#68: Ellen Fishbein — Selling Books About Memes

At the end of the day, I'm trying to be like the Napoleon of memes. Like, I want to dominate the meme vertical fully. I was negotiating with Memes.com to own it, not going to lie here, and they won't sell it. Like, they will not sell it. And it really pisses me off because I want to own it so bad. I think I'm obsessed and it might be a problem.

It's an addiction. The Memes.com thing would be pretty cool. It would be kind of like an Elon move. Let's blow up the internet from the basement to the higher net. Scrolling, tapping, man, we ain't done yet. Let's blow up the internet.

With all the podcasts and TikToks in the world, why do people still buy books in the year of our Lord 2024? What's the answer?

Because that buying that book gives them feeling that they are looking to feel, the feeling that they can conquer this problem or that they can understand this thing that they don't understand, or that they can get closer to something that they're trying to get. It gives them that instant feeling of having moved in the direction of some goal that they have.

Yeah, I guess that's a little bit different than reading a book, right? Because you, you buy the book and then there's like such a meme around, you know, I bought 50 books that I haven't read, but buying the book.

Yeah. The reason people buy it versus the reason people read the whole thing is like two different questions.

Oh, let's jump into that then. Yeah. Why, why does somebody buy it versus why does somebody finish it?

Right. So the buying it is because of that feeling that they get in the moment of buying it around moving toward their goal. Or sometimes they think it's a really great gift for somebody that could be kind of that feeling as well of like, oh yeah, this would be so great for this person. That's why they buy it. Cuz that feeling in the moment. Why do they read it? That has to do with two things to my mind. It has to do with one, especially with nonfiction, it has to do with utility. They think that this book is a tool that is going to help them achieve something. And my team and I are big into books that are useful for achieving all kinds of goals, including marketing your services or growing your startup or growing your business or fixing your life or whatever. And the second reason why they read it and especially why they would finish it is because they actually genuinely enjoy the activity of reading that book. And that has to do with things like what's in it, you know, the skill of the writer, the pictures that are in the book, the stories that are in the book, all that kind of stuff. There's some pleasure that people get out of the experience of reading something really enjoyable.

Yeah, 100%. I, um, I love the Naval idea of like, you don't need to finish all books. And, uh, as that idea gets like more popular, actually it becomes harder to be an author, right? Because you got to write a better book, maybe. So for Memes Make Millions, uh, you know, we, we published that together. Been really excited with how it's going marketing-wise. I feel like actually it's been picking up in sales. I, I don't know if this is statistically correct, but it feels like I've been getting more sales emails month by month, actually, like since launch. Which is good. Like, it's actually just picking up right now in August and September. I don't know why. Maybe it's just compounding. But yeah, I would love to hear kind of your thoughts on Memes Make Millions and then the future of it, what we're doing.

Yeah, I think it has to do with stuff that you're doing as well. I want to hear about some of that stuff and I have some theories as well, but it has had an awesome arc of like 6 months after we initially launched it, sales started to pick up in various ways from various directions. And can I just tell— can I like tell the story of this book the way that I tell it?

Yes, please tell it. Yes.

Because I think it's just so great. So the way— this is how I tell it to people when they don't, you know, and it speaks to why I started a publishing company at all. It really speaks to the heart of that, which I love. So I tell people, yeah, this guy Jason Levin Levin, I'd never heard of him. He had never heard in me. And one day he had this great idea for a book about memes and meme marketing and to call it Memes Make Millions. And he went on Amazon and he decided to create a preorder page on Amazon through their self-publishing platform that they have that pretty much anybody can use. And Amazon inexplicably took it down. And then he tried again. He was like, oh, well, I don't know, whatever. I'll do something went wrong. So I'll just try again. So he put it up again and Amazon took it down. And then he tried again and he put it up again for this, for to collect pre-orders for the book. Nothing was written yet. And Amazon pushed it back again. Finally, the third time he got an answer from Amazon as to why they were rejecting it. And it was some legal mumbo jumbo about how they were afraid that if the book was called Memes Make Millions, that there might be memes in the book and there might be some kind of copyright problem around the memes that might be in the book. And so As a result, they smacked down the whole concept before the book was even written. And so you went and created a Gumroad page. You were like still not letting Amazon get you down. You went and created a Gumroad page and you started to get your first like handful of pre-orders there. And then around that time, I was making a bunch of noise about how messed up the publishing industry was and how I wanted to start a small, new, different kind of publishing company. And just by like pure chance, You found me and you were like, hey, I got this thing. I got this weird story and I'm collecting preorders for this book. And when I heard that and when I heard the way that Amazon had treated this project, I was like, done deal.

Yeah, it turned out to be such a blessing.

I was like, of course we are going to work on this. And I think the result— I mean, people absolutely love this. The result has been a beautiful book that people really enjoy. Really enjoy it. We learned a lot working on it. I've learned a lot from the book and from you. And it really speaks to just the kind of thing that happens when institutions get really big. You know, Amazon started as the book marketplace, and in many ways they still are that. But when you have somebody who's really forward-thinking, when you have somebody who's doing something that's actually on the cutting edge, which I really believe this speaks to, that Amazon cannot afford to take that risk. And I think that that is awesome.

Yeah, 100%. Most people don't realize, like, the whole extent of the story unless they'd been following me for a long time, and it Yeah, I, I tried posting it on Amazon multiple times, on the phone with India again and again, telling me to delete it, uh, or, or deleting it and then saying it was because of memes. And then Gumroad, I sold like 100 pre-orders and like that was just as a PDF. And I was like, this is crap. I want to do it for real if possible. And so then I, you know, looked into options and, and fortunately, thank God we connected and the entire process was made so much more fun with your editing, with your expertise. You guys did such a good job on the COVID It just stands out. I think the COVID is just beautiful. I still absolutely love it so much and very proud of it. And what's been cool from the book, like you were saying, is like it's a short book, you know, 100 pages, 100 something like that. And I don't even know, but I still get messages every day that— Yeah, yeah. I still get messages every day that it's helped people grow their social media, embrace the cringe, do things that they're afraid to do, not be afraid of looking like an idiot on the The Internet. And it's a silly book, but it's a serious premise, which is like, you know, like I said, embracing the cringe and just going for it. And really like what's been cool is I feel like the meme marketing trend has only grown and I don't take credit for that by any means. But Porsche, Sony, everything like that is now doing meme marketing. They're posting memes. It's not just crypto startups, it's not just startups. And Ellen, what I think is crazy is over the next 5, 10 years, the book sales are actually going to increase because as Gen Z, Gen Alpha take hold of the CMO, the founder, the social media manager positions and gain more buying power, they're, they're going to need Memes Make Millions. And so I really think we're actually very early in the journey of it, which is pretty cool to think about.

It's, it's been really cool on so many levels because I get messages from people saying they're buying it and they're expensing it for their jobs as marketing people or as startup founders and things like that. I get messages from people saying that they found out about me and the different things that I do because of you and your book. And it's all just this like great virtuous cycle. And I completely agree. You were totally on this. You were totally on the trend. You were just aware of what was going on. You were there and you were like kind of on the ground. Like, in one of our conversations, I called you like an investigative journalist on crack. Yes, basically, proudly, literally. But that's basically what you are, because you, you were just, you were like doing what an investigative journalist would have kind of done in the heyday of journalism, but you were doing it in this crazy internet economy with like all this meme lord stuff and all these people who have built these crazy businesses based on their ability to like make people laugh with memes. So just really cool cutting edge stuff. And you were like, you were just like calling yourself a meme lord back then. Now you're doing this head of growth thing at Product Hunt, which is awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been pretty, pretty cool actually. Like the book has helped me in all sorts of ways. But back to that for a second, like internet journalist on crack or investigative journalist on crack. That is, it was one of the biggest compliments I've ever received. Honestly, like, you know, I, I take a, there is this book about like the rogue underground economy that I read like a few years ago where this guy interviewed, you know, thieves and stuff like that. And I was like, man, like that's what I really took inspiration from. Also a little bit of Hunter S. Thompson yellow journalism where I'm not just, you know, interviewing people. I am going and writing about it and becoming a meme. And, you know, even in the book Memes Make Millions, there's a part where I become a meme because I went viral for like a shitpost. And so, yeah, I really, it was a lot of fun and, and met so many cool people in, in the, in the journey of it. And, and like you said, like, it's just the beginning, which is cool. I've learned so much marketing it in different ways as well. Like, I find my newsletter has been so huge for that. My newsletter Cyber Patterns, like, you know, featuring memes make millions has, has been really helpful for that as well as, you know, some very unsuccessful experiments as well. Like I went super duper viral on Instagram reading these books and I thought, you know, that was going to drive a bunch of sales. And I actually don't think it drove much. And it's interesting. And my theory on that is people buy books a lot of the time because they like your writing online or they, they've read some of your writing. What I was doing was a lot of silly videos as well. And so you buy a book because you want to like learn something a lot of time. So maybe, maybe there is a different way I could go about it where it's silly, but also like a little educational. It's, uh, yeah, maybe we'll see. Maybe I'll—

Yeah, the Instagram thing. I remember that, that arc. You were like trying all these different things.

Yeah. Getting millions of views.

Yeah. And it was, it really highlights something that I think is interesting around not, not all social media metrics map to sales or anything in reality.

Yeah, for real.

But you have to just kind of see where the connection is. So what has been I'm actually curious, from my perspective, I can see certain things, but I can't see everything. So what has worked or what has worked better?

Yeah. So the biggest things for me have been Twitter, LinkedIn, and my newsletter. So for Twitter, I have the book in the shop in my bio, but on top of that, whenever I have a meme go viral or a post about meme marketing or, you know, a case study, I plug the book underneath. And people are like, oh, like, how can that really work? But it works and it works very well. And so that's, that's been a big thing. LinkedIn is a similar thing where write about it and write about me marketing case studies and then plug it. And then the newsletter is, you know, very similar where I subtly mention it or I'm writing about a similar topic and just plug it there. Also, I think something interesting is like in my welcome email sequence. So when I, when somebody signs up for my newsletter, I ask them like what they're interested in and if they say memes, they'll get an automated email about Memes Make Millions. So I think that's been pretty helpful actually as well. So there's, there's a few different things also. Yeah, commenting it on Twitter, not being afraid to self-promote. So if somebody's talking about meme marketing or somebody's talking about shitposting, like, you know, you could say, oh, look at this guy, he's trying to sell his book underneath. It's like, no, like I wrote a good book. I think you'll enjoy it. And it's really that simple. And I'll send them a DM or I'll send them a message and You know, the book has landed in some really cool places because of that. I've actually really been surprised, Ellen. The other day I got a note from Mike Maples. He's like a very famous VC saying, loved your book. I didn't know he knew I existed. I didn't know he read my book. I don't know how it got there. Um, I don't know if that was you or if that was just the serendipity of the internet, but things like this have happened quite a few times where It's very weird and I love it. I mean, I'm very happy. I told you about the time when like my friend at UT Austin just randomly saw the book on somebody else's, like, uh, on his table in a frat house. Oh, and like, yes, they, they didn't know they, I knew them. Like they didn't know I knew both of them and just so confused. And it was, I was mind blown, you know?

I love, I love those stories and. That is awesome about Mike. Yeah, I do. I do know him. I don't honestly remember if I had personally sent him a copy. I hope I did, but either way, I'm happy. Yeah, that's so great. And, and I, and I heard, I, by the way, I heard something similar from one of our authors, Adam Draper. Like one time he literally walked into a coffee shop and he saw somebody who he knew from high school, like serendipitously, randomly, somebody he knew from like high school or college. Reading his book, just like, and he just walked in and just ran into the serendipitously surreal. Same thing with the coffee table thing. And it is. So one of the things that I notice is that those comments on Twitter do seem to be like weirdly effective. People just go for it. And people also appreciate the e-commerce flow that happens as a result of all the pieces we've put together to make it really easy to kind of click through these links and have it be a very seamless experience if people would just buy it with Apple Pay. They find that to be like, you know, easy to follow that sort of rabbit hole and take all the steps to actually get the book. And one of the things that I've noticed, I'm curious if you notice it, one of the things that seems to be the case is at least with one of our authors is podcasts seem to sell books pretty well, like podcast appearances. When I've been on a podcast talking about a book, I always see some copies fly out the door. And when he goes, he talks about energy and nuclear power and stuff. And when he goes on a podcast, books just fly out the door.

Yeah, I definitely think podcasts help as well. I've been going on more podcasts and maybe that has something to do with it. Attribution is a tough thing, honestly. Sometimes it's not always simple, but I think that's been really helpful. The more I do think, the more you show your, your face and talk and meet people similar to podcasts, going on podcasts as well, actually, as guest posts in other people's newsletters is huge.

Mm-hmm.

So I've done guest posts in friends' newsletters around marketing, social media, every time sell a dozen books or so. And actually I have one right now that's being read by HubSpot's editor to get on HubSpot, all around me marketing. So very exciting. I'm going to have that Altamira backlink. Let's go. So I think that's really been quite big is going on podcasts and guest posts as well. I think guest posts is underrated. And like, what's crazy is I got in Business Insider and Forbes, and my friends' blogs have sold way more, you know, which isn't surprising considering like how bad Business Insider is. But it's just a true testament, like, go ask your blogger friends. Don't worry about Business Insider, Forbes, or getting like traditional press. Just fortunately, I'm friends with a lot of bloggers because I'm a newsletter, blogger, whatever. So I would just recommend making those friendships way before you even write. Like, just do it anyways.

My favorite thing, my favorite Memes Make Millions moment was the time it went to Hong Kong. There was this guy who is awesome and who is really into kind of the meme and sort of NFT world, and he ordered a few copies and he like tweeted a picture saying, hey, they made it to Hong Kong. And then he ordered like I don't know, like 25 copies or 50 copies or something like that for all of his friends.

Yeah.

So cool.

So dope.

Yeah.

Yeah. And he's like really tapped in there in the crypto community. I know. And he gave it to some like really big people, which is crazy. And like, he's just a huge fan of the book, which has been really cool. And just like, that's what I love about writing on the internet is you meet all the people who are into the same weird things as you are. You know, when, when I started talking about the book before I I was writing it, I remember I was at some party and this big tech guy is like, where's the market for that? Who would need that, right? And he's Mr. Google. I was like, trust me, dude, there is a market. Like, there is a market. And it may not be, you know, uh, Habits or whatever, Atomic Habits, but there is a market. And that's, that's what I find so cool about the internet is you talk about your interest, you do what you love to do, and the internet connects you with, with people who are on the same vibes if you do it for long enough, you know?

Yeah. And I think, I think the personal touch and the personal thing, and this is why I think Gumroad, even though we, we, we moved away from Gumroad for your preorder process and everything, I think it's a great company. And I think that I really believe in the personal brand thing. And you speak to that to a degree, and you even speak to in the different interviews that you hosted in the book. The different people who you talked to spoke to this idea of making brands less corporate and making them more personal and putting more of a human face on things. And I think that people really appreciate that feeling of like authentic connection and like, hey, I'm getting to know this guy Jason Levin Levin, and I like his stuff and I'm going to check out what he has to say about these things and building trust that is tied to an individual. And that was a big pattern that I think also going to continue to accelerate all these topics that you're talking about. Like people equate Elon with Tesla and all that kind of stuff, the personal brand thing. So I'm actually curious, like what is your take on the personal brand thing in terms of priority for people launching products and stuff like that? Do you, are you a huge believer in personal brands at this point? Like where are you at with that?

Yeah, obviously a big believer in personal brands and growing one. It's been very huge to me, where, you know, if I want to go launch another book or when I write a newsletter, there are people out there who read it. And it's, it's amazing. Like growing this podcast, I didn't have to start from scratch because I had my personal brand on Twitter and LinkedIn. And I think really what, what it comes down to is like, it's leverage. It's not necessary though. I will say that is like one of my best friends. Runs a SaaS doing $120 grand per month, and he is a ghost, right? So he just pays influencers who have the personal brands to post for him, and he just moves in silence and eats a lot of Jewish deli food. Like, that is, that is his life, right? And so you don't actually need the personal brand, but I think it makes everything easier. Um, And depending on what you want out of life, right? Like I personally want my words published. I want to be, you know, have my newsletter and have my podcast, but my friend, he prefers to be the ghost. So you can make money both ways. Um, I think if you want to be the ghost, you need somebody with a personal brand though, and you need to go pay them to do it. So you need the personal brand, really just depends which you want to go. I like bringing up that counterpoint though, because I have a lot of friends who are like, you know, afraid to post and afraid to start businesses. And I'm like, you could just pay people, like, you know, you could do that. And yeah, it's a good counterpoint.

Yeah, it's a good way to partner with somebody who— so like I do more of the— I partner with people who have bigger brands as individuals than I do myself. And I have a bigger brand than my co-founders and my business partners and people like that. And like, there's a component of you know, the day-to-day responsibilities of like maintaining that reputation and becoming the go-to person for that thing. I'm curious about some of the other suite of products that like has surrounded this.

Yes, let's talk about this.

Right.

All right. Let's talk about this. Memes Make Millions. It started just as a book, right? And then I realized I don't actually have any tutorials on making memes. And so many people were asking me. And so I just put together a very quick course. Uh, I called it Meme Lord University. Uh, it's literally just memelorduniversity.com and it's $69 and it's, it's actually sold quite a lot. Um, you know, hundreds of copies. It solved the need that the book didn't solve, which, you know, I, I think was necessary. And I think it's, it's definitely helped people from what I understand. And now I'm running a daily newsletter that delivers viral memes. So we, you know, scrape the internet, scroll the internet for you, use a little bit of AI magic to find the viral memes and then deliver them every day, all for $6.9 per month. Right. And so again, it's solving the need that Meme Lord University doesn't solve and the book doesn't solve because you don't get the meme templates from those. Again, it's like solving a new problem in the vertical. So really, Ellen, at the end of the day, I'm trying to be like the Napoleon of memes. Like, I want to dominate the meme vertical fully. There is part of me that really thinks about just doing like a private equity fund and buying meme pages just to own them all. Like, or if I go raise capital, go buy some fucking meme pages. Ellen, I was negotiating with memes.com to own it. Not going to lie here. And they won't sell it. Like, they will not sell it. And it really pisses me off because I want to own it so bad. I want to own this vertical. And I think I'm obsessed and it might be a problem. But it's okay.

It's, it's an addiction. The, the Memes.com thing would be pretty cool. It would be kind of like an Elon movie.

The person who— it's really fascinating, actually. And I think you'll find this cool. The person who bought it has owned it since 1996. Like, that's a long time. That guy was a tech nerd. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, I think it was a big head in tech, low key, like I think it was just somebody big in tech around back then who was just like, now it's— they forgot about it. They probably— maybe it's like Elon, I don't know, but it's somebody big, I have a feeling, and they just will not sell it. The website is barely maintained, but it's number one when you search for memes. So that's why I want to buy it. But yeah, they won't, they won't sell it. I also was looking at memelord.com. They want like $200 grand. Not sure about that one either.

It's, it's tough cuz I know you have memelord.biz, which, um, yeah, yeah, but it's not memelord.com, you know, that's true. It's not, it's not the.com. I will say domains are crazy powerful. Like the owning the writing.coach domain, writing.coach.

Oh, that is so good.

Completely, completely changed everything. It made, actually, you know what, automatically reaction of like, oh, she's cornered the market on this thing called writing coaching, which I was just making everything up as I went along. But I have like a GoDaddy. Impulse that comes up sometimes where I'm like, what about that? And so I was like, that's $200 I've ever spent in my life with registering writing.coach.

That is facts. I, so for a while I had in my bio, you know, cyberpatterns.xyz, but I realized like most people don't know what that means, unfortunately. Like I love the brand name, but, and it makes sense in my head, but it doesn't make sense to most people. So then I changed it to jlev.work/writing. And then I realized, oh, that's kind of long. Why don't I just buy jlev.blog? And I've seen my clicks rise like crazy since buying that actually. And so I think, you know, it was pretty cheap. It was like $20, but I've seen clicks drastically rise just from buying.blog. People know what it is.

Yeah, I have at least one blog domain,.blog domain somewhere in my portfolio. It's just, One, I haven't, I haven't done things with most of the websites that I have.

How many domains do you own? Because I'm at probably like 24.

Are you serious? At least I'm like trying to keep it under 50.

Nice.

Nice. But a lot of them are like little things that are, that just cost like $6 to register for a year. And honestly, like I let them expire, but then I buy new ones. I don't know. It's like some women buy shoes. I have this.

It's cheaper, honestly, a cheaper habit really than shoes. My wife buys the expensive shoes. I'll buy the dumb memes.

So, so what are, so tell me, I want to know about like the future of memes. What do you think in terms of your, you must be tracking the AI trend pretty closely. I am too. We should probably get into that a little bit.

We'll talk about that. Yeah.

So what are your thoughts on memes and AI and? I don't know what's—

so for the first year and a half while writing the book, during the book, everything, I thought there was no way AI can make funny memes. I thought it was impossible. I thought AI couldn't do humor. It could do cringeworthy funny, like, that is terrible. But then there was an advancement, um, by this company called Glyph. So glyph.app, it was started by the founders of Know Your Meme, which is one of the biggest meme sites. And now What they do is they use AI to make memes and they're using Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And for whatever reason, when Claude 3.5 came out, it became unhinged and hilarious. And the problem though is it's still slower than just writing it yourself. And so I think AI can make funny memes, but I don't use it, right? Like I just do it myself because I can do that. But I think there is a world where people people use it more frequently, and I'm working on something around that actually. So I'm definitely excited about that. Also, I do think just a different use case of memes, or a different type of AI meme, is not necessarily the writing, but the visual. And we see that all the time on Twitter, wherever, is somebody will, you know, make Donald Trump hunting cats or something from last night with the debate or whatever. Actually, he was protecting the cats in the photo that I saw, but, you know, from the Haitians. And so he, like, I think that turns into a meme. And so using AI imagery, and there's really cool video apps too, like Veagle.ai, and where you could put somebody's face on like a dancing body. So I don't think the AI writing necessarily is super fast. And if you're funny, like you don't really need that, but the video and image stuff, you can't do that without AI. So I think that is where I would spend more time on. Is, is where my head's at, but my, it's, it's constantly changing. It's, it's pretty cool. There's a cool site out there that I recommend you guys check out. It's called infinite memes dot lol. And it uses that Glyph thing that I was telling you about. You type in one thing and it gives you like 20 memes for, uh, that, uh, all written with unhinged Claude 3.5 sonnet. It's pretty sick. Not gonna lie.

Okay. I definitely need to check that out.

Yeah. What are your thoughts on AI and writing? Have you—

A million thoughts.

Have you used ChatGPT much? Like, we could be honest here. We're both, both writers, craftspeople.

I have a lot of thoughts about it. So first of all, in reference to like the video and, and the visual aspect, Sam, who, you know, who worked on, who was the design lead for this whole project, um, and co-founder of Altamira Studio and everything, he's actually exploring a lot heavily in the direction of visual AI stuff right now. And, you know, he worked at Palantir in the past, so he's really, really fascinated by what's possible on the frontiers there. But in terms of writing specifically, so one thing is you've probably already kind of like realized this, you, when you use transcription for a lot of the interviews in this book, right? Like you used AI transcription and then you had to like manually edit the transcript to like make it work for the book.

So tiring.

So I've done a bunch of that.

I hated doing it.

But now Claude is absolutely a machine at that.

And so I want to try that. Dang.

So let me tell you what we've been doing because we actually— so we do, as you know, but your audience might not know, the way that my business is structured is we have this writing coaching part of the business, writing.coach, and we have altamira.studio, which is the publishing branch. So we have a lot of people who come our way for help with writing books. And that's been the case for 5 years now. Uh, we've worked on some huge books. We worked on Mike Maple's book. We worked on Shane Parrish's book. We worked on Coleman Hughes' book, a lesser known but very, very valuable book that a lot of people love by Matt Lerner. And we got some really cool stuff in the pipeline that we have worked on with specifically our editorial chops and our writing expertise. Expertise, and we have started to zero in on what we think can be accelerated with AI and what can't. So what we do with authors now versus what we did in the past, what we do with authors now takes advantage of how well Claude handles transcripts. So what we do is we start with the part of the process that we think AI is pretty far away from being able to do, which is this thing that we call book blueprinting. And it has to do with understanding— people come to us, they've got subject matter expertise. It has to do with understanding the expertise, systematizing the idea, and figuring out the right way to lay it out in a book. A glorified term for like outlining, but it's— there's— there is a right answer to the outline for like a really good nonfiction book like Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish or like The End of Race Politics by Coleman Hughes. There's a right answer.

I can't believe you worked on Coleman's book. That's so sick.

It's a beautiful outcome. We He's very, very, very smart. It's a great book. Highly recommend it. The arguments are airtight. So, we brought the most valuable piece of the puzzle that we brought to that project and that we've brought to all these projects is this architectural skillset around knowing the architecture of a really good book. So, now what we do is we work with that subject matter expert or that author or whatever for a couple of months and we discern What's that idea? And we do the architecture of the book and we really lay it out and then we get together in person for 3 days and we do like a 3-day long, basically like a 3-day long podcast with the person where we go through that outline and we ask them about every single point and anecdote in the outline one by one. And we have a hot mic for the whole time and we record everything and we come out of that with like 300,000 words of transcription. From people speaking about the anecdotes and speaking about all the stuff. And then we go and we say, hey Claude, I'm going to paste in some transcripts. I want you to lightly edit these, just preserve the speaker's original phrasing as much as possible. And we put those modules all in Claude and we go, okay, thanks Claude. And we take that output and it's literally just a modular building block based thing that comes together into a rough draft of the book that everybody can now, all of us, us and the and the author and whoever else they're working with can all edit and work on and wordsmith and tighten and, you know, button up that book together. And so it gets past this big hurdle that's, you know, with, with your book, it's a little different, but there's a big hurdle at this beginning of getting that first shitty first draft out, you know? So we have a way of doing it that makes it, first of all, not that shitty at all, actually, but a really strong first draft that can then be revised and We think that that revision process is gonna be able to be like largely automated as well moving forward if we can codify our editorial standards into kind of a more granular, um, probably local model that we would have to build. The only piece that AI can't really, we don't see AI tracking toward being able to do is that earliest part, which has to do with relevance filtering. It has to do with. When people talk about even Mike, Mike Maples, super, super, super, super smart guy with incredible expertise on like startups and what makes startups take off and all these crazy things. He talks about stuff and he'll say a bunch of stuff that's relevant. He'll say a bunch of stuff that's not really that relevant. And he'll say a bunch of stuff that's kind of redundant where he sort of uses two turns of phrase to talk about the same thing in two different ways. So, you need that human architectural skill set that we bring to the table to filter and to know this is in and this is out. But once you know what's in and what's out, that whole process can be accelerated. We produce that first draft in under 30 days after that 3-day intensive. It's unreal.

How much coffee is drank during that 3-day intensive?

Oh, like, I just go, yeah, I go to Whole Foods and I buy like 10 different caffeine sources and I just keep everybody going.

That's insane. That's so cool. 'Cause editing the transcripts of the interviews was the worst part of writing the book. I will say like, I loved writing the essays, but editing the transcripts was hell. 'Cause you're just like removing BS words and you know what, that actually, I've been thinking like, how do I use these podcast transcripts? And I didn't want that to be hell too, 'cause I thought that'd be really annoying. So maybe using Claude to clean it up a bit and, and, uh, that way I could put these on the blog. I feel like it'd be great for SEO.

I am going to paste in a transcript. I want you to edit this transcript lightly while preserving the speaker's original phrasing as much as possible. And you can even course correct. Like, you can say, like, oh, the speaker has a little bit of an Italian accent. So the transcript— seriously, and it'll accommodate that. There's a little bit of an Italian accent. So the transcript misunderstood some words. So just be aware of that. And Claude will just pick up on that and just roll with it. And it's getting better every week, like every single week I use it to do something like this and it's better. And I'm like, whoa.

Wow. I love that. Ah, man, I, I really think that's cool. Um, I could see how the first part is the issue though, right? Because everybody wants like ChatGPT to think for them or whatever, but it can't, at least it shouldn't. If you wanna be an author, you should probably think for yourself, especially an author with Altamira. Uh, then you should probably think for yourself.

Yeah.

I want to talk about something else, which is when we originally connected, we bonded over Ayn Rand. And this is total changing topics right now. But right now, the last few months, I feel like we're seeing her predictions and her ideas come more true than ever. Like, there were 3 articles this week from The Guardian to arrest Elon, right? We're seeing the Telegram founder getting arrested in France. We're seeing Twitter being banned in Brazil by some like you know, government bureaucrat. Like, it really feels like Ayn Rand was right. And I keep asking, like, who is John Galt? Like, I just keep, you know, wondering. And so curious, what are your thoughts on what's going on right now? And should we look back to Ayn Rand for, for help, or are we fucked?

I mean, 100%. It's like, how do you, how do you pronounce this? Javier Millier.

Oh, wait, he's the good one. He's the one in Argentina. Yeah, he's like, yeah, yeah.

Like he, his everything he says, it's like he's channeling Ayn Rand.

Yes. Yes, I agree. I love it.

And I think that the— you're totally— you're dead on. But it's kind of like there are always these dueling forces of The people who think, you know, it's like, okay, we're treading in some, some warm water here, but let's do it. But like in the debate, you know, there's like, I'm just going to say this. Trump said something in the debate that I agreed with 100%. And that was when he said, in general, the Democrats, like, who are kind of in office right now do not understand how a functioning economy should look. Now, it may or may not be the case that Trump understands how a functioning economy should look. Okay, let's let that aside. The point is there are a lot of people who are in power, who have the power to make decisions about the business world and how the business world operates, who do not understand how things get done in the real world. They only understand the pull of who you know, the paperwork of checking boxes on a piece of paper, but they don't understand how the world that we live in actually gets built and how the lights stay on. And they don't understand what the conditions are that are necessary for a functioning economy. And it may be true that the people on the other side also don't understand that, but it's become more clear to me than ever that a lot of people in government in general just don't understand the conditions that have to be in play. And that is dangerous stuff. You know, that's dangerous.

Yeah, 100%. It was like, I really— pisses me off when Harris was critiquing Trump about how he's friends with Putin and, you know, Kim Jong-un and whatever. It's like, no, You're supposed to be able to have, you know, coffee with your enemy. Like that's how business works. Sometimes like you have to keep your competition closer. Like that is how business works. That is how you succeed in business. Like, like you can't just shut them down and insult them. Like you have to be able to maintain false friendship or whatever. Right. And I mean, I feel like that's super obvious. And then the other was just like, I hated her smug smiling yesterday. And I tweeted about it. I was like, this is so indicative of a government bureaucrat or a DMV worker or a high school teacher who thinks that they are smarter than everyone because they were, you know, brought up this way or they were given money from the government to do their thing. And it's like, it just pisses me off so much because they haven't been held to higher standards. And Trump's ability to fire people, like he said that last night, that's a good thing. Like that is good. Like you should get rid of bad people. Like that is a good thing. So it's last night was really, it felt like the culmination of the, the Iron— feels like that right now. So big.

It really, there's a lot. I think, you know, it's funny. I, my, I think Harris performed very, very well in terms of being very receptive to all of the coaching that she has received and all of the feedback that she has received. I think she performed very, very well, but I think like a lot of people pointed out, it was very performant and performative. And I think that you have these images of two people and one of them was prioritizing being liked. And I think that that was Harris. And I think Trump was prioritizing being real for whatever that means for him. And I think. Those were, that's kind of the contrast. And it's hard because I think just in general, people, like when people ask me, who do I support in government? I say, I don't really support government. Yeah.

Yeah. Same.

Very much. Fuck that shit. I generally, I mean, I'm not an anarchist, but as a general rule, I would say that if you pursue a career in politics, you're not really someone I look up to. Yeah. You know, and, and I don't really admire political accomplishments and I don't really admire people who are capable of political accomplishments. But back to what you were saying about Putin, honestly, you know, I wouldn't, if, if I were going to, if I were going around being vice president or president or senator or anything else, I would never say Putin is our enemy. I wouldn't say that at all, right? I would say, I wouldn't say Russia's our enemy. I wouldn't say China's our enemy. If I were a politician, maybe this is why I'm not a politician, but I would probably say these are other world powers. These are countries that have different views than we do. They have a bunch of people. We have a bunch of people. We all have to meet and we all have to get along in some way. And ideally we can, you know, kind of move forward with the things that are fundamentally true for everybody. None of this should be controversial, really. But I think in general, if you have somebody who's really, really— if you have dueling powers, you know, there are other people in business, right? There are other people in the space that I occupy in business, all kinds of people. I don't consider any of them to be my enemies. In fact, I don't even really look at them as competitors. I'm a big fan of the Peter Thiel mentality, which is that a really, really, really great company doesn't compete at all. We have our own monopoly over our own world.

You know how much competition there is for Memes Make Millions? Not a single competition.

That is dead on. It's completely true that you created this kind of N of 1 situation where I think honestly, I think if Peter Thiel got a copy of this, which we have to make that happen, I think he'd be all about it.

I got, I got to get it to Thiel. I'll be in Miami at Hereticon, I'm pretty sure in a couple of months. So Founders Fund is hosting that. I agree with that. And I think Lulu Misservey, she talks about this idea a lot of like the memes are influencing the news and so true, like the coconut stuff that was going on, the unburdened by what has been or whatever, the JD Vance couch memes. Like, I really like— I was really excited about JD Vance. Like, I was like, oh, wow, this guy grew up poor. He went to Ivy League, served in the military. So smart. That is American dream. And then I found out he fucked a couch. And I was like, oh, I don't know about him. Like, the memes are powerful. They're pretty powerful, you know? I like him. And now not as much. He also was wearing a shirt while he was swimming that just came out like that meme. Like, oh man, he just has negative rizz and it's kind of rough. Not going to lie. I wish he was a little cooler.

The political space right now is really a breeding ground for some fantastic memes.

It is. I mean, it always is. And right now especially. I, it's, it's been, it's been very intense. It's been fun. I've been, uh, yeah, last night, like it was basically the Super Bowl for memes. Like at the end of the day, like I, I was firing tweets off. Like I had, I think I tweeted like 10 times in the span of like an hour of just, just posting. That's what you got to do. Uh, as I talk about in Memes Make Millions, capitalize on the current thing. Last night's current thing was the debate. Yeah.

So when you, when you're kind of, your, your default mode is like almost like package things as quickly as you consume them?

I wouldn't say default mode, actually. Yes, default mode. Yes. I have to force myself to wait. Like last night, for example, I went to a talk by Scott Belsky, right? Founder of Behance, sold it for a couple hundred million to Adobe. I took a bunch of notes and I was going to tweet it last night, but I realized, like, let me just— if I tweet it today, what's the difference? And it'll probably be better if I take some time and I'm not tired. But a lot of times I am reacting, especially with memes. I'm reacting and you have to jump on the fastest thing with memes. That's why I started Meme Alerts because the meme after like a certain point dies, unless it's like one of the memes that stays around forever. But there's so many memes that don't stay around forever. Right. And so you have to like jump on stuff a lot of, a lot of, a lot of times as fast as you can. And so I would say default is reacting. Yeah. But when I do, be patient, it also pays off sometimes. But I think with jokes, that's also the difference is like the first thought is your best thought for jokes. A lot of time if you overthink a joke, it just gets worse and worse until it's no longer funny. So I, I do think that the first thought's the best thought a lot of the time.

Do you have a favorite standup comedian?

Yeah. Yeah. I, I like Pete Davidson. I will say that. I wouldn't say he's my favorite. Who, who did I say?

Fuck.

Seinfeld's good, but, uh, Louis C.K., you know what, Louis C.K. is, he's dark. I, uh, you know, I really like Louis. I know he's been through the ringer.

That's a great example of the Ayn Rand stuff in a way, because like, I, because when, when all this stuff went down with Louis C.K., I have friends who are like very liberal, like much more liberal than I am, which is not hard. Um, but I have friends who are very liberal. Who were like, am I still allowed to talk about how I like Louis C.K.? Like, yeah, I still like him even though he had this whole thing. And it's just, it's that, that suppression of people's authentic beliefs, that, that attempt to control the market for humor with, you know, this kind of really just extremely bullshit bureaucratic pressure, all that stuff. It's like, None of those are positive patterns. Louis C.K. is awesome. I saw him live. Have you?

No, I haven't. He's so funny. He's so funny.

Worth so much. Even more. Paid a lot for it. Worth even more than I paid for it.

Ellen, I'm performing at my first stand-up show on Saturday, actually. I'm super stoked. I've done 2 open mics and Saturday I got on the slot and so got, got a bunch of friends coming through.

What's the topic? Are you doing like a Type 5? Like you have a topic?

Yeah, it's like 5 minutes or so. It's a, it's a lot of Jewish humor for the internet age. So it should, it should be good. I think the ability, what memes do and what humor does is it breaks through the bullshit. And there is a certain part where if you are being silly on the internet, it's a certain level of clout, uh, a fuck you money, like a fuck you attitude, which I think has obviously helped me for sure. But it's, it's interesting. It's like. Like, you almost have to fake it till you make it, right? Because I'm not, you know, a billionaire, but I'll tweet like one, right? So, and I'll get there eventually. My fuck you money fakeness will get to the real point. I don't know what I'm saying here.

You know, I think that you, I think that you actually have, I think your, your lack of a filter, for better or worse, like, has been a positive thing because I think you genuinely had things that you wanted to say people and you had a, you had a stance, you had a position, you have an evolving position on things and you just kind of speak your mind. And I think people can't get enough of that. I think it's like a drug.

I agree. So there's actually, I'm working on another post about this. I don't think we made it in the book, but this idea of jester's privilege, right? If you're familiar with ideas like the jester is the only one that could criticize the king, everybody else in the court. Can't criticize the king, they'll get their head chopped off. But if the jester is funny, you can say whatever he wants. And so you have the privilege, but nobody takes you seriously. So it's also like a curse, right? And so when something crazy happens, I could say something ridiculous and it's in— it's good. Like, I have the privilege to say that, right? Which is, which is pretty much a superpower. Like, I think the modern-day jester is the meme lord. And so meme lord's privilege. Is I think as soon as something crazy is happening, I'm memeing about it. Like Trump got shot. I had memes out in seconds. You know, people are saying, don't, don't make memes. This is wrong. I respond with a meme like this is the meme lord's privilege, you know, is to be funny and make people laugh through the hard times, through the good times, through the bad.

Yeah. And honestly, I think yes. And like humor is if you can't if you have people who are just afraid to laugh, if you have people who are afraid to not take themselves seriously, I just think it just snowballs into just dishonesty upon dishonesty. Like, it helps you get at the heart of, you know, people and, and being able to speak the truth. Like, if you don't have a healthy humor culture or whatever you want to call it, you know, then, you know, honesty just goes away. And I tend to be like a lot of women. I tend to be more receptive to humor than productive of humor. But, but I think that, you know, being able to have, cultivate a sense of humor, being able to like enjoy funny people, being able to appreciate like not taking yourself and the world too seriously all the time. Like if you don't have that, you just have dishonesty and much prefer cringy jokes or potentially cringy jokes or comedians bombing. I hope you do great, but even if you bomb, It's better than if you didn't do it at all.

I agree. You know, Paul Graham has a good quote where it's like, humor is related to strength because it shows how many times you could get back up again. Something, something like that where humor is, it is related to strength if you're able to be funny even after hard shit in your life. And I've had plenty of hard shit that nobody on the internet knows about, right? And, um, maybe they will one day in the, in the tell-all book, uh, that I already have planned and have a title for since I was 20. But anyways. You know, if you're able to be funny, it shows, shows strength.

I hope they serve beans in hell.

Or very similar. Very similar. Ellen, where could people find you?

They can find me on X @ellenrhymes, and they can find me at ellenrhymes.com.

Sweet. This was awesome.