How To Finally Write That Book & Make it a Bestseller w/ Keith Ferrazzi | EP #59

In this episode, Peter and Keith discuss the significance of writing a book as a means to establish one's brand and positioning in the world. They share about the intricacies of writing, publishing, and promoting a book, highlighting the importance of authenticity and genuine intent over mere commercial success. 24:50 | Chat GPT Writing - Pros & Cons 54:28 | Defining Your Brand With Books 1:17:15 | Book Writing in 20 Years Keith Ferrazzi is an American author, entrepreneur, and recognized global thought leader in the relational and collaborative sciences. He is the founder and CEO of Ferrazzi Greenlight, a Los Angeles-based research and consulting firm. He has written several New York Times bestselling books, including “Never Eat Alone” and “Who’s Got Your Back?”. Ferrazzi has introduced a new transformational operating system he calls co-elevation that leads to exponential change and value Check out Keith’s latest book, Competing in the New World of Work _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Experience the future of sleep with Eight Sleep. Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/moonshots/ to save $150 on the Pod Cover. _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  How do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are?

• 0:34Peter Diamandis?

  How are people going to know you?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  You should be asking yourself, is my positioning in this world about my business, my leadership? You can develop that in what we're going to be talking about today.

• 0:46Peter Diamandis?

  The title and the cover.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Oh my God. So important. Some guy had gone in the back of the room and just taken an ugly orange color and wrote, "Never Eat Alone" on it. And so that ended up being the cover.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Don't think of a book as this crazy Mount Everest thing that only special people do. Think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you. Who you are, what do you want to project to the world? It's a forcing mechanism, an accountability mechanism to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world.

• 1:24Peter Diamandis?

  Keith, welcome to Moonshots. It's great to have you here, pal.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Any conversation with you is a blessing.

• 1:29Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you. Let's jump into this conversation, which is for entrepreneurs, for CEOs, for thought leaders who've never written a book but want to write a book. Our goal here is in service to them, teach them how do you write a New York Times bestseller? Maybe how do you write a number one New York Times bestseller? Each of us have written one of those. And the question of, does it really actually matter? Um, so let's actually start with that. Do you think it matters that your book is a New York Times bestseller?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Let me wind this back a second.

• 2:02Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  I think it's a little different positioning. One is that I think it's important that everybody write their book. I don't care if you publish it. Cause what I'm about to suggest is that you writing your book is you putting a, a footprint in the sand around your brand. What matters to you? What are you trying to tell the world? You, you talk about an MTP.

• 2:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Right? I think everybody should manifest. And again, the way in which one quote writes a book is the same way is in which you develop your positioning, your thought leadership, your brand. Right? So if any CEO out there, you should be asking yourself, is my positioning in this world about my business? Is my positioning around my leadership? Is my positioning around whatever? You can develop that in what we're going to be talking about today. So whether or not you're shooting for the New York Times list, or whether or not you wanna see your book at, uh, on the, on Amazon, it's kind of irrelevant because what we're really talking about is how do you fundamentally put a footprint in the sand around who you are?

• 3:02Peter Diamandis?

  All right. So let's dive into all these parts, which is how do you decide what book you're gonna write? And then how do you write? And then how to get it published? And then how do you promote it? And how do you get on the, on the list? And does that list really matter? And I think your point is right. Um, it doesn't matter if you're a number one New York Times. It might matter for you as an ego to be able to claim that.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  I mean, let's not take it away from me that I've gotten one. So I don't want to, you know,

• 3:29Peter Diamandis?

  I got,

• 3:29Speaker 01

  say that it doesn't matter. Are you at one too?

• 3:32Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I got,

• 3:32Speaker 01

  you just have it in partnership.

• 3:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I got to number two twice. And then I had Tony Robbins as like, you know, the master promotional

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Hey,

• 3:40Peter Diamandis?

  engine of the world.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  What we're about to tell these folks is you use any leverage you can. Right? So it doesn't matter. You've got a number one. I've got a number one. And has it changed our lives? Absolutely not.

• 3:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. At the, at the end of the day, uh, you write a book for a number of reasons. And let's, let's talk about that because I think it's important folks to realize. I mean, you said the first one, right? Uh, developing and promoting your brand. How are people gonna know you? Right? So for me, when I wrote Abundance with Steven Kotler back in 2012 and got in the TED stage and gave that, that opening keynote, It really was a pivot moment for me, right? And I became Mr. Abundance and all of a sudden, good news was cool. And then we'll talk about a second reason, not in this podcast, but later. But you don't make money on the book or the book advances. You make money on?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  You make money on speaking?

• 4:34Peter Diamandis?

  Speaking, yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  And, and, and the tipping point for you, you know, abundance was a big success.

• 4:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  But the TED Talk, like, we should talk about that when we get to our, the second half of our work together today, which is going to be speaking.

• 4:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  But the TED Talk is instrumental, too.

• 4:49Peter Diamandis?

  It was, it was. And, and the value of that. And does it matter if you're on a TEDx talk or on the TED Main Stage? And we'll talk about that in our, our second podcast we're going to do, which is on how to build a speaking business.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  But let, I agree.

• 5:01Peter Diamandis?

  Go back to why do you write, why do you write a book?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  So if I'm talking to any of my clients, I coach executive teams.

• 5:07Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  And a number of my clients, you know, I often ask them, I said, do you have a book in you? And I'd say half of them say yes, and the other half say not interested at all. Um, the ones that say yes, I put them through a simple exercise. Because I'm curious why they have a book in them. It's interesting because some people have a book in them and it has nothing to do with their workplace. It's because they're a Christian and they believe in financial, um, success for, for the underprivileged. And they want to write a book about being a Christian and having financial success.

• 5:43Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  I get surprised sometimes by whatever, somebody comes at me, what really matters to them? Just like when you're trying to design somebody's MTP.

• 5:51Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  But then there are others who are like, I have no interest at all. And when the ones who say I have no interest at all, I push them a little bit. And I said, well, how do you represent yourself to your employees? How do you represent yourself to the world? How do you represent yourself to your shareholders? Who are you? What matters?

• 6:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  And I said, let's, let's think about writing a book. Now, a book to me starts with the simplest thing in the world because most people see this Herculean effort of, you know, Mount Everest that they someday have to climb. No, you don't. You don't even have to get to base camp. All you gotta do is, and what I always say is, go on a piece of paper and write 10 sentences that define for you what you have to teach the world or what you want the world to do differently. Just 10 things, right? And try to make them in some order of flow. And what would those be? And then what you do is you write those ten things and then show them to a few friends and talk about them, have a dinner about them.

• 6:47Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  And then, once you muse on that with somebody else, then go from ten sentences to ten sections with three sentences.

• 6:58Peter Diamandis?

  So sort of flesh it out.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Flesh it out a little bit more, three sentences. And then show that to a few friends and get a bunch of musings back. And then maybe you get to the stage where you write ten paragraphs. By the time you've done that, you've started to structure both what you think you have to share with the world and what the world resonates with, or at least the people who have a sense of who you really are, what they resonate with. Once you get to that, I think you've got the bones of what is most important, which is starting to structure your, what you have to share in the world.

• 7:29Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, at the end of the day, a book is moving someone through a sequence of thoughts and feelings. So they come out the other end, understanding the point you wanted to make.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  And you and I, one of the things I think books failed to do, and this is something that I've lived my life on. I think if there's a core element of my brand that I'm starting to realize about myself, it's not whether I was the relationship guy with Never Eat Alone or the future of teams, you know, with competing in the new world of work and other things. I think at the core of my brand is something very different. It's high-return practices. I'll explain what I mean by that. I had a, remember Pocket Coach?

• 8:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember. I was an investor.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Lovely failure of six million dollars of loss.

• 8:13Peter Diamandis?

  It was a great idea.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  It was a great idea, and it still remains a great idea. And the idea was that there was extraordinary things we all needed to, not just learn, but to do differently.

• 8:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, different habits.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Different habits, rituals, practices.

• 8:27Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, like Atomic Habits.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  It proved it's a great book, right? But my idea was, okay, if you read Good to Great, you would know what a great leader is like. But would you really know what to do? So my idea was, I was gonna go and take all the great books. Originally, the book was called Pocket Coach. And the idea was that I was gonna take all the great books. Turn them into practices so that along with the book, you would get dosed practices and on an ongoing basis. And what I found interestingly enough was that there were basically no practices in most books.

• 9:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  There were a lot of concepts, there were a lot of learning, there were a lot of inspiration, there's a lot of ideas, a lot of storytelling. But the what you fucking do day to day differently?

• 9:12Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  What are the practices and how do I, they weren't there. All of my books are practice based.

• 9:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And that's just my brand, right? My brand, I think if anything else, it's a highly practical, practice based.

• 9:23Peter Diamandis?

  Well, for those who don't know you fully, I mean, you began as a Fortune 500 executive. You were CMO at, at Starwood Hotels.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And Deloitte.

• 9:33Peter Diamandis?

  And then at Deloitte. And today, you know, I view you as what Tony Robbins does for individuals, coaching individuals. You do for executive teams, right? You come in, coach teams for high performance.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:45Peter Diamandis?

  And there's a lot of practices, a lot of this is how you get to that endpoint.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:50Peter Diamandis?

  And, and I agree, I mean, a, a book where I can learn something and it changes my behavior.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:55Peter Diamandis?

  Um, is, is really important.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And I wouldn't say that be, yes, that's my brand, but there are others where you read a book and if you're inspired.

• 10:03Peter Diamandis?

  Or entertained.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Entertained, right? So all of those are good. Um, I just want to suggest that the key to your success as you start to think about this is these are the questions you should be asking yourself. You should be asking yourself, is my brand what? And how does a person, when I have, when I have communicated on paper or on stage with an audience? What does that audience look like? So let's go into the basics. Who am I speaking to? That's different.

• 10:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  You speak to entrepreneurs. Now, the overlap of that is that you also inspire and speak to Fortune 500 CEOs, but that's not your core audience.

• 10:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I, I, my mission, my MTP, inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future. I want to go back to why write a book? And, and you said something a little bit ago. I mean, first of all, we talked about what you said about creating, defining your brand.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:56Peter Diamandis?

  Right? Because if you have a book that really defines your brand, your, if your employees, and again, speaking to entrepreneurs, a, a great book can launch a company. Right? A great book can launch you as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, can align your organization.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness.

• 11:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And then exponential organizations that I recently wrote with Saleem or EXO2.

• 11:19Peter Diamandis?

  Um, it also can allow you to pivot, right? And this is something that you've used in your life.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you and I were talking about this yesterday when we were having lunch. I like to use books to learn. Not to read and learn, but to write and learn.

• 11:34Peter Diamandis?

  The force you to learn.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  It's a forcing mechanism. So, uh, you know, when, when I wrote my first book, Never Eat Alone, it was an accident. You know, it was, I always had a book in me. I was, we want to hear the funny little story.

• 11:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I want to hear it. I want to, why did you write that book?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, um, I always had a book in me and remember I had been the chief marketing officer of two companies and I thought my book.

• 11:58Peter Diamandis?

  And pretty significant companies.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Big companies. And I thought my book was going to be about marketing.

• 12:01Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And I came out to Los Angeles and I was an entrepreneur. I had left marketing because I wanted to be a CEO. I was working for Michael Milken and I was running one of the companies in his portfolio. And, um, somebody came to me and said, uh, we would, um, like to write an article about you on your success. You had such crazy success. You were a Fortune 500 executive by the time you were 30. And, and then you're now you're a CEO, blah, blah, blah. And so we wrote, they wrote an article about me. And it was about my perspective, and this is very important for anybody

• 12:41Speaker 01

  thinking about, um, writing your book. Again, when, when this, when this journalist came to me and said, I want to write an article about your success. I stopped and I didn't want the narrative to be run by him.

• 12:52Peter Diamandis?

  Huh.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  I stopped and I said, give me 24 hours and I'm going to write for you the 10 things that I think defined my success.

• 13:01Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And I delivered those to him 24 hours later after thinking about them. And he called me back and he said, you've just written my article. My article is going to be those 10 things and we're just going to go in more detail now. Right? So the structure, I commanded my own narrative. And it was about, really it was about things like deepening relationships with individuals, being authentic, being generous, all those things.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  And then when I published that, when that article got published, somebody reached out to me and said, "You should write a book on that." Now, remember my head, I want to be a CEO of a major company. I'm a marketer. That's where I am. And somebody comes along and says, "You should write a book about this, this world of networking and, and career development, et cetera." And I said, "No." I said, "I don't want to do that. That's not my brand. I'm a corporate guy. I'm gonna be a CEO." And they said, "We'll give you a quarter of a million." And I'm like, "I'll do it." So, it was...

• 14:01Peter Diamandis?

  And we'll talk about advances and how much is real and so forth. You know, I had a not-too-dissimilar story on my first book. It was just after the X Prize, no, the X Prize had reached some level of popularity, but had not been won yet. And I got, I read an article that a guy, Steven Kotler, wrote about me. He wrote one in GQ and one in, I think it was Wired at the time. And when I read this article, I was so enthralled by his writing, not what he said, but the way he wrote was so incredible. I did something unusual. I called him up and I said, "Steven, would you give me writing lessons? I want to learn how to write like you."

• 14:45Peter Diamandis?

  And, because I, the book I had in me was I wanted to write a book about space, right? I'd been a space cadet for 20 years. And it was like, "I'm gonna write about the future of humanity in space and this and that." And so, I took writing lessons, I wrote a book proposal on space, didn't go anyplace, and I put it aside. And then, here comes 2009, and I am at Singularity University in the first year. And I'm having a conversation, I'll never forget, with Neil Jacob Stein and with Ray Kurzweil about the idea that technology was turning things that were scarce into abundance. And the, that word "abundance" just grabbed me. And I started thinking about that, and it became so...

• 15:30Peter Diamandis?

  Powerful inside me. I called up Steven and I said, Steven, you and I are writing a book together and it's going to be called Abundance.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:38Peter Diamandis?

  I was like that committed. And lo and behold, I got a quarter million dollars advanced that I split with Steven and

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Which is very difficult to do, coming out of the chute on a first book for anybody.

• 15:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So just to manage expectations.

• 15:52Peter Diamandis?

  Steven, who had been a writer, a successful writer, was getting like 60K advances and um and but it was our partnership and sometimes someone who's got a wider reach and someone with writing skills and we'll we'll talk about, do you write with somebody on your own?

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Well, let's actually segue. I know that that's probably in the sequence later, but let's use this as a moment. Um, neither of us would have had the success we had in our first books if it wasn't for an extraordinary writing partner.

• 16:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  I just want to note that. So there's two ways to think about this. One is if what you're writing your book for is to is to document your positioning and to put a footprint in your brand and further explore it, fine. But if you're going to put things out to the world, there is a skill set called extraordinary writing, which is rare.

• 16:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  And I would never have had Never Eat Alone as a success if it wasn't for Tal Ross.

• 16:49Peter Diamandis?

  Who was your?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Who was my co-writer.

• 16:50Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Um, and and similarly with Abundance, you wouldn't have had the same if it wasn't for Steven.

• 16:56Peter Diamandis?

  I was an incredible storyteller and you know, as good as ChatGPT is today, it just doesn't come close. Maybe maybe GPT five or six will will come close, but and we'll talk about that a little bit later as well.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  I just think it's important to note that none of neither of us believes that you do everything alone.

• 17:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Building the right team and we'll get to that later, but I just wanted to note how important it was. You don't have to think, I would imagine it would be daunting for most people to think of writing a book. You don't have to write the book. You have to be the quarterback. You have to be the leader of the book. And there's a whole set of assets that you'll be leveraging to make that happen, which we can talk about in a moment, but I want to get over that hurdle.

• 17:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and and you can write with a co-author where you're both named as the authors. You can have a ghostwriter who comes in and interviews you and writes the book in your voice.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And just on that, I'm often, I'm intrigued by your thought. So Tal and I had an extraordinary writing partnership for Never Eat Alone. And by the time, these days, I always make a habit of making sure that the person who's writing with me is on the cover.

• 18:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, 100%.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  And the reason I do that is because I want them on Saturday night, when they're trying to decide, do they have an extra glass of wine, or do they turn to the book?

• 18:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  If their, their, their, their name is going to be on it just with mine, I think it's important. And I don't think, I don't think an author loses anything.

• 18:24Peter Diamandis?

  I, I lost nothing.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  By sharing the cover.

• 18:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And, and so, Abundance was written in my voice, I, you know, first person voice and so forth. And then Stephen and I had continued our partnership in our second book, Bold, and our third book, The Future's Faster Than You Think. And those were jointly voiced books, right? And, and at the end of the day, it's been incredible. You will, if you have a co-author, it's a very intimate relationship. We used to joke that we were each other's lovers, you know, in terms of, because we'd be up at five in the morning writing for two hours.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:59Peter Diamandis?

  And, and it's, you know, you go deep in that regard. We'll talk about, you know, writing styles. So why write a book? Brand, build a speaking career.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Learning and curiosity.

• 19:10Peter Diamandis?

  Learning and curiosity.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I think launching your business, you talked about speaking as a business, but you're right. Right now, ironically, of all, I've written four books.

• 19:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  None of them are on the subject that I actually make my money from. I make my money coaching executive teams.

• 19:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  And so I'm now cultivating the 20 years of work in a new book around high performing executive teams. And that book will be out next year. And it, it's going to be important for the business that I have, which I have had for years, to take that business to scale. So is there any other reasons you write a book?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  You know, like, like I said, there are, there are people who have a book in them about something meaningful.

• 19:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  In the world, right?

• 19:58Peter Diamandis?

  When abundance came to mind, it's like it was bursting from me.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:02Peter Diamandis?

  It was like I had no, I had no other choice. I had to write that book. It was like something that was new and true. And, you know, and you're sort of using Peter Thiel's, you know, what's your thesis that, uh, uh, that you think is absolutely true and no one else agrees with? When you feel that sort of, um, that feeling, getting it out in a book, uh, can be a very powerful means. So, you know, for me, I love your process and I agree with it. You know, when I start sitting down to write a book, it is outlining the argument flow in terms of the chapters in, one of the things I think is very important in books is storytelling.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:44Peter Diamandis?

  Um, I think that books that are really engaging, we as humans, you know, we receive and we communicate information in terms of stories.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:55Peter Diamandis?

  And so when you open a chapter and it is a compelling story about an individual and for, you know, it's very different than just a bunch of data.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I, I have, um, asked, I had helped my, many of my friends write their books.

• 21:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Uh, Peter Guber is a dear friend of mine. And when I remember one time sitting out on my balcony for a dinner party and Peter Guber, who mostly known these days as one of the owners of the Warriors, who really helped turn that franchise around, uh, the Dodgers helped turn that franchise around, but also a, uh, an Oscar winning, um, movie producer. Um, Peter and I were sitting and I asked him, I said, what is your great dream? What's next?

• 21:39Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And he said, you know, I have made. A legacy in my product that people will always remember, some of the movies that got Oscars. He said, but there's something underneath it that I want to leave as a real legacy, which is helping the world tell better stories. And so I helped coach him through the process of writing his book on storytelling.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And you know what's, from his perspective, it was legacy. He was writing a book for legacy.

• 22:09Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And, and he did, you know, we helped get that to be a number one New York Times bestselling book. Peter doesn't lose in anything, whether it's a pennant, you know, an Oscar or a number one New York Times bestselling.

• 22:20Peter Diamandis?

  Another reason to write a book is to tell your side of the story.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 22:23Peter Diamandis?

  Right? So Paul Allen writes The Idea Man, which is his side of the Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Microsoft founding, right? And so

• 22:33Speaker 01

  That's interesting.

• 22:34Peter Diamandis?

  I think, uh, writing a wrong or telling your side because you know, a lot of times the person who is the most vocal stories out there and a book is a way to provide a consolidated

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Approach to that.

• 22:46Peter Diamandis?

  Data-backed approach.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So, so now that we have some, hopefully what we've done at this stage is we've helped our listeners awaken to the idea that maybe they should have a book in them.

• 22:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think everybody can have a book.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:57Peter Diamandis?

  What does it take and how do you, how do you do, what kind of commitment? So I, you know, I was never a good writer in high school, uh, or in college. My love of writing actually developed later in life. And I actually love writing. I get up, I, I, I like, I'm excited when I get my, wake up before my alarm because I have extra time to write in the morning and I write almost every single morning, first thing in the morning where I'm super, super clear. Still, today. And it's either writing a blog, um, or writing and I'm, you know, I'm always working on multiple books. So right now, uh, we just published, uh, EXO2, uh, Peter's Longevity Practices is coming out next.

• 23:42Peter Diamandis?

  And then with Cheo, uh, Rose Washington, uh, who my head of research, we're going to be putting out a book, uh, which is the follow-on to Abundance. And then there's a book on mindsets after that. And so it's just, it's a, I've turned it into a day-to-day activity and I'll write for an hour. Uh, Steven Kotler once taught me that if you can write a single finished page per day.

• 24:10Peter Diamandis?

  That would put you at the most productive, you know, book writers out there.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  So that's not.

• 24:15Peter Diamandis?

  So that's not my process. What do you do?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I need designated sitting time to write my books, to write anything. So I have a writing day. So my Fridays, it took me a long time to block off my Fridays. And today is a Friday and I'm doing this for you.

• 24:34Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Um.

• 24:35Peter Diamandis?

  And also for our listeners.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Right. And for our, I'm doing this for you. Yeah, I'm doing this for you. But the, the Fridays are my writing days.

• 24:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  So my team knows that they're not allowed to block my Fridays for anything other than my writing.

• 24:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  And it's, it's the, if I can't, I gotta get into a writing groove. I can't just go grab an hour to write.

• 24:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  My head's not there. And I got, maybe, maybe I've got more monkey mind than you do, but I've got to get quiet, in the groove, focused and ready to really think and iterate. Um, that's just me. I totally love the idea of, you know, doing it uh, for an hour every day. And if that works for you, that's great.

• 25:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Um, but I, I block the time. The other thing that I think is really important.

• 25:21Peter Diamandis?

  But could I ask, you, when you were an undergrad at Harvard, you were writing then?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, I was a undergrad at Yale.

• 25:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  How dare you, right?

• 25:34Peter Diamandis?

  I'm thinking of Eric Plater, who was at Harvard.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I was Harvard Business School.

• 25:38Peter Diamandis?

  Harvard Business School, okay.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  But no, when I was, yeah, I've, it's interesting, um, maybe a little bit vulnerable, revealing. So I grew up kind of thinking I was smart until I went to Yale. And then everybody there, because I had not gone to the kind of schools that all these kids had, because I wasn't literate and I hadn't been, you know, steeped in the literature. I didn't feel smart. And as a result, it really stymied me a bit. I didn't think I was smart enough.

• 26:08Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And it took me a while to realize regain again my confidence in my intellect.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Because I was I was smart in a different way.

• 26:18Peter Diamandis?

  That's shocking to me since I've never seen any aspect other than the brilliant intellectual.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you see it, and I guess it was always there, but I. But when you've got a bunch of people, the these erudite philosophers who have read all of Kant and Nietzsche. And I didn't I hadn't done that.

• 26:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  You know, I felt I felt miniscule. So it's it set me back. But when I graduated from Yale, I got into business. And I started writing about the things I cared about. I started writing manuals in manufacturing for continuous process improvement down at the plant plant frontline. So I wrote my first book right out of Yale. Working at a manufacturing company about worker empowerment. So soon as I started getting practical, my writing started to show up.

• 27:06Peter Diamandis?

  And you enjoyed it?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I loved it. I loved it. And that's when I knew I had a book in me and I knew that my intellect wasn't this erudite. Stuff. It was very practical in nature and I wanted to crack the code of continuous process engineering of changing the way the world works. That's always been my core.

• 27:23Peter Diamandis?

  So here's the question of the times, of course, is the use of chat GPT in writing. Right, so.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  It's not cheating. I think it's ridiculous.

• 27:33Peter Diamandis?

  No, I'm not calling it cheating.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  No, but I mean, a lot of people have been saying that. I just don't get it.

• 27:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think, listen, if you say to chat GPT, write me a book on this topic and it spits out, you know. A you, you probably can get it to write you an outline and then say, please flesh out chapter one for me and then flesh it out again. And you can probably get a book written.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And what's wrong with that?

• 27:55Peter Diamandis?

  Well, a question is, is it your thoughts? Versus the consumed thoughts of the internet.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  But what's but what's wrong with that? If if the intention is to be of service to a community. You know, you and I had played the other day with some really interesting prompting theories. Prompting is a clever thing to do.

• 28:19Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And if you get really clever at sequentially asking better and better prompts, which get chat GPT to write a better and better book or a better and better whatever. And look, maybe your point is, and you should say co-authored by chat GPT.

• 28:37Peter Diamandis?

  I think at a minimum, you should disclose that.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I have no problem with that.

• 28:41Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, for me right now, and I've seen, I've seen long form content generated by chat GPT and it was missing.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  But that's another thing, which is if you create a book with chat GPT.

• 28:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And it gets out there, you have to suffer the consequences of a mediocre piece that hasn't been fully fleshed out with your own ideas, right?

• 29:03Peter Diamandis?

  But at the same time, one of the challenges people have is staring at a blank page.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Which is a great way to start.

• 29:09Peter Diamandis?

  And I find chat GPT as a mechanism to say, okay, you know, give me ideas. You know what you're going to write about in this chapter conceptually. And you know, if you can outline like you did, here's the key points I want to make. Can you provide some content on top of it? It can break a logjam and give you an ability to get started.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  I want to take you and the and the and the viewers into a very terrified moment I had less than a few months ago, where I hadn't been fully immersed in the prompting within chat GPT. I knew it was there, hadn't had time to really play with it. And here I was right in the middle of my my major book, my tone, my legacy of high performing teams. This is going to be the most important book that I've written, perhaps aside from Nevermind Alone.

• 29:59Peter Diamandis?

  Thus far.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Thus far. I'll get many, many more.

• 30:02Peter Diamandis?

  You do.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And we'll talk about the pivots, but. I got scared shitless. Because I sat there and I thought. Wait a second. I didn't ask ChatGPT. What it has to think about this book that I have now structured and formalized and ready to ship. What if ChatGPT could make it fundamentally better?

• 30:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I'm I'm feeling castrated. By the fact that I didn't co author it with ChatGPT.

• 30:29Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  And it scared the shit out of me. Because I thought, damn, I've done it just I I've done it injustice to the world. Publishing my tome without the universe of all writing. In it as with my partner ChatGPT.

• 30:42Peter Diamandis?

  Fascinating.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  And and so I actually I I put a pause in the book.

• 30:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I said, we're not publishing the book. We're going through a rewriting process. That will think about, you know, remember I was and and here's something I did the other day. I just said. Yeah, I've always again, I'm I'm all about high performing teams. I always thought, well, what would it be if I had actually read all the great works of philosophy, not philosophy, but of psychology? Freud's great works, etc. So I started asking ChatGPT, what does Freud have to say about high performing executive teams?

• 31:16Peter Diamandis?

  And?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  And it gave me some very interesting stuff. And I said, what does Young have to think about? High performing executive teams and I asked more questions and more questions. And it made me realize there is a body of knowledge. That I can give to my readers.

• 31:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  That was not there before.

• 31:31Peter Diamandis?

  The way I think about it is. As a writer. As an entrepreneur, as an executive, you only know how to think the way you know how to think.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:42Peter Diamandis?

  And having ChatGPT in the conversation. Uh, can give you massively different perspectives and especially if you're proppant properly and saying. You know, take on the mantle of Freud. Uh, I'm an author trying to write about this.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:55Peter Diamandis?

  How would Freud look at it? And then the ability to prompt it and say, make it more compelling, make it more data driven, make it more whatever.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I had played with this idea by talking to a bunch of shrinks over the last five years about their perspective on executive teams. Barely.

• 32:11Peter Diamandis?

  Barely.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And in three hours.

• 32:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  I got this deluge. And then I started doing the same thing. Like, I chased after the, the woman who was the coach for the women's soccer team that won the Nationals. I got to sit with Coach K, asking him questions. So now, then I did a whole separate thing about, you know, successful, uh, sports teams coaches. Right? So all of this, again, is, is powerful. Now, the, the question you were asking is, um, ChatGPT and book writing. I, I think they're, they're going to be massively integrated.

• 32:44Peter Diamandis?

  So the question, so listen, at the end of the day, if there are, you know, ten X or a hundred X more books going out into the market. Because it's easier, right? Because an individual can now use AI to write their book. The question becomes what distinguishes your book? Um, and is, is the future of, is the future of books going to be this, you know, hardcover or softcover or digital?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Um, aren't those, aren't those two different questions, right?

• 33:14Peter Diamandis?

  They are, they are.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Because I think at the core, how you differentiate your book from other books, obviously, the quality is going to be important. Both Abundance and Never Read Alone were extraordinary books. And they had viral appeal such that when somebody read them, they wanted to pass them along.

• 33:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the number of times I've heard, and I'm sure you have, I bought a hundred copies and gave it out to all my teams.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  All I've been doing is getting your book out, and I've been doing it for twenty years.

• 33:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So there's that. You gotta write a great book. And we know that ChatGPT will write a mediocre book. You've got to write a, a, a great book. But then the next question is, the, the, the brand. Peter Diamandis has how many followers? Keith has how many followers? As a result, our books get seeded into the world in a different way.

• 33:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So if you really want your book to differentiate, then you need to build a media company. And you and I were talking about this the other day. You know, you need to build a media company around who you are. Now, your media, if you want your book to inspire your employees, which is perfectly fine.

• 34:15Peter Diamandis?

  And a great purpose for a book.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  And a great purpose for a book, then you probably don't need a media company.

• 34:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  If you want your book to have ripple effects around the world and change a state of the universe, then you probably need a media company associated with it.

• 34:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, I'm super passionate about longevity and health span. And how do you add 10, 20 healthy years on to your life? One of the most underappreciated elements is the quality of your sleep. And there's something that changed the quality of my sleep. And this episode is brought to you by that product. It's called Eight Sleep. If you're like me, you probably didn't know that temperature plays a crucial role in the quality of your sleep. Those mornings when you wake up feeling like you barely slept? Yeah, temperature is often the culprit. Traditional mattresses trap heat. But your body needs to cool down during sleep and stay cool through the evening and then heat up in the morning. Enter the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep.

• 35:12Peter Diamandis?

  It's the perfect solution to the problem. It fits on any bed, adjusts the temperature on each side of the bed based upon your individual needs. You know, I've been using Pod Cover and it's a game changer. I'm a big believer in using technology to improve life. And Eight Sleep has done that for me. And it's not just about temperature control. With the Pod's sleep and health tracking, I get personalized sleep reports every morning. It's like having a personal sleep coach. So you know when you eat or drink or go to sleep too late, how it impacts your sleep. So why not experience sleep like never before? Visit www.eightsleep.com. That's E-I-G-H-T-S-L-E-E-P.com/moonshots.

• 35:56Peter Diamandis?

  And you'll save 150 bucks on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. I hope you do it. It's transformed my sleep and will for you as well. Now, back to the episode. Let's dive into a few of the other fun subjects. We talked about writing process. I'm every day, you're on Fridays. I used to, one of the things I loved in writing with Steven Kotler is the back and forth, right? I would write a chapter and he would write a chapter. We'd exchange them and edit them. And then the thing I found really powerful was we'd get on, back then it was Skype we would get on with every morning. And we'd read the chapter out loud. And reading the chapter out loud really is for me

• 36:40Peter Diamandis?

  the way to take a chapter to finish. Cause it's got to sound compelling and not boring to you. And when you read it, it's very different when you, when you speak it. So, so I think we have, again, we have a very different way. Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  You seem to write from the beginning with an expectation that what you're writing is somewhere in the direction of final. I do not.

• 37:03Peter Diamandis?

  You explore.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  I write in a radically agile process. So I expect my chapters to be rewritten twenty times, significantly rewritten twenty times. So first thing, as I said, I did is, remember, so think about how I'm writing books. I'm writing ten sentences to ten paragraphs, right? And I'm iterative, iterative, and every one of those is a turn. Once you get to a chapter and you've got the first paragraph, now it's, for me, it's throw up on the page, anything you would want free form, free form writing, anything you'd want to think about in this. Then what I do, because I'm not expected to be the expert in writing, where you, it's the difference between you and me, you went out and said, teach me how to write. I went

• 37:49Speaker 01

  out and I said, Tal, write this, right? So I did, I abdicated the need to be the writer. I have a writing partner. So my job was to throw the stuff on the page that I think was important, and then recognize that my writing partner knew how to read that and restructure it. So that's the way I do it. And I think that's what Tony Robbins does too. You're saying he speaks to it, he's in the right.

• 38:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, when Tony and I wrote Life Force, it was an unusual process to say the least. And we had like five or six authors on the book, right? And it was, I wrote my own chapters and rewriting, but Tony works with a team of writers that will shape what he says and put into content. Let's talk about how you go from your idea to getting a publisher and a publishing deal. So did you have a literary agent when you went out with your books?

• 38:49Speaker 01

  I have. I've had three literary agents over my four book trajectory.

• 38:57Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  And my first one was exceptional. One of the things that I look for in an agent is somebody who cares about the content.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  And my agent, my agent number one and my agent number three have all been richly interested in the content and hands in the content.

• 39:19Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  In fact, my first agent sat with Tal and I uh for many days in his office in New York and helped combat and structure.

• 39:29Peter Diamandis?

  You remember their name?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  I don't remember my first agent. I don't think he's in the business any longer.

• 39:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  But I do remember the other ones.

• 39:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I had John Brockman as my agent.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  John's great.

• 39:39Peter Diamandis?

  John's amazing. Um, his son Max Brockman has taken over Brockman Inc. at this point.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Peter Diamandis?

  And I met him at TED and he approached me one day. He says, when you're ready for your book, contact me.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:50Peter Diamandis?

  And then I did on Abundance. It's interesting, right? So uh, an agent will typically take a fixed percentage of the deal. And so they're motivated and that percentage can be like ten, fifteen percent.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Oh, higher, I think.

• 40:03Peter Diamandis?

  Twenty percent?

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Twenty, twenty-five.

• 40:05Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Um, and they're motivated to get the maximum advance from a publisher. Now, interestingly, for a fiction book, if you're.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Can I?

• 40:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, please.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Let me debate that. So my agent now, so my three agents, the first agent was a small, single shingle guy.

• 40:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  And um, and he really got in and every loan wouldn't be successful without him.

• 40:27Peter Diamandis?

  Got it.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Um, we ended up not needing an agent because we went with the first person who helped us bird the book, somebody who just read the article and said, you should write a book. Then we went and got an agent, we shopped it around, but we came back to the person who discovered me, so to speak.

• 40:42Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Then what I decided to do is I wanted a named agent after that. I thought I'm a big shot now. So I went to William Morris Agency, which is now William Morris Endeavor.

• 40:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  And I got one of these big named agents. And I remember um, Ari Emanuel calling me when we hit number one New York Times bestseller. I'd never, I didn't know who he was. I didn't know his, I'm not an entertainment guy. He's like, who's got your back, baby? I'm like, who is this? He's like, Google me, motherfucker. What do you mean, who is this?

• 41:08Peter Diamandis?

  He literally said that. I, I know Ari and it's like my experience of Ari is being in his office, having a conversation and him having a conversation on two different phones at the same time. I'll call you right back. And I just like.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  For those who don't know Ari Emanuel, he's the guy who was the Ari in the series Entourage.

• 41:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, but, but what I found out about that whole thing, interestingly enough, was that person, that person didn't care about my book.

• 41:34Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  That person was

• 41:35Peter Diamandis?

  It was all about maximizing

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Maximizing the income for the book. And, and, and frankly, because I was a business book and business hadn't gotten cool and there was no Netflix, et cetera. There was no tail. There was no movie for Never Get Alone, you know, that, that sort of thing. So, I think today, by the way, there could be. I think there's a, there's a genre now emerging. Like you see Brené Brown has her TV series and that kind of stuff. But anyway, but today, Esmond Harmsworth, he is a gem. He works in the detail of the content with us. He, and, and what I was going to say is, he, in my last book, he agreed, we went with Harvard Business School as a publisher. And this is important. Most publishers don't matter. Harvard Business School does.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Harvard Business School has a category around the world that if your book is published on Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School, people know that it has had peer review. It's had some degree of academic pressure to it. And as a result, there are, there are business people in China and Vietnam who will go to their catalog and use their book. And as a result, speaking engagements go up on an international basis because you've got a Harvard Business School book. So I just wanted to put that out there. Um, Esmond took probably a quarter of a million dollars less on that book because he knew long-term, it was better for me to have a Harvard Business School book.

• 43:02Peter Diamandis?

  As compared to if Simon and Schuster or, right? So a few, a few data points here. So a literary agent is not necessary. But if, if you've got a great literary agent, they will maximize your income potential by, and so what, what John Brockman would do is he would have an auction. So their proposal, I was amazed. So if you're writing a fiction book, you typically have to write the entire book and turn in a complete manuscript on a fiction book. On a non-fiction book,

• 43:34Speaker 01

  You write a book proposal.

• 43:35Peter Diamandis?

  You write a book proposal. And a book proposal is typically an outline of, you know, each of the chapters, what it's going to mean and, and how you're going to market it. And it may or may not include a chapter.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  It should include two chapters. Well, these days you don't, but Abundance did.

• 43:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, with, no, Abundance did not.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Did not.

• 43:51Peter Diamandis?

  Did not. Brockman did not want a chapter.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 43:54Peter Diamandis?

  He, and, and so he went out to bid. And Simon and Sister won the bid for $240,000, which was like, wow, it was like amazing amount of money for me back then. And, um, and by the way, when people hear about your advance, just to be clear, that number 240,000 is split over three payments. Right? So you get a third upfront before you start writing, a third when you deliver the manuscript, and a third when the soft cover comes out. So it's not all upfront. That was my deal.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all different. I mean, it, most of the time, it's a third, a third, a third, and the third, third has something to do with the success of the book. Um, or some delivery of some aspect of the book. But let me go back. I think what's important for our, um, listeners is number one.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  If you, if you want your book to be a big success out in the world, having an agent is one path. And we'll talk about another path, which is self-publishing.

• 44:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  But having an agent is one path. What, and, but please make sure that you find an agent that you love and they love you and they love your ideas.

• 44:59Peter Diamandis?

  They love what you're talking about.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  And they want, they get their hands dirty. That's my big recommendation. The next piece then is what is a book proposal? You should write a book proposal, which is you write the introduction, which is telling somebody what the book's all about. And again, in a sense, that's the first chapter. Um, you write about the book. And then you write a structured outline of the book with, you know, half a page per. Now that's one version of it and, and I've often been told that you need one or two full chapters. Because they don't know if you're a good writer. They don't know if.

• 45:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, maybe in my case.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  You had Steve.

• 45:33Peter Diamandis?

  Steven Kotler was a, a known writer.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:35Peter Diamandis?

  And I was a known marketer, promoter, entrepreneur.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  They just want to see that you could structure a chapter that's pretty good. And so they want to see it on paper. And that's what you're selling. What a lot of people think they have to do is they have to go out and, and write a book and then sell a book. Only in fiction do you do that.

• 45:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  In this case, uh, fiction or a biography. I suspect a biography, you might want to write the book. But in the case of a, a book proposal, so that's your next step is write your book proposal. And your edit, your agent will bust their ass to make sure it's a good proposal. My agent has rewritten my book proposals. So me and my co-writer.

• 46:11Peter Diamandis?

  Which is how they earn their money.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  That's how they earn their money. That's, and then what they have that you don't is they have the network of the 10 people that they're going to go pitch your book to.

• 46:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  You do not know the 10 publishers that would buy your book tomorrow. They do. And so that's the idea that they're out pitching your book to people that they know who they are.

• 46:31Peter Diamandis?

  So you're going to sell a book with certain rights. And one of the things to think about is there's audible rights, there's the, you know, the spoken book. And there's international rights. And when you sell, when you sell your book to a publisher, they may say, we want US rights only. We want global rights.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Usually try to get it all.

• 46:52Peter Diamandis?

  They do. And I've, and both ways sold it just US rights and then had bids for rights around the world. Uh, in translations, right? Uh, so like.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  And again, this is where your agent coaches you.

• 47:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And the agents incentivize to maximize your, your income. Uh, it was always fun to get like, oh, here's another language of like, you know, abundance and like, yeah, exactly. And all these languages. Um, so you write the proposal, you submit it. Um, again, you know, whether you're going with a known publisher or a, a press or Amazon entered the business and disrupted the business in some interesting ways. They're now buying.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  So Lea, let's talk about that. So the publisher piece is first, you, I'm sorry, agent. And going direct to a normal publisher that's there.

• 47:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Why do you want to do that? Well, you want to do that if you think you can get an advance, which allows you to pay for your writing partner, which allows you to pay for your marketing.

• 47:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Right? And you also want to do it similar to why you, some, I, some entrepreneurs want to bring investors. You want accountability. You want to have a third party giving you some pressure. You know, they've invested in your book, so they're going to be expecting shit back from you. And you also might want to do it because there's a group of people coaching you, just like an, like if you bring in an investor, your investors are now your coaches because they put money in you and they're going to tell you, you know, what they expect from you. So there's a lot of reasons to do still traditional publishing, but every. Author knows that it's a very challenging and vacuous process in many ways. The publisher does not do much for you.

• 48:32Peter Diamandis?

  Can we put a giant exclamation point on this?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Peter Diamandis?

  At you think the publisher is going to promote the book and you know, create press and really drive sales. And in the final result, they don't.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  They they do their best.

• 48:47Peter Diamandis?

  They they do, but they have a thousand books.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  A thousand books, etc. So you you are going to drive your.

• 48:53Peter Diamandis?

  Success.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  People love Farazi is because when I came out with Never Eat With Who's Got Your Back.

• 48:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Reason it was number one New York Times bestseller was I had a successful book. They gave, you know, two hundred forty thousand. I think they gave they gave me close to a million for my second book because off the back of the first one. They're expecting this, you know, this go go to the next level. Um, and they give you a year to do it.

• 49:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Right. The first book, how long did it take? Well, my first book took me thirty five years to write because.

• 49:22Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  It was it was the book about my life.

• 49:24Peter Diamandis?

  It it took abundance took about eighteen months to write. Uh, the futures, uh, bull took about a year and futures faster about a year. But it's interesting, once you turn in your book.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Then it's a year.

• 49:36Peter Diamandis?

  It's another year.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Problem with going with a traditional publisher.

• 49:39Peter Diamandis?

  So I mean, don't think you're going to get it published the next month.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  That's the big problem. If you like, I'm worried about my team's book. Because for the sake of my business and where I'm going right now with scaling my business. I want my team's book in the market now.

• 49:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  And I know that the team's book is going to take, once I'm done with it, it's going to take another fucking year.

• 49:58Peter Diamandis?

  If you go with a publisher versus self publish, right? Which is the next side of the equation.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Self publishing.

• 50:04Peter Diamandis?

  So.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  But you know more about than I do.

• 50:06Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So just to be clear, uh, uh, I went with Simon and Sister for the first four books. Uh, the fourth one was Life Force with Tony. We got a multimillion dollar dance was huge. And I didn't pocket a dime of it, either did Tony. That money was spent on writers. It was spent on promoting the book significantly. And we donated millions of dollars to health and longevity research. So it was great. I loved it.

• 50:37Peter Diamandis?

  The book we I just published with Saleem, Exponential Organizations 2.0, we decided to self-publish. And

• 50:46Speaker 01

  How was the process?

• 50:47Peter Diamandis?

  The technology is a lot better. So there's a gentleman of Cary Oberbruner, who runs a company called Igniting Souls. And he is a complete turnkey self-publication. So he has writers, promoters, translators, everything on staff. And it's just a lot faster. And so

• 51:11Speaker 01

  And does he, does he get distribution in independents and bookstores as well as on Amazon?

• 51:19Peter Diamandis?

  He does, to some degree.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Not as much as a publisher would.

• 51:24Peter Diamandis?

  And also, he does have international outreach and so forth.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Probably not as much as a publisher would.

• 51:31Peter Diamandis?

  But at the end of the day, it is a fixed price with him. And all revenues from the book come to the authors.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. So that's the difference.

• 51:42Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, when you get in advance, when you get in advance a quarter million dollars or a million dollars.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  You gotta earn that up. So let's explain that math.

• 51:49Peter Diamandis?

  Sell a million dollars of profits.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Which almost no books do.

• 51:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Very few books.

• 51:54Peter Diamandis?

  Earn their advance.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Earn their advance. Did, did Abundance?

• 51:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Abundance, all the books have so far.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so did, so did mine. The, but that's a big deal.

• 52:04Peter Diamandis?

  And then

• 52:04Speaker 01

  You don't have to give the advance back. That's important to know. It's like you get a quarter of a million, you're pocketing that, and that's the bet that the publisher has made on you. And if you don't sell a quarter of a million, when you say you don't sell a quarter of a million dollars for the books, you're getting fifteen, twenty percent of a book?

• 52:23Peter Diamandis?

  At most.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  I forget the math, right?

• 52:25Peter Diamandis?

  When a book sells for twenty dollars.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Five bucks, yeah, whatever.

• 52:28Peter Diamandis?

  Twenty dollars, right?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  You get a nickel. Twenty-five cents, something ridiculously small.

• 52:32Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Right? And that's what gets credited to your advance.

• 52:36Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  The piece, the piece that you got, not, not the twenty, not the twenty-five bucks, but the piece that you got.

• 52:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Gets credited to your advance. You have to sell exponentially that many books.

• 52:45Peter Diamandis?

  So sell a quarter, quarter million books to earn back the quarter million dollars of advance, right?

• 52:50Speaker 01

  It's crazy. And so, um, the The the challenge, I think, you know, so the math on that is a little bit weird. And then you get you get spiffs for international publication, but you don't get advances on it. You don't get royalties on those. Like if you if every time your book gets published in Vietnam, you get 5,000 bucks.

• 53:09Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  It's a one time thing.

• 53:11Peter Diamandis?

  A they buy the rights.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  They buy the rights and they buy them outright and that goes to you um as cash in your account somehow.

• 53:19Peter Diamandis?

  But that's what you see.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  That's all you see. You don't get the tail.

• 53:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Now, and and most books don't have tail.

• 53:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  You know, most books don't have tail. Um, the the self publishing is very interesting because to your point, you're paying a one time fee of X tens of thousands of dollars to this person.

• 53:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  And every bit of the book that you sell, you set the price 20 K, 20, 20 bucks, 25 bucks. That's all coming to you.

• 53:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'll tell you the thing I love most isn't that.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's the speed.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get this.

• 53:48Peter Diamandis?

  And when I'm writing about exponential technologies and entrepreneurs, I can't publish this thing. It's a year out of date is like ridiculous.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  That's, look, you and I both take our full advance and we pour it back into marketing and then some.

• 54:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Right? You and I pour it back into writing partners, research, and then some. But there are some people that are watching this that could think of this as an income stream.

• 54:09Peter Diamandis?

  It can.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And and and if you do self publishing, you could probably do a better business that way, particularly if you've built your media company. And that's the point, which is if you go self publishing, you're getting nothing from the publisher. So we we we we don't give the publishers too much credit for doing a ton, but they do some. Now it's all on you, right? It's all on you if you self publish.

• 54:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  You have an extraordinary book list. You have an extraordinary presence. You snap your fingers and your team lines up 20 of the most important podcasts that you're going to go hawk your book on. And as a result, it sells. I just want to make sure that we're balancing for folks who are watching who don't have a media business.

• 54:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the books don't sell themselves. You have to sell them.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  To sell every book.

• 54:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it becomes it's packaged now.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Which I want to talk about putting your marketing plan together for your book. I I have a a good old school from back in the, you know, in the in the time when I published a book, a binder with tabs. And here's a tab on podcasting. Here's a tab on, um,

• 55:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  You know, etc.

• 55:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Right. Doing your book, we could probably do an entire podcast just on the book marketing.

• 55:23Peter Diamandis?

  Absolutely.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  That's an entire thing.

• 55:25Peter Diamandis?

  And, and it's critically important. I'm going to hit a couple of other things here. Uh, the title and the cover.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 55:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  So important.

• 55:34Peter Diamandis?

  It is. And battles and battles and battles.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I, I literally, the only time I lost my cool in Never Eat Alone was, um, was over the cover of Never Eat Alone. Um, funny story. So Never Eat Alone comes out, the book's done. So here's the thing. Make sure that you write in your, um, in your contract.

• 55:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, you have control.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  You have control.

• 55:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Cause most of the time you do not. There's a lot of times in the book contract, the publisher owns the control.

• 56:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  I didn't realize international covers are

• 56:08Peter Diamandis?

  Different.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Are different and they're controlled by the local. They're not going to, there, there are publishing, there are titles, there are book covers out there that look like crap and I have nothing I can do about it. The English book title for Never Eat Alone, I hate.

• 56:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Um, so the book cover was a guy's hand with a business card on, on top of a white plate as if like I'm handing you a business card at lunch. Now, you laugh because you know that that couldn't be further from who I am and what I wanted. Like, I looked at that and I

• 56:41Peter Diamandis?

  It should have been a credit card.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  I flipped the fuck out. I was like, are you kidding me? That is transactional networking smarmy bullshit. I'm all about authentic generous relationships that are life-changing for both parties. And I said, bullshit. And so I, I puffed and puffed and said, no, and said, no, and said, no. And the publisher got so pissed at me that they said, well, fuck you. This is supposed to be out tomorrow. I'm like, I said, I'm not going to promote it because I, I didn't have any rights.

• 57:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I didn't have any rights. They could do it if I, and I said, fine, then I'm not going to promote it. I said, you want to fucking have rights over my book cover? I'm not promoting it. Fuck you. And so they said, well, fuck you. Here's your book cover. Some guy had gone in the back of the room and just taken an ugly orange color and wrote, never eat alone on it. And they said, fuck you here. And I'm like, good. It's done. It's better than that other thing. And so that ended up being the cover.

• 57:37Peter Diamandis?

  That's hilarious. So I, I, I basically, um, I fight over or spend countless hours on the book title. And then on the imagery on it, because it's like, it's like when it's, you know, the movie poster is the same example, right? You've got like one image and like one statement to capture people's attention. Um, and it's important. One of the things I would do is do A B testing by Google Ads of different book names and covers and see what people would, would click on.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  But to your point, the reason we both care goes back to the very beginning of our talk. It's your brand.

• 58:18Peter Diamandis?

  It's, yes.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  It's who you are. It's how you represent yourself in the world.

• 58:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. If it really is a book that is meant to represent you, every aspect has to represent you. You know, let's talk about a little about the marketing. So the, uh, to get to a New York Times bestseller list. I'm going to give some numbers here that my team researched. So right now, uh, to get onto the New York Times bestseller list, not to get to number one, uh, is you have to sell between 5,000 and 10,000 books in your first week. That's the current rough number.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  I would be surprised that that's enough.

• 58:56Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, but it's on, just on the list, right? And so there's many lists. There's, uh, uh, fiction lists. Uh, there is, uh, nonfiction lists. There's children lists, there's monthly lists. And by the way, when people say I've got a bestselling book, there's a thousand lists out there. We're in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, all of that stuff.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  It's funny, I, I was looking at, uh, somebody's bio the other day. I, I had set up a call with somebody, um, and I was looking at their bio and it said bestseller, you know? And, and when I finally got underneath it, it literally was nothing. It was they. One day on Amazon, they had hit the top 10 of their category.

• 59:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  Which might six degrees lower.

• 59:40Peter Diamandis?

  You could be in a subcategory of atomic physics.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:43Peter Diamandis?

  Part of physics.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  And you were number three on atomic physics within. And that, that, so I think what's important is we spend a lot of time and have, both of us have spent a lot of time sweating.

• 59:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  This idea of our bestseller lists.

• 59:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And I would argue.

• 1:00:00Peter Diamandis?

  It's very ego driven.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:02Peter Diamandis?

  And the question is, does it matter? I mean, at the end of the day, one of the realizations I had a while ago was I'm never going to put on the book, number two New York Times bestseller, right? You're either on the bestseller list or you're number one.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  But you even just said it right now. You didn't even say New York Times. You just said bestseller list.

• 1:00:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  So for the, I really think the answer is if you don't hit number one, none of it matters.

• 1:00:26Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Because you will always be able to say bestseller with some moderate degree of integrity, because you're not putting a predecessor, you're not saying Wall Street Journal bestseller, or Joe's blog bestseller, right? You, you could probably say that you're a bestselling author, no matter what.

• 1:00:44Peter Diamandis?

  In some subcategory.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  Some subcategory with some degree of integrity. And if you're not number one, then you probably doesn't matter. And then just look at the amount, look at the net present value of the energy.

• 1:00:58Peter Diamandis?

  Oh.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  That you and I put into being number one.

• 1:01:00Peter Diamandis?

  Crazy. And the favors you call it.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  And the money and the favors, et cetera. I just don't know that it's worth it.

• 1:01:05Peter Diamandis?

  For those who.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And the likelihood is like nothing.

• 1:01:08Peter Diamandis?

  But for those who want to go for the gold ring, let me hit a, let me hit a few data points and please add to them. So if you want to hit number one, the number of pre-sales are probably in the 50 to 100,000. In the first week. To get somewhere on the list, the number is five to 10,000. You might be number 10 on the list, you might be on a secondary New York. This is the New York Times, which is for some reason, the list everyone cares about.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Well, let me also suggest that I have seen people get those numbers that you're talking about and not make the list. And the reason they don't is because the New York Times finally has an arbitrary ability to say, I don't trust your numbers. I think that you don't have the pedigree. I mean, there is no open algorithm there.

• 1:01:54Peter Diamandis?

  Let's repeat that. It's editorial. It's not, it's subjective. It's not objective. You can hit those numbers and not get in the list. And one of the things they also do, it's there's, if you look at the list and you see a double dagger next to a book, it is, if you look at what that means, it means that this book reached the number of sales, but it was in a fashion that doesn't represent public interest. It was some individual got tens of thousands pre-sold to their friends, which is what you do to get on the list.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I think, I think where, by the way, I want to hear more about this double dagger.

• 1:02:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Um, where I think it is unethical, and I've seen, I've heard of people doing it. I've never, I don't know anybody directly who's done it, but people who are rich and buy 50,000 books and they send them to their warehouse.

• 1:02:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  And now they'll recognize that the way, there's a very intricate process, which is probably inside baseball, but if you go on the Amazon and you buy five books.

• 1:03:01Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  It counts as one.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So, Amazon reports a transaction of a book purchase.

• 1:03:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  And so what was happening for a period of time is there were agencies that were created.

• 1:03:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember them. I hired one.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15Peter Diamandis?

  And it would be, um, you're, like, I had friends of mine who had companies that wanted to support. And they would buy 100 books or 500 books and the agency would take the money.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:28Peter Diamandis?

  Would buy the books individually.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  And ship.

• 1:03:31Peter Diamandis?

  And then ship them to the employees of the company.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Which, you know, from that, actually, I actually don't mind that.

• 1:03:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Because that feels a degree of integrity. There are a hundred people getting your book. Right? Now, they didn't individually buy it, their boss bought it, but they're getting your book. I'm talking about people would buy fifty thousand books. Go to that agency and have it shipped fifty thousand times to people who never got the book. Right? So that's, I consider low integrity and there were some people that got caught doing that and some articles written about them.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

  The, the challenge is that the only way you get to tens of thousands of sales in the first week. Is if you're, you know, President Clinton, or if you are a famous actor and it's on the shelf. And people know you and they want that inside story.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  I, what I was about to share. Yeah, what I was about to share. Again, this was back in an era.

• 1:04:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  When what I cared about was the list. Right? So when I was trying to make the list, I went out and found a partner. Uh, back in the day, you remember University of Phoenix?

• 1:04:38Peter Diamandis?

  I do.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Um, I was doing some consulting. Yeah, sure. I was doing some, some work with University of Phoenix.

• 1:04:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  And, um, they really believed in the book, Who's Got Your Back? Because I was helping them design peer-to-peer coaching groups, young kids that at the university. Would be in small peer-to-peer coaching groups as a part of the learning experience. And alumni that would be in peer-to-peer coaching groups and some part of their career development. And so when Who's Got Your Back came out, they're like, that's an amazing book. We should get it for all of our students. And let's go on a book tour around the country.

• 1:05:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  And so I ended up raising two million dollars with University of Phoenix. To just support my book launch.

• 1:05:20Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Right? And it, and it got number one New York Times bestseller.

• 1:05:23Peter Diamandis?

  It's, it's, you know, non-traditional marketing and thinking.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Peter Diamandis?

  Um, that's, that's fascinating. So, yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  So that, that's the point, which is book marketing isn't just your advance. It's not just your own money. It's partnerships. Working with partnerships with outside organizations.

• 1:05:41Peter Diamandis?

  What I did on Bold, um, to drive it again to number two, and both for Abundance and Bold, it was some. Uh, sequel to a fiction book, you know, sort of like, I think it was Fifty Shades of Grey, was like hitting number one.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought you were like Bold was like Fifty Shades of Grey. I'm like, I gotta go back and reread that. I don't remember that in a book.

• 1:06:04Peter Diamandis?

  It was like the follow on to Fifty Shades of Grey that was number one. It was like, no way I was gonna beat it. I mean, I don't care how many I sold. Um, but what I did with Bold was I did something unique, um, and interesting. Uh, I went out to my community and I had built a community through Singularity University and through X Prize. And I said, I'm gonna create a program, uh, it was, it was called the Vanguard Program. And I said, I'm looking for 200 members of my community, uh, who are going to, uh, go out and, and sell a hundred copies of the book.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, that's great.

• 1:06:39Peter Diamandis?

  If you do that.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  I think Gary Vaynerchuk did something that like that recently. It was a big deal.

• 1:06:44Peter Diamandis?

  If you do that, I will give you an invitation to come and join me and Ray Kurzweil for a day to talk about exponential technologies at Singularity University, either by, you know, by remote viewing or in person. And, uh, it worked great. And so I had a small army

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Peter Diamandis?

  of people who cared deeply about exponential tech and entrepreneurship, who went into this. That was a, a interesting thing to do.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to pause on that because I feel like that philosophy, which is, I think if you are really gonna go big on a book, you need to think of yourself as a movement leader.

• 1:07:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  And, and if you think of yourself, um, as, again, this is the difference between you doing it all yourself and a movement leader. Movement leaders realize, there they go, I must follow them, or I am their leader. That was the Gandhi phrase, right? You need to marshal volunteers.

• 1:07:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  And as a movement leader, I start to marshal volunteers in the writing process. I go out to people who care about what I care about because they've been following me. And I ask for case studies, examples. I ask for volunteers, for people who are curious about a topic that they would go spend a month doing research on the side for and deliver it to me.

• 1:08:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  So I get people involved.

• 1:08:03Peter Diamandis?

  That's what happened in EXO 2.0. Salim had built OpenEXO as a large community of thousands of entrepreneurs. And they contributed ideas, they reviewed chapters, and then they were there to promote the book. And we did, the day we launched the book, we did a five-hour free global webinar, right? Teaching everything that was in the book and then offered the book at 99 cents on Amazon for the digital copy for two weeks, really for those individuals.

• 1:08:37Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it really is about getting creative these days. And you have to care about the book content because you're going to spend a lot of energy. It's not a financial transaction. It's something that represents your heart and your soul.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Let's talk a little bit about a lifetime of book writing. You and I have done that now. You know, we both started and we keep going.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  I have a, you seem to have these short agile sprints of writing book. A book might take you a year or two to be done. I have a long tail perspective. I've been writing one book now for 10 years. And

• 1:09:14Peter Diamandis?

  Need some help?

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  I have had help. I've had lots of help, but it's a very, it's a pivotal book for me. And I'm not worried about publishing it right away because to me, it's about the learning. And I keep rewriting it and I keep reworking it. And I'm not ready to let it go into the world yet, but it's a beautiful, ongoing learning path that I've had with two writing partners. Yeah. And so I just want people to think a little differently about it. And the other thing I want you to think about is the pivots. So when I was, when I wrote Never Eat Alone, it was serendipitous. Here's, there was an article about how you had your career be so successful. Would you write a book about how other people can be successful?

• 1:09:58Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Never Eat Alone, about networking relationships. Great. But that's not what I wanted my brand to be. Right? All of a sudden, I had this amazing success of a brand around networking that I was, um, I was actually pushing away from. Because in my head, you know, my friends were Peter Diamandis, who was a thoughtful scientist, changing the world. My friends were my CEO friends, who were changing major corporations. I didn't want to be the networking guy.

• 1:10:30Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  And, and so I never captured the momentum of Never Eat Alone.

• 1:10:37Peter Diamandis?

  I feel, I feel that. You, you had a trajectory that if you held on to that.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Could have been game changing.

• 1:10:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's well.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  In different ways. I mean, I would have, it would have been different. I mean, this was back at a day pre-Tim Ferriss.

• 1:10:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 01

  This was a day.

• 1:10:50Peter Diamandis?

  You could have, you could have been the ultimate podcaster from, from day one.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  All of those things. I chose not to.

• 1:10:55Peter Diamandis?

  I had to let go of space, which I had spent 20, 25 years developing all the relationships, building companies there.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Peter Diamandis?

  When I switched over to exponential tech and, and, and sort of abundance thinking. And it's really about constantly reinventing yourself.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:11:11Peter Diamandis?

  Right? Which is a fun thing to do.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's what I've done with my books.

• 1:11:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  So if you look at my books, they've, and it's interesting because I may now come back around to that self-help space. It's a space that I abandoned at a time when my sense of self and ego and other things, didn't want to be all in. I didn't want that to be my brand. I wanted to be respected by presidents and, and CEOs and thought leaders.

• 1:11:39Peter Diamandis?

  And you are.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  And ironically, I am, and they still respect me for the networking thing.

• 1:11:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I've helped presidents build their networks during campaigns. And it's ironic that people want to keep pulling me back into that core and, uh, and, and I had fought it for a while.

• 1:11:56Peter Diamandis?

  Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network, I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog.

• 1:12:35Peter Diamandis?

  One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandis.com/blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So you're going to get to a point, your book is published, you get the galleys, you're going to go out there and look for book blurbs. Right? So what's a book blurb? A book blurb is getting

• 1:13:16Peter Diamandis?

  someone on the back of the cover who has some notoriety to say, "This is a great book, buy it."

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Right. Which probably the author has written and handed to the blurb-er.

• 1:13:25Peter Diamandis?

  And it is 100% what happens, right? I mean, yes. It's like you don't actually send them the full book and say, "Can you read it and send me, give me two sentences?"

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  People do.

• 1:13:35Peter Diamandis?

  They do.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  And nobody does.

• 1:13:36Peter Diamandis?

  And nobody. So when someone asks me for a book blurb, you know, if I know the person, I will do it. I will still ask for a summary of the book because I'm not going to have the time to really just slot it in and read it.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  You just want to make sure it's not weirdly-

• 1:13:52Peter Diamandis?

  And what's its purpose?

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  You know, I thought I know what you're reading-

• 1:13:55Peter Diamandis?

  And then how does it connect to me, right? And then I will say, "Then write me three or four draft blurbs and I'll modify one."

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  Right. Are you abundant with your blurbing of other people's books? Because I know some people, I'm not going to say their names-

• 1:14:09Peter Diamandis?

  I am-

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  But they are very stingy with it.

• 1:14:11Peter Diamandis?

  I am in the middle someplace. I have been careful not to just accept everybody, but there are those people who I know- Through Singularity or X Prize, who I respect. Um, but I'm not, I'm not that stingy with it, but uh, I get, I probably get a hundred requests a year. And I'll probably accommodate twenty.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  My, my view is I don't get the stinginess because it's not like any human will have seen the ten things that you've blur, blurbed.

• 1:14:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I just wanna make sure it's authentic for me.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Peter Diamandis?

  Authenticity in that regard. So you get the book blurbs, um, you get your book jacket, you get your final hard copy, and you're gonna have a launch event of some type, which used to be in person. My first abundance launch event was, uh, Steve Forbes threw me a party and Ariane Huffington threw me a party and that was.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Ari, Ari has the best book launches. She threw me mine too, right?

• 1:15:10Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, and then you're on a press tour now.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  Which by the way, first of all, I think a book launch party is useless.

• 1:15:18Peter Diamandis?

  It, it doesn't, it doesn't do anything.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  It's just for you.

• 1:15:20Peter Diamandis?

  Makes you feel.

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  It's like a birthday.

• 1:15:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's like a birthday.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  It's like, hey, listen, do I have a party or do we not have a party this year? Well, I'll have a party. Okay, that's as, that's as important.

• 1:15:26Peter Diamandis?

  Don't, don't spend any money. It's not gonna drive anything. If you wanna celebrate like a decade of work and your friends are there, have a party for that purpose.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Right, right. Um, and then you start your media, then you start your book marketing.

• 1:15:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes. And at that point, it's, it is eyeballs. It's getting on, NPR is probably the best thing you can get on.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  You know, and that changes. So when Never Eat Alone came out, I had a relationship that got me on the New York Times, on, on the Today Show.

• 1:15:55Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:56Speaker 01

  And at that time, not Today Show? Yeah, Today Show, the morning TV show, right. Today Show made number one.

• 1:16:03Peter Diamandis?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  That was it.

• 1:16:04Peter Diamandis?

  And today Oprah will make you a number one.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Does it anymore?

• 1:16:08Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, well, maybe. It used to. I mean, like.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  I mean, does she even have a book club anymore?

• 1:16:11Peter Diamandis?

  I don't, I don't.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  We don't know. We gotta be careful. We don't say that.

• 1:16:14Peter Diamandis?

  I don't watch Oprah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. Well, she, I don't think she has a show anymore, Peter.

• 1:16:17Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, come on, she's had two. Oh, we'll find out. Anyway.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:16:21Peter Diamandis?

  Regardless, but you're, the PR.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  You know, but, but I, I think the, look, what are the categories? This is any media person. There's, um, there's the newspapers which do do reviews and I don't think they matter as much anymore. Except for New York Times, doing a review is a big deal still, I think. Um, you've got the morning shows, you've got radio which still has impact.

• 1:16:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Um, uh, Bob Pittman keeps reminding me, who owns iHeart Media, how important radio is, and I really think it is. But I think the biggest issue are podcasters.

• 1:16:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:16:54Peter Diamandis?

  So it is today, it's going on a podcast tour. It's really speaking about your book. And, you know, people are like, I don't want to give it away.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Oh, shit.

• 1:17:03Peter Diamandis?

  What do you mean? I mean, you want to talk about it as much as, as give everything away. And then a lot of people will buy the book just to have it on their shelves. They can refer back to it.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Well, you know what portion of books that are bought or read?

• 1:17:15Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, God. What, what?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  It's less than 10%.

• 1:17:18Peter Diamandis?

  What?

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Less than 10%.

• 1:17:20Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  I mean, the reality is you're, anyway, I'm not even going to go there. I was about to be, we're about to take this whole reason for watching this podcast and flush it down the toilet. Cause no one fucking reads it anymore. Well, that's the big question is like, what's next for books?

• 1:17:36Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I'll tell you what's next. And we did this with EXO 2.0. We basically trained a GPT-4 model on the book.

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:17:44Peter Diamandis?

  And all the research and it's, you're talking to the big query.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Is that the thing I was talking to Peter Bot?

• 1:17:49Peter Diamandis?

  That's a different version. Um, and Peter Bot is trained on all of my books.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Peter Diamandis?

  And you can ask it concrete questions like, you know, how do I develop an abundance mindset? Or an exponential mindset, whatever it might be, or how do I, I'm in a cement business in, in Sao Paulo. Uh, how do I turn myself into an exponential organization? And the book will give you context and a, and a reason.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  You, your books, I hope my books, um, deserved to be read beginning to end. From people who really believe in what we're writing about. If somebody wants to, I am about to write the most important consummate book today of high performing teams.

• 1:18:31Peter Diamandis?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  The last team's book was 20 years ago.

• 1:18:35Peter Diamandis?

  Wow.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Which was, which was, uh, Pat Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which everybody still refers to.

• 1:18:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  But think about what's changed in 20 years. So my book that we're about to publish is going to be very meaningful and important in the world.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  Most books don't have that gravitas about them. And, you know, you need to ask yourself again, do you, what are you writing for?

• 1:19:00Peter Diamandis?

  Sure. I'll tell you, one thing that I've done recently is, as I'm writing a book, I will release chapters or portions of chapters as blogs. Right? And I ask, and I ask for feedback.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Peter Diamandis?

  And I develop an audience on that way, right? Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian and wrote like my favorite book of the decade, Hail Mary, both fiction books, what had came out of no place and he wrote his book, The Martian, and released it as chapters on the internet for, for feedback.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  And people get afraid that if they do that, they're giving it away and no one's gonna buy the book. It just doesn't work that way.

• 1:19:38Peter Diamandis?

  No, Abundance, it works in this regard. So, give the information away, get the feedback, develop people who want the next chapter in that regards. And I think that's really, you know, important. So.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  What do we have to say in summary?

• 1:19:54Peter Diamandis?

  Well, yeah, let's wrap this up. You know, one last thing, do you read your own books on Audible?

• 1:20:01Speaker 01

  Oh, great question.

• 1:20:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And so when Abundance came out and they chose the, the reader and I listened to it, I was like, I was horrified. I was like, oh my God, I could not listen to this person for a chapter.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  You'd rather Peterbot read it.

• 1:20:15Peter Diamandis?

  Oh my God. So I ended up reading with Stephen, Red Bold and Future is Faster.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  Do you like the process?

• 1:20:23Peter Diamandis?

  I, I do. I enjoy reading it because I can put the inflection into it. It takes, you know, a day and a half, two days to read a book.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hate it.

• 1:20:36Peter Diamandis?

  I know. Well, the thing that's interesting is you don't have to actually read it perfectly.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  But you have to read it three times.

• 1:20:43Peter Diamandis?

  You read a sentence and then you fudged it and you read it again.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm getting, my skin is crawling thinking about it. So the answer is I've not read any of mine.

• 1:20:51Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. Well, I'll tell you, we just trained up my voice model on 11 Labs. And it feels really good. And I'm sure.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Not without, well, not with the inflection.

• 1:21:01Peter Diamandis?

  But not with the meaning, right, of the personal story that goes like, oh my God, you know, when you really, when you convey it in that regard, but it will get there.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. But in the meantime, here's what I say to reading your book. I think it's a beautifully generous gift to give your readers that I've never given them.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Because when I tried, it drove me crazy. I sat, I said, okay, you know what? This next book, I'm gonna do it.

• 1:21:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  And I sat there and I started practicing and I realized I have three days of this ahead of me. And I said, no. What I did do is I interviewed the readers.

• 1:21:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  So I got my publisher to give me three potential readers.

• 1:21:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Speaker 01

  And I listened to all of them and I found one that I thought was good. And then I had a meeting with them.

• 1:21:48Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  I said, listen, let me explain to you, I'm going with you instead of myself. I'd like you to understand why this book's important to me.

• 1:21:55Peter Diamandis?

  Love that.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  I want you to understand and I want to talk to you about some of the stories. I want to tell you, I'm gonna tell you the inflection point that matters to me. I coached them.

• 1:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, nice.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  And you know, I, I think it got better as a result of that, but I agree, I should be a more generous, better human and let and read in myself.

• 1:22:13Peter Diamandis?

  I'll tell you something that is interesting that David Sinclair, when he wrote Lifespan and he had a, he had a, a co, a co-author on that. In between the chapters, not all chapters, but in the between the chapters. When on the audible, there was a conversation between David and the author.

• 1:22:33Speaker 01

  About the chapter.

• 1:22:34Peter Diamandis?

  About the content of the chapter, like has how that's, that was amazing and how fast it's changed. And that gave a level of intimacy. So at a minimum, if someone else is reading your book.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Peter Diamandis?

  Um, getting into an audio and recording, having a conversation with that person about the chapter.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  I, I thought about that. So we, of course, when I'm working with my co-writers, um, I had a co-writer that I did two books with. His name is Noel Weirick, amazing co-writer. He was, he was great. Um, he and I would get into some really like knock down, drag out fights. Like he'd be like, you know, that doesn't make any sense. I'm a book writer. I know what this is like, but that, but you've turned it into mush. And like we're yelling at each other and I would sometimes just laugh and I said, we've got to publish this as a part of the book, right? The, all the soup that, you know, the, the ingredients that go into the soup that makes it. I think we will, by the way. See books that are written in this multimedia fashion,

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  where the making of the book is all recorded. The filmed even perhaps when they're together on Zoom, talking about it. Imagine the richness of that.

• 1:23:45Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  You've got the book and then you've got all the stuff that went into it. I mean, it would be powerful.

• 1:23:51Peter Diamandis?

  So ladies and gentlemen, our next book writers here, Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone, Who's Got Your Back? Leading Without Authority, Competing in the New World of Work. Keith, which social media platform are you mostly active on these days?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  I'd say LinkedIn.

• 1:24:08Peter Diamandis?

  LinkedIn.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  LinkedIn is the right place.

• 1:24:09Peter Diamandis?

  And you're, and you're, it's at Keith Ferrazzi at LinkedIn?

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  At Keith Ferrazzi. But wait, before we, we can't just close.

• 1:24:17Peter Diamandis?

  We can't?

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  We've got to say something poignant.

• 1:24:19Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, I thought we, I thought we did.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  I don't know, we were just, no.

• 1:24:23Peter Diamandis?

  No, okay, okay.

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  We had an hour worth of poignancy.

• 1:24:26Peter Diamandis?

  Bring it in then.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  So like, both of us should give a reflective comment about the wrapper of the book.

• 1:24:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right, so.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  You want to do yours or me?

• 1:24:34Peter Diamandis?

  No, no, you go first.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fair.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  Don't think of a book as this crazy Mount Everest thing that only special people do. Think of a book as your heartfelt ability to sit and be contemplative about what really matters to you. Who you are, what do you want to project to the world? And it doesn't have to be something that you're on deadline. It can be something that you, you evolve. But it, it's a forcing mechanism, an accountability mechanism, to focus on your brand and what you have to say to the world. And then I would also recommend that you get a coach. And that coach could be a co-writer or something.

• 1:25:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  So that you keep on and you work it through.

• 1:25:24Peter Diamandis?

  And you get to the end.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  And you get to the end.

• 1:25:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  And you've got something for your legacy and at a minimum, your grandkids will love to see.

• 1:25:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. You know, that was beautiful. That was beautiful.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  I felt the need to do something poignant.

• 1:25:38Peter Diamandis?

  Your turn. Birth to that. Understanding why you're writing the book is really important. Right? I think the why is, is key. And I, I remember the difference between, I'm going to write a book about space because I'm the space guy, to, oh my God. There's this incredible truth in the universe about technology making everything more abundant and where humanity was going, and I want everyone to know about it. And the level of emotional energy that drove that was night and day. So hopefully, folks listening can find that that book inside them that really has this, we're emotional, we're emotional entities, right? You need that emotional drive.

• 1:26:25Peter Diamandis?

  I found the book writing process incredibly meaningful and creative, and it's artistry. And, you know, it can, it changed my life. Abundance as a book launched, launched me in a brand new direction, as did Never Eat Alone for You. And at the end of the day, it's going to become easier to write a book, right? Use the tools. I think we had an interesting debate and discussion about using ChatGPT. Use the tools, but make sure that if you're using ChatGPT,

• 1:27:03Peter Diamandis?

  that it isn't plain vanilla, that you're adding your own stories, that it is, what is on the page there is meaningful to you. But at the end of the day, we're going to see a lot of books. And people say, I'm going to write a book to make money. Well, guess what? That's not where you make your money. You make your money in the speaking business, if that's what you want to do. And that's going to be the subject of our next podcast. We talked about, you're on LinkedIn, @KeithFarazi, two Rs, two Zs. And what if they want to reach you for, for having you speak or coach their executive team? Where do they go for that?

• 1:27:43Speaker 01

  The company is called Farazi Greenlight. So go to Farazi Greenlight and you can get in contact with us there.

• 1:27:50Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome. Thank you, brother. This was fun.

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  Always.

• 1:28:05Speaker 00

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