going to change fast enough here's what's going to happen authors are going to take advantage of the tools that are available authors are going to fight for better contracts authors are going to remember that they have a million followers on tick tock not the publisher
they're gonna like try to do some things that are different so it is just the case like as with other parts of the Creator economy the individual creators are going to recognize the power and leverage they have that's one the second is The Gatekeepers like you sort of said you want to bring down The Gatekeepers you won't need to like the gates are creaky and they're falling apart you
know like meaning like there's no Gates anymore because you could get a book published however you want to more people will wake up to that over time so I'm actually like it's in a funny way I'm not worried about the publishing industry's fortunes because they're going to continue to do what they're going to do with the kind of tip of the tip of the tip of the whatever of authors I'm
also like hopeful that more people who want to do books who don't who have maybe never set foot in like you know one of these cocktail parties where people decide what gets published like I hope that those people just say well I know like 10 people who have done books on their own and they've done
super well so I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm almost like trying to make sure that the message gets out that you don't have to do it this way anymore right and that like very but but both at the level of like individual creators want to do books and then also like people who have done books or traditional Publishers that everybody's trying to blow up the model and think about a totally different
way to do it and like that more people need to hear that because that's what's going to lead to like some person who's in college who's written like a great paper for a thesis sends it to some publisher the publisher is like no but it turns out to be this like really path breaking book I hope they take advantage of some of these these tools and Technologies yeah and and I I think
at the end of the day that's that's what we're seeing happening right um it's it's a bit like once once the market senses an opportunity uh you can you can try to legislate it out of existence you can try to make laws to say you can't do that it's good luck I I finished uh recently the book reality hunger and I'm forgetting the author's name it's really a good book he's an
essay writer and and like your comment about the cell phone he actually has a thing in there saying we we better learn how to write content for cell phones because it's a different experience um it appears to you differently than um it does in a traditional book format or even an e-book uh or audio but like all of these things things are gonna happen they're happening right now and and
you can you can decide where you're going to be on the S curve right are you going to be down here or are you going to say phooey no I'm you know I'm I'm I got my library card that's all I need hey I love libraries I still love libraries I love going into them I love you know perusing the shelves but let's be honest I mean like the vast majority of the reading that I do I do on my computer on
the Kindle app um and you know it's just the easiest way for me to do it audio is another massive market and you know my son Patrick got this before I did because I'm more of a reader um like he's like dude you know like his whole Colossus thing he he he thinks that that is going to be able to replace a traditional MBA at some point and and so I love those kind of
uh ways of extending these things because voices that you know that's our original communication format right Kids come out with the software fully installed you don't have to do anything and they're going to learn how to speak the language of the uh environment in which they uh are being raised but teach a kid to read you know that the
whole the weirdest people in the world it literally had to colonize a different part of our brain that which was given over during our hunter-gatherer days to uh visual Acuity um you know because Friend or Foe Grog over there it looks I think he's a foe let's kill him but but the even with as long as we've had the printed word we still it still it's
not installed software like voice where voice is story is the fuel that Humanity runs on right so it's like there's this rich and deep vein that is just now and it's sometimes I look at all of the opportunities here I was just like holy [ __ ] I don't even know where we start right absolutely well and it's also like it to get back to some a point we made earlier it doesn't have
to look or feel the way it's always always been like if there's somebody in traditional publishing listening and I I hope they are my encouragement would be treat audio as its own publishing thing do it totally differently than the book and watch the sales like kind of roll in meaning if you have a hit with the hardcover and the audio is something different you know it is
it's it's it's it's the I it's the iPad to the MacBook right uh sort of do the same thing but they're a little different right you can sort of like like this a little bit of overlap and what they do but it's totally different experiences and to my mind that's like the real opportunity is for someone who says hey why don't we just actually like disintermediate ourselves make
killer audio books where we we insert the name of the publisher are like recognized for the quality of these books like that they are totally different that we we engage the author in different ways that we actually create a whole different kind of experience because I'm with you like I think there's just I have a different connection to the books that I buy
on audio sometimes I buy the audio and the real thing but it is the original art form it's the original storytelling medium but we are treating it as a carbon copy of the thing that's stuck between two pieces of cardboard there's no reason for that and but that's that's that's us right that's human OS like when when we when we first uh came up with movies right what did
we do we filmed plays because like that was what we were used to and and and people like when you go back to the source material it's fascinating because like when radio came around they were like well what should we have sermons should should it be like uh like nobody knew and so it's
always easy retrospectively to say what idiots they were but like we see it happening with us right now there there are all of these incredible Technologies and like we we the sin of trying to understand things too quickly really is very difficult for we humans because we we always want to believe that we oh yeah I get that no you [ __ ] don't get it and you're gonna take
some time to get it and you're gonna it's gonna iterate it's gonna iterate change change change change and and yet it also leads me to the thought of like the mindset like during the whole pandemic there was this massive mind virus which was bad for the world but mind viruses in general right it's like yeah no we don't we don't do it that way or we no that's a view that we don't believe
that we would be willing to condone and the thought really struck me when I don't watch TV anymore unless my wife's here and she splits time between here and the city because she's a street photographer she has a book too in fact all of my kids are authors except my youngest um and uh anyway so when she's here we'll like put a movie on and so we put Elizabeth
on the one uh which is a great movie by the way with Kate Blanchett uh playing the lead role and and then we got into a discussion of it uh later and two things kind of emerged the first was like there is this never-ending amount of source material if you want to make a movie like Elizabeth it's just a really great movie because what a great content that
that woman uh provided but then I was also we were talking about like what is okay so Hollywood ostensibly supposed to want to make money right the show business business right and and yet they they make a movie like um Maverick whatever the the sequel was and it it rocks every box office it's it sells billions of dollars worth of tickets you would think that there
would be somebody sitting in Hollywood thinking huh you know what's really interesting that all of these uh these uh ideological movies that we made trying to pound people over the head with our point of view if they didn't sell any tickets at all and Maverick just made like four billion dollars you think we should make a couple more of those do you know do you know what would change
that what if you if you created a a gorilla Oscars so take the word Oscar like reverse it right maybe with a like raxo right recreate the raxos the rack so Jim you should endow the raxos make it like one dollar bigger make the trophy look the same and you award the raxos for right like for basically like like what you're talking about I'm just kidding I'm really not kidding actually I think
well because Awards have a signaling value right and there's a certain structure to the academy and everything I do and it's like it's like I often think of it as like papal selection you know it's like this like really our game ancient process but if you did the raxos and like that Year's picture of the year raxa went to top gun Maverick and it came with let's say the prize was 3x like
I don't know what somebody gets for winning an Oscar with let's say it was like I don't know like a million dollars instead of three I don't know what it is but whatever it is attach some Prestige to it and it will fundamentally change the nature of the business and this is true writ large by the way there's so many any my view is like all in addition to the mediums themselves
being disrupted I think all Awards processes stand to be disrupted in the next 10 to 20 years because we've sort of realized that like there's no real logic to them that like like that it ends up being sort of faintly small P political in some way and so I think like the pilots are gonna get disrupted I think like I think it's like happening I think it's like the rest
somebody's gonna do the raxes right and and it's I think it might be amazing I will go on record here committing oshana's Adventures to doing relaxers because we're breaking news brilliant idea but I think I think what you're getting I think the other thing you're getting at and this is actually this is really this is an important point that ties together the whole nature of the
conversation like Paul Graham wrote an essay about like being very and other people have talked about being very wary of prestige and and I will freely admit that like as a product of like immigrant kids or as a product I was an immigrant myself my parents were immigrants getting into a prestigious College was was you know smiled upon and like was something they really pushed me to getting
a prestigious job at McKinsey after graduating was really important to them because it was about security Prestige and security were connected for my family so getting into a prestigious place was important because it was a mark of security it wasn't even about them being able to tell their friends it was more like we want to make sure that you know you don't have to struggle the way we
did I respect that but increasingly the return on Prestige is lower and lower as we all know you can and in fact if anything the opposite of prestige or that sort of chasing procedure might be authenticity the Returns on authenticity are going up the Returns on Prestige are going down which is
also true for businesses like books and movies and everything else meaning it's important to cast a critical eye on something where you're chasing like a good example samples like New York Times bestseller list for listeners the New York Times bestseller list does not report best-selling books it reports best-selling books that the editors of the New York Times decide are worthy for being
included on the list there's a famous lawsuit in the 1980s Seth Godin has talked about this that it really the the even the moniker New York Times bestseller list is a misnomer that they often will just pick and choose who they want to put on there and then vaguely base it on sales numbers the Wall
Street journalist is a little bit more accurate USA Today list is a bit more accurate but where in all three cases you're really talking about contests of prestige and to be clear like there's value in those contests for authors but I think that value is a declining asset I don't think that like I think in general now you're seeing less return on that kind of investment and it's why
like the biggest Blockbuster films aren't going to be the one that win Awards but they are going to make the people who made them fabulously well be and they're gonna you know have cultural cachet I I think that inversion is going to accelerate and I think it affects books and here's the way it affects somebody listening who wants to do a book book don't worry about the best seller list
you know Alex or Mosey has this book 100 million dollar offers I think last time I heard him on a podcast a really interesting Creator business guy last time I heard Alex on podcast he said he had sold 200 000 copies of 100 million dollar offers his book it's this giant book that he's like self-published 200 000 copies puts him way ahead of pretty much everybody in the New
York Times bestseller list and he has not made it onto that list and so it's just this very peculiar thing that I think people need to appreciate that a lot of the markers that procedure false markers and I think they are they are all going to come kind of like eroding or collapsing because people just have more access to information now I've just told an audience that the New York
Times best service doesn't accurately reflect best-selling books do you think you're gonna believe that title for much longer probably not yeah and the walls are come this is another big part of my thesis the walls are tumbling down and and that whole potemkin village like manufactured reality where you could do it back when I was growing up right there were three networks and
there were two newspapers that meant anything the New York Times And The Wall Street Journal they were the only real National newspapers in the United States uh the three networks in the United States and that was it so really easy to control uh the perception of reality right it's like well God Uncle Walter Cronkite said it and the New York Times I just read the same article
there it was really easy to program Society with those kind of limited access talk about gatekeeper power right and and so that's also why you see all of the traditional Gatekeepers having these meltdowns because they they there's nothing they can do to stop this tsunami that is coming over society's everywhere it's like one of the things one of the reasons why I to just bring
AI back into it that I think open is going to be closed is I just read an article about the Chinese trying to develop their AI right what you can't have certain numbers you can't have anything that might make people think about Tiananmen Square which didn't happen right so so they have all of this these these uh taboo third rails that they won't allow their researchers to touch You're
Gonna Lose You're Gonna Lose in a in a world that is now interconnected ultimately networked and and like the emperor is naked and everyone's just laughing now right it's I watch these old school like the world economic Forum it's 20 30. you own nothing and you're happy and it's just a big joke
so funny because there so ham-handed and they suck propaganda and it's so bad that people use it just as a joke to mock them with and and like they're not getting it and I just love that they're not getting it so I love it I you're absolutely right about Prestige and Wards all that kind of stuff I would say though like I went through all of will store's books if you haven't read will I urge you
to read Will's books he is a great thinker and and his book on on status is really something you need to read because he makes I used to believe that I you know I didn't signal right I I didn't say no and like that's I was [ __ ] wrong I signal all the time I'm signaling right now and and what guys like will help me in conversation and also reading his books understand is that's just
it's part of our it's built into our base code right if if you're living in a hunter-gatherer or a society you first want to fit in then you want to stand out right and and so he as he makes the point much more eloquently that I'm doing so now in his book you know you can't not play the status game but you can play different kinds of status games that lead to really
great outcomes right and so like your reward idea that's one of them uh like Michael's and and and your newsletter are like that is a in my opinion going to become like a super high status thing to be a great curator and I think it's also going to be very renuitive right because we've got this overload of information and and the ability to have a great curatorial mind or a great
author like you Jimmy or a great curator like you Michael I gold I mean that's just gold and and I and I would add like my you know my my glotto kicked the mic to you maybe for the last word but I would say also I you know there's often a false Choice that's presented to people who are in Creative work like they're presented with the following false choice you can either write
something that's like critically gets really good reviews and is in the hunt for prizes or you can write something that people actually want to read and has mass Market appeal and I completely reject that that's like a totally artificial thing like you you even though everyone has the capacity to write and create books what I am not suggesting is that everyone go out and do it in 24 hours and
upload it on Amazon tomorrow take some time like the value of it's not a it's not a Prestige game to invest in good work it's not chasing Prestige or status to take time to read the best books in your genre and to learn from what they are right like whatever that might mean for you right if it's like science fiction fantasy if it's like in my genre like I went to school on the best
business books written overs let's say the last 25 years to understand what made and work so that I knew what to do for the founders and you're it's not like a it's not like a copy and paste it's it's more like learning the language it's like sort of learning the vocabulary of a given space I I don't I think one thing that's challenging is and one thing by the way that admittedly
Publishers do really well is they actually in many cases can figure out who has the desire to really go for Quality like to really go for broke and wanna put you know nose to the Grind Stone there's a spot in the Venn diagram though where it's like you can do that you can like you can chase quality
without saying like it's pure or Bust or it's time list or bust right where like you you could find a spot in the Middle where you can reach an audience and also do work that's that's really high quality and has depth and breath and rigor it's like one of these weird tensions because you also don't want people to just be writing like 50 page PDFs and then uploading them that I'm like you know
like people somebody listening to be like well my 75 hpf didn't take off you're totally wrong I'm it's like well like there are still standards for work there's still a there are still things you could do to make your work better there are questions you can learn to ask and by the way I don't have settled answers exactly for how to do this but I don't want to also like like Robert
Carroll spent 10 years right writing a power broker and every one of his subsequent books you we don't want to get into a world where that's impossible or it's seen if it's like Third Rate or quaint or archaic because actually the amount of time he spent was really in like intimately tied into the end state of that product right and so it's this very funny thing because at the same
time that I want to encourage like everybody to do their best work I also want to like underline best like like bring it like really go like do a job like try you know like really give it your all right yeah like it's like I mean I'm Jim I'm sure like when you were doing your first books you had your wife read them you went over them a bunch you sweated it a lot you know it's like late
nights all of that but that Panic is productive panic yeah and you know just uh and I'm going to give Michael the last word uh but uh on your point about uh saying quality versus you know Prestige versus sales I I just watched a great uh documentary about Kurt Vonnegut who I love uh and it it's made by the guy who is the director for uh for Curb Your Enthusiasm oh wow that's
awesome which I loved this guy because he doesn't even bring up the fact that he is the director of Curb Your Enthusiasm into until like the one hour and 30 minute Mark of this uh documentary that he's making about uh Vonnegut but um uh he he interviews John Irvine uh another author I admire um and and about his time as being a professor with Vonnegut in Iowa and and
uh Irvine said Vonnegut said something that really stuck with me and it was and it's this idea but and I'm gonna get the quote wrong but I'll get the spirit of it right this idea of the false choice and and it was it was vonnegut's saying to Irvine um the idea that you cannot that you have to choose between being a serious author or an
entertaining author is a false one he said because even if you choose to be a very serious author you also better be an entertaining author right and that's near and dear to my heart because play is something that's also baked into our DNA that's how kids learn I just have the greatest time watching my grandchildren because everything is Play Everything Is play and that's how we learn
and you watch animals they learn through play um so the the it is a it is a a false dichotomy yeah you you if you really want to make an impact be very serious do the work it's hard it is hard but also learn to entertain people because you know you know you're not gonna get very many people who are gonna it's this is the perfect way to pass the mic to Michael because his newsletter
does this better than anything I have ever seen absolutely it makes me think and then he makes me laugh and like it's his his newsletter is the distilled essence of what you just described exactly Michael you got the password it's just I can't help the stupid dad jokes um no there are like five different things I want to say you make so many great points I'm gonna try
to pick one or two but and Robin Hansen would be would be proud about the signaling because it's there it can't go away Prestige matters to people and people who say that Prestige doesn't matter to them are just high enough social status that they can't not care right so the way to deal with this not to pretend that it doesn't exist or say oh we're just going to change human nature right no
problem the way to deal with it is to align it in the productive Direction and make it really meritocratic right instead of having Gatekeepers we've built up these institutions that have prestiged right the New York Times bestseller list and then they can attach this Prestige to certain people that they approve of that's not the way to go right so I think the way that it's it's re
the whole system is rebuilding itself kind of from the from the bottom up right rather than top down is going to create new sources of this Prestige and hopefully they're going to be allocated a lot more meritocratically for quality and what will allow this to happen at scale is that when there
were three channels and two newspapers the way to have a bestseller or to make the most money was to Target the middle of the belker and that's where you get enough people and there's not enough shelf space right for every Niche every type of Interest so you have to Target the very middle of the bell
curve and that's the only way to go but today someone like Peter attia could have a podcast that's that goes like he's gonna talk about six hours about lipids with some expert right it's it's very very Niche and very very technical and I'm sure he's making an excellent living from the podcast his medical practice is probably doing way better than it would without the podcast like now
you can have a niche that seems that would never have been on the air back in the day and it can be a great great success right so if we are building a system where you can be at the top of the prestige Hill for every Niche right all of a sudden there's a lot more Prestige to go around and there's a lot more great content for people to to discover and to to consume to read
to enjoy to learn from right and this sounds like such a better system than I have these three networks with hugging all of The Prestige and the air time and so that's why I'm excited about this transition for for right that we're just beginning uh there's a joke that like the internet the web say is about 30 years old and Ah that's super young it's like yeah but in Internet
time that's like 300 years right because it moves really fast but even though it's been that long subjectively I think we're still pretty early in that stuff because it's so non-linear right so uh it may take 10 years to find the right format but then once you find it it explodes right so when blogs began it started moving really really quickly and I feel like there's a moment now with
newsletter newsletters there's been a moment with short form video that's happening like YouTube has been going on for a while but now YouTube is bigger than Hollywood and video games almost anything so we're gonna figure out other ways of doing these things and it's all about like um I don't know this this idea of aligning it with quality and with marital grassy would will give
us the best results and that I know that's what I'm going to try to work on yeah well and you also just gave away our business strategy gotta edit this out [Laughter] no because that's the other thing I believe like this you can shout these things from the rooftops and it doesn't matter because very few people are gonna see it through right yeah it's it's like
and people when I wrote what was on Wall Street I had a firm come and offer to buy my original company it was honesty capital a big firm and the only Proviso they had was you can't publish that book we're gonna keep it proprietary we're gonna keep it you know a black box and and I just started laughing I'm like you could scream this stuff the rooftops and it won't matter because
it's gonna have a year or a quarter where it does poorly and everyone's gonna say well that used to work but it doesn't work anymore right so well listen guys this has been amazing uh thank you for our audience these guys are such Pros I literally emailed them earlier today saying I just had a cancellation you guys want to jump on a podcast completely on rehearsed and here they
were so thank you very much for joining us today it's going to be a lot of fun to watch this world unfold any any final thoughts that uh from either of you well I would I would just say every every time I interact with you Jim it's like it's like an espresso shop like it's five o'clock and I'm like ready to taste everything on now the audience feels that way because that's how I feel every
podcast we do I like finished it up and I'm like I have to go do everything I have to this interview myself all the time so I love this thank you for having us letting us just talk about these things and again like to to put to to put to emphasize a value that I think all three of us believe in
like I say that half jokingly because the hope is that someone listening who's been waiting to take action on an idea takes action on the idea right like we are like those are one of the express purposes of what you're trying to do at osv and what all three of us try to do with our work is like get people to go from zero to one to go over to zero to point five just do the first thing and
it's easier than ever if you're in book land it's easier than ever if you're in other mediums as well but like that I am just grateful that you're out there saying and doing these things because they're vitally important I like it's like one of these things I wish I had this when I was you know younger I probably would have taken action sooner if I did so thank you to you for hosting
things like this my my my pleasure uh as I put on my Twitter profile I am a loquacious provocateur yes thank you so much for the invitation and you mentioned Kurt Vonnegut earlier and can I can I close with the Kurt Vonnegut quote please you know you always ask the question about accepting people and I'm gonna try to do it to the listener uh I don't remember in which book it is but he
has a little thing he says to newborn babies and I love it and that he says something like hello babies Welcome To Earth it's out in the summer and it's cold in the winter it's round it's wet and it's crowded there is only one rule that I know of babies God damn it you've got to be kind and so the idea I want to incept this let's just all be a bit kinder to each other
I love it I love it that's great that is we we're going to make that our Collective inception for our audience today be kinder to everyone it just pays such massive dividends and if you're selfish guess what it's gonna make you feel better too I'm in gents thank you so much we will do it again thank you Jim a pleasure always