Jimmy Soni has listened to 400+ interviews with Kobe Bryant over the past four years. Turns out, Kobe wanted to be the next Walt Disney after basketball, so he obsessively studied storytelling and wrote every day for 15 years.
After Kobe, we talked about professional writing habits, why Michael Lewis wrote under a pseudonym, and why Jimmy loves using AI to write so much.
The highlights:
The world is a conspiracy designed to prevent you from writing.
Jimmy sees himself in a battle against that world to find four hours per day to do focused writing.
“I’m researching” is often an excuse not to write. People spend decades researching books they never write, and it’s a writers job to come up with ways to get research done without falling down a black hole.
Using AI to write is like using a very sharp knife to cook. The tool might make it easier, but you still have to cook the meal.
If you can’t outwrite the AI, what are you doing writing in the first-place?
Find a Model Book to serve as the ”plaster cast” for the book you’re writing and study it obsessively. Jimmy wanted his book, “The Founders” to be like “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone, and read it more than 20 times to understand what made it so good.
People think that being a professional writer means going to a lot of cocktail parties, but the reality is that the work involves showing up to work every day, putting away the distractions, and focusing for many, many hours. You go to bed early, you wake up early, you get your work done. Do it every day for months in a row and you’ll have a book.
A problem with traditional publishing is that the entire system is predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks. If it’s not, publishers largely give up and move onto something else.
What looks like a talent gap is often just a focus gap. Amateur writers severely underestimate just how much time and effort goes into great books.
A/B test the cover art for your book. It’s so easy, so cheap, and as the saying goes: People do judge a book by its cover.
Before Michael Lewis was “Michael Lewis,” he wrote under the pen name of Diana Bleecker because he was writing about Wall Street while working on Wall Street, and didn’t want people to know who he was.
Ambition is fuel that can burn relatively clean for a little while, only to become dirty later on. Jimmy says: “For the true greats, the sustained motivation needs to come from something deeper. It needs to come from love. That’s the only sustaining force there is.”
Michael Lewis was an art history major at Princeton, and once recounted that a lot of Renaissance-era paintings look quite similar. But if you want to see the idiosyncrasies, look at the toenails. That’s where the artists would lose their steam or put in the most individuality, so they’re some of the most distinctive parts of the art. Many fields have an equivalent — a place where you can find hidden answers, if only you know where to look.
Kobe built his own publishing company because he didn’t feel like the big publishing houses could deliver the level of quality he demanded.
Kobe once spent two weeks redesigning the barcode on one of his books because he wanted it to blend more fluidly with the back cover design (no traditional publisher would do something like this).
Transcript
Table of Contents
[04:43] Kobe's Oscar and Further Accomplishments
[07:16] Kobe's "Dear Basketball" Poem
[12:14] Kobe's Approach to Storytelling
[17:57] Applying Kobe's Principles to Writing
[23:27] Building a Writing Routine and Process
[29:00] Overcoming Writer's Block and Fear
[33:45] The Role of AI in Writing
[39:18] Jimmy's Current Project: The Tao of Kobe
Jimmy Soni:
If Kobe Bryant had lived, he would have been on how I Write.
David Perell:
Jimmy Soni says that the whole world is a conspiracy to stop you from writing. He's the guest on today's show, and he's done all kinds of writing. He's written books, op-eds, done the business stuff—you name it.
He's working on a book about Kobe Bryant, and I didn't realize this, but Kobe wanted to become the Walt Disney of the 21st century. That was his plan. So, he studied writing, he studied storytelling, and he obsessed to, like, the level of Kobe obsession. And then we got into the world of AI. How does Jimmy use it for editing, for research? And we got really tactical. Let's rock.
When we were chatting before this, you said the craziest thing to me. You said if Kobe Bryant was still alive, he would have been on how I Write. He would have been on how I Write. And I was like, "What do you mean? What do you mean?" You said, "I'll tell you when we get to the podcast." So what do you mean?
Jimmy Soni:
All right. So I have to offer a bit of context for that comment because I'm 58 and never played professional basketball and grew up loving Jordan's Bulls. So this is a little bit of a non sequitur, but it's an important one.
Around the pandemic, I was—it was rough. I would say it was particularly rough for parents of young kids because you suddenly are caged with these tiny creatures who are accustomed to having much more freedom, and you all of a sudden can't have them interact with other people. At the beginning, you had to be very careful; you didn't know enough about COVID, all that stuff. So, people turn to different sources of relief for this. They turn to alcohol, television, whatever. My source of relief was that I needed to get through big projects: the Founder's book, which I was working on, business things, client things, and raising a daughter. I built a pod school, and it was all very hard.
I somehow stumbled onto this video of Kobe Bryant. It was one of these video interviews that he did where he was talking about discipline and mental toughness and resilience and going through his Achilles injury and everything else. Just as a casual way of providing myself with a morning's dose of inspiration, I would basically wake up and watch Kobe videos. Every single morning for a year or two, I would wake up, and one of the first things I would do is watch five or eight minutes on Kobe.
The more I started to do that, the more I started to realize that he was a much bigger figure than just a successful basketball player. Just at the level of brass tacks, he won an Academy Award, he won an Emmy. He was a successful investor. He was working on homelessness. He was a coach for his daughter's teams.
So I started to learn more about him, and one of the things that I learned is that in his life after basketball, what he wanted to do was become a storyteller and become a preeminent storyteller. He wanted to be Walt Disney. He wanted to be Walt Disney for this generation. He had written or conceived of, I think, like five novels. Four or five of which came out. He had written, I think, the beginnings of a Broadway musical. There were screenplays in the works. He had a whole media ecosystem that he was building to take storytelling and turn it into something.
At first, my reaction was probably the reaction of a lot of people: "Well, good for him. He's a celebrity. He's got millions of dollars. He can do whatever he wants." No, the difference is that Kobe actually studied the craft of writing. Every day for 15 years, he journaled. He studied Joseph Campbell, he studied the Hero's journey, he read Hemingway. He would go interview writers.
David Perell:
George R.R. Martin.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah, he would hang out with George R.R. Martin, and they would talk about writing, and he would pick his brain. He loved J.K. Rowling's work, so he would go obsessively study it. He obsessively studied the art and craft of storytelling.
Fast forward, when we were talking, I was like, "You know, the person who—had he not met his untimely end—he would have been a guest on this podcast because I think he actually loved writing and storytelling more than you and I do, which is saying something."
So what I decided to do with all of that is actually my next project is going to be a book in the spirit of the Almanac of Naval Ravikant or the Almanac of Charlie Munger, and it's called the Tao of Kobe. The idea is what happens if you look at him not just as a figure in sports, but as a much bigger figure in self-improvement and excellence. I'm collecting all of these quotes from about 400, 450 interviews and stitching them together into a story of his life that I don't think most people are familiar with.
[04:43] Kobe's Oscar and Further Accomplishments
David Perell:
There's something that also happened that you didn't mention, which is he won an Oscar for Best Animated Short film.
Jimmy Soni:
The story there is actually such a cool story, and to me, the inspiring thing is that there are a few inspiring angles. One is you're this person who's at the top of his craft in one craft, basketball.
The typical route for someone like that after they leave the game is to go do TV or go be a celebrity spokesperson. Go sell whatever—tires, grills, cars, anything.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
When he was in the year or two before he was getting ready to leave the game, people would ask him what he wanted to do next. He would say, "I want to be a storyteller," and they would basically laugh at him. They would say, "Oh, that's cute. What are you going to do when you get serious?"
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
Part of what they didn't know is how much time he had spent actually trying to become a better writer. This was a process that started when he was in high school. He had a really good English teacher, and she got him inspired about storytelling. So he started just working on things.
People don't know he was the ghostwriter behind most of his ads, all of his shoe ads.
Yeah, he wrote all of his own shoe ads. He would do the copy and then work with other people, but he was actually the pen behind a lot of his ads. He wrote rap music. It didn't do well, but he was at least interested. He actually talked about how doing rap taught him how to think about musicality in words and harmony and the ways things fit together.
David Perell:
I saw also how much you can pack a punch in a sentence.
Jimmy Soni:
A sentence.
David Perell:
Rap really forced you to compress your language.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah. For him, it was a little bit of a source of embarrassment because there were these videos of him rapping and stuff that were not the best, but it taught him a lot about writing.
When he was getting ready to leave the game of basketball, the typical way you do this is you have a press conference, right? You assemble the mat, you assemble the cameras, you assemble your family, your friends, and you announce that you're leaving. He decided to write a poem, so he wrote a poem called "Dear Basketball" that was published on Players Tribune. It was entirely his work.
David Perell:
He.
Jimmy Soni:
He wrote it, I think in one sitting or something, but it had taken a lot of time, obviously, to nurture these thoughts. He called it a love letter to the game. The idea was that he was going to write a letter to the game of—he was anthropomorphizing basketball—and saying, "I'm going to write a letter to you, basketball." That's why it was called "Dear Basketball."
He writes it, and then this is sort of vintage Kobe, he starts to think about what else you could do with something like that, because it made a real impact. Nobody had ever done this before. This is not the typical behavior of any elite athlete.
[07:16] Kobe's "Dear Basketball" Poem
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
He had been in touch with John Williams of symphonic fame, Star Wars, you know, he's done every musical score that's important for the last 25, 30 years, and Glen Keane, who was a Pixar animator who was most famous for, I think, doing Little Mermaid or something. He had done some series of different Pixar films that have been amazing.
He had been in touch with them, and he basically had this idea for turning the poem into an animated short. He went to them with the idea and said, "Listen, I have this concept. I want to turn this into a film. I think it could be a short film, but I think it needs hand-drawn animation."
He essentially just picked up the phone, talked to John Williams, and said, "Would you be willing to do this for the score, for the music?" John was like, "Well, I'm in the middle of Star Wars right now, so can you wait a little bit?" Kobe's response was like, "Yeah, I could wait a little bit."
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
He puts this team together, and they do this short film. No one knows how it's going to do. He doesn't know how it's going to do. Then it's a marvel. It's a triumph. It's beautiful, and it's beautifully done. He's an Academy Award finalist. Then they announce his name, and he's won. It's this incredible movie.
He was the first athlete to ever win an Academy Award, and it was something that he wrote and created and crafted along the way. He and Glen Keane shared the Oscar for it because obviously Glenn Keane's the animator that did the work.
It's incredible. For me, it's such an amazing story about just taking something from one format, writing, and turning into another. That's one piece of inspiration. The other is as a basketball player, you could imagine the looks that he's getting when he's working on something like this. Imagine talking to your closest friends or your agent about calling Glen Keane to ask him to animate a short film with you. People would be like, "Dude, just go sell Gatorade and make a billion dollars, right?"
[12:14] Kobe's Approach to Storytelling
David Perell:
I had the very distinct advantage of you sent me some of your notes, so I got to read all these things. There's a line where he says, "I'm out. I'm on the road with my team members." They're like, "Hey, why don't you come out with us?" He's like, "I'm not going to go out. I got to work on my writing. I got to study Joseph Campbell." People are just like, "Dude, what are you doing?"
Jimmy Soni:
The other part of it that's inspiring to me was when I was in the middle of the pandemic, I was working on a book, and I just remember thinking, if Kobe Bryant was working on this book, he would be working like five times harder. It actually set a standard for how someone should work, because what he did was he just took the discipline that he had for basketball and applied it to writing. That's unbelievable to me. It is the most inspiring thing to think about.
He just took his schedule. He described his schedule at one point, and somebody asked him after he retired, what do you do every day? And there are all these athletes that go through intense depression. They don't know what to do, where to go. They've had a schedule, a routinized life for 20 years or 10 years or 5 years.
He said, I get up, I drop. He's like, it's the same schedule. I get up, I work out, I drop my kids off at school, I go to the office, and I write for eight or nine hours. And then I come home. It was the same schedule that he had as an athlete.
So it was super inspiring to me because I was like, this isn't somebody that was born with genius or became a writer when they were 12. Everybody identified that they were a talent. He just worked at it and worked at it and worked at it over decades while becoming one of the best basketball players of all time. If he can do that, I can definitely get up and work a little bit harder on my books.
David Perell:
Right. The thing that struck me was he was asked, what is hard about writing? What do you get out of basketball that you don't get in writing? He said it's the feedback, the energy. In basketball, if you make a shot, the crowd goes wild, whatever it is.
When you write, part of the thing that you miss is the look on someone's face when they read it for the first time. He was like, I wish I could just be in the car with the kids when they watch a movie that I make for the first time. It bummed him out that he couldn't really do that.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah, there were some moments where he did get feedback and you could just tell what it did for him. The truth is that I actually think someone asked him once, and I think he answered that he loved storytelling just as much as he loved basketball.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
That actually it was a passion with equal force. I just remember thinking, like, my God, that's incredible. To be able to even speak in those terms as a pro player. He wasn't using the language that most pro players use when they talk about something they're interested in.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
There's this great interview I found where the person actually asks him, "So Kobe, are you going to, would you want to come do TV? I mean, you could be like Charles Barkley." He actually gets almost uncomfortable.
He cracks a joke at the end, saying, "I'll do the contract if you give me 60% of the royalties or revenue or whatever." But at the beginning, he's like, "No, that's not what I'm going to do. That's what they do. I'm going to go become a storyteller, and I'm going to go find stories around the world and then craft them and work on them and release them."
He actually was so passionate about storytelling that when he took his book ideas to publishers, what they would do is they would put him in the cookie cutter like, "Well, you're a successful celebrity or athlete. You have a big following. Here's how we do the book." And he actually rejected book deals.
He decided to create his own publishing company because they weren't going to invest in the quality of the books that he wanted to do. Here's an example. He talks in this one interview, and by the way, this is, so just to give people a window into this, I'm on year three and a half or four of diving into every Kobe interview there is. These are not the famous press conference interviews after the 81-point game. I'm watching the ones that he did on Chinese television that are 12 minutes that have a thousand YouTube views.
But what I found was that he actually spent two weeks with his team re-architecting the barcode on one of his books because he wanted the barcode to more fluidly and elegantly blend into the backdrop of the book. No publisher was going to spend two weeks and huge amounts of resources to re-architect a barcode. So at every part of it, he was like, "What's the highest quality thing we could do?" Publishers were giving him insufficient answers, so he designed his own publishing company so the books could be better.
It's incredible. That's an incredible level of commitment at betting on yourself when you have big publishing houses saying, "Yeah, you're Kobe Bryant. We will work with you." And he's like, "You're not going to do it to my level." It blew my mind. That is true love of craft right there.
At every stage of the craft, he talked about the importance of outlining, how obsessed he was with getting the perfect word on the page, really obsessing over sentences and paragraphs and structure, making sure that things were relevant to readers. He had daughters, so he talked a lot about how sports heroes, he had never seen a sports fantasy novel. That was what he wanted to do.
He's like, "Yeah, but it has to be female leads because I'm the daughter of all girls. I've got to find a way to inspire them." So he was reinventing the craft even as he was learning it, which I also really respected and admired. So that's kind of this hidden part of his life that to people like you and I, it's an approach to craft that is about discipline and about stick-to-itiveness and just about actually loving the thing itself. He loved the thing itself.
David Perell:
The other thing that stuck out with Dear Basketball is a lot of people said, "It's not going to work. Basketball's too niche. You know, there's not a lot of people who play the game. It's just not going to be enough, man."
What ended up happening, and I forget the exact details, but what happened was they said, "No, a lot of people can relate to your obsession with basketball, and they'll be obsessed with something like that in their life."
Kobe, when I was reading your notes, I saw that Kobe would think a lot about the introspection of the emotions that you're going through. People are different, but if you go to Italy, if you go to China, human emotions—love, loss, grief, dreams, hopes, whatever it is—they're the same. If you can really do the introspection and get to the core of your emotion, then whatever it is, no matter how niche that thing you produce is, whether it's basketball or painting or whatever, it's really going to resonate because those core emotions are so timeless.
As I was looking at your notes, I was like, "Whoa."
Jimmy Soni:
He is thinking at that level.
What struck me about his life and some of his research and some of the people that he was in touch with is that he would look for people who felt that exact same feeling you just described. So he went to George R.R. Martin because George R.R. Martin feels the same way about his work that Kobe felt about basketball. He would talk to Jony Ive because Jony Ive felt the same way about product design that Kobe felt about basketball.
He would look for these luminaries in every field, not because they were successful or famous, but because they were so obsessed with every detail, so obsessed at getting right. He actually did this long riff on a podcast where he was talking about Taylor Swift, and you would think, okay, girl dad. Look, I have been to the Eras tour twice. I'm a devout Taylor Swift fan, huge Swiftie, in part because I have a daughter, and it was a huge bonding thing for us, but also, I think she's incredible.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
The thing is you'd expect him to kind of say the same thing. What he said was really different. He said the reason that I wanted to get to know her is not just because my daughters enjoy the music and I enjoy the music. The reason is because I wanted to understand how someone could be at that level of their craft for as long as she has been at that level of her craft.
So he was thinking about longevity. He would go and find these people, and I think what he found is probably what you and I have found, which is at base, there has to be an impulse that's love. It has to be about love because everything else actually falls apart.
Ambition is a fuel that burns relatively clean for a while, and then it cannot burn so clean. Revenge probably doesn't burn very clean. So I think you can find the fuel that you need.
Granted, great writing has often come out of those impulses, too. But the true greats, I think it has to come from love. It's the only sustaining force there is.
So he would go, and I remember reading that he actually would go and find somebody in a totally unrelated field and just go to school on them. He said that he read, watched, or saw everything that Bruce Lee had ever done. Every single word, syllable uttered by Bruce Lee. And then the obsession went to the next level. He decided to study Jeet Kune Do, the martial art that Bruce Lee really made a mainstream phenomenon. He decided to study it so he could get inside his head even more.
[17:57] Applying Kobe's Principles to Writing
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
I think of this as somebody who was looking for other people who love that fiercely. Kobe was on a search for people who love something as much as he loved basketball. He describes in one of the interviews I watched that he was obsessed with the smell of the basketball. He loved it so much, he would smell basketballs because he loved it. He loved the sound of a basketball. And he knew he could tell by the sound what kind of floor it was hitting.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
Because he had just obsessed over the sounds.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
That kind of thing, I think, does not come from, I really need to make sure I hit 35 points a game.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
Yes, there's a part of it that is achievement and ambition and competition, but he truly loved the game. And then he went looking for people who just loved anything as much as he loved the game. He had this great line that I always think about, actually, always makes me think about you, because this is like your friendship. My friendship is born of this kind of obsession.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
There's no accident that we connected. We're obsessed with many of the same things. He has this line. Somebody asks him, Kobe, do you have friends? And he pauses. It was an interview in GQ, and it roughly says, he roughly answers the question. He says, not really. He said, what I have are fellow obsessives.
He says, so I'm grateful that I live in LA because in LA there are people who love what they do as much as I love what I do. And he goes on, and he says, am I the friend who's always going to remember your birthday or be at every event? No. But I am the person that when I get together with you, we can go full nerd on our thing and really learn from each other's craft.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
I remember thinking, my best friendships are often the people I see the least, but when we're together, there's an energy that you can't match.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
That is, to me, the essence of who he was. It's the essence of the people that you and I study and admire. They look for that in other people, and then they go and just chase it down.
David Perell:
I want to talk about your obsession, your craft, because you are basically the most, you're one of the most obsessed writers that I know personally. The only person I can think of who's maybe more obsessive than you is Robert Caro, which is if you're in that league, you're doing something right. So I want to just talk about any given Tuesday, what is a day in the life of you, and then we'll go from there.
Jimmy Soni:
I can tell you, any given day to day, any given Wednesday, today, I get up, and I start almost every day the same way, which is I go straight into the writing project. There's no muss, no fuss. I get up, lights on, dive right into the work.
There are a few reasons for this. One, it's a system that at this point has worked for me over many, many years. It just works. The other is there's no one bothering you at 4:00 in the morning.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
I'm up at 4:00 AM because the world is a conspiracy designed to prevent writing from happening. Much of the world is designed to screw with my head, my time, my energy.
I see myself in a contest against the world a lot of the time to protect and preserve three to four hours a day where I can write.
People get this all different ways. Some people need to move to a cabin in the woods. I don't have that luxury. I have a daughter, she goes to school in Brooklyn. She lives a normal life. So for me to live the abnormal part of my life, it has to happen from 4:00 AM to around 8:00 or 9:00 AM every day.
During those hours, I'm working on whatever the most important writing project is that I'm working on. It is not email. It is not administrative stuff, the TDM, making sure the kitchen's clean, all of that. I just go straight in.
David Perell:
I'm going to be starting my days at 9:00 in the morning, groggy as hell, triggered by the first espresso of the day, diving into work.
Jimmy Soni:
And I want to start thinking, Jimmy has already done all of his writing for the day. Do you know how humiliating that is? It's not humiliating because your day might. People can find that time whenever they find that time. The point is not the early rising, because it's not some weird aggro badge of pride thing. It's really basic. It's actually super basic in a way, which is writing for me is a tough thing to do.
And in order to do it well, I need to have time where other people don't bother me, where the world doesn't interfere, where I don't feel the pull of the inbox. The truth is, the hours of 4:00 to 8:00 AM, or 4:00 to 9:00 AM, or sometimes 4:00 to 10:00 are ideal because nobody is bothering me. And even when I'm with my daughter, I can eke out 4:00 to, let's say, 7:00 when she wakes up. Then I get time with her where I don't feel like I'm in parent guilt mode.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
You're not robbing Peter to pay Paul.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
Those hours are really protected. A lot of the creatives I know have to shift their schedules this way because after a certain hour, at least for me, nothing functions anymore. I need to turn it off. That's a big part of the 4:00 AM thing.
If I get that work done first and I do it seven days a week, there is no possibility that a book won't get done. I don't know if the book will be good.
David Perell:
Right.
[23:27] Building a Writing Routine and Process
Jimmy Soni:
That's a separate conversation. But there's no chance that something doesn't get done if seven days a week you're doing the most important thing from 4:00 AM to 9:00 AM. It's just math. If you have three to five hours a day that you devote to a thing, you're just going to finish it and then you can go on about the rest of your day. You just stack enough of those days together. This isn't any kind of big breakthrough insight. It's just the process that works for me.
I try to give my best mental energy to the thing that's most important. For me, my best mental energy is the first hours of the day. If I front-loaded other work and then I went to the books later, I'd be giving it regular fuel instead of premium.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
It wouldn't be the premium fuel. The premium fuel is reserved for the morning, and that's reserved for whatever the book project is.
For example, this morning, you and I are going to record. I've been up since 4:00. I was working on Kobe this morning. I know you texted me at 5:16 this morning, like, yeah, I'm ready to go. I was up working on Kobe. Jerry Seinfeld talks about not breaking the chain. I do think so.
David Perell:
Have you ever seen the photo of him in New York with all the yellow legal pads? He would always write on a yellow legal pad. There's an entire street in New York and the whole cement is just covered with yellow legal pads that he had written on over the course of his career. That photo encapsulates the creative residue that comes from obsession and dedication.
Jimmy Soni:
If I do it seven days a week as opposed to five, all right, so I had this feeling a week or two ago. I was on vacation. I was happy to be there, but I did not have the time or the kind of structure to do book work at that moment. I was happy to be there, but I realized I felt off throughout the day. I could feel it in my body chemistry. I was like, I didn't do the thing.
I knew right away something felt off, like it does not feel like a normal day. At this point, it's become such a habit that I can feel it when I don't do it. It's like breathing.
The nice thing is when that becomes your default, this isn't work anymore. I don't wake up and I'm like, oh, God, I gotta work on Kobe again. It's not the salt mines. I'm not packing a lunch pail and going to someplace I don't wanna go. I'm waking up every day and doing the thing that I'm most passionate in the world about.
Because I've just gotten so accustomed to doing it, I protect that time. So I go to bed super early. A lot of people think that the writing life is fancy cocktail parties in Manhattan or whatever. For a lot of the writers I know, it's much more boring. You go to bed early, you wake up early, you get your work done, and that is the most exciting time there is in the day for me.
David Perell:
The other thing I want to talk about is the sheer diversity of writing that you've done. I want to talk about the stuff that you're working on now. But you've done political speech writing, you've done op-eds, you've done ghost writing, you've done books. You've done a whole book about a carousel in Brooklyn. So many different kinds of writing.
Jimmy Soni:
Right, right, right.The less charitable way of doing that would be the Winston Churchill line when he was describing something he was criticizing. He was like, this pudding has no theme.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
It's kind of how I feel about myself sometimes. There are a few reasons for that. One is careers in writing are rarely like a single-track thing. It's hard if you don't know what this industry is all about. Writing, broadly defined, can mean anything. It can mean copywriting for ads; it can mean writing novels. You sort of find your way.
I kind of found my way in different domains: speech writing, op-ed writing, ghostwriting, all sorts of different things, essay writing, and then books. Often, I just had something that I wanted to say, and there was a format that was going to work well for it, so I said it. Or it was just work. I was being paid to do it, and you just get better. I would say that there's a lot of value in thinking of different types of writing as cross-training for your core habit. If we go back to an analogy you and I have used before about training like an athlete, if you're a soccer player, you might do yoga.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
I'm a book writer who also writes op-eds. Op-eds help me become a better book writer. And by the way, writing books helps me become a better op-ed writer. It's cross-training.
It is the way I think about it. I'm stretching different muscles. Op-eds are typically 700 words. That is not a lot to make an important point, so you have to really compress. Where else does word economy help? In every other kind of writing you do, literally every other kind of writing. People are like, "Oh, social media is terrible for writing." Actually, I think Twitter improved a whole generation of writers because it forced them into, at the time, 180 characters, then 240, and now a little longer.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
Word economy is important in any format, and I learned it through op-ed writing. I learned how to take words out of sentences, rearrange things so they're a little shorter. That skill came through a totally different format.
I like having different formats. There are some novelists, other people I know, and nonfiction writers, where the only thing they can work on is one project at a time. I have one core project, but I really like getting my brain into a different mode of writing and then coming back to my core project afterward.
David Perell:
Hmm.
David Perell:
Tell me about research. How does research factor into all this? Whenever I feel like I need to do research, I often use it as an excuse for procrastination. I've got to do research, and then you kind of end up in rabbit holes. I sometimes over-index on the things that I just learned when I'm doing research.
[29:00] Overcoming Writer's Block and Fear
Jimmy Soni:
And.
David Perell:
How does that factor into your writing process? Is that something that you do in the morning, or is that afternoon work?
Jimmy Soni:
That's a great question. It's evolved over time because what I've discovered is that for myself, and I think for a decent number of people, research is an excuse not to write.
David Perell:
Yeah, right, exactly.
Jimmy Soni:
It's like, look, nobody, maybe except you, loves a Wikipedia rabbit hole more than I do. I could spend hours researching random things, but it's often an excuse for putting aside the work that I actually need to do.
Over time, I realized this about myself. I was like, "Look, you're just using your research time as a way of getting out of the anxious feeling that you feel when you have to put pen to paper and actually say stuff because it might embarrass you because it's said badly."
Speaker C:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
You've got some anxiety around this project, and you don't think it's going to work. So what are you going to do? You're going to convince yourself you're doing fake work by doing research.
Speaker C:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
I decided to build this into the system. I typically structure my morning to get really tactical and really specific.
I realized if you wake up, fire up an open page, and just start to write, you're going to be scared out of your wits. It's really hard. At least for me, I have to get the engine warm a little bit, so I have what I like to think of as on-ramps. One of my on-ramps is whatever the model book is for a book I'm writing, like a book I really admire, where I'm trying to basically do whatever that author is doing.
David Perell:
Wait, that's an interesting thing. So that's you have model books?
Jimmy Soni:
I have model books. All right, quick digression, then we'll get back to the schedule.
The digression. One of the best pieces of advice I got was just to take a book that basically is like the cast, like the plaster cast for your idea, and study it obsessively. And I mean really obsessively. So, for the founders, it was The Everything Store by Brad Stone, which I think I've talked to you about before. I read that book over 20 times. I will read the model book for a particular book I'm writing dozens of times if need be.
Part of how I do that is I spend the first 10 or 15 minutes of that time at 4:00 AM reading the model book. Because what it does is it sort of tricks my brain into thinking, "Oh, you're not doing anything right now. All you're doing is reading. Jimmy, you love reading. This is gonna be so much fun. Just get on this on ramp, right?" And the on ramp is reading. So, for example, I think—and Eric will be delighted to hear this because the book is phenomenal—but I've read The Almanac of Naval Ravikant probably nine times already, right all the way through. I'm taking notes and I'm dissecting things, and I'm seeing how he made certain sections work, and seeing why certain formatting things work, and why other things didn't work. Why is this sentence longer than this sentence and how did he do this?
But that's the first 10 or 15 minutes, and it's my little on ramp. But it also is teaching me why that book worked as well as it did.
Jimmy Soni:
So once the on ramp is done, what I typically do then is I'm like, "All right, let's do a little bit of research." So I set a timer, and I'll give myself 30 minutes of, let's read some notes, watch a video, study something that I found, or reread an interview, or reread a book. 30 minutes of research.
Then I get into writing. And then what I do is I just set a word count. And so if I hit my word count every day, it's been a good day. A lot of the process is just very brass tacks, battling your own psychology to get the on ramp, then do a little bit of research, and then get into the writing. What I try to do is, obviously, you have to calibrate some of this. Like if I'm preparing for an interview, I have to dial up the research a little bit.
David Perell:
So that's an interview where you're interviewing.
Jimmy Soni:
Like a source. Yeah, like a source.
David Perell:
Okay, got it.
Jimmy Soni:
But the point remains. If you spend the entire morning researching, you didn't do any writing.
David Perell:
But then I'm trying to figure out how this squares with the PayPal book or something like that, which is phenomenally researched.
Jimmy Soni:
Yep.
David Perell:
So you're not doing that in 30 minutes a day.
Jimmy Soni:
There's no way. 30 minutes a day is my candy excuse before I start writing and then I'm getting into the writing.
Cause if you're too slow, a lot of the research, I would say, happens as a blend of research and writing. So if I'm in the middle of a section and I need to make a point, I will just go dig up the fact I need and put it in the thing that I'm writing. Is that research? Yeah. Is it writing? Yeah. If they happen at the same time, I'm not letting myself off the hook. I'm actually doing them at the same time. And it's far more productive.
People have spent decades researching books they never write. I actually know somebody who has spent like two decades working on a book about Plato, and he hasn't written it yet. It's not done. It's very easy to fall into this trap. It can be because there's an anxiety around creating new material. People want to talk about it, they want to medicate it, they want to run away from it. At base, it is there.
Writer's block can be real, so you have to battle it. And the way I battle it is by blending writing and research. Here's another thing that I've done. I turn all time that is quote, unquote, free time into research time. Here's how. If I need to walk to go do groceries, I will listen to a podcast or an interview about the thing that I am writing. In the evenings, when I was doing PayPal, I was watching YouTube videos that were just interviews of the people I was writing about. So it was research. It was the time when somebody else might be watching Netflix. I was watching interviews with Peter Thiel. Welcome to my life.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
That was a useful way of me having the time to do research so that the quantity of research was huge. I would also say there are moments when you do need to spend an afternoon really diving into some topic.
But honestly, honestly, you can typically set a limit on your research, start the writing, and then go back to the research. Because the research is the fun stuff. That's the discovery, that's the hunt, that's the game. That's just like Googling and it's reading and it's printing things out. It's so fun that I don't even need to schedule it. What I need to schedule is the creation of the thing itself.
David Perell:
Can you tell the Ed Bogus story?
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I feel like it's kind of like asking the Eagles to play Hotel California.
Jimmy Soni:
Can you just tell that story? It's so good.
David Perell:
Because I think this is such a good example of what happens when research goes well is you find an alternative source. You tell a story that's super memorable and then also speaks to something that is core to the theme of what you're sharing. And then you get some lunatic like me, and I think about the story all the time.
[33:45] The Role of AI in Writing
Jimmy Soni:
So, yeah, just for context for people, this is a story that emerges from my research for the founder's book. That book took six years. It was a really intense project.
I wrote double the quantity of words. I wrote about 320, 350,000 words for a book that ended up being about 140,000. I cut a lot of stuff. And I did lots of interviews.
There was this amazing thing that happened when I found somebody had shared a cap table for one of the early companies that would become PayPal. It had listed the investors who had invested in PayPal.
Some of the names I recognized. They were familiar names from my research. Toward the bottom, there was this name of this guy, Ed Bogus, and I was like, who is this? I've never seen this name before. He's not some famous Silicon Valley investor. He's not a technology person.
I was like, but he invested very early in Peter Thiel's company. It was called Confinity. What could it be? Why?
So I Google his name, and I find out that he's a musician living in San Francisco. Now it's even more perplexing. Did I get the wrong Ed Bogus? Is that like an Ed Bogus Jr.?
I do one of those searches where you can look up somebody's name, and they'll find a few phone numbers that might be their phone number. I screenshotted all those. I was like, I gotta track this guy down, see if he's the right guy.
I was like, what other option do I have? I call the number, 650-something-something-something.
I'm like, "Hi, Ed, I'm not sure if you're the right Ed Bogus. My name is David Perell. I'm working on a book about the origin story of PayPal, and there's this document I have where it says you're one of the earliest investors. I have no idea if this is you, but if it is, if you wouldn't mind giving me a call back, I'd love to talk to you about what led you to do the investment."
This is a total Hail Mary. I'm not actually expecting a call back. I finished the phone call and leave the message. Within like 10 or 15 minutes, I get a call back from this guy.
I didn't expect this. I'm a little caught unawares. He calls me and he goes, "Hi Jimmy. Yeah, you've reached the right Ed. I was actually an investor in an early iteration of this company, and happy to chat about it."
I had the fish on the line. I dive in, and I'm like, well, listen, how did you find your way to this company? You're not an angel investor of any renown.
He cut me out and he's like, "Yeah, this is the only real investment I've ever made." It's the only serious investment I made.
It turns out he tells me this story, which is the most amazing story. He said that while Peter was building companies and investing in companies and familiarizing himself with the technological landscape in and around Palo Alto, he was also playing competitive chess because he was an exceptional chess player.
So he and Ed would square off at chess tournaments because Ed was also a chess player. They would face off against each other. He met Peter and played him, and he described his style of play as merciless.
One day, Peter Thiel shows up at Ed Bogus's house. He is looking for friends and family investment for his company. He knows Ed, and he says, "Hey, Ed, I don't know if you'd want to invest. I know you and I have had some good chess competitions or chess matches. Would you want to participate in this thing?"
Ed stops him, goes to the back, grabs a check, writes the check on the spot, and gives Peter the money.
Naturally, as an interviewer, I'm thinking to myself like, wait, hold on. Why would you do that? Why would you—that's money—and you're just giving it to this guy you played chess with?
He said, "Peter was so ruthless, so merciless in his style of play, that I knew that anything that he did, he would make it successful."
And that's why he did it. He said it was one of the best investments I've ever made in my life because I got in early on this company that became PayPal.
It was just such an amazing thing to me, because it was really validating on a couple of counts. One was just like, it does just pay to run to ground every little thread of a story that you're looking for, because you never know when a story is actually going to lead you to something that the world had never known.
Ed Bogus had probably forgotten all about Confinity and PayPal and his investments and everything.
[39:18] Jimmy's Current Project: The Tao of Kobe
Jimmy Soni:
For me, the story spoke volumes about Peter. It spoke volumes about that era, about how people can intersect and interact.
It was amazing, and it was one of these things that my friends would jokingly, they would joke about my obsession with PayPal. They would actually give me grief for it. But I was like, got you guys. This is why I'm as obsessed as I am.
David Perell:
Well, there's another thing about this story, which is that sometimes the best anecdotes come from the people on the periphery.
Jimmy Soni:
That's right.
David Perell:
And not from the people in the middle. You know, and you—this sort of like what you were saying with Kobe early.
Everyone knows the press conference after he scores 81 points. There are certain things in the Kobe story that are just part of the canon. But then there's other interviews that have 634 views on YouTube, and sometimes those are the things that lead you to the real nuggets.
Jimmy Soni:
That's right. One of my favorite writers, Michael Lewis, I heard him describe this once, and it always stuck with me. He was an art history major at Princeton, and he described this thing that happens in Renaissance paintings because a lot of Renaissance paintings basically look the same, right? They're all depictions of religious scenes.
He said, if you want to find the intricacies, look at the toenails. Look at the toenails of the figures that are being drawn because it's where the artists would often lose steam or have their most—that's where they didn't have to depict everything the same way everybody else did, right? So he's like, if you look at the edges, those toenails, you'll actually see some very distinctive designs. By the way, I don't know if this is true or not. I might be wrong, but the image always stuck with me because I always ask myself, what did everybody else looking at this miss, or what question didn't they ask?
Jimmy Soni:
I'll give you an example. As a part of the founder's book, I was interviewing Elon. It was maybe my third interviewer interaction with him. I knew I wasn't going to have more. There was no reason to have more. I was almost done with the book. I had gotten from him everything I needed for his part of the story.
So then I said to myself, what would be the question that I'd want to ask him that other people have not asked him about? He had a close friend of his who was an early investor in and advisor to his first company, Zip2—this guy, Greg Coury. He was a close friend, and he died at a very young age.
In my head, I was thinking, look, if I were in my 20s or 30s and I had a young close friend of mine who built a company with me die, that would leave an enormous imprint in my life, in my makeup, in everything, right? I don't know if you have a vivid experience of death. I fortunately do not, but everybody I know that has been through that kind of experience, it shapes everything that happens after. Grief casts a shadow that never leaves you.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Jimmy Soni:
So I thought to myself, what if I started my interview with him by asking him about Greg Khoury? That's what I did.
I remember I said, Elon, I want to begin our interview a little bit differently. I had read about this gentleman that had helped you early on in your life when you were trying to make it in technology. I found his widow, and we talked, and his name is Greg Coury, and I wonder what he was to you or what he represents to you. Can you talk about him? There was a pause, and he goes, oh my God. He actually had this incredible response, and he gave me this minute-long meditation on Greg and their friendship and everything that it meant to him.
I don't think anybody's talking to him about Greg Corey because ultimately, the people who are interviewing him are dealing with much more day-to-day connection concerns. But I always try to ask myself and remind myself, the human beings that I interview or the projects that I'm working on, they have lives that exist outside of the very narrow frame of reference that we see them for. So what's the thing that they never get talked about or asked about that you can kind of find a way in, and it actually reveals something about their character.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
If you're talking to a successful business person, they have a family life, they went to college, they have lives outside of these little domains that we're in. If you ask them about that, you'll often learn more about the core thing. I have found this to work enough that it is a technique that I like using also because it makes things just easier and more personal and more interesting.
So that, call it the Toenail Strategy, is a part of what I try to do. Could I interview all the other important names on the cap table? Yes, and I did. But Ed Bogus has a hell of a story to tell. You just have to find him, and that's the fun. The fun is finding him.
David Perell:
You were talking about Michael Lewis. We talked about the model books, but I want to talk about a hall of heroes that you have. Who's on that hall of heroes? Who do you really look up to? Who do you want to emulate? Who are these masters of craft that you really admire?
Jimmy Soni:
I would say, for me, a big one is someone you mentioned earlier, Robert Caro. Talk about the Kobe of nonfiction biography. There's nobody that does it the way he does it. All of us, I think, are actually just secretly in my particular domain, are all just trying to become Robert Caro. It really is. We're just trying to do that.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
He is that good. Somebody who spends 10 years on a book, somebody who moves to Texas Hill Country so he can describe it better, right, and lives that. Somebody who runs from his apartment in Washington, D.C. to the Capitol so that he can see the light on the Capitol dome the same way that Lyndon Johnson saw it, in the morning sun. Morning sun, unbelievable, the level of dedication and commitment and everything else. And I look at him and I'm like, well, if he can do that, what's my version of that?
I'll give you an example: I remember when I was writing the Founders, I knew the street that the offices were on, so I actually would go, this is in Palo Alto, and I actually chose different times when I would walk the street just to get a sense for what it would look like or feel like when I was doing it. I didn't end up including those observations in the book.
David Perell:
But also having a sense for how boring Palo Alto is and how uninspiring those blocks are is really important to know because it's no Manhattan. Palo Alto is not an inspiring place, and yet all of these things have happened within a 5-mile radius of Stanford's campus.
Jimmy Soni:
You're like, and what?
David Perell:
There's something to that that you need to know.
Jimmy Soni:
Totally. And my friend calls it method writing. She's like, you're a method writer. You need to inhabit your subject's world as entirely as you can. I think of Robert Caro as basically the dean of that.
The guy, to spend as long as he did with the kinds of projects that he was taking on, which are hugely risky projects, by the way. There was no guarantee the Power Broker was going to work. There was no guarantee that any of it would. Even today, if you were to say the name Robert Moses, most people outside of you and I and our friends don't actually know who that is, right? And so, to take on the risk, the level of risk that he took creatively, and then to do it at the level that he did, and then, by the way, to turn history into art, to make it a pleasure to read, oh my God. The books, they vibrate; they have their own frequency.
You get into a book from Robert Caro and you're just enraptured the whole time. You're just like, I don't know how somebody could do sentences like this. This is amazing. He turned history into literature. He turned it into high art, and it's incredible. So for me, if there's a Hall of Heroes and there's a Zeus in Mount Olympus, he's the Zeus. He's just that good and that disciplined.
I also really like that he would treat his work like a professional treats his work. He would put on a suit, even though he didn't have to wear a suit. He would sit and work at a typewriter. He had a real process about his work, and it was just every day, day after day after day. I think there's something to that, and that's why his books will be monuments for the rest of time, and the doggedness is just something to be admired. You can't look at a person like that and not find something to admire about them.
David Perell:
How about Michael Lewis?
Jimmy Soni:
So this is an interesting one because there's a lot of fans of his. I'm a fan, obviously, but I actually have, this is. I've watched every interview he's ever done. I went to school on Michael Lewis because he's so good, but he's otherworldly good.
I actually think of him as a talent I'll never get near because he grew up on New Orleans porches listening to people tell stories, like in the South. So there's a quality, a musicality, a rhythm of those stories that is in his writing, and it infuses his writing. Here's why I see him as on my Hall of Heroes. I, as you could probably tell already, don't want to be pigeonholed as an author. If I want to do a book about carousels and then follow that book up with a book about the justice system and then follow that book up with a book about Kobe Bryant, that's what I'm going to do.
David Perell:
You want to be able to do any kind of book.
Jimmy Soni:
Any kind of book. And I want to follow my curiosity wherever it's going to take me, to whatever crazy extremes it takes me.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
And my list of books I want to write, you would think I belong in an insane asylum. It's all over the place. It's truly all over the place.
So for me, what I admire about Michael Lewis is he could have followed up Liars Poker with probably like 10 more books about finance, and he could have just rinsed and repeated the entire time, and he hasn't. He wrote a book about coaching. He wrote a book about parenting. He's written books about the friendship between two Nobel laureates. He did The Blind Side. He did The Big Short. He would say that the common denominator is markets and understanding weird distortions in markets, but you have to have some level of dexterity and creativity to say, I'm doing a baseball book, and I'm probably the best-read baseball book of all time.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
One of the things that I really admire is just his willingness to say, the world wants me to do this. I'm going to go and do this other thing now. He's ridiculously good and super hardworking as best as I can tell, and approaches his craft with real seriousness and a real flair for storytelling.
It still takes a huge amount of creative courage to say, I've been doing this thing well and I have a lot of success. I'm going to abandon all of that and go do something totally different.
David Perell:
Didn't you say wrote under a pen name or something?
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah. This is one of my favorite stories that nobody knows. So when he was working at Salomon Brothers, he wanted to write op eds. And so he wrote an op ed in the Wall Street Journal. Big day in his life.
But the op ed basically made the argument that bankers were overpaid. He works at Salomon Brothers, so the leadership at Salomon Brothers was like, you can't keep writing op eds. This is not going to happen. He basically told them, I'm going to keep writing op eds, but what if I did it under the name Diana Bleeker, my mother's maiden name?
So for years, Diana Bleeker was doing commentary about Wall Street, and people did not know that it was Michael Lewis. He got his first book deal because the publisher called around trying to figure out who Diana Bleeker is and managed to find their way to Michael Lewis.
So he was writing under a pen name for years because he wanted to keep writing about Wall Street, but his bosses at Wall Street said, you can't do it. And so that's what he was doing.
I find that story super inspiring. It would have been so much easier for him to just hang it up and be like, all right, cool, I get it. I got to stand down. But he just kept going. And to me, that's the craft. That's love of craft at its purest form. I'm going to do it, even if it's my mom's name on the op ed. Come on. That's incredible.
David Perell:
Yeah. What makes you so excited about what's happening with AI? Before we get into this, I just want to establish something for our fellow listeners: There's something that a lot of people feel that AI is for people, AI in writing is for people who don't take craft seriously.
You'll notice that in the way that I structured this conversation, I really wanted to establish that Jimmy takes craft seriously. So whether you are pro AI or anti AI, all power to you. That's fine, but I really want to hear about how you're thinking about AI, how you're feeling about AI. I think it's far more interesting with the context of everything we've spoken about.
Jimmy Soni:
I think of it as the most unbelievable tool I've ever seen to improve every single part of the work I do. I have been blown away. I've been a power user now for a year and a half. I've been aggressively using every tool that comes out, trying to understand the intricacies of the tools, trying to stay ahead of a field that's rapidly developing.
I'm not a technical person. I'm not an engineer, and I'm not a founder of a tech company. My interest in this is purely at the level of tooling. What tools are being developed for people like me to do our work better?
Honestly, there's been one other moment when I've been this blown away, and it was the first time I connected to the Internet. I was like, wait, I'm connected to literally everything and everyone if I want to be.
The great challenge for any kind of writer is simply getting stuff on the page that you think reflects the thing in your head. You have an image in your head, and in your head it's perfect. Every pixel is exactly where it needs to be. Now you need to describe that image to somebody else, and that's where the challenge is. AI helps you do that better and faster.
How does it do that? I'll give you an example from just a couple days ago. I'm working to edit a book about grief in my role as a publisher. The woman who wrote the book lost her daughter two years ago. This book is extraordinary. I haven't been able to edit it without weeping. It's that good. Part of that is I'm a parent, and when you read a book about somebody's child dying, it hits too close to home.
There's a section in the book where she talks about how Judaism emphasizes the need for the body to be buried and in the ground very quickly.
David Perell:
Yes.
Jimmy Soni:
You're supposed to wait a maximum of three days. That's the outer limit or something.
David Perell:
Basically, I think the soul or the spirit leaves the body after three days.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah. She talks about how there's actually a decent amount of writing in Jewish liturgy about the importance of the speed, like why the speed matters. Where does that come from? There's sort of two abiding explanations.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
One is that the spirit needs to be back to God as quickly as possible, back to the heavens as quickly as possible. The other is that bodies, if they were left out, could become decayed. They would start to, like, the flesh itself would start to smell and rot and all these other things. So there was a reason that was spirit and there was a reason that was flesh.
I wanted to understand that better and to understand what the rabbinical sources said about that better, so that I could confirm that one, she was telling me the truth. I'm not Jewish, I don't come from this tradition. But also, in case I missed anything, did we miss any quotes or ideas or something from the Talmud that should be in here?
Could I spend a month really understanding Judaism? Sure. But instead, I could use AI to take the paragraph and ask AI to really give me sources and quotes and texture and nuance, and please explain what this word means, is this the actual explanation? It gave me really incredible thoughts so that I could verify the information. I could share some things with her that I learned that might make for better editing.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
It actually enhanced that paragraph, taking it and putting it in AI and just asking it a series of questions.
There are people who could say that's unfair, and I would say, well, all I did was just Google on steroids. What would have taken me 10 Google searches took me one query with Claude. Claude, by the way, is my preferred AI of choice. I actually prefer it over ChatGPT. I think it's friendlier for writers, and I think it has just a bit more personality. I'm not the first one to say this, there have been a number of pieces writing about this. But the point is that I think what it does is, one, it enhances your ability to research, and it allows you to pull sources together that you wouldn't have otherwise thought about.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
There's a second thing. Psychologically, having an editor that's always on call is new and super powerful. It used to be, and it still is, that you have editors and they help you punch up your work.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
No writer works alone. They have people who work with them. I now have the world's greatest editor, the world's smartest editor, who never complains, who never gets tired, who never turns off.
So if I'm working at 4:00 in the morning and I need my editor, I've got it. It's right there. So if I have a paragraph that feels flabby, or if I have a word that doesn't quite sit right, I can put it in and say, what are some other options for this? Or what's wrong about this?
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
So that's the editorial function. There's another important function that I use it for. This is something that another one of my people in the hall of heroes is Tyler Cowan. I know you're close to him as well.
David Perell:
Love Tyler.
Jimmy Soni:
One of the things that Tyler talks a lot about is the ability to argue the opposite position is insanely important.
So sometimes, particularly with OP eds, when I have an OP Ed I've finished, or something I've written where there's an argument, a real argument, I will have Claude argue the opposite position for me. I will have it write a takedown of this op ed. Please criticize in 700 words this op ed. And I tell it, do not hold back. I'll add personality to it.
Once I see how it's criticized the piece, I can then go back to my piece and strengthen it against those criticisms, because everybody's got blind spots. I have to actually be able to unearth those blind spots so that I can address them. I would say nine times out of 10, the arguments that it makes really force me to stop and think.
Everything I've just described obviously has hazards. There are hallucinations, there are problems. There are times when it gets source material wrong. But that's the whole point of human operators running these LLMs and using them judiciously. I'm not substituting for the work of getting up every day and doing writing. I'm using the tools in the places where it matters, and I cannot emphasize enough how much better and faster my work is as a result.
David Perell:
Balaji Srinivasan has a line where he says, AI is not end to end, it's middle to middle. What he means by that is when people criticize AI, they say, well, you're going to need to figure out what is the thing you want to do in the first place. Hey, there's going to be hallucinations. You have to check it at the end. That's the end to end stuff.
Humans have to work at the very beginning to set the vision. Humans have to work at the very end to verify, to fact check, to make sure everything's good. But a lot of that middle to middle work can now be done by AI.
Jimmy Soni:
Also, I think a lot of the criticism about AI is being leveled by people who don't use it. I'll just be honest. I think a lot of the people who are critiquing it are people who have an understandable anxiety about how it might threaten their work, their income, or just their position in life.
David Perell:
Right?
Jimmy Soni:
But a lot of them don't actually use AI. They don't actually sit down with the tools and put things in and play around and learn how to use it.
Learning AI, learning how to use these tools effectively is a skill unto itself. Learning how to ask better questions, create better prompts, use it for things like numerical analysis, use it to write code. These are all actually things that teach you.
David Perell:
What do you mean by learning numerical analysis?
Jimmy Soni:
Okay, so you're a word person. I'm a word person, but often word people.
David Perell:
I'm not a numbers guy.
Jimmy Soni:
There we go. I think I used to be a numbers guy. I was much more math oriented earlier in my life, but now I've long since abandoned those passions.
If you feel like your numeracy is not as much as you'd like it to be, ChatGPT, in particular, is extraordinary at number crunching, spreadsheets, taking things that are super complex, and coming up with analogies that are number related. I needed to write something the other day and I was trying to compare the distance that I had written about to the number of times a spaceship would have to travel around the moon.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
Math is not that hard to do, but it's much better having ChatGPT do it, and it's much more accurate. Then I can fact check it and make sure everything's accurate.
I had a friend who's an engineer at a very prominent technology company that is doing a lot with AI, and I asked him about AI because engineers, in particular, are also feeling the same pressure that AI could replace them, that it could be a threat to their livelihoods. I asked him what he thought. He has a family, he has a stake in the future of his financial life, and he's not independently wealthy. He said, "AI is the sharpest knife that an engineer has ever been given, but it's still a knife. I've still got to cook the meal."
I think of it the same way. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to the Kobe book. I'm still cooking the meal when it comes to all of my other projects, but AI is an exceptionally sharp knife, and it is unlike anything I've ever seen.
There's one final piece that people don't necessarily think about that I talk about a lot when I encourage people to try using AI. My daughter doesn't have a hard time writing because she has no self-consciousness about the quality of her writing. She doesn't care if it's good or bad. She just does it. It's an unadulterated, childlike approach to creation. It's marvelous. All parents have experienced this at some point. It's why we put our crappy drawings of our kids' stuff on the fridge.
The bigger point is, ego is not interfering. Self-consciousness is not interfering between the impulse that my daughter has to write something and the act of writing it. Between my impulse to write and the act of writing is people who are going to hate me. Things people are going to say on Twitter. All the interferences get in the way. All of the stuff that clouds up your brain that leads you to say, "I should shelve this essay. It's not going to be any good. What if somebody doesn't like it? What if they think less of me? What if they think?"
AI actually allows you to short circuit a lot of that noise because it gets you to a finished product much more quickly and effectively. There's a particular AI tool I like called Whisper, or Whisper Flow. It's really effective voice dictation. Sometimes, if I'm feeling really stuck or I feel like I'm not myself that day or something's off, I will use Whisper Flow to just dictate thoughts. It'll do a very good cleaned up transcription or translation of what I just said. Then at least I've got a bad first draft that I can play around with.
I didn't get in my head about it, and I didn't wait and wait and wait and agonize and research and clean the kitchen and make sure my shoes were all lined up by the door, and all the stuff that we use to excuse ourselves from actually finishing the work itself. AI is an anxiety antidote. People think AI causes anxiety, and for some people, it does. For me, it's been the ultimate antidote to the thing that prevents me from getting my work done because I can get to a bad first draft very quickly, and then I can bring to it polish and flare and attention and refinement. I think that's seriously underestimated.
I had to write an apology to somebody two or three months ago, and I've been dreading this note. This is one of those notes you're just like, "This person was a friend. I maybe did something wrong, or I said something wrong. What do I say?"
I basically used Whisper Flow. I closed my eyes and I just said what I wanted to say to them. I got a bad first draft transcription of it, but it took what would have been months of agony over a note and turned it into an email that I could take, edit, and send very quickly.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
It's still my words, it's still my thought process. AI just helped me overcome the anxiety. And so, for me, it's been an interesting tool psychologically as well as practically. I'm happy that the practical use cases are voluminous. People are still discovering exactly what it can do.
For me, it's been a superpower, and I think people who are running away from it are doing so at their peril. I think, think of it like this: Could I write my books by hand? Yeah, Robert Caro does so, no shade, literally by hand. Could I write them by typewriter? Sure, but I'm choosing to use a word processor.
That's how I think about AI. AI is the next iteration of that. I am choosing to use this tool. The words are still my own, the research is still my own, the facts are still my own, and the interviews are still my own. All of those things still belong to me. They're still coming from my brain. AI simply accelerates all of that and gives me a far bigger canvas of research and potential options for words and phrases and paragraphs.
I don't see how any modern writer couldn't use AI. I think the idea that it is like stealing work... No, it's been trained on work. It's not stealing, it's borrowing to learn, so did Google Books. But there was no outcry about Google Books. There's plenty of information on Google that is the Cliff Notes version of a given topic, fact, book, or novel. There's not the same outcry. I think of it very much in the same spirit, and I think the courts are going to find the same conclusions, too.
David Perell:
Hmm. You've been looking a lot into the book industry, and the book industry is a dinosaur. I'm happy about AI.
Jimmy Soni:
AI a dinosaur.
David Perell:
A Tyrannosaurus rex. So, you've been looking at the Tyrannosaurus rex, and you were telling me that you went in and you were like, I have a feeling that this industry situation is a little wacky. Lots of nonsense going on. And it sounds like that's been affirmed. So, what's going on?
Jimmy Soni:
This should be comfort to anybody who's listening or watching, who wants to do a book, who thinks that it's impenetrable as an industry, or thinks it's impossible to do, or they have to have the right agent or go to the right parties or meet the right people. I've been doing books for 15 years now, and I got pretty good at it over time. What I noticed when I was doing my books with traditional publishers is that all of the things that traditional publishers used to do, they started to do less and less of.
For example, marketing, good cover design, or editing. In almost all of my projects with traditional publishers, I have had to pay for editing on my own just because I wanted extra editing. I had to pay for my cover design for the founders because I wanted a better cover. I thought to myself, wait, I'm doing a lot of these labors.
By the way, I've had great relationships at modern publishers. I think the world of my editors; they did a great job. They were just so beleaguered. There were so many projects on their plate that you always felt like you were getting whatever the table scraps were. To me, that was one problem with the industry. I just didn't feel like I was getting the kind of focus and attention that one would want, and I was paying other people to help me with my work.
Then the other thing I noticed is I had friends whose projects were being turned down, but they weren't being given very good reasons for why they were being turned down. Some of these, by the way, become legendary case studies. There's legendary case studies of how Harry Potter was turned down by everybody; Four Hour Workweek was turned down by everybody. I also noticed that there was a real allergic reaction to AI tools, to AB testing, to technology, to advertising, to all the things that in the digital world, if you become a digital native first, you learn you can test everything and anything and make your products better as a result.
Once I started to nerd out on this stuff a little bit, I connected with another writer friend who also has a podcast, Jim O'Shaughnessy, and we decided to create a new publisher. We created Infinite Books. It turned out that when we kicked the tires on almost every part of publishing, there was so much desire for a new way of doing things.
I'll give you a really simple example. The way publishing contracts work is you typically will get an advance and then you earn somewhere between 10 and 15% on a given sale price of a book until you make back your advance. You only see new money once you've made back your advance. There are a lot of people who don't want that deal. What they want is, "David, you've published a book. If the book is $10 when it sells, you make seven, I make three," as the publisher. They want that deal. But that deal never existed because most publishing contracts were exactly the same. They'd been on the same way for the Paleolithic era. If you even asked questions about whether something could be different, you were called a problem author. You were like, "No, no, stay in your swim lane, author person. Don't concern yourself with the commerce of this. Don't ask these kind of, we're an artist, you're an artist, so you're the artist. Go do your art thing, right?"
For a lot of us, we've had to develop multiple skill sets. We've had lives in business that then translate over to our writing. We at Infinite Books are like, "Why don't we just talk to authors about the deal they want and then come up with a deal that makes sense for us financially?" So for a number of our authors, we're giving away 70% of the royalties. They might not want an advance. We're not going to do an advance and 70% necessarily. Some authors do want an advance, and we'll work with you if you do. But there are a lot of authors who are just betting on themselves. They just want a publisher to help shepherd the project, and they want the lion's share of the revenue.
That's not a hard thing to do. This isn't like inventing a new rocket and taking it to Mars. It's literally just shifting a contract. Let me give you another example. Here's a good AI example. There's all this hostility in the publishing industry to AI. People are saying they've trained the LLMs on all these books and they're going to steal work from authors and they're going to be able to create stuff and it's all going to be slop and it's all garbage. Okay?
David Perell:
There are.
Jimmy Soni:
Every few years, you read about a scandal in the industry, and the scandal is plagiarism. Some author, whether deliberately or accidentally, will copy a sentence or copy a paragraph or copy chapters, and they'll get tarred and feathered. Their careers will be ruined. Many of them never come back from it. Something will happen. The publisher doesn't catch it, they have to stop the presses. Huge scandal, New York Times article, career done. These people enter deep depression. Some of them never come out of it, or they get out of it, and there's always a little bit of a checkered past.
In the age of AI, there should never again be a plagiarism scandal.
Because think about it: You can take someone's manuscript, and as the publisher—this is your responsibility as the publisher—upload it and check to see whether this person stole work.
If they did, you either have a conversation with them and say, "Hey, listen, did you just miss some quotation marks here? Was this accidental?" Or you look at the work and you say, "Oh, this person is actually just copying and pasting and they're stealing." There should never—after 2025—there should never be another plagiarism scandal ever again. AI is too good for publishers to not use it to check for something like that. Is that cheating?
I don't think it is. I think it's just good, honest, responsible publishing. Why wouldn't you use it for that?
A final example, and this one's important. I think there's a haughtiness within publishing, like an arrogance that publishers know best, that they're tastemakers, that they know what the cover should look like. You don't know. You audience don't have any idea what the cover should look like. We do.
I disagree. I AB test all my cover art, and I use services that allow you to very quickly get hundreds of people to react to a cover. Why? Because in the digital world, people are making snap decisions on Amazon, and they're buying often based on the way a cover looks. Look, you may like that or hate it. It's the reality of the world we live in. Why wouldn't you AB test cover art? Well, because maybe your designer would be upset if you're at a publishing house.
I'm sorry, but that isn't good enough. That's not a good enough reason to not test what's going to work or not work. When you have tools available that allow you to cheaply test things that are going to work and not work, and use that to sell more books, you should use those. Some of those are AI tools; some of them are not. But the point is, I just noticed a real lack of attention being paid to those sorts of tools, and I wanted a publisher that was basically doing that natively and figuring it out.
These aren't popular opinions within the industry necessarily, but if you talk to authors, like the people actually creating the books, they are wildly happy that these tools exist for their personal use and then that publishers are starting to adopt them, because there's no going back. You can very quickly get access to information, resources, and feedback you couldn't before. Authors are going to do it, even if publishers don't.
David Perell:
I have a friend—really talented guy—and he just published a book traditionally.
Jimmy Soni:
And...
David Perell:
I have two copies of the book. I have the original manuscript, which is basically a printed-out PDF with a cover he designed, and a book that he wrote without any editing. Then I have the final book, done by the publisher, with a changed title, and they made the book cover.
I've said this to him. It's an abomination. It's an abomination. It is an absolute tragedy to see how degraded this book was.
I said to him straight up, "Dude, you did not stand up for yourself like you needed to." But what really irked me is the way that by going traditional, he lost all sense of individuality. This is a guy who's unlike anybody I know who has a book that is just like every other book I see now, and it's such a tragedy.
I think part of the reason that we need alternate ways of publishing things is like the blob takes things and turns them into the blob, and that's why you just see this homogeneity all over the place.
Jimmy Soni:
I'll give you another example that's really compelling. Somebody I'm talking to right now is a super prominent authority, and he's done one kind of book and succeeded so well at it. He's a true craftsman and cares a lot about the craft. He's been successful with this particular genre of book.
His publisher is a Big 5 publisher. They love him to death. He wrote a memoir, which was an unexpected work. He wanted to get it out on the page. It was a bit of personal therapy, in addition to doing a book. He wrote a memoir about his childhood. I guess he took it to both his agent and his publisher, and they said to him, "You're really not the memoir guy."
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
He's a brilliant, multiple New York Times bestselling author, and because it's out of genre for him, they didn't think it could work because, quote, unquote, "Your fans only know you as this." You and I know that's BS. If he did that book, people would love it because it was different.
Jimmy Soni:
Just to get back to Taylor Swift for a second, we love her because she's had multiple eras.
Jimmy Soni:
Why wouldn't you want your artists to reinvent themselves time and time again?
Jimmy Soni:
One of my favorite Metallica things is when they partnered with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and they did the music with the symphony. The symphony is working with them to do something.
Jimmy Soni:
There's a certain amount of creative risk that comes in doing that.
Jimmy Soni:
For every one of those, there's when Dr. Dre did the Tango album, and it was a huge flop.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
You want to encourage a world in which authors are taking creative risks. I don't know that the publishing industry does that enough, because this person would be successful with this book. He's been successful with other books. He's made his publisher a lot of money, but they don't want to take a chance on a memoir because he's, quote, unquote, "not a memoir guy."
David Perell:
I think this is one way to distinguish between art and content. Art is trying to push on some sort of frontier, the human being itself. We're not these static creatures. We deal with different joys and different sufferings as we change in life. There's a sort of meanderingness to life, and you're trying to explore new frontiers. I think that that's what art is.
Content is when you have a style, once you have a form, you begin to have a quota that you need to meet, and there are cookie-cutter package specs that you need to hit. That's a lot of what you're saying is what traditional publishing gets people to.
Jimmy Soni:
I think that's part of it. We shouldn't just turn this into 30 minutes of bashing on traditional publishing. Here's the thing. These are exceptional professionals, many of whom are world-class at their craft. This is an industry filled with super smart, super thoughtful people.
The problem is there's been so much consolidation and there's just less room to take risks. If you have a bunch of books that aren't successful, you're costing the publisher money without having a return. So I can understand why editors feel the pressure they feel.
The entire business model is predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks. If it's not a hit within the first two weeks, publishers sort of give up on it and move on to the next project. That's one of the biggest issues.
One of my favorite books is "Boys in the Boat." It's a quintessential example for me of the publishing industry getting it wrong. "Boys in the Boat" is a masterwork about rowing team Berlin, the Berlin Olympics. It's an extraordinary story, and it's beautifully told.
The book debuts. Crickets. Maybe got one or two reviews, no significant TV appearances. Nothing happens with it, and the publisher is just like, "All right, good." We're good”, "Enjoy your book.” “We're done”
That was a write-off. Rowers pick it up. Months go by. Rowers pass it to other rowers, then rowers start passing it to their families.
Something like eight or nine months after the book debuts, it gets on the New York Times bestseller list, and then it takes off like a rocket. The rest of the world gets exposed to it, and 10 years later, it's a movie with Tom Hanks on Netflix. It takes a while for certain projects to take off, but the timelines in publishing are you are a hit within the first two weeks, or you're just not. It's not going to work But meanwhile, we have example after example of people who continue to sell books over a long period of time and then hit their crescendo much later. I think the timelines in the industry force authors to chase instant success, or you're dropped. They're not going to give you any marketing support, help you, or do anything.
It's not because they're mean, but because they have to move on to other projects. I suspect there are a number of projects that could have been successful if there had been a little bit longer window of attention paid to how to get this book in the right places. My books continue to get attention; they are Evergreen books.
Somebody discovering Claude Shannon for the first time seven years from now won't care when my book was published. They're going to find him now. I can continue to market my book now, and it's as new to the person discovering it for the first time as it was to every other person who discovered it when it first debuted.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
That also needs to change. The time horizons on these projects are so short, and it puts authors in this really uncomfortable position because they're basically like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. They have the launch. If they succeed, they're the hot new thing. If they fail, they're forgotten about, and nobody wants to do business with them again.
That's really depressing. A lot of these books should be revived. A lot of these authors should get more support on how to market or how to be aggressive and make yourself into the kind of book that sells perennially.
David Perell:
The other thing that's crazy is that you wrote a coffee table book.
Jimmy Soni:
Yeah.
David Perell:
About a carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. You wrote about Claude Shannon, PayPal, and Kobe. This is a huge outlier, so what's the story?
Jimmy Soni:
This project was a labor of love in every way. This is the book, Jane's Carousel. It's actually a pretty weighty, substantial project.
The quick story is, I had a very young daughter, and I was living in New York, and I was at a loss for what to do with her all the time.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
It's a classic parent problem. One of the things that we got into the habit of doing is going to the carousel, which is right on the water's edge in Dumbo, right at the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park. My daughter became obsessed with this carousel, and I've ridden that carousel over 200 times.
One of the things you notice if you go to enough carousels in New York is Jane's Carousel is a cut above all of the others. I became interested in why. I went on Google and learned that the woman who had put this project together, her name is Jane, had hand-restored this carousel for 30 years.
I remember thinking, 30 years? I could barely do anything for 30 minutes. I was obsessed with her because I was like, how do you do this for three decades? Why? So I wrote an email to her, and it was like Jane@JanesCarousel.com or something.
I emailed her and said, "Listen, I'm looking for a gift for my daughter that is not a Chinese plastic toy thing. Do you have a book that I could write a note to her inside, maybe a picture book or something?" I assumed she'd done something. She's like, "You know, I don't."
I wrote back and said, "You should really think about doing one. I think it'd be really cool." She said, "Let's have lunch."
So we get together for lunch, and I told her, "Jane, the story of this carousel is a story of a creation from 1922. It survives a World War. It survives a fire in Idora Park in Ohio, which is the first park that it was placed in. It is crafted during the heyday of American carousel making when each of these horses was hand-carved and hand-painted. Carousels truly were incredible works of art."
I said, "And you then buy it after it's been burned and hand-restore it for 30 years, not knowing if it's ever going to get into Brooklyn Bridge Park. What could possess you to do this is a story, and I think you should really think about doing it as a visual coffee table book."
She went for it. We sat down with a contact of hers who was at Phaidon. Phaidon is one of the world's preeminent coffee table book publishing companies next to Taschen, Assouline, and Rizzoli. They make beautiful books.
So we go in, and I'm ready to pitch. We're sitting in front of all these assembled editors who are a lot cooler than me and have a lot better aesthetic sensibility than I do. I said, "Listen, you need to take this project on, because the book on the High Line is exactly like this. The High Line is a marvel, and that coffee table book is so beautiful. It tells the story of how the High Line was created, and it's got all these amazing design features and elements. Just in the same way that people appreciate the High Line, they love the carousel, and I know this because I love the carousel. I'm a parent of a young kid who loves this carousel so much."
The editor at Phaidon starts laughing, and I was like, "I'm sorry, did I offend you?" He's like, "No, Jimmy, I was the editor on the High Line book. I love that project, and I do want to do this project for the exact same reason."
So then we started working on this book. The tragic part of the story is that I did my last interview with Jane, and it was right around COVID times, May or June of 2020. She had gotten COVID. She went in to get the all-clear, but then they found stage four lung cancer.
She would never survive to see the book done, but her husband and her son have carried on the carousel's legacy, and the book is a monument to her work.
To give people watching and listening a sense of how committed she was to this carousel, she refused to have the horses chemically stripped of their paint because you could clean up a carousel just by tossing a bunch of chemicals into the horses, getting rid of all the paint, and then starting from scratch. She said no. The reason is because if you did that, you'd lose whatever the original coloration was; you wouldn't know.
So for three decades, using X-Acto knives, which I have seen, which I have held, she would file away the paint on every part of these horses to see what the original color was, color match to that paint, and then restore the horses that way. She brought in the best pinstripers in the world to do pinstriping. There's a lot of pinstriping on these carousel horses. She found an organ that matched the exact organ that the carousel used to have. She did an architecturally and historically faithful restoration of this carousel, and it took her three decades to do it.
I could not believe, in the same way that I can't believe Robert Caro would do 10 years on a book, I couldn't believe that somebody would do 30 years on a carousel. Learning about it, I was like, there's a story here. This is amazing. And so that's what resulted, and it captures one woman's commitment to something and an obsession about something that surpasses understanding.
Jimmy Soni:
To me, the greatest things that I get to encounter in my life as an author are when I meet or find somebody that is that obsessed with something.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
To get back to the beginning of our conversation, what is at the heart of that? The heart of that is at least partly love. You have to love this thing so much that you're willing to give up decades of your life for it.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
If you have one wish for the people in your life, it's that they find something they love that much.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
And she did. She had the carousel.
David Perell:
I love that story. What did you learn? How is publishing one of these books different?
Jimmy Soni:
Almost the entire process is different in the sense that it's not that many words. It's not a foreground thing. It's an artistic challenge. You have to think a little differently in how you structure and present information. You don't get the benefit of 70,000 words on the carousel. That's not what this is. This is designed to be flipped through in exactly the way that you're flipping through it.
David Perell:
Right.
Jimmy Soni:
You have to think a lot about what are we keeping, what are we cutting, how are we presenting certain images? Another thing I learned is captions are super important. I rewrote and wrote all the captions.
David Perell:
What goes into writing a good caption?
Jimmy Soni:
Word economy. You don't have any space at all. You've really got to decide what you're going to keep, what you're going to cut, what story you're going to tell, that kind of thing.
Another good example of something that I learned in doing this book is you really do get what you pay for in coffee table book publishing. That's a full color book, which costs a lot more to make than a black and white book.
We did a really clever thing in the middle of the book where we used tissue paper to show the color of the horses. That was a design decision, but obviously it costs money to have regular paper and then tissue paper.
We did little fold out things, cut out things, fold outs of different things so we could show all the horses in one place. I never had the chance to think about the design of a book as creatively.
Part of this is that it wasn't my work at all. It was the brilliant people at Phaidon who put all of this together and really made it into something that was monumentally beautiful.
This is a great example of how I wanted people to see how obsessed she was with the colors, so we figured out how to use tissue paper to show the color on top of a black and white image of a horse.
You can see right there, by the way, in those two pages, you understand why she did not want to chemically peel the paint from the horses. Because the only way to get the original colors was to file away layer after layer after layer of paint and then do little notations for what the paint was and then have the paints recreated.
David Perell:
I think that what I'm really taking from this conversation is just the liberty to just follow wild rabbit holes and intersections.
Jimmy Soni:
I don't even know.
David Perell:
I'm very moved, so I can't really think clearly right now. But as you were talking, I was like, oh, my goodness, he loves this so much. This is such a beautiful story. And as you were talking, I was like, we have taken such a departure from the rest of this conversation. That is the point that I'm trying to make.
Jimmy Soni:
That's the point. I think the point is you have felt the same thing about your podcast and about different projects you've done. When you obsess over it so much, you enjoy it so much that you simply cannot help but think about it and work on it and continue to refine it.
This is not for everyone. There are some real hazards to living this way. Socially, you can exact a huge price.
You have to find friends because all your other friends are too much for you. They can't hang out with you and have you talk about the carousel again for the 15th time.
But at the same time, when you find somebody else like that, it's a little bit like probably the conversation that Kobe Bryant was having with George R.R. Martin. You know that energy and you can sense that energy and you feed off that energy.
If I have one quest in life, it's to find that and then to turn that into stories. For me, that's a big part of what I feel I'm a part of as a tradition of storytellers.
David Perell:
Dude, I could hang out with you forever. Thanks for coming on the show.
Jimmy Soni:
Of course. Thank you for having me.
