I had been writing every single day on the internet for 10 years. I have practiced and done this and generated the result that everyone else wants. Now let me tell you all of the things that I learned doing it.
You told me that this is bringing in between 600 to $700,000 per month, sometimes up to one million, correct? Yep. There's a reason why we have no competition.
A lot of people will call courses or education programs scams. That's kind of always been my impression, right? It's hard to break that. Education is whatever you make of it.
We've had students join PGA as a complete beginner, and a year later now are running ghost writing agencies of their own doing 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 grand a month.
What do you find is most effective in, like, helping those people understand, like, no, you have to give some things up, you have to compromise if you wanna make a living doing this? This is one of my favorite topics.
I want to say, I think I was first made aware of you, I might have mentioned this to you before, uh, with... when I interviewed this guy, Pejman Milani, about a year and a half ago. And he had done Ship 30 for 30.
Um, and you know, I'm generally skeptical of, of course products, online educational products, plenty good stuff out there, um, plenty bad stuff, I think. I respect what you do.
Uh, but I was really impressed by his story. He had this story where he was around, he was like early 40s, and around his 40th birthday, he had been reading his journal from his 30th birthday.
Animation teacher, um, at a high school in Texas. And in his 30th birthday, in his journal, he'd written how he wanted to make something for himself, and he, he never really was.
He wasn't writing anything, he wasn't animating things for himself, and his students would ask him, "PJ, what, like what are you making?" He's like, "Oh, I teach you guys."
And then on his 40th birthday, he goes in and he writes that again, and he goes back to his 30th birthday, and he finds this note. And he's like, "God, I can't do this again on my 50th birthday."
Anyways, long way of saying, he does Ship 30 for 30, um, and then he starts doing it, and pretty quickly he s- kind of figures out a format that's like illustrating these, these ideas, you know, and he blows up and now, um, he's got like 200,000 followers on LinkedIn, and newsletter subscriber, whatever.
Um,
so that's, that's how I heard of you, and that's kind of what brings me into this conversation, is that you are somebody who, you know, is able to produce an educational product that stands above a lot of what's out there on the, on the internet.
Well, thank you for that. Uh, PJ is great. That was a great success story.
Um, I c- I wish I could take more credit, but Ship 30 grew into something that I don't think I or even my business partner, Dickie, really thought that it would grow into.
I mean, I, I started it with him just because I thought it was a cool idea, and it spoke to my own writing journey. You know, I started writing on the internet in...
Well, when I was a teenager, but I really got started right after I graduated from college.
And in 2014, this is a story I've told 1,000 times, I challenged myself to write one Quora answer every day for a year, and I figured, you know, worst case scenario, I do this thing I enjoy and I get better. Yeah.
Best case scenario, something happens. And so when Ship 30 came around and I saw Dickie building that almost a decade later- Yeah... you know, that spoke to that experience that did end up changing my life. And,
you know, yeah, there's a big educational component in Ship 30, but to be honest, my whole... And it sounds so... It's funny because I know when I say this, it seems very easy to devalue it. Mm.
But it is the most important thing, which is for a beginner, it, you, you actually don't really need education. You don't really need to know the answers or the reasons why you do everything that you do.
You don't need to know the secrets. You don't need to know the hacks, the tricks. Like, all of those things come after a very basic foundational starting place, which is everyone just needs encouragement. Yeah. You know?
And the metaphor I like using is I, I feel like, you know, and I'll speak in the context of writing online, everyone always wants to know what's the platform, what's the hack, what's the way to tap into the algorithm, what's, what's the quick fix trick, advanced tactic?
And the reality is that's a little bit like someone saying, um, you know, "How do I shoot a, a perfect turnaround jump shot like Michael Jordan?" How do I get off the couch and run a marathon tomorrow? Yeah.
And it's like, "Well, how about we start with you going to the gym?" And they're like, "Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. But, like, how do I do that?" And it's like- Yeah...
I literally can't tell you anything until I get you physically into the gym. Mm-hmm.
And so, so much of Ship 30 and why it, why it's become so successful is because it, it gives every person the f- fundamental thing that they all need, which is you just need someone to tell you it's okay- Mm-hmm...
and I believe in you, and nothing bad is gonna happen. Yeah. And then people do that for 30 days, and then all these amazing outcomes happen, you know? Yeah.
I mean, which I think part, uh, the big part of that, right, is the cohort-based course versus a j- maybe just like a, a solo email course, which we'll get into that in a second.
But, um, to spare you having to, you know, try to put in any of the bits that you've, that you've said a million times before on your own, in your own content and on other podcasts, my summary of, of what you do and the history of your career is you were, like, a teenage World of Warcraft whiz, and you were writing on W- World of Warcraft blogs, and then you get into kind of bodybuilding, and you're participating in, in bodybuilding forums, this kind of thing.
And then, uh, you, you're in college, you're studying fiction writing. You're kinda like, I don't... I'm kind of disillusioned by the fact that there doesn't really seem to be a way to make money out of this.
You get out, you join an ad agency. You're doing that for a little while. You start doing the Quora thing. Um, you become the most, most viewed writer on Quora, I believe, and then- Yep...
uh, you start doing ghostwriting. You start this ghostwriting agency with a friend. You scale that to, like, two million a year, I believe, and then you shut that down. You've got 10,000 in the bank you failed to save.
You'd grown this business that you'd, uh, hadn't really put aside for yourself. I'm probably missing a few details. And then around- Oh, that's... You're nailing itOkay, good.
[laughs] Around 2020, you, you link up with, with Dickie Bush, your business partner. Um, you guys make Ship 30 for 30. It grows slowly and then quite quickly, and now it's one of these...
one of the most popular, um, writing education programs on the internet. And now you've also got, um... So you've got Ship 30 for 30. You've got TypeShare, which is a writing and multi-platform publishing software.
You've got Premium Ghostwriting Academy, which is another writing course for ghostwriting specifically. You've got Write with AI, which is a paid newsletter.
You've got Different Publishing, which I s- understand is like an audiobook publishing platform. And then you have written- Yep... nine or ten books. And this is kind of the full shtick, the full story, right? Yeah.
[laughs] Okay. Yeah. When you say it back like that, it makes me, it makes me realize, uh, how much I did not have it figured out at any one of those chapters. And I...
But I just kept try- I just kept trying things- Yeah... you know? You kept, you kept shipping, uh, you know, three hundred and sixty-five for three hundred and sixty-five or whatever, if you will.
Um, okay, I just wanted to get that out of the way because I don't want, I don't want you to have to fall back into explaining these things that you've explained a million times before. Well, thank you. Yeah.
Um, so this business portfolio that I just explained, I wanna talk about that for a little bit, and then we'll get more into the, the micro. I think I wanna get back into the Ship 30 for 30 cohort-based course stuff.
Um, you told me that this overall portfolio right now... I'm always interested in figuring out how the people I interview make their living, right?
You told me that this is bringing in between six hundred to seven hundred thousand dollars per month. I imagine that's not you personally, that's what the, the business' revenue overall. Yep.
Sometimes up to one million, correct? Yep. Yeah, I'd say our, our average is probab- probably... Right now our average is around 600k a month. Mm-hmm.
Uh, and then depending on when we do product drops or if one vertical just has an amazing month, um, we'll have pops up to a million. Yeah.
So our current goal is figuring out, you know, so what, what needs to happen to get from half a million, 600k, 700k a month to a consistent million a month. Yeah. That's our, that's our current goal.
What's, what's the most performant of these businesses? Um, Premium Ghostwriting Academy makes up eighty percent of that. Wow. I mean, it, it has... Yeah, it's, it's our biggest vertical by far. It is...
It has grown tremendously. Um, it's also the one that has the most operational complexity. Mm. So Ship 30 as a business was very simple, you know? And it was me, Dickie.
We had a early team member, Daniel, who's an absolute rock star, and we maybe had like, a, an assistant or two, VA here and there.
And Ship 30 as a model was interesting because it was cohort-based, and so if there was ten people in a cohort or a hundred people in a cohort or a thousand people in a cohort, like, your, your marginal change in operational complexity was actually not that much.
It was, you know, maybe we need to set up a couple more Zaps or- Yeah... you know, maybe we need to hire one or two VAs to do some of the things that, uh, we were doing but just don't scale with more people, right?
Figuring out breakout groups or something. Yeah, exactly. And that model worked really well, and Ship 30 grew to a million dollar a year business in the first year.
And then on the back of that, we launched sort of this continuity program called Captain's Table, which was essentially Ship 30 had ended. Now you're looking to do other things on the back of your writing.
You know, you wanna start a newsletter, you want, you know, um, maybe launch a digital product, et cetera. And so we'll give you some education on that, and we'll do like a live session, uh, once a week.
It's like just straight continuity. And when we added that in, the next year Ship 30 grew to two million a year as a business, which was great, and, and that was, that was a very... I mean, that was a super small team.
It was me, Dickie, and maybe th-three other people, four other people. Um, and it was making amazing money. It was very profitable, like eighty, [chuckles] eighty, eighty-five percent margin, you know? Not bad.
Um, but d- you know, in hindsight, Dickie and I also realized, like, but you're... We were also capped a little bit. There were things that we couldn't do because
the reason, like, what, what eventually clicked for us is the reason why it was eighty-five percent margin was because we were still doing a lot of the roles, you know?
And so when we started PGA, you know, PGA's operational complexity is completely different. It's evergreen, so someone can join at any time. It's high ticket, so people have very different expectations.
In order to sell high ticket, that means you have to sell it over the phone, so we have a sales team.
In order to get people on the phone and remind them to show up to their sales call and make sure that they're educated, we have to pre-educate them, so we have a whole marketing team, you know.
Once they join the program, we want them to instantly feel like the money that they invested in themselves was worth it, so we have a success team. We pair them with a coach. You know, so
like, it, it has been a huge learning for all of us that building something like that, that does the amount of revenue that it does, it is not just a little bit harder than Ship 30, you know?
Or it's not like twice as hard. It is literally like ten times as hard. Mm. And so something we, we repeat over and over internally is that operational complexity is the moat, you know?
That there's a reason why there is no other ghostwriting program. There's a reason why, like, we have no competition.
Because we spend an exorbitant amount of money every month in the operational complexity that is that vertical. How many... How big is the team?
I think we're n-north of thirty at this point, maybe, maybe thirty-two, thirty-three, something like that. Wow. Um, one thing about like you...
So it's this complex business, and you could've only really started it after Ship 30 for 30, I think. I was...
Just before we got on, I was listening to one of your Coffee with Cole podcast episodes, um, and this one, I think it was about a year old, and you're, you're kind of breaking down the success of, of Ship 30 for 30 and how you've built it and the, the whole timeline.
Um, and you describe this process for validating... educational products really, which I, which I found really kind of clear-eyed and wanted to, to bring up.
So basically you say, like, you started by, you know, writing yourself and then you taught friends, loved ones, like, "Oh, here's how I do this thing." Um, you're helping individuals.
And then, oh, now you're doing coaching calls. And now maybe you're doing calls with, oh, maybe 10 people, and you build the cohort-based course, and then the cohorts grow.
And then once you have validated that, that then allows you to productize it in a different way, maybe with Premium Ghostwriting Academy.
Um, but yeah, I, I haven't got the chance to talk about educational products and who should make them and how they should be built, right, uh, for a while here. So I...
In terms of, like, how you validate that idea and grow it, maybe there's nothing else to say. It's just start with one person, then a few more, then more. Yeah?
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that gets lost, and the reason why info or education products tend, tend to have this, uh,
generally negative association, like, a lot of people will call courses or education programs scams. Which is what- And I think-... as I was saying at the beginning, that's kind of always been my impression, right?
It's hard to break that. Yeah, and I, I get, I get it through the lens that, first of all, education is whatever you make of it. [laughs] You know? Like, we, we have...
In the same program, we might have someone go through it and say, you know, "Well, this didn't help me at all." Mm-hmm.
And then we, and then we have another person go through it and go, "This literally changed my life, and every single thing that I wanted happened in a 10th of the time." Yeah. It's not that we...
It's not that they had, like, a different curriculum than the other person, but it is largely dependent on what you choose to do with it, you know?
But I think the reason why there's that association with info and education is because info and education is not this thing where you wake up in the morning and you ask yourself, "Oh, what would crush as a info product?
And then let me go build it." That's what a lot of people do. And so they're trying to teach other people how to do things that they themselves have never done. They just think that that would make for a great product.
People forget the reason Ship 30 grew so quickly is because I had been writing every single day on the internet for 10 years before we started Ship 30. Mm-hmm. You know?
Like, I had written thousands of articles on Quora. I had written thousands of ar- of columns for Inc. Magazine. I had, I had a decade of I have practiced and done this and generated the result that everyone else wants.
Now let me tell you all of the things that I learned doing it.
People also forget the reason that PGA, our Premium Ghostwriting Academy, grew so quickly is because I built the first ghostwriting agency for founders and executives.
I have spent 5,000 hours ghostwriting for CEOs and- Mm... founders and investors and venture capitalists.
I, I have trained dozens and dozens and dozens of writers that I've employed on how to ghostwrite like me so that I could scale my agency.
So when we started PGA, it wasn't, it wasn't, "Oh, h- I think that if we had a ghostwriting curriculum, that would crush, and we'll just, you know, wing it."
It's like, no, I had years, like, thousands of hours of my own frameworks developed.
And then as soon as we package them up and share them, of course people are gonna get a high-quality result because I've already gone through all of the hard work.
And I think that's, that's the important distinction with info and education is it's not...
I, I think the best place to start if you wanna get into any, any sort of education product is actually doing it for yourself and providing it as a service. Mm.
Because you should actually do the work, and then info and education is just, well, let me package up how I do what I do.
And then if you choose to go down that road, well, then there's all these different business models for info. You know, some people go the community route. Some people go low-ticket digital products.
Some people go high-ticket group coaching. You know?
Then it becomes a game of all right, so which business model is maybe best suited for your skills or best suited for the thing that you're trying to help someone accomplish? Hi there.
My name's Tom, and I'm the producer of the Creative Spotlight podcast. I'm just interrupting real quick to ask you to subscribe. I know you hear that a lot on YouTube, but look at this stat.
Over the past 90 days, 75% of our watch time has come from people that aren't subscribed, which means there's a good chance that you're watching this and you watch our other episodes too, but you aren't subscribed yet.
If that's you, do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. It will help us keep getting these great guests to share their knowledge and their insights with us and with you. Thank you. Back to the episode.
And also, if you're on Apple or Spotify, please also follow and subscribe. Thank you. [whooshing sound] Um, I wanna talk about ghostwriting a bit. So I... This is how I got my start in this career as well, right?
I was a rhetoric and English major in college, and I didn't know how to make money doing that. And I decided I wasn't gonna be a journalist 'cause I couldn't figure out how to make money doing that.
Um, and so eventually, after messing around in kitchens for a couple years, I went on Upwork, and I started to...
I was, I, I realized, right, you gotta take these gigs that pay you basically dirt, um, to learn how to do it and to build the portfolio, et cetera, and I'm writing for, like, this,
I don't know, s- somebody's personal camping project blog. Anyways, uh, that's neither here nor there. But, um, yeah. Now I don't really ghostwrite anymore.
But, uh, I, I'm w- I w- You teach people how to ghostwrite, and I think it is still a very popular industry that has not reached its peak, right? There's more and more people are trying to get on LinkedIn.
There's, like, I'm seeing job postings on LinkedIn for, like, write... You know, head of CEO content for PayPal or ChatGPT. Uh, w- not for ChatGPT but for PayPal. Um,
all a long way of asking how do you see the state of ghostwriting as this category of work on the internet?
What is that in 2025 going into 2026 compared to, say, what it was when you started over a decade ago?I mean, the, the category has matured tremendously over the past 10 years. I, I started ghostwriting in 2016. Mm.
In 2016, people were still saying that, that ghostwriting was, like, against the law. [laughs] You know? I mean, like, think, think about how much, [laughs] how much that
category has matured, and I don't even think about it like ghostwriting, to be honest.
Gho- ghostwriting is a, a word that now more people understand and have associations with, and so it's a great thing for me to name and claim and build company in. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
But I don't even think about it like ghostwriting. I think about it like, what is the demand? Like, just to say it very overtly- It's copywriting. It's production... what is the,
what is the demand for business owners who want to scale themselves online? What is the demand for people who wanna generate organic traffic?
What is the demand for businesses that want to build trust with as many potential customers as possible? The demand for, for that outcome is infinite. It is infinite. And so that's...
There, there's something that's so funny to me when people say, you know, ghostwriting is a trend or, or ghostwriters are gonna get replaced by AI, or, um, I don't understand who would hire a ghostwriter because that's cheating.
[laughs] It's like, okay, well, if, if, if hiring a ghostwriter is cheating, then so is hiring a YouTube editor, and so is hiring a social media manager, you know? Like, it...
None of, none of those things actually make sense. And the thing that I knew in 2016, and I know way more today, a decade later, is that every single person
not even wants to, now needs to build themselves on the internet. Mm.
If you have an invisible presence, and if you aren't sharing the things that you've learned and your insights that you've gathered and the frameworks that you've built for yourself over your 20, 30, 40-year career on the internet, you are missing out.
And people have to remember, in 2016, we didn't have Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Satya Nadella or all of these people, like, actively participating in the digital social conversation. Now, they all do it. Mm-hmm.
They, they tweet each other, you know? And so if you have that tier of person essentially signaling to everyone else, "Well, I'm active in this game,"
every layer of CEO and founder and investor and podcaster and YouTuber and e- everyone, solopreneur, everyone looks at that and goes, "Well, I should too." Mm. And, and this thing isn't going away.
Like, the demand for this service is, is up and to the right in such a parabolic way, and I've known that. I've known that for 10 years, and I'm still just pounding the table about it. You're still making money off it.
No, it, it's interesting that, like, um, focusing on the word ghostwriting is like... Well, maybe it's less relevant as this word, but obviously useful for you and your brand, right?
Like, uh, something I ask almost everybody who comes on here is, is how you... how do you define the term creator? And with you, in researching you, I don't really see you use that word to describe yourself anywhere.
Maybe I see digital writer, serial entrepreneur, right? I think these are some of the words on your, on your website.
Um, but when I, like, try to fit you into that box, right, which basically the way I define it is anybody out there on the internet creating content, building an audience for it, and somehow monetizing it, or maybe a more simple way is just somebody putting stuff on the internet, right?
Um, but you're kind of like this, like, earlier era of creator, where when you were on Quora, you're this Quora creator, right?
And then after that, you become more of just a professional writer for hire, call it a ghostwriter, whatever, then you become an agency owner, et cetera.
Um, but it's kind of what you're describing too, where, like, it all collapses.
Even the word creator, I kind of think maybe in 10 years, maybe earlier, people won't really use it because it's, it's almost irrelevant because everybody, everybody is publishing content to the internet.
Um, I don't know. There's not really a question in here, more of just, like, I... It sounds like you're describing this kind of collapse of, of context, right?
Like, if ghostwriting was cheating, um, and you wouldn't wanna do it, well, like, that describes somebody who, like, for them, the point is the writing, right, not the distribution of the message and, like, the, the meeting of an audience where they are.
Um, and that's kind of the same thing as this, the creator economy eating everything.
Yeah, I mean, so I'll share some commentary to your, your no question, but I, I have some thoughts, which is I think people forget that the term creator was really a reflection of how technology had evolved. Mm-hmm.
Because, you know, I've, I've been writing on the internet since 2007,
so I've, I've gotten to write and, and try writing and try lots of things in and around the world of writing on the internet for a very long time now.
And so I've watched a lot of technologies a- and I've tried and experimented with a lot of technologies.
And the term creator really started emerging when you had these tools that allowed one person to essentially do the, the V1 of lots of, uh, lots of different things that in the past had required other people.
So, you know, in, in the late 2000s or the early 2010s, if I wanted to launch a, uh, a website with a paywall, or if I wanted to launch a paid newsletter, or if I wanted to create a digital product, right?
Like, there were all sorts of things that the... a, a single individual, especially an average individual like myself, like, [laughs] that you can't really do that.
Like, I couldn't just go teach myself how to code- Mm-hmm... on a weekend to build the thing that I needed, right? People forget that before Stripe, like, handling payments on the internet was very complicated.
It was very hard. And so I think this term creator really... The way my interpretation of it and what I associate it with is really sort of like aA f- a full stack digital solopreneur type person. Yes, I like that.
Right? And, and there's a lot to be said for that. There's a lot of freedom. That is, that is a new type of person, a new type of creator, uh, that has emerged in only the last, you know, five to eight years.
You know, so it's still fairly new. Mm-hmm. But, but there's something...
The reason why I think I don't typically use that word is because while that is amazing, and I think it works for a lot of people, and I encourage a lot of people to do it, if those tools were available to me as a 17-year-old, I wouldn't have even gone to college.
I would've just been crushing it as a creator, you know? But I think what separates and wh- where you graduate from there is dependent on the amount of operational complexity that you're willing to take on. Yes.
You know? An, an individual creator, there's a reason why they tend to be limited to a couple business models because in order to build more advanced things, you, you literally can't do it all yourself.
I could not run PGA as a solopreneur. It, it, it would be impossible, you know? And so if you want... Or an agency.
I could not run a full-blown agency servicing 80 clients around the world generating millions of dollars- Mm... as just an individual, right? And so who knows?
Maybe AI will change those numbers and, you know, there will be a version that is possible. But I like to think of that separation where creator is sort of you're doing everything yourself and there's- Yeah...
pros, but you're also limited.
And then if you're not a creator, you start to step into that, the, the more mature version, which is an entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur, where you're actually building things, and now you have, you have bigger problems.
Those bigger problems are how do I convince other people to work with me? How do I keep other people motivated?
How do I tolerate all these systems and build all these processes that I might have no idea how to build- Mm-hmm... but I gotta go recruit the right people to help me build them, you know? No, 100%.
I mean, I like to say that any creator is, like, a potential media startup, right? Or, or other form of startup.
Like MrBeast even, people call him a creator because he's on YouTube, but I almost would not- He's so far beyond that. Exactly, yes.
He, he is now just, like, he is running multiple, m- multiple, like, multi-100 million dollar companies, and he happens to be the face or the host of a lot of this content, but he is actually just a scaled media entrepreneur, right?
Yeah. Just like, just because Elon Musk has however many million followers, that doesn't mean he's a creator. Precisely. You know? I think, I think there's this, i...
Yeah, there's an intersection, obviously, and, and media is becoming a baseline skill for everyone. Mm-hmm.
But I like to, I like to think of it as creators are, are typically solopreneurs or, uh, more limited in, in the business models that they can pursue. And again, that's great. It just means that you sort of have it...
Being a creator is like having a higher leverage lifestyle business- Mm-hmm...
in which, you know, you built yourself your dream job, but you still have a job because you gotta show up and you gotta do your song and dance 'cause, like, that's what puts food on the table, right? Yeah.
And, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. But it just, it is a different path than if you were to go the entrepreneur route and actually go, "How do I build a team?
How do I build systems? How do I build this thing that can function without me?" Mm-hmm. Yeah.
So in, in doing that, in building a team, in building a thing that can function without you, and you keep talking about, um, operational complexity.
This is something that you were stressing too when we, last time we talked.
Um, I would love if you could give me, like, two or three moments in your career where you have chosen to add that complexity and kind of the, the struggle of, of, of achieving it, right?
Of like, you know, at X point in time you decided to hire a person, and that was hard at first and then... Anyways.
But, um, yeah, two or three moments in your career where you've added that complexity and kind of the struggle of integrating it.
I mean, the first big one was the moment I went from ghostwriting for myself to saying, "I'm gonna build a ghostwriting agency," you know? I mean, in hindsight, 2016, I was 26 years old.
I had just quit my full-time job as a low-wage copywriter at, at, at an ad agency, and I fell into ghostwriting. And three months later, you know, I'm making 20 grand a month, so that's a quarter million bucks a year,
working, like, four hours a day- Mm... ghostwriting for CEOs. I, I mean, those last couple months of 2016, in hindsight I'm like, wow, I was living the dream. [laughs] I was just...
I, my, my, my burn rate, my expenses were super low. I was still living in my, you know, dumpy little studio apartment in Chicago. Mm. I was just
saving tons of mon- more money than I'd ever saved in my whole life, you know? And I wasn't, I wasn't even working that hard, and I was doing something I enjoyed. And I, and I got to...
I was getting paid a premium to practice writing, and I got to talk to these super smart people, ask them whatever questions I want, and then send them an invoice. Mm-hmm. It was crazy to me.
I thought it was the coolest job ever. And then I would have other, the whole rest of my day to work on other writing. And so the decision to scale into an agency
was really a decision to give up all of those freedoms and benefits, you know? And the thinking, I... You know, at the time I convinced one of my best friends to do it with me.
He was graduating from business school, and he wanted to start a business 'cause he wanted to apply all the things he was learning, you know?
And I had this thing that was working, so we were like, "Let's build an agency together." And really, that decision was a commitment to building a whole set of skills that neither one of us had yet, you know?
And the reality is there were a lot of things that worked, you know? We scaled it to millions of dollars in revenue, and we'd hired, at our height we had 23 full-time employees. We had 80-plus clients around the world.
I mean, it, it was, on paper, like, we did it. We built a business. Um-But at the same time, w- it did- that didn't mean that we were good at the things that we were doing, you know?
I can see now in hindsight, I, I hadn't yet figured out how to articulate how I do what I do. I wasn't as good yet at training other writers. Um, I wasn't as good yet at managing my own stress and emotions.
Um, I wasn't a good enough leader yet. I was young. I was 27 years old. I didn't even know what I wanted out of my life. How was I supposed to give other people career paths? You know what I mean?
Um, we didn't understand systems and processes enough. There... This was also pre-AI. Yeah.
So there were all these things that now are super easy, like transcribing calls, and we were spending thousands of dollars every month sending our recorded Zoom calls over to, you know, some company in another country to transcribe them and then send them back to us.
So it's like that, that commitment to building all those skills at the time was extremely painful. Mm-hmm.
It was extremely painful, it was very hard, and I gave up a lot of freedom, and I gave up a lot of money in order to do that. But that's the journey- Mm-hmm...
'cause then, you know, five years later, seven years later, I start PGA and I am older, I am more equipped, I can handle stress at a different level, I can manage my emotions at a different level.
I've hired and trained tons of people by that point, so I'm more equipped to do that. I better understand processes and systems, you know? And so then that business explodes.
[laughs] And so it's like you have to really extend the time horizon and realize, like, you're probably not gonna get it all right the first time.
You might not get it right the second time or the third time, but if you keep building things, you will eventually internalize all these little skills- Mm-hmm... that then allow you to build something that can grow.
Mm-hmm. Um, what... I'm sure you're delegating a lot, right? And a- as you've said, you've matured and now you're much better as a leader, et cetera.
What in your work do you besi- you know, obviously you make big decisions, et cetera, but what are you not delegating? What is core still? You've got multiple businesses. What do you not give to other people to do?
Uh, admittedly, I think if you had asked me that, that question a year ago, I would've said a ton of stuff. [laughs] Yeah.
Um, but admittedly, that has been a huge focus for us this past year, and I have been able to learn how to delegate a lot, you know? Mm-hmm. Like, I think, I think the, the next thing that I'm really working on,
uh, learning how to delegate is learning how to train other people, especially department heads, on how to continuously improve something without- Mm... me needing to be the one to point out what needs to be improved,
you know? Um, because especially when you have multiple businesses and you have multiple verticals within... or departments within each business, it is very ta- The, the hardest part about my job is context switching.
Yeah.
It's, you know, I could spend eight hours digging into just the success vertical of PGA, and then if I change the context of that and I go, "Well, now let me dig into the sales component," it's a completely different way of thinking, completely different set of problems, completely...
Everything's different. Mm. And then if I change that to, you know, front-end marketing and ads, well, that's completely different. And so the context switching is the most taxing part.
And so a lot of what this year's been about is putting people in place that are in charge of each of those things, and then the next evolution will be, and then how do you train the people who are in charge of those things how to look for areas of improvement over and over and over and over and over again, just like I would do- Mm...
except now I don't have to be the one to do it. The thi- the thing can begin to grow on its own. Mm-hmm. Um, on the writings- Does that make sense? No, that, that makes, that makes complete sense.
It's about, like, externalizing your taste kind of, and you're, like, trying to externalize your context and get people to understand the way you think. Yeah. So much, so much of it is, is documenting.
Like, it's not just, you know, here's your checklist to make sure Airtable is set up correctly, right? It's, it's actually writing out, here's how to make decisions. Here's why Airtable is set up this way.
Here's why we make decisions that way. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. It's hard. Yeah.
Uh, on the subject of, of writing and delegating writing, I know that you do use some ghostwriters for your own content, and I also know that you are good at recycling content, right?
Like, here's something I wrote a year ago. I think it's relevant now. Let's update it slightly and publish it again to all these platforms. Um, so I'm curious the extent to which the...
You're quite prolific on socials, right? The extent to which that is net new content and, um, how... what goes into producing it and distributing it. Yeah. So this is a fun...
It's a fun and funny topic because I find that people have a lot of faulty beliefs when it comes to what you can do with the things that you write.
Oftentimes people will say, like, you can't or you shouldn't, uh, take something that you wrote and then just post it again. Yeah. That will annoy the, the reader, right?
And that would, that would be like saying, "Well, once you read a book on your bookshelf, you're never allowed to read it again," you know? All the, the- That's also very egotistical.
The reader doesn't remember what you posted, right? Yeah. Like... The reader doesn't remember, and the first time you posted it, you reached, you know, 500 people, 1,000 people.
You did not reach everyone on the internet, right? Mm-hmm. So, so much of my thesis when it comes to writing on the internet is based around this idea that, uh, no individual platform matters.
You don't need to spend all this time figuring out, you know, the nuances to hack the algorithm of each in- individual platform.
The most effective, highest leverage thing you could do over a long period of time is just focus on building a library of content in a niche that you wanna write about for a very long time.
The, the example I always use isWhat is Ryan Holiday's niche? Mm-hmm. Ryan Holiday writes about stoicism. He tweets about stoicism. He has me- medium articles about stoicism. He has a newsletter about stoicism.
He has a YouTube channel about stoicism. He has a podcast about stoicism. And guess what? He's about to come out with another book about stoicism, right?
[laughs] And so when, when you look at people who are really successful over long periods of time, the thing that they all share in common is that they created a massive library of content in a niche for 10 years. Mm.
20 years. And if you take that approach, then every new platform, every new opportunity is just another channel for you to take your library and go, "And now I put it over here too." Yeah.
So with that in mind, I have been writing about digital writing and writing on the internet and business models for writers. I've been writing about those things, self-publishing, for 10 years. Mm-hmm. So
little insider, I'll, I'll pull the curtain back. I think 95% of the content that I put out on X, LinkedIn, Instagram... YouTube is a little bit of an outlier because it's, like, newer and I'm figuring that out.
But- No, and it's you... 95- Yeah... and it's me, and I gotta record the videos. Yeah.
But, like, the topics, the scripts, everything, uh, 95% of it is a remixed version of something that I've written in the past, and I wasn't even the one who did it.
[laughs] So we now have a team, you know, that is trained on, all right, here's Cole's library, here are the talking points, here are the things that he hammers home, here are his frameworks, here are his stories.
Just create a new version of it. Yeah. And I think, again, the faulty belief, like if the average person hears that, they're like, "Oh, so I'm not even reading you." But, like, you are. Mm.
You're reading- Just mediated a few times... something that... Yeah. I wr- I have wr- Do you know how many times I have written about how to find your niche as a writer? I do, because I've- Like-...
been researching you for the past couple days. [laughs] Like, I, I have written about it so many times that it, it... If I have to write about it again, it is painful for me.
[laughs] But that doesn't mean that I, that I should stop sharing it. That doesn't mean that I should stop putting it out. So what do, what do our team of ghostwriters do?
They go, "Well, Cole's written about this topic 1,000 times. I'm gonna take a piece from this one, a piece from this one, a piece from this one. I'm gonna smash them together in a new one-" Mm "...
and then we're gonna publish that." And that is what allows you to scale. That is, like, the whole thing that I'm trying to educate more and more founders and CEOs and investors and people with personal brands.
You can't scale yourself.
Like, do you think that, you know, the CEO of some $100 million company has the time to sit down and be like, "I'm gonna write all my tweets for the week, then I'm gonna create all my LinkedIn carousels for the week"?
That, no, you need leverage. Mm-hmm.
And the way that you get leverage without losing your voice and without losing your own stories and some of the things that make you you in the writing, is you focus on building a library over a prolonged period of time, and you have to learn how to work with a ghostwriter.
And if you hire one or y- you know, you work with an agency or whatever it is, you have to learn how to work with a ghostwriter so that you can just speak. Mm-hmm.
And then they can take the things that you say and you distribute them. Yeah.
So this is, like, an interesting topic in that I think the creator economy, right, there's people who are kind of the pure artist, often like journalism on one end, and then there are more the businesspeople, marketers on one end.
Basically people who kind of are doing the craft for the craft's sake and maybe reject some of the principles that would allow them to make a living doing it, and then there are some peop- the people on the other side who maybe are maybe quite cynical, right, about, about the whole thing.
Um, one thing I like about your whole approach to this is you come from, you know, being, going to school to do fiction writing, right?
Like, you come from that world, and then you have this story of like, "Well, shit, I gotta make a living somehow, and it's not gonna be this." Um, and so you... And even the way you were just describing that, right?
Like, this is why I'm, why I'm asking this. Like, uh, you,
you're good at putting some of these, like, good business practices, uh, into terms that are palatable for people who maybe don't come from that world but want to make a living doing this kind of thing. Which is the...
Like, that's kind of the whole goal of, of this podcast, of this newsletter, of Creator Spotlight, right?
Is, like, trying to make these entrepreneurial ideas palatable to people who otherwise would just be laboring forever without ever, you know, going back and remixing the thing and distributing it. Um, what,
what do you find is, like, most effective? Like, I'm sure there's people who have, you know, in, in, in your time educating people more one-on-one to early cohorts, right?
Like, who are very skeptical about like, "Well, no, it's, it's about the craft, and that's what I care about." Mm.
Like, what do you find is most effective in, like, helping those people understand, like, no, you have to give some things up. You have to compromise if you wanna make a living doing this.
So this is, this is one of my favorite topics, and I think it's one of my favorites because I have spent a lot of time reflecting on my own journey of figuring that out for myself. Yeah.
And I also think that it is something that holds a tremendous amount of creative potential in people from ever getting shared with the world and them actually achieving their potential.
I fundamentally reject this idea that either you care deeply about the craft, and you're this purist and all of the associations that you have with that, or you are just this like,
you know, money-grubbing marketer that is just, you don't even care about the craft. Yeah. And, and whenever people talk about this topic, they talk about it in those two extremes, okay? Mm-hmm.
And the reason that I reject thatIs because first of all, I spent a lot of years of my life being a broke purist, really, really frustrated that I was broke.
And the irony of when you ask someone, you know, "Why do you wanna write? Why do you wanna create? Why do you wanna do what you do?" The vast majority of people will give you the purist answer first. Mm.
And they will say, "I wanna do what I love. It's fulfilling for me. I really care about it." And then if you wait two seconds later, they will complain about how they're not making any money from it.
And so it actually is neither. Mm. The other point is that when I, when I talk about things like leverage or working with a ghostwriter or remixing your content so that you get more distribution on your ideas,
people will often, uh, immediately take what I'm saying and put me in that money-grubbing marketer box and go, "Oh, Cole doesn't actually care about writing. He doesn't care about the craft.
He just, he just wants to make money." And the irony is that
I think a lot of people really misunderstand how much I truly care about the craft of writing and how even though I have all that leverage working for me, I still write 5,000 to 10,000 words a day.
I still wake up at 5:00 AM and study literature. I still work on a dozen other book projects early in the morning or late at night on my own.
And I think part of the reason why I feel so confident talking about building leverage and using these systems and working with ghostwriters and, and, and giving yourself th- that support to scale yourself as a writer or as a creator is because I know that if anybody questioned my ability and they were just like, "Oh, he's just doing that 'cause he doesn't actually care.
He doesn't care about the craft," I will get on Zoom with any person who questions that, and I will write whatever you want me to write in front of you for as long as you want me to write.
If you want it in 15 minutes or if you want me sitting there for 15 hours, and you will watch me do it in front of you. 'Cause I've put in that many, uh, like literally like 20,000 hours. Yeah. And so that's...
Because I've experienced this and I've, and I've learned this so viscerally, that's why I see this, this cognitive dissonance where people think it's either art or business, and it's not.
It's that if you become business savvy, you have more time for art. You have more... I just, I just finished a, or not, I'm, I'm about to finish a fiction project that I've been working on for two years.
I invested $100,000 of my own money into the audiobook of this fiction project. No publisher, no investors, noth- just exactly what I wanted to create, and I put up my own money.
So when people say, "Oh, like you're not a purist," it's like, no, I actually have the resources now to do- Yeah...
all of the really cool things that I've always wanted to do, and you are giving yourself a cop-out saying, "I don't have to build these skills because I'm a purist." Okay.
Well [laughs] what are you actu- [laughs] Do, do you get to write for eight hours a day? No. So what is, what are you gaining by saying that? And so I, I feel so... If you can't gather from my tone- I love it...
I feel so strongly that these two extremes are just, they're holding people back.
And, and you will find so much creative potential and freedom when you marry the two and realize, I-- artists can use the business to their advantage. Yeah.
And business people can use taking art to, and using that to their advantage. And I just don't understand why these two worlds are kept so separate. I 100% agree.
I 100% agree, and I'm glad you, I'm glad [laughs] you went on this tirade about it. Um, yeah, I think... I mean, to me, it's like that's the key to success on the internet. I, I said the creator economy.
You could say the intention economy, the information space. It all kind of blurs together, right? It's like you, you need to have both.
You need to understand like how to write a sentence, and you also need to know what the acronym LTV means, right? It's, it's- Yeah... as simple as that if you wanna have a good- Yeah... newsletter or something.
Um, something that I've, I saw you, you or, or your ghostwriters, uh, distributing across social media was this, uh, post, "10X writers are the new 10X software engineers," um, which I totally agree.
I, I've been saying my own version of that recently. I just wrote a piece for it, about it for Creator Spotlight, which is that learn marketing is the new learn to code.
And m- maybe that learn marketing bit could learn a bit of work, could use a bit of workshopping. Maybe it's just learn to be a good writer.
Um, but I'd love you to speak on that, this 10X writers are the new 10X software engineers idea. Well, I mean, what's been fascinating watching ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and all, all these new tools is
how do we interact with all these tools? We don't interact with them... Well, I mean, you can, but the, but the primary consumer way that you interact with these tools is not through code.
It's through the English language. It's through a chat window. And so to me, like I remember when I first played with ChatGPT for the first time in 2022, 2021, I forget, when it came out. I think it was then, yeah.
I will never forget the first... Like, I didn't even mean to do it.
I just sat down and intuitively started articulating, "Well, yeah, here's the thing that I'm looking for, and here's how I want you to create it, and I don't just want you to create it like this.
I want you to follow these rules." And like instantly, I started getting high-quality outputs. And I would look at other people using it, and they'd be like, "Oh, I, I... It's all just slop.
I can't get it to produce a high-quality output." And to me, it seemed so intuitive. I, I, I was like, "I've already written about this thing that I want a thousand times.
Now I'm just writing about it in a chat window and having some leverage. Now the technology can help me do it."And so over the past couple years, as I've spent more and more time writing with AI,
I've really realized that the bottleneck to using all of these platforms is your ability to write. Mm. And
e- the bottleneck to writing effectively, this is like the part that everybody misses, is actually not all your knowledge about the craft of writing necessarily.
The, the true bottleneck to writing effectively is your ability to think clearly and articulate the thing that you are trying to automate. You can't automate something that you can't articulate. And so
it's like if writing wasn't a important skill before AI, it is now the most important skill because, A, that is how you interact with the tools, but B, because writing is the dominant vehicle for crystallizing your thinking.
You can't automate something that you can't articulate. Precisely.
Um, another thing related to the conversation we were just having about, uh, the, you know, this false business craft divide, um, I'm gonna summarize a story I heard you say on another podcast.
So you were, you were 27, you're working as a ghostwriter, you went to a lunch meeting in LA. The client was a crypto startup, um, and they were having you write a white paper.
And you decided you're gonna go big, you're gonna charge 10K. You almost chicken out when it's time to say the price. You- you're, you're about to go lower, but you say 10K, and the guy says, "Okay, 10K.
We're gonna do that because you told me that, but I was gonna pay you up to 30K. I was prepared to pay you that much."
Um, and you told this story as an example of not understanding your value and not being able to articulate it to other people and being afraid to value, to, to value yourself and to really figure out your place in the market.
Um, I know that this is probably part of your work, I don't know, in Premium Ghostwriting Academy is, is helping pe- training people past this. Um, yeah, what would you tell people who
are currently going through that same problem of articulating their value? Oh, man. I, I have trained... I mean, we're probably coming up on 2,000 people have gone through PGA at this point. And I will tell you that
80% of the reason why people struggle to charge their worth, as they say, or just charge more- Mm-hmm... um, is not that they lack the ability to understand the, the hard skills.
Like, yeah, there's some tactical stuff of, um, here's how you should package your service. Here's how you should present what you do. You know, here's how you should speak to the, the problem that you're solving.
Like, that tactical stuff, very easy to teach someone. The hard part is everyone's relationship with money.
And it's, it is one of those things where, uh, what works for one person, like, and, and what, uh, you say that can help someone, uh, overcome that faulty belief in them is different than what's gonna work for another person.
'Cause each person has a different sort of relationship with money. And I find that the majority of what I do inside PGA is coaching people through how they think about their value and how they think about money.
And every person goes through the same general process.
You know, their nuances might be different, but the general process is when you first start y- providing any sort of service, you have a very hard time wrapping your head around how someone would pay you $1,000, right?
You have no context for that number. And then if I tell you, "Well, no, you actually could charge $5,000," your brain explodes. [laughs] You know, you can't do it. It...
And, and what I've learned is it's a little bit, it's a little bit like taking someone who's never been to the gym before,
they've never picked up a weight ever in their whole life, and you walk up to the dumbbell rack, and you jump to, "All right. So why don't you grab the, the 40s? Why don't you grab the 50s?"
The person's gonna freak out, and they probably can't do it. Like, they, their body literally, like, they can't do it, right? So what do you have to do? You gotta start them at the 10s.
You gotta slowly build them up, right? And there's a reason why almost every person that goes through PGA, I go, "We're gonna show you how to ghostwrite a five-day educational email course.
You're gonna pitch it to a business owner, and you're gonna pitch it for five grand." And almost every single person can't get the words $5,000 out of their mouth.
[laughs] And so what they do is they revert back because they have some sort of faulty relationship with money, and so they revert back, and they go, "I, I charged $1,000."
Client, of course, is gonna say yes to that 'cause they're like, "Wow, this person's really undercharging." They're a steal.
And then, and, and what happens is it's the same, you know, metaphor as the gym is they start with $1,000, then they sit there, and they're like, "Wait. I could have charged more. Why did I do that?"
They gain a little bit of confidence. They're like, "Next time, I'm gonna charge 1,500. Then next time, I'm gonna charge two grand. The next time, I'm gonna charge 2,500."
And I find that a lot of people, the only way to really overcome these faulty beliefs around money or what you feel like you can charge is by undercharging and then realizing how frustrated you feel because you just signed yourself up for something that you could have charged more for.
And if eventually most people get frustrated, this was my experience too, most people get frustrated undercharging for so long where eventually they snap, and they go, "All right. Fine.
I'm just gonna say the higher number." You know, they almost do it to spite me. They're like, "Fine, Cole. I've had enough. I'm gonna say the higher number."
[laughs] And then they do, and then the client says yes, and then it... and then they're like, "Why didn't I do that the whole time?" So there's, there... It is a, it is a very emotional thing.
And of course, everybody wants to believe that, oh, I can just figure that out on my own. But that's not what happens. You know?
What happens is they try, and then they fail, or they run into some friction, and then they question themselves, and then they talk themselves out of doing it, and then they give up.You know, that is, that is fundamentally why we build PGA the way that we did.
Because we... The value isn't just saying, "Here, you should package your services like this." Yeah.
The value is they, they package their services like this, they go to a client, the client says something, and then they freak out. And we go, "Don't freak out. It's okay. Do this. Do this instead." You know? Yeah.
Totally.
Whi- which, I mean, brings me back to a thought on education, on, like, the conversation, conversation on educational products w- we were having at the beginning of this conversation, which is that, like, what makes a good educational product and what makes your information education products popular, um, and gives them a good reputation, is this sort of hands-on nature, the relationship with instructors, the relat- the relationship between students, right?
Like, it's... That's kind of the mistake is thinking that it's about the information itself. It's about the relationships with other people in this context.
Yeah, I mean, I, I would say, you know, don't, don't get it twisted. Obviously there's, there's information in education that people- Yes... find extremely valuable.
But, but you need the other people to activate it, right? But yes, yes. I would say generally our, our thesis and perspective is we want to wrap education in community. We wanna wrap it in accountability. Mm-hmm.
We wanna wrap it in either people or systems that increase the likelihood that a student is successful. Mm-hmm. You know?
I mean, we don't, we don't promise this, but we've had students join PGA as a complete beginner, and a year later now are running ghost writing agencies of their own doing 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 grand a month. Yeah.
You know? And so it's... All of these things are possible. The thing that I tell every writer is, it's, it's not h- do, do these things work or not? It's not are these things possible or not?
The question is, are you willing to go on the journey to make them work for you? Mm-hmm. You know? And so if you are- If you go to the gym and you go every day, you're gonna get stronger.
It's just a matter of if you're gonna g- go show up and, and lift some weights. Yeah. And if you're not gonna show up, I could, I can give you all the answers, but it's not gonna do anything, you know? Yeah. No, totally.
Um, so your books. We haven't talked about your books really. Uh, you are... You said you're publishing a, a new fiction book soon. Um, you've published a memoir, a few fiction books, um, a few non-fiction books.
I think one of yours, The Art and Business of Online Writing, right? Or is it The Art and Business of Writing Online? Mm-hmm. I think it sold over 40,000 copies. You recently...
Your Amazon publishing account recently got shut down. Um, I was just checking and I think it might be back up.
But, uh, you also tweeted the other day that you are considering republishing it in 2026 to, to the point we were making earlier about, uh, you know, refreshing the thing and adding new bits.
Um, but what are some of the new ideas that you would, that you would be stressing in this new edition for 2026? What are the new rules, new patterns?
Um, I remember when I wrote The Art and Business of Online Writing in 2020, and I, I knew... You know, the challenge with a topic like that is the writing landscape does change. Moving target. You know?
It, there, there is, there is a timeliness aspect of it. But I didn't want the book to be timely. I didn't want it to be relevant just for a year.
So I tried to write as much of it as possible sharing these principles that are never gonna change. You know?
Like, the way that you think about headlines, or the way that you write hooks, or the way that you format your write. Like, those, those things are really not gonna change all that much. Boron letters type shit. Yeah.
And I, i- if I do a re-released version, I think some of the pieces that I would tweak would be platforms. Mm.
Like, when I wrote, uh, that book, one of the platforms that I stressed was Quora, and Quora in the late 2010s was an amazing platform. Um, today less so. I think, I think that platform has really gone down.
Uh, the founders, I don't... I could spend a whole hour talking about the decisions they made, but, um- Let me turn it into an hour then [laughs]... Quora, Quora is... Yeah. Quora is not what it used to be. Yeah.
Um, same thing with Medium. You know? In 2018, 2019, Medium was an amazing channel. Uh, today not at all. You get almost no distribution on Medium. Uh, my recommendations more today would be X and LinkedIn are- Mm...
tremendous, you know, traffic vehicles for your writing. Um, Substack and Substack Notes I think is very interesting.
Um, Beehiiv and the different, uh, like, uh, business model things that you guys are doing with the ad network and, uh, pairing sponsors with newsletters, I find that to be very interesting, especially 'cause that removes a lot of operational complexity for creators.
You know? People that don't wanna do those things themselves. So there, there have been new tools and new things that would be worth speaking to, but
yeah, I don't, I don't know that I want to make that a thing where, okay, well I'm, now I'm updating those, this every five years. Maybe. I, I, I haven't decided yet.
I have, I actually have another art and business book that I want to prioritize writing first. Uh, and so my goal is to ship that out in 2026.
And then if I have some time, maybe I'll go back and- Book's art and business of what? It's gonna be The Art and Business of Category Copywriting. Mm. So it's, it's all about, uh... I, I think that
copywriting is probably one of the most misunderstood words in all of writing, and the vast majority of people who are in copywriting actually have no idea what game they're actually playing. Yeah.
Everyone calls everything copywriting. And category copywriting is this idea of specifically writing things to differentiate yourself from- Mm... any competitors.
It i- it, it is how you create a niche or a category for yourself. And-Uh, I've never seen anyone write about this topic.
I've b- I've kept a note on my phone for the past five years of just, like, examples I see out in the world. So I'm really, I'm really excited about this one. Okay. Well, stay tuned.
Um, last thing, I know that you keep, like, a dozen books or so on your desk at once, and you're, you know, constantly reading through bits and pieces of each one.
Uh, what are, what are two books that you've particularly enjoyed recently? Um, let's see. I've got- What's on the desk? [laughs] Let's see. What do we have right here? I've got... Oh.
We've got, um, Something To Do With Paying Attention, which was a, uh, like, an excerpt of an, a novel in progress by David Foster Wallace. Oh, nice. Um, which was published after he died.
It's very chaotic, but I really like the, the voice in it.
Um, this is a book I read in college that I'm rereading called Body, uh, written by Harry Crews, and it's about this guy who trains this woman to win this bodybuilding competition. Um, it's awesome.
It's, it's very literary. He's a great, like, very gritty type of writer. Uh, s- yeah, he's just a fantastic writer. I'm super into it. I was rereading, um, Robert Greene's Mastery recently. Nice. I love this book.
This book, like, changed my life, uh, when I graduated from college.
And this actually, this book really inspired me to start taking writing, like, really, really seriously, and, uh, I read that and then started writing on Quora, and then here we are. There you go.
Um, I am re- I'm rereading my first memoir, Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, because- How's that?... in 2026- How's the, how's that experience? Honestly, I s- I still think it's the best thing I've ever written. Yeah.
It is, it is so- You spent four years on it, right? It's so good. Yeah. And you can tell. Mm. It's so good. And, um, in 2026 will be the 10-year anniversary.
I published this 10 years ago, and so I think what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna re-release it with a new cover and sort of celebrate the 10-year anniversary, 'cause I love, I love this book. And then lastly, um...
Or actually, I did, I started reading, uh, The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel. Mm-hmm. Not bad. And then, uh, I'm also reading, uh, The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse- Nice... which is, um, a classic.
So- I've read, of course, Siddhartha. Yeah. I think I, I think Damian's by him, too. I've read that one, but I haven't read him for a while. Nice. I'm currently reading, uh, Shadow Ticket, the new Pinchin.
[upbeat music] Oh, cool. It's good. Yeah, really good stuff. Nice. Um [laughs] Yeah, always looking for new, new reads. Yeah. I'll, I'll, maybe I'll, I'll share some more after, after we turn it off. Um, but cool.
Thank you for coming on. This was fun. This was great. Good questions. I appreciate it. Thank you. Of course. Gotta bring the questions. All right. Uh, that's it. Listener, we'll see you next week.
[upbeat music] If you enjoyed the episode and are interested in writing online, one of the best ways you can do that is with a newsletter, which is why I recommend watching this episode next with Nathan May.
Nathan runs a newsletter growth agency, and he gives away tons of great information in this episode about how to grow and monetize a newsletter. It's a great episode. Give it a watch next.