#43: Ellen Fishbein — A Writer's Writer

S'up nerds, welcome to another episode of the Jason Levin Show. Today we have my publisher on, Ellen Fishbein. She is a writer's writer. She works with some of the best writers around, uh, Danny Miranda, David Perel, a bunch of CEOs and executives, and now she's publishing my book, Memes Make Millions. Um, this is a really good episode for writers. If, uh, if you're interested at all, highly recommend listening and, um, shooting her a message if you want to work with her. It's been a wonderful experience and I can't say enough good things about working with Ellen. All right. Hope you enjoy. Sweet. All right. I've got no real agenda today. I want to talk about memes. I want to talk about writing. I want to talk about Ayn Rand. Where do you want to get started?

Let's start with talking about writing, because I think that you are someone who has— someone who models a lot of the kind of writing habits and beliefs that I think a lot of people should have. So maybe we could start there and then branch to the other stuff.

All right, sweet. What have you noticed about some of the best writers that you've worked with? And I guess maybe a little context for the listeners would be awesome.

Yes, I have worked with a lot of writers over the course of the last 12 years or so. I've done a bunch of different writing-related businesses that have been mostly that I've started. And I've also been involved with a venture-backed media company, like pretty early on. And so I've been like a managing editor and then more recently a writing coach to the stars, working with a lot of well-known kind of high-profile online writers and offline writers and authors and business people and CEOs who write a lot and need to write. And then even more recently, the publishing company that my team and I started, Altamira Studio, is doing Yearbook, as among a lot of other very cool projects. So yeah, so I've worked with and coached and managed and edited a ton of writers. And one thing that I think surprises people a lot is that I just, I don't think that writing is something that can really be taught. Like we write in school and we have writing classes in school, But really the best writers, the people who, even if they don't think of themselves as writers, as a word that they would use to describe or introduce themselves, they are very much self-taught. So they take things that they learn from people and they can definitely be guided, coached, helped, collaborated with, all that stuff. But ultimately it's the kind of thing that you just learn by doing it and by practicing it. And nobody can really teach you how to write. So the people who come out of school not having spent any time sort of teaching themselves how to write, or people who haven't just gotten passionate about it for any reason, they just reach a certain level of proficiency that they never really get beyond. And then the people who actually find themselves drawn to writing are the ones who, who learn, because every single person learns in their own way and different things help, like, at different times.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. Self-taught autodidactic kind of thing where you're just reading other people's work. You develop your tastes, you develop what's good, but it takes so long to get from beginning to the taste that you like to read. It's a very long journey. And I know I was definitely frustrated when I was younger. It was like, ah man, this just sounds awful. Like I'll never sound like Kerouac. I'll never sound like X or whatever. It's, I think a lot of people give up in that process. They keep trying to compare themselves to some famous writer instead of a 16-year-old or 17-year-old.

Totally. And for, and also it has to do with having good taste of the stuff that you read to some degree. Like you sent me a recommendation for that book, The Father of Spin. And first of all, the number of people who will send me a recommendation that's more than 5 years old. That already put you in a 3% of the total group in terms of setting that recommendation. And it was actually a good, like, nonfiction book that told a really good story, which is awesome. How do you, like, how— I'm curious, like, how do you find books that you like to read? Cuz I know you're pretty picky, right? So where do you get your ideas for what you like to read and then borrow from as a writer?

Yeah, I, I guess recommendations is definitely a big one. Obviously Twitter and podcasts are also great. Looking on just like Amazon to see recommended and then what previous authors have done. A lot of times it's if I heard an author's name but I haven't heard their work, I'm like deeply curious where I have to know, like I gotta dip my feet in a little bit. And so digging back on some of those older works. Yeah, I guess a lot of it as well, studying English and doing that kind of stuff was like being assigned, right? Reading and figuring out what I hated, which is just as important. Is figuring out what you like. Yeah. I, I wish I, I had some magical formula, but it's like the, it's like the grapevine from all the directions.

What's, okay. Outta curiosity, I haven't actually asked you this. Is there a book that a lot of people like that you really don't?

Yeah, there's definitely a lot. I'm looking through like my Readwise now. Oh, Rick Rubin's book. I read one page and put it down. It's so bad. Yeah. I thought I was just so fluffy. I was like, I wanna hear about your time in hip hop and how you helped specific artists. I don't wanna see these metaphors, man. Maybe I wasn't stoned enough. I don't know.

But the storytelling element is totally missing from that book, sadly. Like, yeah, when he goes on podcasts, he tells these actual stories and in the book there's like almost none of that. Yeah.

And that's what's the coolest part about Rick Rubin is Shangri-La, like how he built his studio, working with Kanye, Jay-Z, like all these people. And he just totally skips out on that. I'm trying to see what other books in the background. What about you? Do you have any that you hate that other people love?

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Atomic Habits.

Oh yeah, it's definitely overrated for sure.

I guess it freaks people out so much when I say that, but I'm like, no, I don't really think it's that good or really that well written. Yeah.

Yeah. It's definitely not that great. I guess the one part that sticks with me from that book though, which is important, is like, in order to start believing you're a specific type of person, you need to do the stuff to do, to be that person. I was actually, all right, I wanna jump into this. I was talking to a friend yesterday and he, so he is making a lot of money doing AI threads for companies, right? So he's writing these AI threads, but it's soulless. He's, but he's making 15 grand a month. He's happy just writing AI threads. And we're talking, he's, oh man, I just feel like I'm in this like weird place where it's meaningless. I'm like, dude, are you being a Twitter writer or a writer's writer? You can't be both all the time. It's fine to be a Twitter writer sometimes, which I obviously am, but you gotta fuel that writer's writer side of you as well. And he was just, I, his jaw, I could hear it over the phone from across the country. His jaw was like, oh bro, that just shook me to my core. And I think it'll shake a lot of people to their cores. Are you writing on Twitter or because of Twitter? How do you think about the differentiation?

That's, I love that you said that to him and that's totally the kind of advice that I would give to somebody. There's nothing wrong with having an audience. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with building and cultivating an audience. And there's nothing wrong with using social media for the stuff it's good for. But what happens is, and some people have called, some people have this like jargony word for this audience capture, which is where, uh, the famous example is there was this like food YouTuber. You might even know who it was. And I might not remember the name, but there was this like eating YouTuber who started out just being this normal guy, but then he became like extremely obese as a result of kind of wanting to just keep—

Yeah.

Making these videos of eating and stuff. And that's like a terrible and really like extreme metaphor for what can happen with your social media audience if you just let that take over your entire writing process. It's that level of feedback that you're getting from just likes and retweets and follows is a very shallow level of feedback that can only get you so far. And you always have to come back to developing as, and growing as a person and like having real deep conversations and having that feed into your process in a way that's totally off of the platforms that you're writing on.

100%. I, I find it helpful to be doing other kinds of writing other than just work writing. So even just writing in my journal, I have, I have a contest going with another Twitter person who's like frustrated cuz she hasn't been writing her stuff. So we're trying to do one short story every week and whoever doesn't do it has to pay the other person $20. But I just wanna break out those muscles because I haven't done that in years. I really wanna just focus on that. I'd love to finish up screenplays and stuff that I had from college, like breaking out all those muscles and not just— I was thinking about this the other day. If I die and like I'll be remembered for my Twitter threads, is that was Really? Like, that's pretty awful. Like, I don't want that to be my like best work like that. That'd be so sad.

Totally. Yeah, totally.

Getting personal on Twitter where it's like sharing more than just, like I've been doing these cool threads about different famous writers or stuff like that, but like telling personal stories. I saw this, I lo— I saw this Twitter thread the other day where it was this guy writing about his old Italian grandparents. And how they used to just have friends stop by their house all the time. And the unexpected visits have stopped in like our modern age. And I almost cried. Like, it was beautiful. I was like, that is what I wanna keep putting out there. That kind of work.

There's so much of the— there's so many dimensions of the human experience that just don't translate naturally onto like social media. And sometimes somebody gets part of that and manages to actually convey it in that format. And you're like, wow. Cause it's a really effective format for moving things through groups of people quickly, Twitter and Instagram and stuff like that. But it's usually shallow, right? So that's awesome. I love that.

Yeah. Wild.

All right.

Shall we jump into, what are you thinking? Memes or Ayn Rand?

Yeah, let's talk about memes because that's the natural next progression of, so for you, you got on Twitter and then you started specializing in memes. And even I don't know like the full story there. So what happened? How did you start to zero in on this like center?

When I was in high school, I'd been tweeting like funny stuff since I was like 14, just for my friends. And I stopped for a few years and got back on and made a bunch of new friends on Twitter and a bunch of internet friends and this big community. And I just have always liked making people laugh. That's just, I love, I've always been that kid in the back of the class who cracks a joke and like the teachers get mad at. I've just always been that kid. So it's just a natural extension of that is writing my funny thoughts and memes are just a, a, a good way to express humor and like a quick thing that everyone can easily understand and incorporate imagery. So it was like a very natural thing. And then, sorry, there's just an ambulance, but I was working for I started posting memes on Twitter just to make my friends laugh. And then I was working for a startup at the time doing content writing, and she just asked, hey, can you make memes for us? And so I started getting paid to make memes and then talked to other friends who were making really big money, which is the premise of Memes Make Millions. And I started realizing like, oh shit, like being funny on the internet can really pay. So yeah, that's a path for memes.

I just love the message that having a sense of humor is valuable and, and that value ultimately can be made not soft and not fuzzy. That was one of the things that just really captivated me out of the gate about your project. Plus the fact that I think you're a strong writer with a unique kind of view of the world, but just that thesis of there's so many humorless people in the business world. There's so many people and not only can they not take a joke, like if It's like the concept of something. This is part of the first conversation you and I had, like we were, which, which was one of the best conversations I've ever had because we just hit it off on certain core values, I think, out of the gate. And we were talking about how there's this epidemic of people thinking reading fiction is somehow like this horrible, unproductive, terrible thing to do. And people are like ashamed to— I talk to somebody almost every other day who's like ashamed to admit to me that they read fiction or that they like movies or something. And I'm like, where, how did this happen? How did we get to the point where like joy and laughter are like taboo? What is that?

I know. I was talking to that friend, the same friend who the writer v Twitter writer kind of conversation. I was like, dude, making art for art's sake is a beautiful thing. Like appreciating art. You don't have to be showing somebody how to get jacked or make money. Like you could literally, it doesn't have to be a transformational thing. You could just be entertaining them for 5 minutes, for an hour, for 3 hours. And That is fine. That is a valuable thing. I even feel it. I feel guilty. I've been watching a TV show. I've been watching Blacklist, like, very obsessively. And even though I'm a writer and want to write screenplays, it does feel like it's that obsession with work. I talked to Paul last week, Paul Millard. We're obsessed with work, and we want to be productive all the time. And it's sometimes you just got to appreciate art.

Yeah, and if you look at the argument that a lot of times I make when we're talking about this stuff is if you look at the stuff that's actually stood the test of time, the oldest stuff that's been passed down through history through like centuries, it's art and it's fiction and it's stories and it's the Iliad and Gilgamesh and like all this stuff and ultimately stuff that comes from people's imaginations and is maybe very lightly based on something that happened and then is 95% imaginative embellishment with like mermaids and Cyclops and all this kind of stuff. That's the stuff that stands the test of time. Stories, great stories. They've, that's like the glue for civilization. So this idea that it's somehow dispensable, I don't know. Workaholism has really done a number on people's sort of priorities when it comes to that stuff.

Yeah, it's optimization. You're like over-optimizing and not enjoying. Like I was talking to a friend about this too. This, the same friend is sometimes you don't have to listen to a podcast, like just turn on music, listen to music for the sake of enjoying music. And I feel this, you know, desire when I'm walking, I'm like, oh, I gotta be productive. Listen to a podcast, get a good idea for a tweet, get a good idea for an article. And some of my best ideas come from a hip-hop song. Or pulling quotes. I've learned more from rap albums than podcasts, which is contradictory to say talking on a podcast. Well, I've, you can't forget about art and that we could learn things from that, not just talking heads.

Yeah, totally. Like the first thing we, the, as like the first thing that we published at Altamira Studio was my poetry book Spacefaring, which you have a copy of. And this was like, we worked with this family-owned print shop. We figured out everything that goes into making something from start to finish and like all of the design requirements and everything it takes to like do custom stuff and all these kinds of things. And it's a calling card that I send out to people. Like you could think of my personal and business network, really, that inner circle is encompassed by the list of people who I've shipped this book to. And when people get it, a lot of times people who know me in a business setting get it and they're like reading, they're reading it and they're like, oh, it's poetry. And it throws them for a loop. It's, people are surprised. They're like, wait, what am I, what, what's happening here? What's going on? But then they take a minute and they read it because I sent them this thing and they're like, oh, you know what? Reading that one page poem was actually a really good use of my time. Yeah.

Yeah, there's so many, so much wisdom that could come from art that is like just plain old art, plain good art. Yeah, I, I think that's getting lost today. Oh yeah. It's kind of, yeah, it's, it's definitely is.

And by the way, speaking of Ayn Rand, I think that was largely the problem that she was running into and trying to solve. Ayn Rand gets a lot of criticism, obviously from many sides. I think part of that is that the audience that is most vocally supportive of her is a very particular group of people who can be very strong personalities in ways that not everybody appreciates. But a lot of the flak that she gets is related to kind of these philosophy books that she wrote on objectivism and all this stuff. But the stuff that she really cared about and the stuff that she really spent most of her most productive years of her career doing and the stuff that she worked the hardest on and all of that stuff and the stuff that was the most special to her. And ultimately the stuff that is also standing the test of time with people who like her is the fiction that she wrote, like Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Anthem and all these books. And what happened with her was when she put out those, those novels, she found— she put out the novels and she put out her philosophy and she found that the nonfiction people, the academics, the philosophy departments, the people who were all serious about the intellectual sphere, they just outright rejected everything that she had to say. They just weren't open to it at all. But when she put forward her ideas in the form of these stories, which— because she was a big student of film, these stories have a lot of movement, and so you can get through this 1,000-page book somehow and you're like, wow, I actually read that. She has these stories and these characters and these cinematic kind of Incidents that happen in her novels and she puts forward her ideas in that format and she gets through to people where that kind of nonfiction intellectual sphere layer just wasn't enough for people to find that common ground, if that makes sense.

No, it does. Like in a nonfiction account, you don't have people saying, I'm pulling up quotes from Reid Wise, but, "Me, whatever we are, it's we who move the world and it's we who will pull it through." Like, Nobody, most people don't have the ego or the, the chutzpah to say that even though we might believe it. Right. But like she did such a good job, like making 'em so honestly comfortable with their talent and whatever, and confidence, I guess. It's beautiful to have people who are so comfortable in that. I get, I think that was like one of the main messages of it is be comfortable with being good at something, like be comfortable with your intelligence. Don't try to hide it. Yeah. That's one of the things that I really took from her.

Oh, totally. And one of the quotes that I have, by the way, I have this, I have this short article slash like collection of quotes that I put together when I reread Atlas Shrugged after 10 years, because I found myself in the thick of my first, uh, business and I was really lost. So I read Atlas Shrugged and then 10 years later I was running my third business. I'm like, oh, I guess I'm still doing this. So I read it again and she's got this great quote that I end up coming back to, which I can't agree with more, which is this idea that she wrote: The sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets, what do they suppose moves the industrialists, the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs and new continents through all the ages? This idea that people who do science and engineering and business and all of these things might be motivated by an intuitive creative spark. There's something about that's like anathema to the over-optimizing mind, but I think she's absolutely right. Like the great entrepreneurs who I've met, just like the great writers, like they have a lot in common in the sense that they're very much guided by this intuitive inner creative spark and this desire to do something that's not really optional for them.

100%. It's yeah, I think just also her The honesty around money. Pulling another quote, when I die, I hope to go to heaven, whatever the hell that is, and I want to be able to afford the price of admission. I just love that. Like it's, it's very seen as, I, especially in today's age where almost communism is on the rise, especially with young people, it's like it's seen as wrong or hated on for loving money or wanting to honestly just chase money. Well, it's not a bad thing. If you want to embrace that, you should embrace that kind of thing.

Yeah, she's got a great— she's got a great way of talking about it where it's like money is just— if you exchange money, it means you are assuming that everyone is the owner of their own mind, of their own effort, and there's the ability to transfer the value of your own effort to someone else in a voluntary way. And so money stands for something that is very uncorrupt, I think, in many ways. And people can get distracted by it because, you know, it doesn't really exist. It's a means to an end, right? So like money in itself is a means to an end, and that— and it can distract people because they see these numbers and they get, they get obsessed with it. But the invention of money, the idea of money, the idea of being able to transact in something that's not bartering, that's a really powerful thing that can allow a lot of great things to happen that are not evil at all. Yeah, I don't know. I think the— I think what ends up happening though is that like these things, there are things that are true and there are things that are not true. And what happens when you take that opposite philosophy of just expecting people to give things to you for free or from each according to his ability or any of that bullshit, that stuff just objectively fails to work in the world. It just doesn't match how the world really is. That's my opinion.

No, I 100%. I guess jumping back to Altamira for a sec, what other projects are coming? How's everything with Tim's book? Yeah, just all of everything around that.

Yeah. So Adam Draper.

Adam Draper.

Yeah. Adam Draper wrote this book called Breakfast with Pops, which I highly recommend. It's awesome. We published it. It's very short. It's this long. And everyone always laughs when they open it. The, the, the text size is actually really big. It's almost like a young adult book, but the book was co-written by Adam with a lot of input from his grandfather, the great legendary venture capitalist, Bill Draper, who like practically created the whole, created the whole field. And we actually had. Our very first print of this book was this tiny type size that was like, we accidentally put it in this really small font and we got these test prints and we were like, oh my God, like there, no 95-year-old man can see this at all. It's just way too small. So we, we made the text way bigger, like to err on the side of too big for kind of the next run. And then when Adam saw that, he was like, this is perfect. I don't wanna make it any smaller.

Nice.

So it's like grandpa-sized and it's a really quick read and it's a lot of fun. And, and the book is doing, the book is doing really well because what's happening is Adam seeded the process of the word spreading about this book by sending a few copies around to like people in his inner circle. And he asked them for their feedback, like even before he started talking about the book, before we even started visibly promoting the book anywhere, he sent out some copies and he asked them for feedback on that like early version. And then he incorporated their feedback and we put this list of their names at the end with this special thanks list of all of the people who contributed to the book and actually helped us make the book better on the next release. And now those, a lot of those people are like, first of all, they feel happy to be included in the process. And a lot of those people are like, I'm buying 6 more copies of this to give to all my business partners. And all this stuff. So that book is definitely accomplishing the objective, which is to bring more people onto Adam's wavelength in terms of his investing philosophy, to bolster his relationships with other investors and create a more robust, more high-trust kind of deal flow between different investors, if that makes sense.

No, it makes sense. I got it in the mail the other day with the pen. And thank, thank you all for that. I, yeah, I gotta post a picture of the book. Um, I will do that right after this call or after this call I'm interviewing Bad Luck Brian, but then I'll do that.

Nice. Yeah. And then we got other projects in the pipeline that I can't, it would be better not to like name exactly what the projects are, but we have some very fun projects, including a couple of fiction projects that, that I think are going to be just not really anything that most people have read in their lives. And so I'm very pumped about those and pretty much The rule is short books, no fluff, no BS, no making the book artificially 400 pages long, and taking some risks in the book, like doing something different with the book. Because so many things that people say and write are just all— they just all blend in together.

Yeah. The saying, long-term games with long-term people.

Yeah.

I like short books with long-term people. Like that would be a good, good motto there.

Yeah, that's totally part of it. And then of course, like, I don't know if you wanna go into the story behind, behind your book and what happened. Do you wanna go into that at all? Yeah.

The stuff with Amazon?

Yeah. Cuz I just, I mean, on principle, I literally on principle had to like really go, yeah, I have to work with Jason Levin because of what happened.

It's so funny cuz I like, I think I threw that in almost at the end, just like I, it wasn't the main thing, but yeah, I could explain. So I had the idea for Memes Make Millions over a year ago, and I hit up two friends about it actually, who are in the book now. Both of them were too busy. Charlie and Jack, love them to death. They've both been on the podcast and very grateful, but they were, one had a kid, one was doing his thing. I was like, oh my God, am I going to write this thing myself? And so I sat on it for a little bit and then I was like, all right, screw it. You know what? I'm going to do it. I'm going to post on Amazon. Like, I can handle that. That's not too hard. Post on Amazon, get like a bunch of presales when I post on Twitter. And then 2 days later, it gets taken down off of Amazon. And I am just, you know, fucklumped, to use some Yiddish there. I am upset, on the verge of tears, because for 3 weeks I'm on the phone with Amazon support, messaging, just like very upset because I feel like I screwed over readers who bought it, like some of my friends, some of my followers on Twitter, and then just also like very upset because it felt, looked very unprofessional. And then, so finally I find out that Amazon doesn't allow you to post, have anything with memes or copyrighted. And especially I, I think it could have gotten around it if memes weren't in the title, but because memes were in the title, especially, and just so much of the book is based off of it, Amazon didn't allow it. So I switched it over to Gumroad. Which was fine. Made 50, 60 sales and then something like that, maybe more. And then we started talking and the rest is history.

Yeah. Now, now the pre-orders are really rolling in and it was just on principle, like the whole idea that Amazon would just ban your book because you put a meme in the book. And the excuse for that is, oh, we're worried about copyright concerns about a meme. Like, I just got so— I just went like zero to 100 when I heard that. I'm like, that is so just not with the times at all. And there are so many ways to have that just not be something that you're worried about. And there are so many ways to just not get into any kind of disputes with anybody over this. Not to mention that they're very unlikely to come up in the first place. And just, but of course, literally a million people work for Amazon. So it doesn't matter if you're like, no, I'm going to adjust the memes in such and such a way, or I'm going to do this, that they don't care. They just have to make a rule. And in my view, that is the weakness of publishing options like that is you're going to run into a lot of different barriers and edge cases where you're trying to say something that is with the times and that is pertinent and that's interesting and relevant. And one of these old rules just gets in your way. The same thing is even worse with the legacy publishers like Penguin and Simon Schuster because they have rules that are from when they were started 90+ years ago.

That's funny to think about. You think about Amazon as an institution, but they're still younger. They're 3 times younger, right?

Yeah. Amazon's a spring chicken compared to Simon Schuster. But all this stuff, they, these things, these things live and die and they have their— when they were started, they were very open to people doing all kinds of experimental things. And as these things get bigger and they grow and they get older, they can't tolerate risk and experimentation. So that's why I'm glad we serendipitously ran into each other because we're both trying to be on the front of all of the things that are interesting and trendy and different and experimental in media.

So I missed last week's Future of Publishing. Spoke with Paul a bit, but what is the future of publishing?

Yeah, we had this great town hall discussion, and we had Paul Millard who spoke, and Jen Vermette, and Dan Hunt, and me, who we each prepared like a small little talk. And then we had about 28 people who showed up, and most of them also participated in the conversation. Like, We gave our talks in the first half hour or so, and then we spent an hour and a half in dialogue with each other and with the group. And what we found is that there are a lot of people who have things to say and they just want to be able to say them frictionlessly. And they're doing that online, which is great. And they're able to do that with all these web platforms, but How many times are you gonna meet somebody like in a place? If you meet somebody in real life, like on a subway or like just at a place and then you like give them your card with a QR code and go, hey, why don't you go and read all my blog posts now? That's not gonna happen. It's not. It might go the other way where they might read all your blog posts and then maybe they might wanna meet you in person after that. But the digital to analog thing happens. The analog to digital thing, not in the same way. So being able to take those conversations offline and reducing the barrier to entry to just being able to give people like a physical copy of something and also having a place where you don't have to do everything yourself. You don't have to assemble your own editorial team, your own design team, your own, all of this stuff to be able to produce something high quality, but just being able to not have the barriers to doing this very simple thing of getting your thoughts on paper and being able to share it with people. That was my position is that there shouldn't— in this day and age, there are ridiculous barriers to doing that, including what we just talked about with your Amazon story and including how long it takes to publish something with a traditional publisher. And there's just no need for that. And I think the rest of the future of publishing is going to follow from people being able to share their thoughts online and in person with low lift, with low friction, and being able to have those conversations be really flowing across our networks. Because a lot of us know people who live all over the place, and being able to build that personal connection and more analog Intimacy, I think, is gonna become only more and more important over time.

That's so interesting. I didn't even really think about that. And so I've— people read my blog posts and then we meet in person, get a burrito or whatever, real story. But I didn't even think about that. I meet random people all the time at events and stuff, and how many do I convert to readers? But if I had a book with me, like I see Nick Gray doing it a lot, just like handing somebody a book, like that's a That'd be a very cool feeling to be able to do that when I feel the opportunity is right. Or if I want to go, if I'm visiting, like I was at Google the other day, like why wouldn't I just go find some marketing guy at Google, hand them the book and say, hey, if you guys need a workshop, right? But you can't, it's a lot easier to do than with a, with an email. Some things are still better physical, right?

Yeah, it's both. It's both. And one of the broader kind of The broader thing that, that my team and I believe is that all of these things, like all of these digital technologies, all of the internet stuff is still so much in its infancy. We don't even realize it. Like it's just so at the beginning and you have tons of people who are like, oh, the best practice is this and the best practice is that. But it's really, these tools are very new, especially if you think about the whole history of humanity. You got like 300,000 years of us as a species. Like talking and gesticulating to each other, but never writing. And then you have 5,000 years of us writing, starting with the stone carving stuff. And then you got what, 25 years of email? So these things are very new and the ideal kind of harmony between all of these different communication tools is something that we just don't know what it is yet.

We're, we're still exploring. All right. This was awesome.

Cool. Thank you so much for having me on.