Why He Took a 50% Pay Cut to Work With the Best | Jay Yang, writer | The Quest with Diksha

When I got this opportunity to work with Alex, I was kind of hesitant because in order for me to join Alex, I would have to shut down my business, drop out of college, and move from Illinois to Las Vegas across the country.

I want to go back to the story how you did cold outreach to the Beehive founder.

When I was 15, I Googled how to make money online. I tried a bunch of things. It failed. And so I cold emailed Tyler Denk and I sent him a 10-slide pitch deck with 3 summer project ideas I could do over the summer. And so that's how I got the opportunity with Beehive.

How do you really think one can stand out out in this very AI-driven cold DM approach.

With AI now, it reduces the cost of sending an email, but it doesn't reduce the cost of reading that email. And so if you can show that you are competent, that reduces the friction it takes for the other person to figure out who you are and how you can help.

How has your writing process changed after AI has taken over our lives?

I am not a big fan of using AI for the creation part. So if I use AI to write, then I am using AI to think and learn for me. However, I am a huge fan of using AI for ideation and distribution.

I want to talk about your newsletter. It has 50,000 subscribers today. Take me to day zero. How did it grow?

There's 3 types of posts that I like to do to grow the newsletter pretty organically and consistently. Number 1 is the—

If I had to think of how to make money online in 2026, do you think the thesis has changed?

When I Googled how to make money online, the general consensus was pick a high-income online skill, get good at it, sign freelance clients. And now you have digital freedom. I would say in 2026.

Writing a cold email has become so easy with the help of AI, but reading it still costs the same amount of time. Most of my guests are either building AI companies, working in AI teams, or building systems. But my today's guest, Jay Yang, is different. He cold emailed his way into Beehive at the age of 16. Under the age of 20, he's already worked with Noah Kagan's content team, with Alex Hormozi's acquisition.com. Today he writes a newsletter which is read by 50,000 people. His new book, Work with the Best, is out. I wanted to do this pod to ask him if he would do things the same way as he did before AI was a thing. I really hope you enjoy this conversation. This is The Quest and I am Deeksha. Your first book is You Can Just Do Things, and I remember reading this phrase a lot of times on X. And now you are writing your second book, which is Work with the Best. It is 2026, and who do you think is going to read your book and why?

I would say the ideal person for this book is someone who is ambitious and driven and knows they're meant for more, but doesn't quite know what to do to get there. And so, you know, we've always been taught that It's not what you know, it's who you know. But no one actually teaches the how. And so my newest book, Work with the Best, is for the people who want to get in rooms with people they admire. How do you actually reach out to them? How do you break into the rooms? How do you create value for the people you admire? And so it's more of my, it's my cookbook for creating opportunities. And so I'm hopeful that it'll inspire a lot of people.

And you've done that, right? You know, the proof is there in the pudding. You've done that. Like, I think very, uh, 3, 4 times or even more. You've worked with the Beehive founder, you've worked with Hormozi, you've worked with, um, Noah. I can't help but bring AI into this whole conversation because, you know, um, I think it's really helped some people who suck at communication in sending cold emails. And that's why I see like a lot of similar cold emails that I keep getting, you know, from people. So how do you really think one can stand out in this very AI-driven email writing sort of, or cold DM kind of approach that a lot of people are applying? Do you think the rules are still same what you had like a few years ago?

One of the number one questions that I push people to ask is to ask, how can I make this a no-brainer for the other person? How can I reduce the friction it takes for the other person to say yes? And so with AI now, it reduces the cost of sending an email, but it doesn't reduce the cost of reading that email. And so it still takes the other person time to get interested in the subject line, open the email, read the, read the email, figure out what it's about, figure out who you are, figure out how you can help. That's a lot of burden to put on the other person. And so one of the biggest tips that I give people is to do the work up front. And so if you can show that you are competent by attaching a Loom video, or creating a pitch deck or writing a memo or drafting a mockup website, that reduces the friction it takes for the other person to figure out who you are and how you can help.

But if a person has only 10 seconds to read my email, the longer it is, the— as in the first email that I'm sending or the first outreach message I'm sending, it's more likely that it will not be read. True?

Yes and no. When you attach work, This is why it's attaching it and not writing it in the email. And so the email can be as simple as, you know, feedback on your website. And then it's like, hey Diksha, I saw your website. I noticed this one thing needed to be changed. And then you, you attach a picture and then you say, while I was at it, I did a deeper dive. Here's the full audit. And then you attach the work and then you say, PS, I'm actually a website designer. And so if you like these changes and you want me to implement them for you, I'm happy to do that, right? And so now you've made it a no-brainer for you to be like, okay, well obviously Jay knows what he's doing, right? Because he just did an audit and now, oh, it's, he's actually being useful. And so it makes it really clear who I am and how I can help rather than a long-winded email of a lot of telling and not a lot of showing.

I want to talk about your newsletter, The Spark. It has 50,000 subscribers today. Take me to day zero. How did it grow to this much audience?

I started my newsletter back in 2021 and it was actually on Substack because it was free. The first few subscribers was me telling my friends and family, and so my mom was a day one reader of the newsletter. And over time what I would do is I started to learn how to promote the newsletter on social media. And I would say that's been the, the biggest driver of the newsletter so far is there's 3 types of posts that I like to do to grow the newsletter pretty organically and consistently. Uh, number one is the pre-CTA. And so a pre-CTA would look something like this. If I'm writing my newsletter on Sunday, then on Saturday I may say, tomorrow I'm gonna write a newsletter on confidence. This is something that I've struggled with, and you know, tomorrow I'm writing an essay on it. That's a pre-CTA, right? You're teasing what you're gonna write about tomorrow, and then you link to the newsletter. You say subscribe here if you want to get it in your inbox tomorrow. So that has worked pretty well. The second. Piece of content that has grown the newsletter really well is what I call the post CTA. So if I write the newsletter on Sunday and it goes out, then on Monday I may say, yesterday I just broke down my confidence framework, uh, for 20,000 readers. If you want it, you can grab it here. And then I link to the article and that does super well. And then the third and final piece of social media content that I typically like to do is what I call the excerpt. And so I take the best part of the newsletter, either take a screenshot or turn it into a tweet, and then I'll post it on social media. And then I'll add a comment underneath that post saying, hey, if you like this, you can actually read the full newsletter here, and then link to the newsletter. And so those are 3 simple ways I like to promote the newsletter every week. And you're not going to get thousands of subscribers, but over several years, it all tends to add up.

Yeah, I mean, since 2021, So did you start building it while you were already quote unquote employed, if you want to call that like employed when you were working with all these famous creators?

No, I started it way before that. I started the newsletter, it was called, I think it was literally called Jay Yang's Letters. And I would document 3 things that was top of mind, 2 of my favorite quotes and 1 story. And that was the structure. And I started that before I had any traction, before I had any followers. I just wanted to start documenting the things I was learning for two reasons. Number one, when you write online, it increases your surface area for serendipity. And so I actually got the opportunity to work with Beehive because they looked at my writing online and they said, we don't really know who this kid is, but we can see that he's consistent and we can see that he knows something about marketing 'cause he is putting himself out there. And the second reason is because you don't actually understand something until you can write down and explain it. And so in the process of writing a weekly newsletter, I have solidified a lot of my beliefs on topics and it's crystallized a lot of the things that I've learned. And so like my brother used to joke, like, why are you giving yourself like weekly homework? Like, I would never do that. But to me it's a process of learning. And, and so that is, that is a, I'm a big advocate for writing a weekly newsletter.

I mean, I totally resonate with that. How has your writing process changed after AI has taken over our lives, and is it also impacting the process that you are writing your book?

I'd say yes. To me, there's 3 parts of content creation or writing in general. There's the ideation part, there's the actual creation or the writing part, and there's the distribution part. And so I am not a big fan of using AI for the creation part because to me, the act of writing is again solidifying my learnings. And so if I use AI to write, then I am using AI to think and learn for me, which is not what I want. However, I am a huge fan of using AI for ideation and for distribution. And so I will often say, hey AI, can you look at some of the creators in my niche or some of my old posts in the past and identify some of the common topics that are doing well? Or hey AI, can you scrape all the people who have replied to my newsletter and can you figure out what the common questions are and give me some ideas to write about?. And so that is giving me a lot of ideas, then I'll write it. And then what I do is I say, okay, hey AI, I have written this thing. Can you use these templates that I've created and turn those into different social media posts? And so I'm able to turn one piece of content into 12 by distributing it using AI. And so I'm not a big fan of using AI to write, but I'm a huge fan of using AI to distribute.

What is your stack? What all, what are the tools you're using on an everyday, I'm basis, except Claude, of course?

It's just Claude. I think I've become definitely a power user. I have a lot of custom skills. I use Beehive MCP, and it connects to the Beehive newsletter. I have custom projects within Claude, and it's been awesome.

What do you think is the smartest prompt you've ever given that has got you a great result in some thing, because I think we all suck at prompts. I mean, most people I know suck at prompts and they're just asking AI to do the easy, plain shit. And that's why I always ask this question, like, what is a prompt that was like a breakthrough?

I'm not going to try and posture and say that I am an AI expert or a prompt engineer, but I think what I've done pretty well is, number one, I've written a lot before AI, and so I have a lot of data that I can train AI on. And so that's why I'm not a huge fan of using AI to write, because if you use AI to write and it sucks, and then you use that writing to train the AI again, it's just going to produce more writing that sucks. And so I have 50,000 tweets before AI that it can now train on. For me, I like to structure prompts into, I'd say, 3 main things. Number 1 is like, pretend you are X. So pretend you are an expert copywriter, assign a role, and then say your structure, like, hey, I want you to do this. That's your instruction. And then The third thing is the brain dump. And so I almost never tell AI like, hey, can you write a tweet on confidence? Because that's so like, it's so vague, it's so amorphous. It's going to be pulling from stuff that other people have written on confidence. Instead, what I like to do is I'll use Whisper Flow and I'll voice note just a bunch of, I'll just brain dump a bunch of thoughts. And so it gives AI a lot of my real-time thoughts on the subject so that it can deliver a more specific prompt. The second big point is I always ask AI, hey, what are the things you're doing wrong and how can we improve this? Because I think AI tends to have this like people-pleasing tendency. And so it'll just like agree with whatever you say. And so instead of like saying, hey, what are all the things we're doing right? I like to try and make it say, hey, what are all the things we're doing wrong? And once I get an output that I feel comfortable with after a lot of rounds of editing and a lot of rounds of prompting, I'll say, hey, AI, based on all the feedback that I've given you in this conversation chat, can we create a skill on this type of piece of writing? And so I have a bunch of custom skills with a ton of iterations on feedback and prompts so that the next time I do this task, it has context.

I want to go back to the story that is there on the internet in almost every podcast that you've done. And very briefly, if you could explain it to somebody who is listening to it for the first time. Is how you did cold outreach to the Beehive founder, how you did it to Hormozi, and how you did it to Noah. And what was like the common thread between this and what was different? That's a big question.

Yeah. Big thing is, yeah, you can, I'll do podcasts. I definitely go deeper into the story. The skinny is when I was 15, I Googled how to make money online. I tried a bunch of things. It failed. I realized I sucked at many things and my mom told me, hey, you should work for a work for a founder and see if you can learn something. And I remember feeling embarrassed, but you know, 'cause I'm, I'm an entrepreneur, I, I won't work for anyone else. But I realized that there's actually a lot of alpha in learning from people who were where I wanted to be. And so I cold emailed Tyler Denk and I sent him a 10-slide pitch deck with 3 summer project ideas I could do over the summer. And in hindsight, what I think I did well was what we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, which was do the work upfront and reduce the friction it takes for them to say yes. And so that's how I got the opportunity with Beehive. With Noah Kayin, I saw that he was looking for someone to help grow his newsletter. And so similarly, I said, oh my gosh, this is a great opportunity. I just came from a newsletter company. And so I sent him a 19-slide pitch deck. I went even deeper of deconstructing his entire social media and email funnel. I said, you know, if your goal is to grow your newsletter, let's map it out. How big is your email list? What platform are you using? What does your landing page look like? Where are you pushing traffic from? What do all your social channels look like? Are you posting consistently? If you are, what are you doing well? What are you doing not well? Here's what a competitor's doing well that we can maybe steal or copy. And I put, I put together that audit and I sent it to him. And then I also put together 9 pieces of social media content for free, ready for, ready to publish. And I said, test these out. If you like them, let's work together. If not, no harm, no foul. And it made an absolute no-brainer to work with him. And I started on a test trial with him and slowly I, I, I would absorb more responsibility and eventually start leading his content. And with Alex, it was different. It was an inbound opportunity. Someone that I used to work with, with Noah, introduced me to the director of media at acquisition.com and I created a 10-slide pitch deck for the interview of all the different ways I grow Alex's Instagram., and I like to think that that played a small role in getting the opportunity. Um, but I think the common through line between all of them is I did the work up front and I tried to ask myself the question, if I had this role, what would my strategy be for doing this well? And I'd say the differences between all of them is each pitch deck was tailored to each founder's personality. And so for example, in Noah's pitch deck, if you look at it, you can, you know, we can link it down in the description. It, it was very, it wasn't professional. It was like raw and real. It was kind of like, kind of quirky, right? Because Noah's definitely more of a quirky person. With Alex, if you look at that pitch deck, the last slide is me flexing my bicep because I know Alex likes working out. And so each presentation is tailored not only to the target's like work and content, but also to their personality so that it goes both ways.

So if somebody's looking for their next job, they should just not apply for jobs. They should adapt this strategy where probably they cannot go for like the volume game, but they select like few people they want to reach out to, deep research, do deep research on them, and then apply. I think you also joined Alex at a 50% pay cut. Why was that? And would you do it again? If you had to join somebody you really wanted to work with? I mean, your book really says working with the best. So does that— is that more important than also getting paid well for your talent, like what you deserve?

Yeah, I'll give you my decision-making framework for this. And, you know, I write about it in my next book, and I think it's one of the most important decision-making frameworks that I've come up for myself. For context, I was in college at the time. I was running a multi-six-figure ghostwriting agency. I would work in the mornings, I'd play pickup basketball in the afternoons, and I'd hang out with my friends at night. And so honestly, life was good. Like, I, you know, the harmony between business and play was fun. And so when I got this opportunity to work with Alex, I was kind of hesitant, right? I like, why give up something good for something potentially risky? Because for context, in order for me to join Alex, I would have to shut down my business. Drop out of college and move from Illinois to Las Vegas across the country. And so it was definitely risky. And I remember feeling two distinct emotions. The first one was, man, I, I'm gonna have so much FOMO if I drop outta college and leave all my friends. And the second emotion was, ah, but I just don't wanna disappoint Alex. I really look up to him. And so I said, gosh, screw emotion. I'm gonna think about this decision as most, as logically as possible.. And so I came up with this framework that I call the Four Pillar Framework, which was the four most important things to my career in that season of my life. And what I ended up deciding the four pillars were was number one, learning. How much will I learn in this skill? Number two was earning. How much will I make in this role? And more importantly, how much will this increase my capacity to make in the future? Number three was network. Who am I going to meet by being at the company? And who am I going to meet because of the people who come in the doors at that company? And then lastly, number 4 was story. How much is this opportunity going to create future opportunities? And so I weighed both paths out of, out of 10 for those 4 categories. So out of 40, and the acquisition.com path won. And so I chose that path. And so when we think about like, you know, Jay took a 50% pay cut. I was willing to take a pay cut in the short term so that I could learn the skills, meet the people, and have the story so that I could far surpass that in the long run. And I think what most people not do wrong, but what most people don't think about is that sometimes you have to leave the fast money on the table so you can get the big money in the long run.

And you also had age on your side. Yes. Probably that's also a factor, right? Like, I, I don't know if you could give that advice to somebody who's been in tech for like 30, like is probably 40, like could they do that or not? So I think also like the younger you are, the more risks you should take and you should just do more and more things till you're 30 and I don't know, maybe 25 or even 30 or 35. And then probably then your risk appetite just keeps getting lower and lower. So let's have a hypothetical situation. Like if you join, you know, like an ambitious startup today, if it's a new gig and you are like a head of growth, what is it that the first thing you did or you will do when you join a new gig and you're looking at achieving results in the next 12 months? What is your strategy when you're joining a new project?

Gosh, well, let's, if this is a hypothetical example, let's get a little bit more concrete. Let's say join a creator marketplace for enterprise companies to hire UGC creators, right? Let's say, let's say Shytift, Shytift, for example. If I were to come in as head of growth, I think number one would be identifying what are the things that we're doing well already, because one of the best risk-adjusted return strategies is to do more of what we're currently doing. And so the first question I'd ask is like, what's stopping us from doing more? And I think what that does is it then identifies the bottleneck. And so this is one of the biggest things I learned at acquisition.com, which is the theory of constraints. And so put simply, at any given time, there is one thing constraining the business's growth. Anything that you work on that is not that constraint is a distraction. And a quick visual is like, imagine there's water going through a pipe. You can make the end of the pipe bigger, but if there is something blocking the water upstream of that, then it doesn't matter. And so I think what Alex and Leila did really well is their ability to identify the constraint and then debottleneck that quickly is what's allowed them to scale quickly. And so, if I were to come into a company, I would say, okay, what's our goal? What are we doing that's working? How can we do more? What's stopping us from doing more? Okay, can we do variations of that? And then, okay, can we try something new? And so it's very similar to Google's 70-20-10 method of 70% should be spent on variations of what's working, 20% on a little bit more variations, and then 10% on completely new and experimental things. That would be my general approach to, to growing a startup.

You also Googled, I don't know what age was that, but I heard you saying on a podcast, how to make money online. If I had to think of how to make money online in 2026, do you think the thesis has changed from what it was 5 years ago? And if you had to make money online in 2026, what should you do?

When I Googled how to make money online, when I was 15, I think 5 or 6 years ago, the general consensus was pick a high-income online skill, get good at it, sign freelance clients, and now you have digital freedom. I would say in 2026, that is relatively the same advice I would give, but I would also learn AI as well. And so I think one of the common fallacies I'm seeing is colleges and universities pushing college kids to try and start like a venture-backed startup. And so they spend 6 months raising money, then they, they're, they get an idea and then they maybe build it out and then maybe a year from now they, they launch it and they test it with customers. I think that is a very risky strategy for making money online. I am not a fan of that because starting a business in general is hard. It's risky. Starting a, starting your first business when you're young is even harder and even riskier. Starting a venture-backed business when you're young is even harder and riskier. And so what I would recommend is starting a service-based business. So pick a skill, whether that's copywriting or video editing or graphic design, whatever it is, learn how to do that well with AI and then pitch your services to business owners. And what I love about that strategy is two things. Number one, you get cash upfront. And so instead of getting theoretical checks from founders that you have to put in the business bank account and you have to use for growth, You get that money in your bank account today upfront. The second thing is when you do service-based business, when you do a service-based business and you help other business owners, a lot of those business owners want to help you because you're young and because you're just starting out. And so you almost get mentorship for free from those entrepreneurs. And so not only do you earn more, but you actually learn more that way.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting advice because usually you get something like, okay, build a product because you can scale a product. You can't scale services, you can't scale an agency, and then you're not really a founder if you haven't built like a tech product. And that's like the most fashionable sort of thing to do. And you always get the advice that if you build like a services company, you cannot really scale a lot. But maybe to build skills, when you're building services, you learn a lot of skills like negotiation, getting clients, sales, which maybe on the product side you don't start with. You start with the tech. So yeah, that's an interesting perspective to sort of have. Why did you decide on the title Work with the Best? And what is different here that was not there in your first book?

What I've always tried to do with the titles of my book is make the titles a mantra that you can remember. And so like I'm not a personal huge fan of like the art of blah or the power of blah because it's not, it's not actionable. And so when, when the title's You Can Just Do Things, it's a powerful reminder to self. Same with Work with the Best. And so I chose Work with the Best because I think fundamentally my life is the way it is because I've chosen to find the best people in the world at my craft, get as close to them as possible, learn everything I can, and now I am the product of that. And so that's where the title came from. To me, the second book is a, a distant cousin to the first. And so in the first book, I talk about unlocking your mindset. I talk about the power of permissionless action. And this book, I talk about how do you actually do that? How do you write a cold email? How do you send a pitch deck? How do you ask for a referral? How do you create value for the people who you admire? How do you get in front of them? And so it's a much more tactical companion to the first book. You know, as I mentioned in the beginning of this podcast, it is my cookbook for creating opportunities. It took me the last 5 years to learn these skills, but you can read it in the next 2 hours and find value.

And what was your, so I think you've helped authors before to make their books bestsellers, and you've done that for yourself. What is your distribution process once the book is out or once it's published? And when do you really start, you know, marketing it? I don't know if it's the right word, but you are talking about it or go through like so that enough people know about it because there are also so many books and podcasts and everything coming. You know, attention is like the biggest currency right now to get people to actually pick up your book.

Yeah, I wish there was a silver bullet that I could just say, do this one thing and your book will be a bestseller. But the unsexier honest answer is that it is just a lot of trial and error. And so one of the processes that I learned with Noah Kagan when we were launching his book Million Dollar Weekend, which became a New York Times bestseller, is we would put together a marketing activity spreadsheet. And so we said, okay, if our goal is to sell 1,000 copies in 3 months, let's reverse engineer the things that we need to do in order to make that goal happen. And so we said, okay, what are all the different things we can do to make that goal a reality? Well, we can post on Twitter, we can post it on our newsletter, we can get, we can go on podcasts, we can get other people to write articles, we can ask companies to bulk buy, we can do some public speaking, right? And so we listed all of the things we could do in column 1. In column 2, we listed the expected sales from all of those things. To get to our goal. And then in column 3, we tracked how many actual sales did we get from each of those activities. And then after a month, we could then say, okay, this is working, let's double down on that. This is not working, let's cut that. This is doing okay, let's keep testing it. And so this is how you start to do this iterative process of quantity-based, of this iterative process of data-driven growth. And so this is how I approach many of the things that I do now is instead of operating from the lens of like, we're gonna do this one thing all in, It's how can we test our assumptions before we invest a lot of time, energy, and resources.

So what, so what worked the best in that case, or in the case of your first book?

My first book, which was actually interesting, is my email list. And so I think it just goes down to the power of having a newsletter. I think for a few reasons. Number one, people who sign up to get stuff from you often have a higher likelihood of buying your stuff than people who don't. And I think number 2 is when you have an email newsletter, the likelihood that people open your email and click something is higher, right? When you have a 50% open rate and a 2% click rate, you can actually backtrack the number of people who will reasonably click on a link and buy something versus on social media. It really depends on did this post blow up? Did you get the certain amount of impressions? Are you, you know, does the algorithm favor you right now? Which is a lot more up in the air. And so that's why I'm a huge fan of building an email newsletter.

So I just listened to a podcast just before this, before recording ours, and you were talking about the different experiments and you were saying that, okay, I go to a podcast and I share a story and then I see what's the reaction of people on that story. And then I know if I need to highlight it in my book or not. I'm just curious, like, do you feel that if you give away so many things about your book already, in different versions, the curiosity aspect of it will maybe be lower, or you, or there is some hypothesis that already tells you that it'll be like higher curiosity.

Fundamentally, a book is not necessarily new information. It is structured in the way that is the most condensed and efficient way to get a result for a reader. And so this is why it's like, Why would I take a course when all the information is out there for free on YouTube and AI? Well, because you're saving yourself time. You can go read all these copywriting books and read the articles and watch YouTube videos and figure that out for yourself. Or you can take a 2-hour copywriting course and learn everything you need to go from zero to where you want to be, right? And so that's fundamentally what a book provides. And so when I'm testing these materials, snippets here, snippets there, you can go find all of those if you want, or you can just read the book in 2 hours and get from where you want to— where you are to where you want to be. Efficiently in the way that it's supposed to be delivered. And so yeah, a book isn't anything new, but to me, if you want to save time and more importantly digest the learnings, I'm a huge fan of books because a question for you would be like, when was the last time a tweet has changed your life? Probably not often. But if you say, hey, when was the last time a book changed your life? Or at least something in your book remembered, you know, in your memory that you've implemented, probably higher.

So where are you in the process of your book right now? And when can we expect it to be out? And is it self-published or do you have a publisher? And Yeah, I think it would be also cool to know because I had a publisher and I think generally the whole traditional, you know, thing of having a publisher, at least in the journalism world, is more like a credibility thing. So yeah, two questions. Where are you in the process and have you chosen to go self-publishing or will you be having like a publisher?

So for the first question, what's really exciting is that pre-orders for my book will be available this Wednesday, so July 22nd. So it depends on when this podcast comes out. You may be able to preorder the book already. Okay. And so awesome. So I'll send the link there and then the book will officially be out September 30th and you'll be able to find it on Amazon and wherever it ships. And why I chose to self-publish my first book and both my second book is I think it goes along to what you said is, you know, with traditional publishing, you may get some credibility, some status, But fundamentally you don't get much else, right? They're not gonna help really write the book. You still have to write the book yourself. They may have an editor or a book cover designer, but you can also find that yourself. And the marketing process is largely up to you. And so to me, I don't feel comfortable giving up 70 or 80% of my royalties for someone who won't necessarily be a partner in this book launch because most publishers operate like VC funds, right? They give a little bit here and there. And then the ones they think will do well, they invest a bunch of their resources and everyone else they don't really care about. That's not something I feel comfortable with. And so that's why I chose to self-publish. I've helped launch other people's books and so I know the general process. And so I said, well, why don't I just do it myself?

Yeah, no, that's great. I think, and I think Noah also spoke a lot about it on, I don't know, maybe it was Ali Abdaal's podcast or I don't know whose pod was it, but I think he also spoke a lot about why you should just take like the risk of like doing it yourself. Do you feel that people who don't have a personal brand and are not good at marketing probably struggle with self-publishing or just generally publishing like a book? And if somebody's not good at marketing but is a good author, is a good writer, and there are many of such people I know, what should they do?

I typically don't like to give advice on things that I haven't really done myself. And so I am not an author who isn't great at social media. And I would say if you are a great author but struggle with social media, you will probably struggle with self-publishing, but you'll also probably struggle to find traditional deals. I think a lot of traditional publishers nowadays are looking for authors who already have a social media audience and a distribution network to push the book. They're not looking for an author who is the best well-known kept secret. They're looking for authors who already are popular and have people who want to read their stuff. Because it's less risky for them. And so the honest answer is if you are a good author and you don't know social media, it's probably worth investing in learning a bit about how to market there.

Yeah, that's true. Okay. I think with that we've covered most of the things, but we would like to know what is your plan for the next 12 months?

You know, I've been asked that question a lot actually this past week, and I wish there was a more juicy answer, but my answer is more better. It's how can I keep doing what I'm doing? And I think the older I get, the more I realize that if you commit to nothing, you'll be distracted by everything. And so I think in the past I've been trying to say yes to a lot of things and experiment and figure out what I like and what I don't like. And now I'm getting to the point where I feel really comfortable doing the things that I'm doing. And if I can just continue doing that for the next 10+ years, I think I'll, I'll be pretty, pretty happy.

Yeah, when you're happy, you do good work. So thanks, Jay. This was fun and also like a unique episode for us to actually talk to, you know, somebody who's on the creative path in this, where most of our episodes are about AI and what's coming next in the next release. And we wish you all the best. And in 2 weeks, the episode is out and your book is also available for pre-order. So that's great timing.

Thanks for having me.