How To Make $100,000+ With 0 Employees (Full Guide)

It was the number one nonfiction book on Audible. So I have a screenshot. It's Personal MBA first and then The Hobbit.

Josh, you've done something that I think very few creators have done, and that is run a one-person creator business at scale.

It would probably require 20 employees if I were doing it 25 years ago.

Very curious how you think about AI.

It's not replacing the values of human attention. It's freeing up human attention from the lower value things. I think the big opportunity here is For a lot of these things, it's like, how can you streamline the process so then you can reinvest into the core of what you do? The Personal MBA is named the Personal MBA for a reason. Getting someone's attention exactly at the moment when someone becomes interested around each of those ideas, I should be one of the first things that they see there.

Is there any principles you most want professional creators to dive into as they level up in their career?

If you want to be a better creator, if you want to be a better marketer, if you want to be a better salesperson, person. The trick is—

Josh, you've done something that I think very few creators have done, and that is run a one-person creator business at scale. Let's start with why. Why is that important?

Yeah, so publishing is a really interesting business because it is fundamentally creative. And most of the activity in my business happens between my ears. And so it's like, as much as I would really love to outsource some of what I do, fundamentally it's not possible. And so the counterbalance to that also is management and leadership is work.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so, you know, if you hire someone training someone overseeing, managing, directing, coordinating, there's, there's a time, energy, and effort cost to that. So very early on, I decided that I was just going to maximize the amount of time doing the thing that only I can do and not take that portion of time, energy, and attention that would otherwise go into managing people. I was just going to take that and put it into the creative part of the business. And that's worked out very well for me.

So your revenue is, is it entirely book sales, like print and audiobooks?

Yeah, I would say 90% plus comes directly from publishing. There's advice, advisory services, coaching. And that's mostly at this point, if I meet somebody really cool and there's a potential really good fit, then that's a fun way to spend time that is also profitable. And then it's a question of the balance between. So some days I could have full unstructured nothing scheduled sort of day where a lot of book progress gets done. And there are some days that are a little bit more fragmented. So on the fragmented days, if I can put an advisory session in there, then, then that makes an enormous amount of sense.

Yeah. So then when we look at it, most people in your position with books that are selling really well would then say, okay, what else can I layer on top of this? Mm-hmm. Coaching would make sense. You know, you have that in your revenue stream, that not something that you're actively pursuing or doing much with. You know, they're like, okay, what's the course? What's the group program? What, you know, all of these other things. You don't do that. And one thing that you said to me, this is probably 2015, 2016, I don't know, was talking about how you don't have customer support at all. Like if someone is like, I didn't get my book, that is a problem that they take up with Amazon or Barnes Noble or Audible.

That's right. That's right.

I guess besides protecting your time, what's the reason to not take those additional leaps when normally people would say like, oh, how do I, you know, I can add an extra $100,000, $500,000 a year in revenue if I did these additional things.

Yeah, I think it fundamentally comes down to the tradeoffs that I feel are good, healthy, appropriate, exciting for me. So the way that I think about writing books is I can spend a critical mass of time doing the research, doing the experimenting, putting something together. And when I do that well, I only have to write the book once, right? And, you know, barring a 10th anniversary edition or like previous up— like, that's a discrete unit of work that if I do my job well and this is an evergreen resource, it will exist for decades. And so that's a very high-value use of time. By stacking those on top of each other, you're basically building a series of annuities, right? Just keep ticking along in the background while you're working on the next project that kind of adds to that.

If someone's not an investor, sure, over that, explain annuities and then tie that to ebooks.

So an annuity is a financial instrument that just pays you every month, every year until the end of time. Or however long the annuity lasts. And so in the non-financial sense, if, if you make something that has permanent value and you commercialize that in a way that that value can be provided without your direct input, then that puts you in a really great position because you build the thing once, you commercialize it once, you have systems in the background that keep it selling. And to your point, like non-customer service options that keep it selling in the background without your direct involvement. And so instead of having to redirect a portion of your attention to support customer service, managing a course or a group coaching program or something on top of that, you just take all the energy that you were putting into commercialization and then you put it back into what is the next asset that I'm building that's going to continue to—

it's just stacking these up. Exactly. Yeah. And I, I'm just thinking about the leverage that you create because most people would look at the leverage of the audience coming in, be that the popular creator mindset, and say, okay, what else can I sell to this group of people without really thinking through the tradeoffs of what do I give up in that process?

Exactly.

You know, now I, need to get really good at marketing in a different way. You know, maybe it's building my email funnels or, you know, now I need to add the whole customer success, customer support aspect of it, you know, and then I have these ongoing obligations and you're saying, all right, no, the purest form of leverage here is taking one thing, packaging up really, really well, and then selling it for absolutely as long as possible.

Yes, that's right. And there's a personal values section of this too, which is— I mean, this is kind of weird coming from a business author, but like, more money is very often not the point, right? And so I am perfectly willing to trade more money against other priorities in my life that are as or more valuable than continuing to increase growth at the fastest possible rate. That I can.

What's— yeah, the diminishing returns of additional dollars. Like the— there's probably plenty of things that you could do with more money, but it's relatively less and less as you— you know, there's a bell curve to it. Yeah, right. And so when you don't have— like there's a point that more and more like really has a substantial quality of life impact for you and the dollar amount depends substantially on your goals, your lifestyle, where you live, all of that. But then you know, it comes down the other side where the next dollar means less and less. And so you're one of the few people that I know who has said like, cool, yep, this is working for me. I have other things I value much more. Yeah. Is there anything, if someone is thinking in those terms, is there anything you would say to them or they're starting to feel that of like, oh, maybe I don't actually want to pursue growth for growth's sake?

Yeah.

Yeah. How would you have that conversation?

Yeah, I think it's, it comes down to being very clear about what you want instead of what you think you should want. And so I remember early on in my career, I was talking to another author who was just getting started in building their business and had a successful book. And the career path for, for many people doing the work I do is you write a book to fundamentally sell corporate speaking engagements, and then the profit model is traveling, giving a keynote speech.

Yep. And the other hand, you hate travel, don't want to leave your house.

Yes. Really don't like people, right? Or you don't like strangers. So this person said, because they were really struggling with this and they decided to have it as a portion of their business, but not as the full thing. And the thing that I remember them saying, which has stuck with me ever since, is I would rather have platinum status with my kids than with an airline. And then there's, there's also the sense of for the type of work I do, there's a certain amount of structure and stability and predictability that opens the space to input a lot of information and think deeply about it and sit down and write. And traveling can be very disruptive, right, for that process to me. And so just making that tradeoff, like, I'm going to focus on making my stuff. Not being on the road 180 days a year or more. And might those priorities shift in the future? Sure. But at least right now, what I should want doesn't match what I actually want. So I'm just— I'm happy to make a conscious tradeoff there and feel good about what I'm giving up to get more of what I want.

We're here in Atlanta for a mastermind event that happened yesterday that was excellent, but it often leads to these scenarios of people asking for advice. I can't give you any advice that makes any sense at all until I understand what are you optimizing for? And oftentimes people are saying business growth or whatever else. But if you're saying I am optimizing for platinum status with my kids and a, you know, really healthy income from my business and a lot of dedicated writing and creating time, then like, all right, we can design exactly. And that's like right in there, you know, it's like, all right, we need to define an income level. And you're like, all right, I want to make $150,000 a year, right? Great. We can, you know, you can make very intentional choices through that. But then you have to remember that most people, if you're out there consuming content, something like, and here's how I grew my team, doubled this, whatever else, you're going to be like, okay, cool, I'm really happy for you. Yes, but I actually am going to disregard like this whole category of advice or experiences because it's not the goal that I'm optimizing for.

Sure. And I think one of the interesting things about the creator market in general, I think, and, and research and write a lot about social status adjacent things. I think the creator market is very social status signal heavy in terms of how messaging and marketing and what success looks like and all of those things.

You know, you know, all of the— where did you do a keynote? How much did you get —get paid. Yes. What was your book advance? Yeah.

You know, all of those things. And those things are easy to measure and they're easy to communicate. And what's often not included in those conversations are the tradeoffs that are being made in order to focus on those things. And one of the benefits of this particular career is I've met a lot of really cool people with a lot of really cool, high-status things. And it's really illuminating to see the tradeoffs that, that people make in their lives to get more of things that are important to them and valuable to them. And then also take a step back and be like, yeah, that doesn't sound good to me. And so like there's, there's a joy. I think this is the self-management part that's really important when doing this. The tradeoffs are going to be made. Regardless. Like, we don't live in an infinite universe. There's only a certain amount of time and energy. So like, it's going to happen. So if you make those tradeoffs consciously instead of implicitly or automatically, you tend to get much better results because you're just more clear about what you want. You can start to navigate how to get it and minimize the costs of it. The trick is, if you're doing it consciously, you can also manage the like Oh, but what if, like, and feeling bad about the things that you're not getting, just knowing that at a certain level you chose the not getting and the choosing the not getting is okay.

Is there a trade-off that's like actually been really difficult to make or that you really struggled with?

There was a time, so for my second book, The First 20 Hours, I did a really big TED Talk that ended up exploding. Like exploding in what way? The last— so I just checked this about a week ago, closing in on about 40 million views of that talk. And it's one of the 10 most popular TED Talks that have been released ever. That's incredible. Yeah. Which is fun. And it was, it was also one of those things that's like, I'm not a professional public speaker, but there's a cool opportunity. I'm going to do the cool opportunity. And the cool opportunity worked out really well. So when something like that happens, it's like inbound speaker bureau, we could— oh yeah, blow this up. And when you live that life, sometimes the speaking fees can be really great, very enticing. And so there was a deliberate, like, okay, I'm not making a trade-off against a theoretical possibility. I'm making a tradeoff against an actual reality, and I have to make a decision right now about what's important to me and what's not. And when it came down to it, I'm like, this sounds really cool, and it's not for me.

Of going like building a public speaking career. Yes.

Organizing my career fundamentally around that and then stacking it up.

The $10,000 keynote turns into $25,000, turns into $50,000, you know, and, and up from there. What I would do in that situation because I'm a person who tries to do everything.

Yes, you are.

That's why it's good for me to hang out with people like you. Sure. Who are much more thoughtful and deliberate is I would say, okay, I'm going to do 6 keynotes a year. I would like find some version of this and then it's like, look, if it doesn't meet the schedule requirements of this income requirement, I'm not going to do it. But I would put boundaries on it and say yes. Sure. I'm like wildly impressed with your willpower and discipline. Thanks. Yeah.

And it's like, I am very much an option D, all of the above, please. Because there's, there's something about— I think we were at a retreat together where we were doing like, how do you show up in the world in a career sense? The, the, the red, yellow, green, blue Herman Yes. Brain scan indicated that. And like, my result was all of them. All of them, all the time. Yes, please. Lots of variety. Let's do all the things. And so part of becoming more skilled at managing myself over time is recognizing that my impulse is all the things. And that's where if I try to do all the things, the tradeoffs start to be implicit and they start to get more and more extreme. Because you're just juggling glass bottles and at a certain point one of them is going to fall and that's not going to be a pleasant experience. Yeah. So more focus is, is better for me generally.

Something that I think about a lot is the core production function of a person. So Tyler Cowen talks about this. He's got his blog Marginal Revolution, but he will ask like, what is the core activities that you do as a as a person, as a creator, as a business owner that like creates the ultimate value. Like, right? Yes, there's all of these end results, byproducts where you end up spending your time, but like, what is the very core of it? And for you, you're very dialed in on— I read things, I distill it down, I put it into practice, like stress test it, and I write about it. Yep. And it's like— and you design your entire life around those things. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. The more input that goes into my head, the better. And that's also joy. Like, that's the part where it doesn't feel like work. It feels like the thing that I would be doing regardless of whether or not this is my job. Right. And so that's the part that comes easy. And then the actual work part is the, all right, I have inputted enough. Now it's time to start distilling it into a format that other people can benefit from.

For those creators that have moved away from like their core production function, like they've gotten caught up in the team they're building or whatever else, all their opportunities, you'd be an advice of like how you would distill it back down and make sure that that, that core engine, that core driver continues to operate.

Yeah. So I think step one is understanding exactly what it is, which is just like really I'm a big fan as a general practice for figuring out stuff like this. Take a sheet of paper, write a question at the top, which is what's getting in the way of me doing my core production function right now? Set a timer for 10 minutes and just like go. Because when it comes to things like this, most of us just— we're busy. We don't spend a critical mass of time actually looking at the problem in a sufficient level of resolution to find interesting stuff. And so that's a really good, straightforward way of surfacing a whole bunch of things that might need to be addressed. And then one of the things that I talk about a lot in the Personal MBA, which to a certain large segment of the creator population sounds like the most boring thing on the face of the earth, it's actually the opposite. Yeah, systems and process, man. It is. That's the way that you can take all of the things that are necessary and valuable must be done. And your goal is to identify exactly what they are, exactly what's necessary and what's not, and how to make sure they happen with a minimum amount of time, energy, attention, and stress so you can redirect the rest of it on the core thing that, that you do so well. And so I had had a client early in my career who was very much like massive creative type, like just loved making stuff and had a day job in order to pay the bills so he could maximally make stuff. And when I brought up the idea of systems and process and checklist and all of that, he's just like, you could just feel him deflate. It's like, I didn't, I don't want to do that. That's like— and his experience was actually the total opposite. And so he started doing some of these things to make his day-to-day much more streamlined and much more predictable. And he ended up doing so well that he was promoted. Like, they wanted to promote him in his day job. And he's like, actually, I would like to do this 40-hour-a-week job in 2 days a week. And I'm going to divert the rest of my time and attention to my creative pursuits. And they were happy to because he was amazing at what he did. Right. And so for a lot of these things, it's like just a little bit of what are the core things that need to happen? How can you streamline it as much as possible so then you can reinvest the time and energy that's freed up into the core of what you do?

One thing I want to go to with Personal MBA is this idea of working in public and sharing the content. Sure. I believe you have the entire, like, Personal MBA online for free.

Yeah, it's searchable. Talk about the strategy behind that. Sure. So one of the ideas that I actually talk about in the Personal MBA in the marketing and sales section is called point of market entry. So classic example here is when new parents welcome a child into the world, they are given at the hospital a little care package that's sponsored by Pampers or sponsored by formula companies or whatever, because like prior to that moment, diaper advertising just really isn't relevant to your life. It just would be completely ignored. After that moment, it is highly relevant, clear and present need in your life on a regular basis. And so getting someone's attention exactly at the moment when someone becomes interested in a certain topic is very, very important. And in my case, the Personal MBA is named the Personal MBA for a reason, because the moment an adult learner decides for themselves, business is really important, I need to get better at this, what do they type into Google? What do they type into Amazon? They start looking for graduate business school programs. For better or worse, in our culture, that's one of the first impulses. So when they search, they find me first. And as a potential alternative or as a way of understanding this decision better or whatever, it's, it's a pretty compelling first step. So I use the same strategy to market the book. With the ideas that are contained in the book.

Okay. So first, at a high level, the book title is focused around this like point of entry. Yes. And all that of like I'm searching for— I mean, you have to have MBA in the title. Yes. Because that, that draws people in. And then what you're doing is the book has so many topics that each one becomes a point of entry. Exactly. Yeah.

So if somebody is, is on Google and they are searching for balance sheet, I want to be there because that signals that there's an interest in this particular cluster of topics and they're in a receptive point, right? And so if the goal of the Personal MBA is to explain business concepts to a normal person who has absolutely no prior knowledge or experience, that's actually a really good fit for somebody who's, who's searching for a term like that, right? And so the, the marketing strategy for the book is it's a book of concepts. It's about 250 very specific ideas. And if someone is motivated enough to search for a cluster of things around each of those ideas, I can and should be one of the first things that they see there. And then the, the strategy of, of providing the content of the book is it's a very clear and tangible example of exactly what this is and why it's valuable and why somebody might want to, to read the whole thing. And so there's also a very deliberate strategy. I've heard from a lot of people who actually buy The Personal MBA in all three of the major formats. And it's because like one way of thinking about The Personal MBA as a book is it's a very comprehensive business course that would usually cost thousands of dollars that that you can buy for $15 for a paperback or one Audible credit. Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. And so a lot of people will go through the entire book in audio just as a, like, introduction to the topic. Here's how everything works. But then they want a reference version, so they'll buy the paperback to put on their desk and they'll buy the ebook so they can search within the book wherever they need it. And so it's, it's the same information. Like they read it on my website and then they have the audiobook and then they have the paperback and then they have the ebook. And each of those different forms of value plays a separate and distinct role in how they benefit from the information. And that's just really cool.

But I'm curious how big of a role search traffic plays in it, because you're right, the Personal MBA is particularly made and optimized for all of these points of entry is, has search traffic continued to be a really strong driver for years to come?

Yeah, strong and increasing.

Oh, it's continually increasing. Yes.

Oh, yeah. Because the more people find it and link to it and include it in a blog post or send it to a colleague in an email or any of those things. Yeah, that like all of that, the, the domain reputation, all of that continues to increase over time. And then the way to think about that. So it was actually a really long conversation with my publisher.

Yeah, I'm sure that at first they were like, no, deep discomfort.

And to their credit, it's like, let's do a pilot, let's see how it goes. And the results of that were so strong that it was like, yes, this is the obvious right thing to do for this particular book. And then there are ways to, to encourage people to pick up the primary formats. We don't— the worst case scenario would be cannibalizing all of your sales by offering the free version that's more compelling than the other versions. You don't want to be a replacement. But the other way to think about it is it is earned media that, like, many companies pay lots of money to have this form of promotion working in the background all the time. And so being able to take the value itself and also make it marketing for the primary forms of value. That worked very much in our favor.

Well, it's something like with the how to make things shareable, like make it easy for this thing to spread. And so if I'm like reading about something in the book and I want to tell my friend about it, I'm like, oh, take a photo of it. Oh, but it spans 3 pages, you know? Yeah. But then if I know, oh, it's available online, then I'm like, here, I can link someone to that and then they enjoy it, read it, and they're saying, oh, let me buy the full book. Are there types of books? Obviously this works well with the Personal MBA. Mm-hmm. I'm wondering how far we would take this. Like, I'm thinking about books that I'm thinking about writing, if I would go the full publish the thing on the internet.

Yeah. Or like essays or extra bonus material or elaborations. So one of the things that I added to the website version of this were a bunch of questions for reflection. So we didn't have 250 concepts times a chunk of text for each of that. Would have been the 600-page book instead of the 450, 500 it is. And so I already— I had all of that ready. And so it was possible to, to add to the book in a meaningful way. And then that also has a whole lot of benefits in terms of asking some really interesting things that get people thinking to want to dig deeper into the book. So yeah, I would say like, even if it's not the exact thing, pulling out some extra bits or bonus, like showing your work in, in that way and making it available is a really good strategy.

When having that really strong tie-in between your web presence and the book itself or the product, you can go back and forth. I'm realizing how well this ties into the idea of a one-person business. Sure. Because as a creator, you have to have a marketing department. Mm-hmm. In this case, one of your employees in your marketing department is the public version of the book. Yes. Yeah. And so you're like, because I'm not paying someone full-time to source opportunities and build backlinks and all of that, I need to deliver a lot more value for free on the internet.

Mm-hmm.

And have that work. Like, it's not just a, you know, I want to run this type of business, so I will. It's like, all right, we have to make some very deliberate decisions of, you know, what does one-person marketing look like rather than team-based marketing?

Yeah. And it's, it's a system that automates or that operates automatically in the background. And so it essentially becomes a project. I'm going to spend a couple of days or a couple of weeks doing this thing, but then once it's done, it's going to sit in the background doing its thing for many years.

What are other examples in your business of that work in the background, either automated or the leverage of, you know, this, this annuity that continues to deliver results or pay you over time?

There are a couple of things on the publishing side of things. Literary agents are worth their weight in gold, particularly good ones. And so they're not employees. I don't manage them. My agent is an amazing human being that I enjoy working with very much. And there's a certain level of Um, royalty statements come in that need to be reviewed for accuracy and publishing terms and, uh, renewals for foreign rights translations and all of that stuff. So having someone in the background who specializes in that sort of thing and can do it for me in a high trust, high context way, it turns something that might turn into a couple-day project that, that's not in my core value wheelhouse into a phone conversation. And that— so that is amazing. And then there are certain things like this is, this is the benefit of software. Like, you know, you and I started back in the days where you had to like manually apply to a merchant credit card processor and how like how painful that was. Authorized.net, that's that. You had an Authorized.net account too? Yes. I mean, yeah. And that's just what you had to do. And now there are just so many much better tools to handle common things. So like, instead of having an assistant, I have SavvyCal for, for booking either advisory engagements podcasts, opportunities, chats, whatever, there's a really great automated system that just takes a lot of the manual effort out. And so I was thinking like, for the type of business that I run right now, it would probably require somewhere between 10 and 20 employees if I were doing it 25 years ago. Yeah, just to handle like the manualness of what's going on. And so, you know, being, being able to add some of those high-value, relatively low-cost systems to streamline the process, it's a good thing we're living in this era because it's pretty great.

Yeah. And it's like, take full advantage of it. Yeah. One thing that I think about is I've made a lot of— a lot of my success in life comes to like conforming the world or my circumstances to my will. Sure. Making things operate the way that I want. And being relentless, sometimes difficult, you know, and, and bringing that to life. But what I'm realizing is a lot of times now with systems, like, I have a very particular way that I want something and realizing that I could get 80, 90% of the way there with very little effort because it works out of the box. Sure. You know, but it's like, I want it to be a little bit different and I'll often spend a huge amount of effort to get that a little bit different. Yep. And I'm finding more and more cases where I'm just like, oh, actually this doesn't matter. This is not like the core driver of my business. So I'm going to accept 80%. In this case, it's not lowering, lowering my standards. It's me conforming to what works out of the box. And then the amount of friction, like I'm accepting a software tool as it works instead of like, okay, I can get there, but then if I Zapier and duct tape this other thing in there and all of that, then it will be perfect. Yes. But it's also brittle. Right. And look, what I'm noticing in your business is that it's not— it's not brittle. It's just like it's pretty, pretty simple and resilient.

Yeah. And choosing your battles and figuring out where you want and need to apply your craftsmanship. So one of the things I don't talk about very much, but I did talk about— so The First 20 Hours is a book about learning new things as quickly as possible. And going from like zero to proficiency very quickly. Uh, the experimental part of that book was I researched the theory of skill acquisition and how to do that well in Quick Lead. That was really cool. But then I didn't feel comfortable teaching that until I had the experience of doing that for a bunch of different things in wildly different domains. And one of the things that I decided to learn was programming. Because systems are a big part of my work, and the friction of having to use a system that doesn't quite do the thing that I want or need it to do, or drives me nuts every single day because it's brittle and it breaks, which can pull focus from other more important things— suddenly there was a value to me in learning how to put some of these systems together or, or build something that works for my idiosyncratic needs. And so I just published a new version of my website where I wrote 100% of the backend code to do that. And I expect that system, because I build it exactly to what I want and need, and because it will not update unless I spend, like, take a couple days or a couple hours, couple days, a couple weeks to make it work in a fundamentally different way, that is stable and predictable. In a sense that's really important to me. And frankly, I enjoy working in it a heck of a lot more. And so that's also like, does that make rational business sense? You could argue maybe not. If I was like trying to, I could spend that capacity doing more advisory engagements or whatever. But there is a joy and a satisfaction I mean, Kit wouldn't exist unless you, you were like, I'm sick of everything that exists right now and this needs to change because I care. And so I think like those being introspective around like, where do I really just need the results? And however it comes about, as long as it's not too janky, that's, that's fine. And then finding those areas where you're like, this is not okay. Like, I really need— like, something needs to exist in order for me to have the experience I want or get the result that I want. Those are often the areas where you, you find the most valuable things that are kind of being ignored. And those are the product opportunities. Those are the book opportunities. Those are the, the chances where you can exert your will on the world and make it better in some, some permanent way.

Yeah, it's some version of choosing your battles. Yes. And narrowing it down. As you think so much about systems and processes and tools for a one-person business in particular, I'm very curious how you think about AI and the tools coming up now. Both like, I'm sure you've done a ton of research on it, but then also I'm just noticing so many things that I used to need to hire someone to do. Yep. That, or ask someone a question about that. Now I'm like, oh, I can actually build a pretty decent little system or use an AI tool to help that. And so how are you thinking about that?

Sure. I really like Kevin Kelly's heuristic. What is that? Treat AI as a very overeager but not very experienced intern. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's the perfect analogy. So like, I, I only use a couple. I never use it for writing, for output. Okay. Because for me, that's what I do.

You are part of your production.

Yes. And both the ideas that go into a work as well as every word that I write for the work needs to be me in a way that I can verify. It's like it's all output of my brain. That's the core of the value. And so I'm very strict about that. What it's extremely helpful for is surfacing primary source material. Guess, and giving like the overeager intern high-level executive summary of what is this like, like a general introduction and then tools that will point to the primary sources, whether that is internet discussion for like consumer behavior sensing sort of purposes or like a big part of my job is there's a lot of really interesting things that are in academic research journals. And the general audience for some of those papers is, is numbered in the, like, sub-100. And so being able to find them in the first place is important. But then being able to ask a question with a targeted tool that can ingest a huge amount of material and kind of point you towards the things that are more likely than not to be valuable. Yep. That's great. And so what I'll usually do is have some, some queries around the topic that I'm doing research on, and then I'll find the primary source material. And then, then that goes into my brain in a useful way. And then I just kind of go from there.

Yeah, I find that the re— it's really good at the research. Yeah. I love the over a year intern because, hey, I will be so confidently dead wrong. Oh yes. Times. And just like, I've never been so gaslit by a computer before where it's just like, even when you're like, reference this exact material and it's not, and it's this. And I'm like, wait, I know this well enough to know that that's not, that's not correct. And so you correct it. It's like, oh right, I reread it and it's actually not correct. But the one version that I got working really well is in my writing, I need to reference specific creators. Yes. You know, I, I have things that I know broadly to be true, and I need to illustrate that point with a wide range of creators. And so at Kit, we've written, I think, over 100 creator stories now where we're profiling like a creator's journey. And Isa on our team has written all these stories, published them for free on the internet. And, you know, I'd often ask her like, okay, Isa, who's someone who stayed consistent for years and didn't really have results. And then only after like 2 years of consistency, then they had a breakthrough. Yes. And she's like, oh, well, and she'll list off 3 people. I'm like, this is amazing. Also, I probably should let you get back to writing. I shouldn't be pestering you over Slack with these questions. And so what I did is I took a giant document of all of the stories and it took a little— like, first I tried ChatGPT and then Claude. Neither of them could ingest that much data. And it was, it was hard to do, but, um, Google's NotebookLM was quite good at it. Mm-hmm. And then I could ask those questions to NotebookLM and even load in the article that I was writing and be like, give additional context and say, hey, from this source document, who's a, a, a source story that could work for this? Give me 3 of them. Sure. And, uh, it would be quite good at that. And then unlike Claude and ChatGPT, NotebookLM will very confidently cite its sources. And allow you to click into it and pull it up and be like, oh yeah, yeah, let me read that section of the story. And that does actually illustrate this point. Yeah. And so that's worked really well.

One of the— building on that, one of the more interesting, valuable, archetypical examples of, of what's possible now that I've heard, and I wish I remember the designer's name, a fashion designer early on who has a career, who's built up a body of work, and was using some of the early image generation AIs in the most brilliant way, which is, here's my entire body of fashion design sketches, and just that. AIs do whatever they do. Yep. And then they would use it for rapid prototyping. Okay, so it's give me 50 examples of a certain type of dress in the way that I would design it. And so you can take the AI can generate an enormous amount of potential iterations or options. And then it's the designer's job to look at that output and say, oh, that's a cool idea, right? I can do something with that.

This is all garbage, but that is.

And then you can either run it through a couple more times or just take like a really cool thing that came as a result of that. And then the expert skill takes over and then you build it out into a something.

What is the taste to know which of the 20 that it's like spit out, which one is worth paying any attention to? I think about that in writing. I was having a conversation with someone the other day where they're talking about how with AI, writing becomes much less important of a skill. And what they were saying is like, now I can take the copywriting greats and I can train an AI on it, give it really good prompts and all of that. And I was just disagreeing with them because I think that great writing requires taste. And so to be able to distinguish between the garbage writing that AI will so happily give you. Yeah. And the really great stuff, which with great prompts and all that you can get to as well. It just made me think that refining writing as a skill is even more important now than ever.

Totally. Yeah. My heuristic here is Writing on the nonfiction side of things needs to be true, useful, and clear. And each of those things takes a certain amount of human judgment to get to, is this true? Is this useful? Is this clear? And I think one of the advantages of, of AIs in general is a lot of the, like, more transactional, lower value things that need to be done. Yeah, AIs are great for scheduling. Because, you know, the text that needs to be accompanied, the data format that the invite needs, like that is a perfect use case for a computer because it's something that needs to be done often. Even some of the like, you know, you record a conversation and a computer transcribes the whole thing and can give an abbreviated executive summary. Pretty great. Yeah, it's pretty great. And it would require hours and hours of an actual person's time in order to get that result. So being able to get it in a more straightforward way, in a more consistent way, in a faster way. All of that is really great. And so I think the big opportunity here is it's not replacing the values of human attention. It's freeing up human attention from the lower value things so we can redirect it to the higher value ones. To me, that, that's both exciting and taking it too far, having too high expectations on, on what that's going to result in is like, no, it's, it's an efficiency thing, right? There's a pair of concepts I talk about in the systems section of Personal MBA called the, the paradox of automation and the irony of automation. So the paradox of automation is that when you have a system that can produce a result, um, and you have a human overseeing that, it's actually a really bad situation for humans because automated systems that just run get really, really boring really, really fast. And so the, like, quality control vigilance all of that, like you might need a very skilled human looking at the output of the system, deciding whether or not it's true. But the more efficiently the system runs, like the less likely the human is to actually do that. And if you're— if you have a system that's multiplying a particular result and you don't catch a subtle error, it's just going to compound. Yeah. So like this is kind of a deep cut at this point, but one of the largest recalls in automotive manufacturing history was Toyota because there was an automation production error in their braking system and they had to recall millions of cars and replace a very expensive thing because like the production line took a tiny error and just like exploded it. So the irony of this situation is that the more efficient the system, the more skilled and on top of it humans have to be in order to take full advantage of the benefits of the automation without running into the air. So humans become a more important component in the system, not less.

So there's a period of time on the internet where audio rights, like, people realize the power of audio rights and all that. I feel like you and Tim Ferriss and a couple of other people realize the full power of it. I believe Tim purchased the rights to Ryan Holiday's book. That's right. Which is the audio rights to it and published that himself. He did it with a handful of other, other books. Part of this was because of the deal that you could get with Audible at the time, which was the best deal in publishing. It doesn't exist today anymore. But can you talk about how that royalty arrangement with Audible played out and what it meant for The Personal MBA?

Yeah. So at the time in the publishing, like, so podcasts are kind of just getting started. And at the time, audio rights were kind of this, like, backwater, like books on tape for libraries was basically the market. And so in the original deal, publishing deal for Personal MBA, audio rights were included, but Penguin wasn't really in a position to do it themselves. And so they went out searching for sub-licensors. And you can kind of see why that didn't go over well, right? Like, who wants to publish a 500-page business encyclopedia in 16 to 18 CDs, right, for libraries? And so I just went back to the publisher and said, well, if, if the interest is not overwhelming, then let's unbundle this. Like, I would be happy to, to purchase the rights back, and then I'll do, I'll do with the audio what I will. And that ended up being really good timing. And so at the time, I had no— zero idea what I was going to do with this. I'll just do, do something. And meanwhile, two things happen. Amazon buys Audible and develops a program that's very much like Audible's ebook self-publishing system. So Kindle Direct Publishing, Audible Creation Exchange was the equivalent of that. So it used to be you had to be a publisher to publish audiobooks on Audible. You had to have a back catalog of at least 10 titles. Like, it was, it was pretty difficult to do. And Amazon comes in and says, no, if you have a book, as long as your audiobook format meets these specific requirements to make it a professional production that people will pay for, we're happy to publish your book. And so that happens around the same time that podcasts really start taking off in earnest as, as a unique format. And so all of a sudden people are listening to audio in a like independently produced and published audio in general in a way that they hadn't been traditionally. And at the same time, you're liberated from the need to produce warehouse, ship CD sets. It's all electronic. And so all three of these things start coming together. And so I ended up recording the audiobook for Persuasion BI myself. I was one of the first business authors to self-publish an audio title on purpose, not with a major house. And yeah, at that point, because it was new, the royalty terms for that were extremely good in the same way that, um, that Kindle Direct Publishing versus working with, with a publisher to do an audiobook, the terms are extremely good. And so it was a calculated bet that I think over, and again, thinking of this as a product that's going to, to exist for multiple decades, like, yeah, I think this is probably the way to go. This is also representative of the time period, but it was so like when you have a centralized bookseller and the bookseller does promotion, that becomes a really big deal. So they decided to promote Personal MBA, enormous amount of sales. It was, it was the number one nonfiction book on Audible for many days straight. And it was, if memory serves, the same year that The Hobbit came out as a movie. Okay. And so I have a screenshot that I get a lot of nerdy joy out of, of like, it's Personal MBA first and then The Hobbit. Like, that's pretty cool. You're like, that's great. Yes. My life is now complete. Yes. I feel really good about this particular decision.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. As a true Lord of the Rings fan, I think I read Lord of the Rings cover to cover probably 3 or 4 times by the time I was 12 years old.

I would get the same amount of nerdy joy out of It's the little things. Yeah.

Out of that, what do you think the opportunities are in audio today in 2024?

Okay. A couple of different thoughts. One is I'm definitely thinking about audio as a primary format for the book.

Yeah, we have some friends who like— they sell more audio copies than print and ebook combined.

It's very common for audio to be above 50% of week 1 order volume on a new title. So thinking about, so most people think about the paper version of the book as the primary thing and everything else flows from there. And yeah, you're sitting at a desk putting words on paper. That's kind of how it works. But when I'm writing, I am also narrating in my head. What the audio version is going to look like. So treating it in that sense, it's a primary format. It's going to come out in conjunction with the paperback and the ebook, whether it's— whether it is published with a major publisher or whether it's professionally independently published. You need to have those three formats on day one and the audio needs to be treated seriously. Yeah.

As we wrap things up, one thing that I'm curious about is if there's any principles from The Personal MBA that you would most want, like, professional creators to dive into and explore as they, like, level up in their career.

Okay. So if you're going to dive down any rabbit hole— Yeah, just that it's not directly related to, like, the production side of things, but it's, but it's very fruitful. Psychology is a goldmine for creators because understanding how the human mind works, what it pays attention to, how people think in general is important for product development. It's important for marketing, it's important for sales, it's important for working with yourself. It's important for working for other people. Like, it's just psychology is in everything. And so there's some wonderful high-level resources around some of these tendencies, biases, like how, how people process information. And there's just like a handful of ideas that once you have them in your head, you can see them in operation all around you, and then it becomes a, a real opportunity to put them to work in a useful way. So a classic in the field and a good representative example, um, Influence by Robert Cialdini, is one of best psychology books of all time.

It's one of those recommended so many times I haven't read it yet, so now I need to actually—

I'm, I, I'm actually mortally offended. Like, it's, it's so good because— and also, like, these are things about humans that are never going to change, right? And so when you know how people respond to something like scarcity, when you understand how humans process contrasts in, in things and how they think about, or how contrast can highlight or diminish the importance of how information is presented or how a sales pitch goes. If you know what authority is that you've talked about in extreme detail, like those things are baked in very deeply into the human brain and the human body. And so like to the point where I set about writing a book about business, and only the first third of the book is about business. The whole second part of the book is about psychology and how to apply it because it affects everything. And so if you want to be a better creator, if you want to be a better marketer, if you want to be a better salesperson, you want to be a better manager, you want to be a better— like, just this is the core that's going to unlock a whole lot of different things. So time spent there is extremely well spent.

That sounds good. Well, you've been an incredible friend and mentor to me in the last— I had, I think, 12 years. I think we met at least— yeah, 2012 was probably when we first met. And so it's been a really fun conversation. I'm glad we got a chance to hang out more. Where should people go to dive into your work?

Yeah, the best place to start is joshkaufman.net, and you'll find all of my books, all of my essays, all of my book notes, and in my email newsletter powered by Kit is I'm including random recommendations of things that bring me joy in addition to all of the, like, cognitive work that I do. And so, yeah, for updates on, on future work, signing up for, for the email update is, is the best place to hear as soon as new fun things, things launch. Sounds good. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. Thanks, Nathan.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.