Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 885

30:50So at that point, you solve the first problem, but now they need somebody to help them work the leads. They're now hungry for dessert, right? Right, or whatever. So they have a new deprivation that we can then sell the next day. And so I see that as a big mistake from a copywriting perspective is actually the timing of when the copy is being delivered in the larger context rather than the subcontext of the prospect. And so when I'm thinking about the pain is the pitch to bring this full circle is I want to think about as many very concrete examples that someone would experience pain. And so I remember when I was, so when Layla and I were really poor and I just lost everything and we decided that we weren't going to actually do the gym business anymore.

31:31So there's this like, you know, 30 day period where we decided we're not going to do the gym fit. And so I said, okay, she had lost a hundred pounds and done a fitness competition, all that stuff. And I was like, all right, I'm going to write a sales page of your story. Cause my story isn't compelling. I've had a six pack my whole life. No one cares. And so, but her, she had all this weight loss wear. And so I wrote her life story and she was like, this is more compelling. And I'm the one who lived it. And I didn't live any of it, but I just thought about like how she would wear a coverall when she would go to the beach and she would get chafing between her thighs when she was walking all day when she was overweight.

32:05Back to that specificity. And not wanting to be in pictures and just be always in the second row or to the side because she didn't like having a picture taken. And I'm like, how many of these moments, right? And so like pain happens in moments. And so I want to capture the moment because anyone who's had that pain is like, I never want to live that. I never want to have that happen again. I think that if you can accurately describe a prospect's pain in their own language, in their own experiences, you can persuade them to buy whatever your product is based on how well and how knowledgeable they believe you to be as a function of how specific you were about the pain they're experiencing.

32:44And so if I'm talking to a business owner that's doing$10 million a year, and I'm like, this is what's going wrong in IT, right? And this is what's going wrong in sales. and this is what's going on in your marketing and this is what's going on in it. They're like, I get it, I get it. You know where I'm at. I'm like, right. Do you want my help? I don't have to make a promise. If I can describe the pain so acutely and they're like, you can't know that pain this well and not be able to deliver it. Sure. And so that's where the pain is, the pitch comes from. And so oftentimes when people try to write sales pages or even they're trying to do a sales pitch, I think many people will overemphasize promise and there's nothing wrong with having promise, you know, private, it's compliant, all that stuff.

33:22But the thing is, pain is what motivates a lot of people to take action. It's cool to hear you speak because what really stands out is how much of an engineer you are. And you have this almost mathematical, not formulaic way of speaking, but you are in search of formulas in the way that engineers are. in basically trying to break down reality into formulas to basically say, yo, I'm trying to figure out how things work, simplify it, get it to a place where it's super clear, concrete stories, examples, and then I'm going to share it for you so that any problem that you have, here's an answer. I feel like that's a lot of what you're going for and you're right.

34:05It's 100 % what I'm going for. It's actually very well described. When I get in my deep emotional places, I'm like, I just feel like I want to understand the world better. And a lot of times I feel like I don't understand it well at all. And so a lot of my writing is an attempt to just understand one tiny quarter of it. And that just happens to be the quarter that I spend a lot of my time in. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about business. And so a lot of my frameworks, a lot of my writing, a lot of my content is in search of simplified formulas of seeing the world accurately. And so fundamentally, if you can predict, you can control.

34:36What do you mean? If you know all the variables that you can influence to create an outcome, right? Which means that if you have a perfect predictive model, so this would be like from a science perspective. Like if you have all the variables that predict an outcome, then if you reverse that, it means you can also control the outcome. Okay. If you can manipulate the variables. If the weather is one of the variables, fine, if I can't control the weather. But if I can put someone indoors and mimic the weather, then I can in a very way, in a real way, control the outcome. So what you're saying is that businesses have these similar equations and you can say, I'm struggling with this.

35:06I can pull the lever on leads and then I know what's going to happen here or there. Yeah, we don't have enough demand. Okay, well, demand is straightforward. Are we going to talk to people one on one? Are we going to talk them one to many? Well, what how many customers are we going after fortune 100? So it's probably gonna be a one to one approach. Are we going after mass market weight loss? It's probably one to many. Okay, cool. If we're doing one to many, like, are we going to do kid ads are gonna be making content? Okay, well, we could use one on one to get affiliates who then are doing paid ads are doing content on our behalf.

35:34Well, then we can use that strategy. But fundamentally, the only four things that you can do as the entrepreneur or whatever is gold outreach, warm outreach, paid ads, content. That's it. It's the only thing you can do. But what about affiliates? Well, you do one of those four to get the affiliate. You reach out to them. You make content saying, hey, I'm looking for affiliates or you run ads saying, hey, I've got an influencer program. You're going to still have to do that first core four to get other people to come do the other stuff on your behalf. Here's the other, Alex. Dude, there's two lines that I feel like I've really, that I think you really nailed.

36:09The first is, we'll talk about this one first, that if you put in 10 times more work into a book, because the quality is better, you end up with 100 or 1 ,000x the word of mouth. Talk to me about that. It's kind of the difference between gold medal and fourth place. The real difference is small. The practical difference is enormous. So what's the difference in terms of someone's life when they're the gold medalist of something? They get endorsement deals. They're forever the gold champion, all that stuff. fourth, it's like you get nothing. And so I think a lot of people don't even get fourth to be real, you know, like they're like number 100.

36:46But the thing is they still try pretty hard. It's just that all of the best returns come at the end of work. It's like those, it's the 16th coat of paint that really just makes it that little bit better. And I think in an increasingly connected world, more things are winner take all. Well, the way that I put it is that the curse of the internet is global competition. The gift of the internet is global reach. And because of that, your stuff has to be way better in order to stand out, but then the rewards on the other side are way bigger. Yeah. I think Naval has a good quote on this. He says, technology democratizes consumption and consolidates production.

37:25And so it means that if you're the best in the world, you get to do it for everyone. And so then it's like, if you get to do it for everyone, then it's like, then trying to become the best in the world. And the best in the world, definitely not going to do it on four hours a week. it's higher leverage to work more which sounds ironic or counterintuitive right because then that's kind of the point of what like i think why you like that statement it's like how are you telling me that this unscalable effort where i'm putting in n equals whatever many more repetitions like i'm getting diminishing returns here right how can it how can that be more efficient than doing half the work or having a ghost writer it's like well if i have a ghost writer no one's going to talk about my book, right?

38:04Like I'm just going to have a marketing campaign. I'm going to sell whatever it is before people read the book and that's it. But the long tail on time is huge. And so the fact that like Rich Dad Poor Dad still sells 100 ,000 copies a month, 40 years, 50 years later than when he originally wrote it, I'm like, I want to build assets, not magazines with hardcovers. and that's also why I spent a long time on all the books to try and make them to make them evergreen like think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform Facebook is not in there Instagram is not in there so as you were thinking about these you were like in 2080 I want this book to be as useful as it was when I wrote this and the easiest way I do it is I back test it what does that mean does this make sense 2000 years ago people still want things to be risk free they still want them to be fast they still want them to be easy you can reach out to people one on one that you know that you don't know.

39:00Reach out one to many that you know that you don't know. Like reaching out one to many is standing on the corner of a street and shouting. Right. That's what it is. Right. Right? You can put a billboard up. You can have a sign. Like this works 2 ,000 years ago. So rather than try to predict the future, I just look at the past and say, does this still work? This one's good too. It's from Michelangelo. If people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is. I love this visual, which is that if you look at a marathon, right? If you've ever gone with somebody to some marathon that they're running and you wanted to support them, 95 % of people are in two places, at the beginning, at the end.

39:41But the marathon is everything in between. And so we, as a society, the highlight reel is only these two places. And so what happens is most people in their mind assume that that is the race, starting and then finishing. but the 26.2 miles that happens in between like the mundane middle right master the middle um is the part where the champions meet and so i think that to the same degree like if people saw that i wrote 19 drafts of this book they wouldn't think it was that special can we do this can we open up to that table of contents and once again i just want to remind you take as much time as you need to find.

40:22So it's the second sticky note here. So if you go right here, should be opened up right to it. But maybe as much time as you need to go through the table of contents. And I think it'd be really cool to walk us through how some of these ideas have changed. And also, I just want to emphasize before you start here, this table of contents, it's not like, oh, Alex made a table of contents. No, no, no. This, the table of contents is the outline for your book. And so it does a lot more than a standard table of contents. And I feel like that's how Alex's opinion, I feel like that's how books should write.

40:54Like if you want to, if you want to figure out if you want to read a book, I feel like you should read the table of contents and be able to make a good decision. Sure. And that's kind of, and I try to make my, my titles and chapter headings like pretty descriptive. Like this is about where my reach. So what's going on here? So when you start, what am I looking at? So believe it or not, this book was, was the original through line was going to be about leverage and i ended up cutting all of the leverage concepts from the book for the most part except for one chapter right before lead getters um because i just it was so difficult to try and weave it in that i felt forced i still believe it to be like the actual essence of that but because it's like how can i as one man get 20 000 30 000 leads a day like how well i can't do it i do it through leverage sure and so that was kind of like the the catalyst for wanting to even like begin writing about this.

41:44But anyways, so this was kind of like my rough ideas. Like, okay, you know, I have to define some terms, right? I have to define media, lead gen, leads, content, promotion, the three contact types, which is not even a thing. I thought it was going to be a thing and it wasn't a thing. Promotions, I ended up just cutting entirely from the book and using somewhere else. I'll just leave that there. You know, and you know, I was going to take this very like everything we used to talk about marketing is wrong. And I do believe that to a great degree that is somewhat true. But it's like, okay, now you got to define the target.

42:17So it was like the market, deeper, up, down, adjacent, different market types. I ended up cutting that from the book. But what I see you doing here is you're kind of trying to do a full pass, give yourself enough fidelity to see where you're going, but you're not married to this. I mean, we did 19 drafts here and we completely rewrote it after number 12, but you're not married to this, but but it's crucial that you're actually putting enough on that you're like, I can at least start walking. Yeah. And so I would say that one of the biggest filters that I use for utility is whether it can be operationalized.

42:50Huh. And so the fact that it's unsurprising to me now, because this was however many years ago that I wrote that, the activity box is what I called this. I didn't even have the name of the core four yet, but the idea that like, what can I tell someone to do if I can't change their behavior, they cannot learn, which means that there's no point in writing about it unless it changes there what they do right and so that has pretty much been the the biggest lens that i use from a cutting perspective when i'm making the book and so i think the reason a lot of people are like man the books are from what i understand people say that it's they're they're really digestible they're really easy to use really easy to understand it's because i talk almost zero about theory yes i only talk about what you do yeah and by talking that way it's it demystifies a lot of it i will eventually write a book on branding but i looked up all the all the definitions of branding on the internet from different marketers.

43:38And I was like, I don't know what any of this means. They're all fluffy. Yeah. It's all like the feelings, impressions, experiences that a prospect has and associates. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is, right? I was like, well, if I want to brand, I have to figure out what I do. What would I do to brand, right? And answering that question has pretty much been how I try to answer everything within businesses. It's just like, okay, what is sales? Sales is just having a conversation that increases the likelihood that someone purchases, right? It's like, okay, cool. So then everything that increases the likelihood that someone purchases within the context of conversation is sales right and so then like okay now i can start working through this right okay so this is the first version and what i will say that often happens is like i'll write all these ideas that i want to have in the book and i'll probably end up being able to make the book like 10 of it so like if i look at all of this i cut out like i cut out so many people like i have this the hoop just this one line was the second half of the book just this one line.

44:32Operational drag, reliability, method, platform, all of that was cut. More, do better, I actually put at the end of section one around the activities. So actually, this is really interesting that you don't actually have a very good sense of what ideas are going to be the best ones. You love more, do better. You absolutely love that idea. But look where it is. It's section six, bottom line, almost looks like an afterthought. So that, this idea right here that's like an embryo that then really grew through the process of writing this book oh yeah so like once i get tired enough of something i'm like all right i'm going to rewrite it from the top again and so this is me rewriting it uh the sections right and so i'm like okay now it's actually just to find the target where when give ask evaluate scale so i thought it was going to be this like incremental process that i'm leading someone because again leverage was like this through line that i wanted to have um uh through the book And so then I got to like, okay, maybe I can try and visualize this a little bit better.

45:31And so, you know, marketing, like where do people actually come from, right? Because people exist. How do I get them to find me? Like I would have forced them to find me, which fundamentally is what I think advertising is you force people to find out. It's also just striking that you're doing a lot of drawings to basically work out the high level thing. This isn't you're writing and then you're drawing. It's like you're drawing and that's how you kind of get the conceptual map of where you're going to go. Yeah, I do almost all doodles in the beginning. Yeah, so doodles are at the beginning at the end.

45:56And this is an iPad thing? Yeah. Yeah. Just like, just, you know, just notes or whatever. I mean, there's a huge amount of time that I was like, you know, media different, you know, this is a book on advertising. So I'm like, okay, well, media is a huge thing. Platforms are a huge thing. Audience selection is a huge thing. And so the whole time I'm thinking like, okay, maybe that's media is section one, platform section two, audience section three. And I'm like, that's not, that's going to be so boring. Like, it's going to be a terrible book. And then I was like, okay, what about the process? Like, how do people buy?

46:23Now, real quick, when you get there, you're like, oh, it's going to be so boring. It's going to be a terrible book. Are you down on yourself? Or are you at this point like, you know what? I'm going to work through this. I need to find another way. So right here, this right here, these four little lines end up being the second half of the book. Wow. Right? So like it totally like it just keeps and a lot of times it's like this cutting away process, right? This is actually just continued from the one before because this is all leverage. All this stuff was leverage. So I'm like, okay, this is the first time I'm like, really, I've got this attract attention, interrupt attention.

46:51So I was like, maybe that's going to be like an angle. Yeah, because I didn't have - But see, this is the Mosey method, which is like, you're always trying to find either mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive, or these contrasts where you're either on this side or you're this side. Which I think is how you can make the Mises. Yeah. Like if you draw one line, it's going to be valid. If you draw two lines, it's much harder. It might not be valid. Right. Because are they all true mutually exclusive? Right. Yeah. So this is me trying to put sentences in place of all the different ways you can get customers.

47:22Okay. And then I tried to make it in this like leverage equation of like you times promotion times offer times the medium times the platform. Like that's all the variables that exist. This whole thing ended up being one paragraph. Wow. In the second half of the book. That's absolutely striking to me is how you just don't actually have a very good intuition for which one of the ideas are going to be good. And that's not you. I think that that's all writers. We just kind of have to wait and see. And I was like, I'm supposedly good at marketing. So that was a little humiliating. This has been my big filter.

47:57It's like, what does someone do as a result? And if I can't clearly define that, then I probably either just need to break it down more or I just need to cut it. It's just not a thing. That's been probably my number one filter for everything. Like, what does it change about someone's behavior? And that's why defining learning was so important for me. Like, if I want this book to educate, educate it's about changing behavior. But if you don't change your behavior, you can learn. just like in the simplest like that is how you define learning um and the speed of the speed of the rate of uh of learning is intelligence so if i have to show you the same streamline multiple times before you change behavior then you are done better than somebody you can change it immediately sure right um so growing into you got do more pay more new platforms more frequency more uniques more impressive like i kept like working through this and so this was actually just continued there from that same, that same page.

48:45And I'm like, okay, scrap all of that. Let's start with just like, what about the basic questions of like, okay, maybe it's just who, what, where, when, how, how much, how long. And what's crucial is you don't get here unless you have all these pages. And so that I, for a minute, I thought this was going to become the table of contents. And then what it really became is this became the action at the end of every chapter for, yeah, go for it. So that's the final result of me being like, oh, this isn't the table of contents. This is what I need to show for every way of advertising. So when you're posting content and you make your action checklist, you just have to say, okay, who's my customer?

49:25What am I going to do? Where am I going to do? What medium or platform? What am I going to make this post? So this is basically how you make your list of this is what I'm going to do. I love how messy all this is. I don't know. I find that to be so gratifying you know because it's so clean in the output and it's just that this is a train wreck thanks man yeah three ways i mean i could keep going on this but it'd be simple do this go to the very last one or the table of contents in here finals yeah yeah let's go to the final yeah and so i got to here and then i thought and this this is what was so painful i thought this was going to be a thing forever like i thought that i had this like friction framework thing like filters because i thought i was like maybe it's like a distillation process like you just still like raw attention is the input and then leads is the distilled output of that and so i kept doing that lead distillation process and so then i was like maybe i can make an acronym around this um and then i'm coming back to this method medium thing that took forever to try to work through um and i was like can i do piece like i don't know if i can find an acronym i'll use it i kept going i don't even know where the end of this thing is right so right here i see start here get understanding get leads get lead getters get started.

50:33Yeah, and then this became the final. So this was like a couple versions before the final, and then that was the final. Nice. That very messy process got me to here. Wow. I mean, this is the work, man. It's draft after draft after draft. So we look at how much stuff is here, right? The amount that actually made it to here is like this, this line, this became one chapter and that's it. Everything else I more or less threw up. So that's how I came over to the table of contents. And then I was like, all you gotta do now is just write the book. Right, so then once you did that, then it was basically game time.

51:15Yeah, then it was easy. Tell me about this, how do you think about who you're writing for? Because one of the things I learned from you is there's this difference between being known and being respected. And it's really easy to look at the analytics and say number go up, therefore good. But no, you're trying to reach a specific kind of person. So how do you think about that? I think it's the validity utility piece. Like, is this useful? And I think that people will consume things that are useful for them. Like, does it make their life easier? Does it make things happen faster? Does it make things less risky?

51:48Depending on who you talk to, like, if I talk about food, then that applies to everyone. If I talk about leads, it's only applied to people who are advertising, which is usually business owners and so i think about this in context of deep and wide deep versus wide and so wide i define as um something that is only useful for a beginner and deep i define as something that is useful for anyone like in a in a vertical and so how to get your first five clients is useful really only for a beginner because anybody who already has customers is like i know how to get my first five clients. But if I talk about strategy, that's useful for somebody who's starting out and somebody who's got a billion dollar company.

52:28Because I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I can have something that's deep and wide. And that's kind of our sweet spot for what we try to do. Now, we don't always succeed, but that is the intention, is I'd like to have something that a beginner can get value from and somebody who's super advanced can also get value from independent of their context. And how do you think about the general strategy of what you're doing? Like what was the Genesis moment of we're going to make rock and business content and then that'll be the first domino that then makes all these other ones fall? Tim Ferriss has his concept of like the big domino.

53:03So you kind of like, I don't know if you're purposely referencing it, but basically like, is there one thing that is so important that I can do that if I do that, it makes the rest of my to-do list irrelevant. And so it's like, if you have a hundred things on the to-do list, it's like, there's probably not one that's important enough because if it were important enough, it would make the other ones disappear. either shrinking to irrelevance or accomplished by consequence. And so we're investors, right? And we have capital. And so what does every investor want? They want proprietary deal flow and you want to shift the supply demand in your favor.

53:36And so if I can have unlimited people coming towards me who have good businesses that want to do deals only with me, then I can decrease the likelihood that basically I can decrease my skill at picking and negotiating and still probably do well. I saw the ultimate way of maximizing my luck surface area as building, you know, our hope is the most valuable business brand out there to business owners. And if we can build that, then I don't need to worry about all the negotiation tactics. I don't need to worry about having the most capital. I don't need to worry about having the best term sheets i don't need to worry about any of these things if i just have more people who want to do business with me than i can possibly do business with and then after after you you you match the supply demand of like okay there's more people who want to do business with me then it's how what quality of person like basically then you can just consistently continue and that's kind of an unlimited i think continue to raise the bar of the quality of company and entrepreneur that you work with and so like the companies that we that we invest in now don't even look close to the companies that I invested in four years ago.

54:45Talk to you about this. The number one creator mistake is building new products for their audience rather than building more audience for their product. Okay. I'm going to tell you this little side story and then I'll ask the question. So I'm really a pretty big stickler with written word. And so it's been very difficult for me to have anyone write for me at all. And so as a result, basically the only thing that's fair game that my team can use to put captions on stuff is stuff that I have said in a video and they can just transcribe it or tweets. That's it. Anything else that you've seen that's written is me.

55:21And so like, just put context on like, if all the words that are out there, like I have written all of them or I've said them, that's it. And so to your question, it's just more of a business mistake than I think it's just creators fall in the same traps. And so let's say they spend this time growing their audience and they get to call it you know 100 000 followers whatever and then they come out with the product and then they sell the product and they make money and then they're like huh i should come out with another product to make more money but what it did was it reinforced the wrong activity because it was late so the activity that made the money was building the audience not coming with the product and so what happens is you find these creators who have like six businesses essentially which is really just like six different products that each of the businesses in and of themselves could be$100 million plus businesses, but they don't have enough audience.

56:09And so they do the short term fix, which is come up with another thing, but long term, you end up drowning in the fact that you have six businesses and your attention split. And so there's two components to this. So one is that if you just launch a product on its own, and there's no repurchase rate, or it's not consumable, and there's nothing recurring about it, then you're going to have to keep coming up with products, which means that's kind of a a strategic mistake, right? You should have just thought of something that like, if we launched it, people were gonna buy it quickly, but then keep buying it.

56:37Now you have a regular stream of income and you can take that income and keep doubling down on the audience to grow it or pay for other people's audiences or pay for ads or like all the other strategies that are in the book of like expanding your reach. But fundamentally that's the trap, is that rather than saying, cause like you just think about a long enough time, Rosen, do you just keep starting new products? and then you in 20 years you have 30 products that you're doing uh or when i say products a lot of times it's businesses because the products are actually not they are too differentiated to be like a second product in the same line i guess someone has two different t-shirts i don't see that as a different product if someone goes from t-shirts uh to selling consulting that's a different product right versus the alternative which is like i just make t-shirts and i keep advertising and all i do is i keep getting more and more people find out about my t-shirts and my brand and that's how I grow my sales.

57:26And it's going to be more steady, less pops, but that's how you can build a really big company. Whereas if you have seven businesses, which are like the most common thing that I see, you end up just going to be split thin and all the products are going to be crap. Yeah. And I see it all the time. So when you say, hey, I'm a real stickler about words, how does that show up? We have by and large solved this problem by me having lots of video content and the team being able to take any snippet from anywhere, if it's appropriate to use it as you know like a caption or something like that um like linkedin is the only thing that i don't write right uh so captions and linkedin are the basically things that i don't manually write but they are taken from either tweets or they are taken from videos and so that's but emails i write books i write copy i write um not ad copy that's one that i don't write as much but that's a problem so i'm fixing so tell me what is the business model of these books break it down for Because you sell them for cheap.

58:27You spend a bunch of time on them. I mean, the sort of naive person could be like, what are you doing? Yeah, it makes no sense. So that's part of it is that it does make no sense. But the other part is that long term, like, I think that I'll die. And my hope is that these will still be around. But I don't think that's true. Isn't this the thing that sort of initiates everything else? Kind of gets you the domain expertise? Yeah. Yeah. So from the asset perspective, I write these because I really want them to be assets. I want them to help a lot of people. I think that anybody who reads my books can feel my intention behind what I'm trying to do.

59:03Like if it were just a lead magnet, which is why I think it would cheapen it to describe it that way, they wouldn't be bestselling books. I think they would just be lead magnets and suck. And so I think the ultimate lead magnet should be timeless assets. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up when they do what, like 99 % of people will never buy anything from you. And, but 99 % of people are what create your reputation. And so I would want them to consume something that is still exceptionally valuable because they are ultimately the ones who will create the reputation you have. Now, if people are like, well, you don't know them or you've never done this with them.

59:34It's like, yeah, but the internet doesn't really deal in nuance. And so, yes, this is the gateway drug. But really, before this, the gateway drug is the content. And so the content is really the first thing that Samuel consumes, and we want to make that really, really good. And then if they got enough value from the content, they're like, maybe I'll give one of his books a shot. And if they read the book, then they get way more value. Then maybe they come into my world, my show better headquarters, come to one of our advisory events. And when you speak to people who come to the advisory events and whatnot, what kinds of people, what kinds of businesses do you recommend that the founders be writing like you do?

1:00:12And then if they do that, what do you tell them so that they can be successful? and honestly the i i basically try to dissuade most people from writing a book and i think that's because it's people who aren't writers who don't love writing see my book and think oh i'll do that and it's just like it's the michelangelo quote you don't understand how much work it is and you i could already tell you if you've never written before you aren't willing to do it like i've been writing for a long time i haven't been writing as publicly from a book's perspective but i have four books like it's not like i'm and before that i i loved writing you know in my i've loved writing since I was a kid.

1:00:48And so it's something that I can do and can immerse myself in and really lose myself to the craft. And a lot of people can't do that. The amount of people who are entrepreneurs who I know who are like, hey, man, I wrote my book in 12 weeks. And I'm like, that's amazing. But it's probably not that good. And I try to like God say that in a mean way. It's like, yeah. I'm like, first draft, they're like, yep, just knocked it out. I'm like, that's okay. Sure. Good luck. How you launch a book determines how good you are at marketing. How well the book is selling two years later determines how good the book is.

1:01:28Is there a tactical way that you get more Amazon reviews or is that just one of those things? If the book is good, people are going to review it, but you really can't influence it that much. I'm always scared to make a review ask because my own insecurity is like, well, what if it sucks? And they remember to leave a bad review, right? But I think that in some ways, it's almost a litmus test of how confident you are about the quality of the product. Like if you're willing to ask everyone to leave a review, then you're really confident that people will like it. And so I have a review ask in the middle of both of the books.

1:02:02And I figured I put it in the middle. So it's like if someone got to the middle, then they probably liked the book. Enough to get to the middle, right? not on page five yeah exactly not exactly oh by the way you know like it's like i haven't given you any value yet so like no i've put it after they hopefully have gotten a significant amount of value i do think that making an ask increases the likelihood that they leave review um but i think if you have a crap book then we're like no or they'll be a bad one which is you know arguably worse okay i don't know anything about your love for writing as a kid and i want to hear about that yeah i wrote short stories or poems um and i enjoyed that i enjoyed that stuff the free that's why the literary magazine was probably where i spent like that's where i wrote more of my stuff so it was all student submissions for short stories poems um and so i managed them and art and art too like kids who put art so like the cover art you know we'd get a bunch of paintings and we'd be like okay which of these is going to cover and then between stories between poems we'd put other art from you know the art department from the kids who are you know making painting or whatever they're doing you know pictures of sculptures and things like that and so we you know we do a review every week and so that that helped me get better at writing just being able to like look at other people's writing um and so i just i enjoyed it i enjoyed that writing significantly more than everything that was assigned to me i didn't enjoy that writing and that was actually a really interesting breakthrough for me is that like i didn't like reading that much and that's not common usually writers like reading i think um i didn't even know that nonfiction was really a genre to like like after i graduated high school because everything you read just about everything you read in high school is fiction or a textbook right textbooks suck and fiction i felt was useless and so i enjoyed making my own fiction but like think about like from a learning perspective what does this change about my life nothing i'm like okay some person some random land just did some thing and whatever it doesn't affect me because i never really understood the point as soon as i became an adult or whatever uh i got introduced to nonfiction and i was like oh my god this is useful and so then i got more into reading for specific purposes but i'd still want to separate that as like i was trying to learn a specific thing not analyze the writing right um and so yeah i just i really liked writing and i just it was one of the few things i feel like i can get the flow really easily with writing like writing and drawing which is why all my books have lots of drawing lots of writing and i like doing my brainstorming with a pen because i don't know it feels more tactile i i lose myself in it more recently that that was pretty much my experience and i did take a bit of a break from writing when i got into the business world and it was only like gosh it was probably was this like the gym launch days yeah well i wrote the gym launch book but getting i think i wrote that book in 2018 so writing the gym launch book was the first like real writing that i had done that wasn't like copy or things like you're like writing writing that i'd done and i think as soon as that happened And I was like, oh, I missed this.

1:04:51It was like I'd forgotten how much I liked it. And so then I pretty much haven't stopped writing since. Last question. So you get a call from UNLV. They're like, hey, Alex, we want you to teach a writing class. How do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you want to teach people? I'll bet you the first day I would probably define terms or first week. I mean, I could bring this into sections rather than the sessions. But like the first section would be the definition of terms. The next one would be clarifying the objective of why are we writing? What are we writing for? How does writing serve us?

1:05:27Why does it matter? And then I would probably transition from there to the rules of writing. What are the rules of writing? So there's, at least as I see it, and I would probably be parroting a lot of Stephen King's on writing, if I were to say it. But I think that's one of the best books on writing out there. As few words as possible. Like, if you can use a simpler word, use that word. you know, very sentence structure. So there's a rhythm to it, you know, short, short, long, you know, and then from a stylistic perspective, I purposely try to use a lower grade language because I want more people to understand it.

1:06:04I don't think there's, I don't have an ego to people thinking that I'm sorry. I also have no, nothing against people who use bigger words. It is like alternate word concision uses more complex words, right? But I want maximum comprehension rather than maximum word concision. So I use concision only as a tool to increase comprehension at large. So short words, short sentences, big promises. So you have rules of writing, anything else? That would be, yeah, that'd probably be the next section. And I would probably practice super constrained writing for people. So if the objective of the course was to teach people to write, then it would be like, I want you to write an entire paper on this thing in one page and really force people because i think like twitter i think is or x i think is a wonderful platform for learning how to write because it just you have you have to force the you have to keep crunching them down and i think that's honestly i think x is one of the best tools for learning to write because you get fast feedback um the other one is i would probably use um like hemingway as um because that also gives you real-time feedback yeah and so typing into there is so helpful because you know Stephen King pretty much says this is like just don't use adverbs by large just don't use them like there's a better verb that you're not using x and Hemingway would probably be the vast majority of the remainder of the time that I had it would be repetition of them getting fast feedback on the writing that they're doing under specific constraints and i would probably have a lot more uh free like freedom in terms of topic and far less in terms of rules like you have to obey these rules but you can write whatever you want you have to do it in page or you have to in half a page and you can write whatever topic you want but you have to obey these 27 rules now right because fundamentally when i'm writing for the most part i now they're like a lot more or less ingrained in how i write um but if like a section still doesn't seem good, I'll paste it into having a way and be like, ooh, that's why.

1:08:08And like, you know, long sentences. Like there's just, there's things that you just learn that you're like, oh, this might have sounded good in my head, but no one can read this. And so not to get super writing tactical, but that's... That's why we do this. How I write, maybe. It's called how I write. Yeah, that's probably how I'd like that. So definition of terms, why this matters, and how it's useful for you. And I basically sell them on why they should even do this. Rules the game. and then practice. And that'll probably be everything. The rest will just be practice. Rock on. Well, I just want to thank you because I've read a lot of your stuff, consumed many, many, many of your videos, had a lot of questions and I feel like you answered them well, but also you've been a big inspiration.

1:08:50So thank you. Oh, I appreciate it. I'm glad they, hopefully they were useful.