Ep. 118 - Steven Kotler: Tomorrowland: No Matter How Hard You Try You Can't Get Out Of Its Way

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Jay, I've done over 1300 podcasts now. The very first one I released on January 2014, and I had, like, 3 or 4 in the can. I remember I had, like, Mark Echo in the can, maybe Tim Ferris, maybe Tucker Max, 1 or 2 others. And then that was early 2014. And, Jay, when did you start working with me? I think it's 2016 because you always remember me as 28 even though I'm 35 right now. Cannot believe you're 35. How did that happen? I have no idea. Time flies. I worked with you for more than 6 years. It was April 1st, April Fools' Day 2016. We had Jesse Itzler on. He had just written Training With the Seal, something like that. Yes. But and that was good. That was a good book. Jesse's a great guy. Great podcast that we met on. And then you switched around, as an audio engineer at different places, and finally you came on as the producer of the James Altester show. Thank you. Thank you. You, I've probably done about I don't know. I mean, that's 6 years, and we do 3 podcasts a week. So we've done about 900 podcasts together. Oh, yeah. It's sometimes more than that because, like, sometimes, you know, you do you do other shows. I've considered and then I recorded those shows as well. So it's you do more than more than that. Oh my god. And look. Here's the thing. And this is for any listener out there who would like to come on the podcast, maybe you've written a book, maybe you've done something interesting, and you have some good stories. I wanna give you some advice specifically, but this is really for anybody who wants to write a book. And I'm begging you to do this, what I'm about to say. Write an interesting book, and I'll tell you what I mean in a second. So so many I've heard so many things. You know, after 1300 podcasts, I look back and I say, well, how is my life better? Have I learned anything from all these amazing people who've been on the podcast? And, you know, there's some things in common that everyone says, like, blah blah blah, sleep 8 hours, Be grateful. Don't eat sugar. Cold shower. Cold showers. Yeah. Not not that many people have said that lately. I don't know. Maybe it's, like, out of favor lately. I don't know. Yeah. But here's the thing. None of that's bad. I don't care about anything. The reason why a lot of people say the same thing is because they're like scientists. They quote all these studies. Oh, people who sleep 8 hours a day are more productive than people who sleep 6 hours a day. People who, are grateful are more likely to have this amazing thing happen to them. And and there's all these scientific studies. Oh, this type of meditation is better than this type of meditation, or this type of negotiation in business is better than this type of negotiation. Like the famous study where, you know, you know, a bunch of students go up to people in a subway and say to them, sir, can I have your seat? And 70% of the people get up and give them their seat without any questions asked. So there's all these studies, but here's the problem. If you write a book with just all these studies because you have some statement you wanna make or something you wanna prove or maybe you did the studies, maybe you're an academic or a scientist or whatever. Okay. It's fine, but how do I use those studies in real life? I'm not gonna go up to people on a subway and say, 'Hey, can I have your seat?' I'm never going to do that? And I don't know where else in life, like, I'm not gonna walk up to people and say, hey, give me money. Like I don't think that is the same thing as the subway study. So it's like all all these scientific studies, oh, when, you know, 58% of people who are vulnerable are more likely to win the lottery than the 42% who are not vulnerable. Like, none of that stuff is actually applicable to real life. And then and then there's all the kind of business book, marketing books, where it's like the same lee you know, how to be a leader, listen to people, do active listening, and, you know, or how to be good at marketing. You know, buy Facebook at like, and I get it. Everybody wants to write a book so that they could say, they wrote a best selling book in their category. They're an expert. Please hire me as a speaker. Please hire me as a consultant. Maybe publish my next book. And I I don't blame these people. They wanna write a book. They want that credential for a variety of reasons, but they just don't have anything original to say or it's often not that. They're often afraid to say what's interesting. And I think we've got it done a pretty good job of saying no, not because people are bad or bad guests or whatever, but I just don't want to have people on who say the same thing over and over again. You know, even among my friends, I've lost friends by not having guests on. And, you know, I and sometimes we book guests and I have to cancel at the last minute because I don't like the book, and I hate doing that. I've lost friends over that. And, you know, I take responsibility for that. I like to read the books as close as possible to the podcast because then everything is in my short term memory and it hasn't yet moved back into long term memory where, you don't remember as much as when it's into your short term memory. And and I'm not blaming the authors. Once again, I'm taking responsibility myself, and again here's the thing, writing is a skill, and it's a different skill than writing a book. Writing a book means you sit down and you quote scientific studies and blah blah blah. But you know it's it's hard to have the skill of writing a good story and to understand what's okay in a book. Some people are afraid to tell personal stories in a book. They think, oh, if I tell this personal story, it will, you know, I need to do I need to do case studies that are real examples of my theories, not just link to random stories to my theories. But here's the thing, I'm gonna give you some advice on how to turn your crappy boring book into an interesting book. Number 1, your story is always interesting. Whether you believe this or not, your personal story is the most interesting story you have. It's it's the one story that AI will not be able to tell better than you. You've done interesting things. You've lived your own unique life. Maybe, you know, when you were a kid nobody liked you, so you learned how to do magic. And now you knew all these things about how to do magic tricks. What does that have to do with entrepreneurship? I don't know. You tell me. Tell the I wanna know how to do those magic tricks. Tell how that's similar to the day you got your first customer in a business. Like, you know, even even the reasons you were interested in writing the book you wrote, that's interesting to me, and and it's it's going to be interesting to others if you write authentically. Like if you say, you know, I wanted to give talks about leadership because I thought it would be a way to have sex with strangers, I might meet in the audience, then I I hate to say this, that's pretty authentic when you say that. And you might be like, oh, I can't possibly say that, that sounds bad. And maybe you're right, but the one advice I have related to this is I personally do not hit publish unless I'm a little bit afraid of what people will think. Because if I'm not afraid, then it means I'm saying something that someone else has said before. So so I could describe any any post. Like, for instance, this is like 15 years ago. I wrote an article on why you people shouldn't go to college anymore. And I it was a column in the Financial Times where I first wrote this, and unfortunately, sadly, I lost friends over this because they thought it was really important that they went to their Ivy League school and and and that's how they it changed their life. So fine. Whatever. But I was afraid what people would think because 15 years ago this wasn't as big a discussion as it is now. Or even I will I will once again talk about this viral article, you know, I wrote New York City is dead forever, here's why. I wrote it because I love New York. I'm seeing all these problems. No one else was. Blah blah blah. But I what was I afraid of? I wasn't afraid that 8,000,000 people would hate me, which is what happened. I was afraid this is the one article I've I had ever written where at the end, I wasn't really optimistic about what was going to happen because I didn't know the answers about how to save big cities because of the you know, don't forget the economy was shut down for 2 years and big cities are expensive to run. And, you know, as this happened, people living in major urban areas moved out, particularly the tax base, and this is starting to cause problems now. But I was afraid because it was the first article I think I had written in that all I can in in all the days I remember where I didn't offer a solution simply because I didn't know. And I remember thinking that I remember thinking, okay. I'm about to publish. What am I afraid of here? And that was I could feel it in my stomach. That was the fear that I had. So be authentic. Be a little bit nervous with what you're writing because don't forget you're saying something net new. And again, authenticity. Tell your own story. You could say, for instance, my dad was constantly humiliated by his boss every day I was growing up, so I was determined to learn learn how to be a good leader who did not humiliate his employees. And you could describe their process by which you learned this and your stories along the way and why it was so bad, like, how your dad's life was ruined. He became a wreck of a human by his boss, and you just did not wanna do that. And you did this again, described how you learned to be a leader. Now that's interesting to me as opposed to saying, oh, we did we broke people into 2 groups. One where the leader was yelling at everybody, the other where the leader kept saying the I love this. I love this. And the people in the love group were 51% more effective than the people in the control group. Like, in other words, don't be a scientist. That's this this is rule number 2. Number rule number 1, your story is always interesting. Rule number 2, do not be a scientist. I have a question. Go ask your question, Jay. Yes. So is there a way to turn so let's say if if my day is just sitting around and walk to the park, is there any tips or tricks to make that story interesting? Yeah. When you walk your dog in the park, don't you wanna talk to other people who are walking their dogs? Particularly if you're single, maybe an attractive person that you're attracted to. Wouldn't you like to be able to figure out, oh, she has a dog or he has a dog? It'd be great if we could talk. Did you ever have that experience? Oh, yeah. For sure. Okay. Well, what happened? Like, what happened when you, try to talk to a real attractive girl who had a dog? Well, usually we we hit it off, And then 2 sentence later, I think he they find me creepy and then just walk away. Why do they find you creepy? Because I ask a lot of questions. Like, I ask a lot of personal questions. Have you ever asked someone on a date that you were, that you met walking the dog? Yes. And then and then the the date became, when the date comes, you know, like, when we're closer to when we're supposed to go out, she's like, oh, my cousins come to town and visit. I'm like, okay. Sure. Let's do next weekend. She's like, okay. Yeah. Sure. And then close to the day, and she's she's like, oh, I have to go out of town. And then schedule again, and then they are like, oh, no. You know? You ever run into her again in the park? Yeah. I tried to, and then she walked away. She just walked away? Yeah. She I think she I I was trying to get close to her, and then she just, like, walked away. Okay. What do you mean you tried to find her in the park again? Well well, it's like, you know, sometimes you give stalking her. I I'm not stalking her, but sometimes, you know, you go to the same pub for so long, you sort of know everyone's schedule. Right? You know? This person That is a little creepy, by the way. But, yes, I I get what you're saying. So so look. You just told me, like, 5 different stories, and then let's connect this to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is all about first off, here's the important thing about entrepreneurship. When someone's in the meeting with you, they often say yes, but then later they really there's a lot of reasons why, in entrepreneurship why someone says yes. They might say yes because they really wanna buy your product. They might say yes, but another very important big reason why someone says yes is they wanna get you out of the room so that they could say no later on an email. Right. And so this you could link any story. This is an example of a very important concept in entrepreneurship, which is that yes doesn't mean anything, no means something, no people only say because it's very hard to say no, people only say no if if they really mean it. And you can if you can ask someone or discover why did this person say no, that actually is valuable feedback for your business or in your case, Jay, for your approach to women. Although I can already give you some feedback right now based on some of the things you just said. But that's how, you know or let's say you're writing a book about, you know, negotiation. You know, maybe you have to kind of take what you learn you know, first off, negotiation, like Robert Cialdini talks about this in Presuasion, that a lot of the preparation you do, in a negotiation should be done in advance. And so like you were saying, you know the schedules, you know what parks people go to, and so on. That's a little bit of persuasion. But maybe, you know, you need to do a little bit more tribe building. So the tribe you found yourself in was people who walk dogs, but maybe, you could also find other things in common with that person other than just the fact that you walk dogs, and that might be better for your quote, unquote negotiation of asking them out on a date. But on and on, as opposed to saying, like, oh, when both sides are have dopamine firing, that's a better time to negotiate according to neuroscience. Like, that's most books, you know, are just baskets of scientific studies, and people are afraid to tell their personal stories. They only want to tell case studies. Oh, here here's a book about how to innovate. Here's how Steve Jobs innovated. Okay. That's interesting, but I probably heard the story before unless unless you're telling me something really new I've probably heard the story before and I really want you don't always have to tell your personal story. Maybe you could tell some story about how some random scientist in the 1800s innovated the toilet and boom, that was super innovative and I have never heard that. I don't I don't know when the invention of plumbing was. So like again, just because 7 out of 10 people give me their subway seat, this won't help me in real life. I'd rather know the story of why the professor did that research, or what someone was thinking when a student asked for their subway seat, or what happened when the author the author himself of the study tried the technique in real life. Now now we also have to wonder, can an AI write this chapter? Like, if you ask yourself, I'm writing a chapter on how to be a better leader. If an AI could write the chapter I just wrote, then you have to rewrite it and tell more stories. Tell your story. Tell to live a unique life, and that beats the AI. Or write about other people, the more, you know, quasi obscure the better. When I say quasi obscure, someone potentially famous like the inventor of the toilet or air conditioning or whatever, or some baseball player who was great but not like world famous or soccer player or whatever. So tell stories. Stories are the bridge to to communicate ideas from your book to other people's brains, and I could tell you I I did an experiment. I I talked about this a couple of podcasts ago. I wrote an 80 page book a few Saturday afternoons ago, about the neuroscience of persuasion. I never published it. I just wrote it using chat gpt. I just wanted to see, is AI a threat to book writing? And I realized, first off, there was a particular way to use chat gpt to make the book as interesting as possible, and I could discuss that somewhere else, another podcast perhaps. But it showed me that one the one thing AI can't beat us in, AI will not live a unique life, and you're gonna do things in your future that an AI will never dream of. You will have done things in your past that an AI, unless you've already written it down because the AI absorbs everything that people has written, unless you've already written down, AI won't be able to magically come up with this. By the way, even though my biography is everywhere, and Wikipedia and articles and all this stuff, a if I ask, Chat GPT, hey, what where's James Altucher from? It says Brooklyn. I'm I'm I've hardly ever was in Brooklyn in my entire life. The AI is not always correct, which we know now, but again if an AI can write the book or if the book is just a collection of studies, you need to rewrite the book. And it doesn't matter if the AI book is smart or whatever, it won't be a good book. Rule number 3, connect communities. And this is this is really important. Like, you know, I'll I'll give you an example. So Annie Duke, she's been on the podcast twice. She wrote this great book called Thinking in Bets, and it's a very scientific concept actually. It's it's from statistics where it's possible that you could make a bet that is almost always going to lose money. I'm talking about a financial bet, but still it's the correct decision to make that bet because the expected value is positive. So if you make that bet thousands of times, eventually you'll make more money than you lose. Now that's a boring way to describe it, but Annie Duke took this concept and she she told stories from her poker career. She's a was a professional poker player for like, I don't know, 20 or 30 years. She was able to tell the story from her experience in poker, plus she told other stories, many many stories, and then she also told the history, you know, the stories about the history of the early statisticians, and she came up with a unique book which combined poker, her stories, other people's stories, the history of statistics and this concept of expected value to write a book called Thinking in Bets. So here's the formula. So she connected the poker world with the world of decision making, with the world of statistics. So unusual thing, which is this concept of expected value, this concept that you can make bets that almost always lose, but it's still the correct decision. Unusual thing plus real story plus scientific proof plus connecting communities equals good book. So remember that. Unusual thing plus real story, tell real stories, plus scientific proof, plus connecting communities equals a good book. Number 4. Rule number 4. Add to the frontier of knowledge. So whatever you're writing about, make sure you are saying something new. So I'll give an example. Range by David Epstein. Great podcast episode that I did with him. I forget, Jay. Did we have David Epstein on once or twice? Oh, twice. Because he came on for the how to podcast again. He used to hold how to how to podcast by Slate. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. But, anyway, David wrote this book range, which it studies the ideas behind the peak performance concept of the 10000 hour rule. So Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the amount the 10000 hour rule, which was developed by Anders Ericsson, who's been on the podcast also. And it's basically this concept that, if you spend 10000 hours of what's called deliberate practice on something, you'll be among the best in the world. So fine. But David Epstein added to the frontier of knowledge about the 10000 hour rule. And I'll just say he has a unique background. He trained as a geologist, but was obsessed with sports. He became the youngest writer ever for Sports Illustrated by being their science of sports writer. So he come it's like idea sex. He did career sex where he combined his career as a scientist with his love of sports to be the 1st sports science writer at Sports Illustrated, and that made him the youngest writer at Sports Illustrated. So this unusual expertise combined with studying 100 of stories of sports excellence and scientific research allowed them to add to the frontier of knowledge of what creates great athletes. It might not be 10000 hours of repetition, but a good synthesis of a variety of disciplines. It's called that's why you call the book range, and synthesis of all these different disciplines creates peak performance. And I remember to this day the stories like he told the story of Pele and how Pele got to be the best soccer player in the world by playing something else called football in Brazil and combining that with soccer or football. So, you know, it's not like this idea was a big secret, but Epstein uses real stories and backed as minimally as possible by science to write a good and unique book that expands the frontier of what we thought we already knew about expertise. So number 5, very good this is a very good rule if you wanna write a book. Make an old idea new, and I'll use as an example, Ryan Holiday who is coming on the podcast in a few weeks. The guy writes a book every 6 months now. He's coming on the podcast to, support his next book. But, Ryan Holiday, Robert Greene does this too. They are the masters of taking an old idea and making it new. Ryan takes an old philosophy, stoicism. No one has really thought seriously about stoicism since 300 AD, 2000 years ago almost. He takes a simple he takes this philosophy, takes a simple concept from it that is relevant to everyone, like discipline or ego or courage. And then he kind of he he researches 30 to 100 modern day stories that exemplify the concept of discipline or ego and uses us us and he takes modern stories like he'll tell the story of Babe Ruth or he'll tell the story of Napoleon or some scientist or whatever. And it'll exemplify how ego is the enemy or discipline is destiny and it has an element of stoicism in it. Like, it'll tell the story of John McCain being a prisoner in Vietnam and how he was very stoic in sort of, you know, surviving through that difficult period, and this was unique. Other books about stoicism tend to focus on just the history of it and the history of the ideas rather than saying Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig were stoics. So so that was really fascinating. Rule number 6, and this is difficult, but I'm gonna give you some shortcuts here. Be a really good writer. Now this is hard. Again, I started writing I remember I started writing in 1989 no. 1990 because I saw this friend of mine who was pretending to be a writer. He always said he was a writer. I never saw anything he he wrote. You know, we were all, like, 21 years old or something. And this the girl I liked was going out with him because she she wanted to be a writer. She actually did become a successful writer. He was pretending to be a writer all the time, and I literally was thinking, boy, I wanna be a writer. This looks pretty good. And that was, of course, the wrong reason to get into writing, but I eventually, you know, very quickly, actually, I fell in love with writing. I really wanted to be a great writer. I was reading everything. I was writing all the time, but I was constantly writing I was writing 3,000 words a day for years, and I was I wrote novel after novel after story after story. I got rejected everywhere. It took it took 14 years no. It took 13 years from the day I started writing seriously before I got my first check, paid money for writing a a an article. I got $200 for an article I wrote about stocks in January 2003, and I framed that check actually. I don't think to this day I've ever cashed that check. It's hard to write, but I'll give you, let me just give you some tips here. First off, study the best writers. Now I just described some examples from some nonfiction writers who I think are very good, but the best writers by far are usually fiction writers. Why are fiction writers better than nonfiction writers? Nonfiction writers spend their lives focusing on the thing that the nonfiction subject that they are an expert in. So if you're writing a book on about the history of World War 2, you spent your life or many years becoming an expert in World War 2. You didn't spend all your time becoming an expert writer. Write it being a great writer, like a like one of the greats, requires 3 to 5 hours a day. You have to read a lot of writing and then you have to write a lot. Being an expert in World War 2 also might take 3 to 5 hours a day, or being an expert poker player probably takes 10 hours a day. So the best writer fiction writers focus just on writing. Nonfiction writers focus on, you know, the topic that they're writing about, so they're experts on that. But doesn't mean you have to be a bad writer. You know, here the the technique is before you start writing for the day, read a great writer maybe for an hour, and you'll feel the inspiration sort of bubbling up, and you'll learn from the great writers. I I started doing this technique I remember I was in I had to write up an essay in 12th grade, senior year of high school, and I couldn't write it. It was so hard. And my dad gave me a book, by a great writer, and he said just read a couple chapters of this. And this is, like, probably the I'm thinking this now. It's probably the best advice my dad ever gave me because he gave me some really horrible advice otherwise. But he said read read just a couple chapters of this book. I read it, and I instantly like, it's almost like it flew from out of the book. Like, I started writing my essay in the almost in the style of I think the book was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann and who now I wouldn't really enjoy, but, you know, he was a great writer, I think, of the 1800. And I wrote this essay. I got, like, an an a plus on it. The teacher was really impressed. She's like, I didn't know you could write like this. And even now to this day, before I write, I always read good, solid fiction. There are some books I've read maybe over 200 times because I have like my go to books that are inspirations for my writing. And I tend to read what I what I like to read is semi autobiographical fiction. So now this is called literary nonfiction, but, you know, take a guy like Charles Bukowski or Hunter s Thompson. They would often write books that felt like fiction, but it was actually very autobiographical. And so there are a lot of writers like that, and I tend to read those writers before I write my own articles or or essays. And, you know, all of all the writers I read, they're very self deprecating. They're great storytellers. They're great writers, and the stories they tell are the vehicles that they use to exhibit their skill in storytelling. And so, again, I'm gonna summarize all of this. But one one question that doesn't raise my hand. So, like, with the chat gpt, does that really matter if you're a good writer or a bad writer? Well, you're not gonna use chat gpt to write your book because if you do that, you're gonna write a bad book. Oh, okay. If chat gpt could write your book, then don't write it. Oh, okay. Chat gpt, they it always people always say, oh, you know, write a speech about bowel movements in the style of Abraham Lincoln. And then it's funny and it seems unique and whatever. But it's not really a unique story. It's a and, yes, maybe in one day in the future, Chap GPT will write stories that seem very close to unique and original, but they won't ultimately be unique and original because, you know, Chapity is drawing from a source, which is, like, maybe all of Wikipedia plus all of Reddit, as the data that it does its AI on. But you yourself, it's not gonna maybe write, the story of what happened to you, you know, all your experiences asking out thousands of women in the dog walking park. Only you could tell your unique story, and only you could tell it in a way that has writerly skill. One thing for sure I've seen from Chap ET is that it writes very clean articles, but they're not but I could tell they're too clean. And even when you try to to say, hey. Mix it up. Write in the style of Hunter s Thompson or something like that, it won't really read like that. Like, mimicking mimicking, ultimately, it doesn't do well. It doesn't it doesn't work, and it doesn't really understand the nuances of how really great writers write. Gotcha. Chat g p t will not write like a good writer ever. I mean, okay. I shouldn't say never because it's gonna get better, but always a great writer will will be able to stay ahead, I think. All these techniques I'm using, please do these techniques, and I will love to have you on as a podcast guest after you write your incredibly unique book. So remember, tell your story. Tell other people's story. Tell the journey of how you learned something as well as the conclusion because that's how you tell your personal failures along the way. Don't tell me a book don't write me a book on leadership and expect me to read it if or anybody to read it if you don't have your own personal failures along the way because that's the part every reader relates to. Right. Make an old idea new, whether it's stoicism or the art of war. Like Steven Pressfield wrote the War of Art, which is kinda like Sun Tzu's The Art of War except about art. Synthesize ideas like David Epstein did in Range, Annie Duke did in Thinking in Bets. Don't just quote science or other people's ideas. I don't I don't care about some scientific study that was conducted at the University of New Hampshire. Just just tell me you could mention store or, you know, the the the academic source a little bit, like, maybe a tiny bit, but you don't even have to. I I wanna know what happened to you. You know, be be, an experiment of just one person. That's what I care about is your story. Ask yourself, can AI write this? If AI can write it, let it. Don't just use AI to write your book and publish it. Everyone will see right through that, or even if they don't see right through that, they'll be bored with your book. Answer these questions. Who are you? Why are you? And why now? So for instance, I'm writing a book about my journey as someone over the age of 50 who is trying to once again master a skill that I had previously mastered when I was in my early twenties. So I was a chess master in my early twenties. I stopped playing in tournaments as I became more serious about family and business and all that. And now I'm starting again, and it's so hard, but I've learned and I'm failing so much, but I I've talked to neuroscientists, psychologists. I've had so many, like, weird and wild stories that are just insane. And so so who am I? I'm a writer, chess player, and and someone who's, as an adult, as an older person trying to improve. Why am I? I'm someone who's always interested for whatever stupid reason in taking on challenges that are probably too hard for me. Like, I wish I was, I I love making bonsai trees or I was a bird watcher or I collected, you know, rocks or something. Why now? So so again, the questions are who are you, why are you, why now? And the why now is, well, chess as an example has reached new heights in popularity, thanks to the TV show The Queen's Gambit. So a 100,000,000,000 people have registered accounts on chess.com, and right now happens to be the point when I'm doing this. So that's why now. And and adult improvement during the pandemic became very important to people because they had to figure out things to do and things to learn and how you how the brain changes as you're an adult isn't very much related to how you improve. So that's the why now. And the answers to these questions are unique for every writer and for every story. Jay is a shy person who owns a dog. Why is he? He's he's he's he's single and or he was he was single and he was asking out girls on on his dog walking. Why now? It's because during the pandemic, he got a dog and was was walking them all the time, and this is an interesting topic as people fought with loneliness during the years that they were isolated. I was very lonely. Yeah. See? So this was and a lot of people were. And so that's very it's very important to understand why are you writing this book now. That's again part of, you know and as you dive deeper into that with stories, maybe even stories from your childhood or parents or whatever, you know, as you answer these questions and revolve it around a topic, which is the idea of the book, that makes a unique writer or a unique story a unique book. So again, this is all not a summary of how to be a good writer, but just the tip of the iceberg on making a book that is interesting enough to be shared with others on, for instance, a podcast, a speech, a consulting gig, coaching, whatever. And again, this doesn't mean other people everybody should write their expertise books, but and it doesn't mean people shouldn't write the books they're writing even if it's a bad book. I 100% respect that people are writing books for all sorts of reasons. It doesn't have to be a Pulitzer Prize winning a book, but just in terms of what I wanna have on this podcast, that's the filter. This is the type of book I recommend everyone write, if they're writing an expertise kind of book. And this is just a few tips. How if you're not a writer, you can still write a book that moves the needle and stands above the rest. And if you do this, I promise you I look forward to having you on this podcast. Yes. I will be on your podcast. You're gonna write the book about asking out girls on your dog walk? Yes.