Episode 82 features author Jimmy Soni, co-author of A Mind At Play about Claude Shannon and The Founders about the founding of PayPal and the evolution of the PayPal Mafia.
We discuss the process of creating those books, researching, method writing, going dark, plus the creative process in all its forms, the good and bad, the early mornings and late nights, and much much more.
Throughout the conversation, we discuss:
- Writing about the dead vs. writing about the living
- Historical research
- Research processes
- Going Dark
- Stumbling into a book
- Creating a firewall for current events
- Method writing
- Creative motives change as you do them
- A Night to Remember by Walter Lord
- Creating vs. Consuming content
- Balance
- Ambition to create should be more celebrated
- Giving people a platform
- The Chaos of Publishing
- Advice for writers
- And much more
Mentioned and Helpful Links from This Episode
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shapes Silicon Valley
Music created and provided by Henno Heitur of Monkey Tongue Productions.
–End Show Notes Transmission–
–Begin Transcription–
00:00:00:01 – 00:00:23:59
Agent Palmer
Previously on Agent palmer.com Len Deighton’s City of Gold is must read world War two fiction traveling band documentary reminds us just how great CCR is. And if you’ve heard the last episode and you know a teacher, thank you teacher. This is The Palmer Files episode 82 with author Jimmy Soni, coauthor of a mind at play, about Claude Shannon and author of The Founders, about the founding of PayPal and the evolution of the PayPal Mafia.
00:00:24:03 – 00:01:09:09
Agent Palmer
We discussed the process of creating those books, researching method writing, going dark, plus the creative process in all its forms the good and bad, the early mornings and late nights and much, much more. Are you ready? Let’s do the show.
00:01:09:13 – 00:01:34:32
Agent Palmer
Hello, and welcome to the Palmer Files. I’m your host, Jason Stershic. Also known as Agent Palmer. And on this 82nd episode is Jimmy Soni, who is an author. I have not only read, he is an author I’ve connected with and spoken to on occasion since we met through his first book, the two books of his I have read and that I do mention are a mind at play How Claude Shannon Invented the Internet Age and the founders, the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley.
00:01:34:36 – 00:01:55:19
Agent Palmer
If you are interested in the history of the internet or technology, finance, or the device you are listening to me on, then at least one of these books should be of interest to you. But that isn’t all we talk about. It is where you will hear this conversation start, but we really dig in deep into the processes with which Jimmy uses to research, write, and create these books.
00:01:55:32 – 00:02:17:53
Agent Palmer
We also talk on a more general level about the creative process, things like how the ambition and willingness to put something out there should be more celebrated. The process of creation is just as much of a dopamine hit as the finished product. Advice for writers and others looking to create something. The chaos of publishing balance and well, all of that and a whole lot more is coming your way shortly.
00:02:17:53 – 00:02:42:21
Agent Palmer
But first, if you want to discuss this episode as you listen or afterwards, you can tweet me at Jim Palmer, my guest, Jimmy Sony at Jimmy a Sony that’s Jimmy a show and I and this show at the Palmer Files. You can find more information about Jimmy at Jimmy sony.com. That’s S0 and I where you can not only find links to all of his published works, you can see some of his essays and talks there as well.
00:02:42:26 – 00:03:02:33
Agent Palmer
Don’t forget, you can see all of my writings and ratings, including reviews for both the founders and a mind at play on Agent palmer.com. And of course, email can be sent to the Palmer files at gmail.com. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
00:03:02:38 – 00:03:36:46
Agent Palmer
Jimmy, I’ve read two of your books. You’ve written more than that, but I’ve. I’ve read two of your books. And I wanted to ask you the first book about Claude Shannon is about someone who is deceased. And the second one that I read features the founders of PayPal called The founders, and they’re very much alive. Did it feel any different writing about a quote unquote historical figure that was very much in the past when you were writing about it, versus people that are alive and still doing things?
00:03:36:51 – 00:03:56:39
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. Oh, I mean, it couldn’t have been more different. And I’ll just say, like, dead people are so much easier to write about, like, in every way I like, you know, I’m not obviously like, I’m, I’m glad the subjects I wrote about for PayPal are alive. But it’s way easier to write about dead people. No, I’m I’m sort of.
00:03:56:43 – 00:04:19:39
Jimmy Soni
I’m joking, but the. There’s some. I’m joking because it’s the truth. Okay. And the truth is that how do I how do I put this? You know, if I got something wrong about Claude Shannon, he doesn’t have a hundred million Twitter followers that he could deploy like a drone missile. Okay, right. But, but but in all seriousness, like, the stakes are lower.
00:04:19:52 – 00:04:36:54
Jimmy Soni
And that, by the way, I it’s not it’s not a you know, we didn’t skimp on the research for that book. Like my coauthor, Rob Goodman, I like really went for broke. We talked to a lot of people. We interviewed tons of people, went through the archives, library of Congress, went and visited his gravestone. You know, all of the things.
00:04:36:58 – 00:05:00:27
Jimmy Soni
But, you know, Shannon wasn’t going to be around to correct the record. Whereas with the people that I was writing about, not only am I writing about people who are alive, but I’m writing about people who are very as as somebody put it to me, like in something that they wrote to me, they’re like, they’re assiduous guardians of their public image, right?
00:05:00:32 – 00:05:20:55
Jimmy Soni
And they are and like, they’re very when someone says something about them that is false, these people will take to Twitter and correct the record. Right. And so I had this extra threshold to overcome when I was writing about these subjects, because they wasn’t just that they were living, it was that they were living. And public figures, some of them, not all of them, but many of them.
00:05:21:00 – 00:05:48:51
Jimmy Soni
And so that was, you know, it was a very different experience. I think the other thing is I felt an added burden to be careful, like to be extra careful, to dot eyes, to cross t’s, to hire a fact checker, to go back over every scrap, to look at emails that were from that era. Because I also recognized, you know, that when you’re talking to people about things that happened 20 years ago, you know, you’re you’re sort of fighting against memory.
00:05:48:51 – 00:06:07:20
Jimmy Soni
You’re fighting against like my the way that the mind kind of like overwrites certain information and forgets other information. Yeah. And so I had this challenge of, you know, I would hear something and I have to just go and kick the tires on it, or I would talk to somebody and they would lead me to something, and it would turn out that it was that didn’t happen that way.
00:06:07:33 – 00:06:32:38
Jimmy Soni
So I think it’s it’s I see it as actually like very different processes. The one thing that carries over that was important is, you know, I approached one could say that, like one of the tools in the toolkit for doing the PayPal book was historical research with primary source documents. Right? Yeah. And, and and the idea of just going through thousands of emails.
00:06:32:43 – 00:06:53:22
Jimmy Soni
Right. Like thousands and thousands of emails is part of what historical work involves, like looking back at the record as close as you can get to the era in which the events happened and then making heads or tails of them. And so I think, you know, there’s some definitely like some commonality is but writing about the living is vastly harder than writing about the dead.
00:06:53:22 – 00:07:16:12
Agent Palmer
So when it comes to that extra layer of like, protection, right. When you’re when you’re talking about getting the facts right, is that and I’m, I’m not trying to make it so binary, but is it more on the editing, the after the fact, or is it more on the research like where because obviously the the final catches happen in the editing.
00:07:16:25 – 00:07:29:45
Agent Palmer
But there’s that that amount of research which gets you to wherever you are. Is it on both, you know, do you just feel the weight on both sides or is it does it fall. Yeah. Oh, the editing is so much more.
00:07:29:56 – 00:07:51:20
Jimmy Soni
No. You feel the weight on both sides. And I’ll tell you why. Because the what is a fact. What is an opinion and what happened. Questions are the questions that you want to ask. These people live when you’re interviewing them. Right. And so you can’t escape it on the gathering string. And on the end where you’re actually just like accumulating the information that you’ll take to shape the book.
00:07:51:25 – 00:08:09:37
Jimmy Soni
You know, I had to ask, for example, Elon, about the moment that he was pushed out of the company. But I had to ask him that, like, you know, kind of full well knowing that it wasn’t his proudest moment and that he might have, like, might throw me out of the interview like, as I’m asking him about it.
00:08:09:42 – 00:08:27:14
Jimmy Soni
But I wouldn’t have been doing justice to the work if I hadn’t asked that question. And so there’s the there’s there is stuff that happens on the front end. It shapes that part of the process. But as you said, most of the work actually happens on the back end. And a lot of it, you know, what it really comes down to is at least in the way that I do my work.
00:08:27:14 – 00:08:47:52
Jimmy Soni
You are citing all of the quotes and citing all the sources. And so if you flip back to the the section that nobody will read, right. All I have about 100 pages of notes at the very end of the founders and I cite, I mean, every quote in some cases where a subject might have repeated themselves, I say multiple sources.
00:08:47:57 – 00:09:16:13
Jimmy Soni
And what what you try to do is at the very end is like a stress test, right? To sort of borrow the like, finance language, or at least like the finance language. They adapted after the financial crisis. You are stress testing your text and you are looking at like, okay, did I get this quote exactly right? And part of what I had in that, or just to get into the weeds a bit on this, because I think it’s interesting and I think readers ought to know or listeners ought to know how these books come to be.
00:09:16:18 – 00:09:42:53
Jimmy Soni
Publishers don’t have fact checkers. They don’t hire fact checkers that comes out of an author’s pocket. So I found I mean, I’ve never worked with the fact checker before, but he was he came, you know, his reputation preceded him, and he came recommended through a friend. His name is Ben Caitlin. And Ben has been a fact checker for, I think, I mean, two decades and he is so aggressive and so smart and he has the most thankless job in the world, which is he has to tell authors, well, you got this wrong.
00:09:42:55 – 00:10:07:22
Jimmy Soni
You got this wrong. You got this wrong. You get this wrong. And he didn’t say that. And this is 1998, but it actually happened, I use it this happened in 1998, but actually after 1986. And so he essentially has a job like beating you up for chapter after chapter of a chapter. But Ben was a godsend because Ben caught all of these things that, again, were were in some cases, unintentional errors or just kind of like somebody had said something one place.
00:10:07:22 – 00:10:22:50
Jimmy Soni
But there were three other sources that said it happened somewhere else. And so I was able to go through that process with him multiple times. So actually Ben went through the draft several times, and then at the same time, I was going through it and making sure, okay, you know, does this line up with this, does this line up with this?
00:10:23:02 – 00:10:48:21
Jimmy Soni
And a book like this is never going to get you. It’s ever going to be perfect, right? I mean, there’s no way to sort of it’s always going to be an asymptotic limit that you’re trying to hit. But I tried to be very rigorous about the use of my sources, the use of quotes, you know, everything from like who is saying the quote to what’s the context or when was it said I always tried to like get information and insights that happened as close to the events that I was writing about as possible.
00:10:48:25 – 00:11:06:21
Jimmy Soni
And so it’s a long way of saying, like every part of what I described in terms of like writing about the living and some of the anxieties and how do you balance it? It happens from the beginning when you’re interviewing all the way through the fact checking. But if you had to do the split, it’s probably 40% during the interviewing and 60% in the end.
00:11:06:21 – 00:11:11:03
Jimmy Soni
And the fine tuning and the checking of notes and citations. Now, it may have been a longer answer. And you want to.
00:11:11:03 – 00:11:36:43
Agent Palmer
Know know it well, because it’s interesting, because I read a lot. I tell you about 50% of the things I read are nonfiction. And most of them that aren’t biography are 100% history. Right. So I get that kind of vein of like, reading stuff. And, you know, I, I kind of remember how I ended up with your first book.
00:11:36:48 – 00:12:03:45
Agent Palmer
I kind of I got an email, because either you or Rob or someone, had read one of my other internet history book reviews, and I, I there’s a part of me that wants to say it was a review of hackers, by, I think, Levy.
00:12:03:50 – 00:12:21:26
Jimmy Soni
I think I might have been it and or it was if you had read the information by James Glick or the idea of Factory by John Gaertner, we may have, you know, we I there’s a small subset of people who are reading books about Claude Shannon or related figures and writing about it. So we did our best to reach out to, we could.
00:12:21:31 – 00:12:30:14
Jimmy Soni
And, you know, I like I think of it as fantastic in some ways because we were able to connect and you, you know, you’re somebody you’re predisposed to want to read about Claude Jennings.
00:12:30:14 – 00:12:49:27
Agent Palmer
Well, that’s true. And, and I, I, I bring it up because we had a relationship. We, we kind of started a small email relationship back then. Yeah. I think after the book, after I posted my review and, and, and I, you know, I tried to help as much as I could because when I like a book, I do that I, I kind of reached out to you.
00:12:49:27 – 00:13:26:58
Agent Palmer
And I remember at a certain point you were like, oh, I’m researching the PayPal Mafia. And then like, you went dark. And I presume it was just because you were buried in so much stuff. Because the thing that astounds me about your taking on, the story of PayPal is that it happened in our lifetime. So if if the stock goes up, there’s about five what you would call authoritative journals or newspapers that are going to write about that stock jump up or down.
00:13:27:03 – 00:13:36:46
Agent Palmer
And so now all of a sudden, if it’s in the history of the book and the story that you want to tell, you almost have to read all five of those things.
00:13:36:51 – 00:13:58:39
Jimmy Soni
Well, yes and no. Okay. Yes and no. So, so I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll just riff on a couple of the things you said because it’s really funny. So you describe this sort of and then you went dark. Right. Which is like if you were to interview all my friends like they experienced at the same way, right? Like about five, five and a half years ago, I ghosted the world.
00:13:58:39 – 00:14:16:42
Jimmy Soni
Right? Like, I, you know, I sent my thing about the pandemic was like, everybody just caught up to the way I was living. I was quarantining before it was cool, right? I was just born dealing with PayPal. But the truth is, I did go dark and like, it’s this interesting thing. I think all writers look, all writers have a very different approach, a very different process.
00:14:16:46 – 00:14:34:54
Jimmy Soni
But for me, you know, my one of my friends lovingly describes my process is method writing. She’s like, you’re like a method actor, but you’re like a method writer. We have to, like, inhabit the book, actually. And you have no other life for a while. And your friends have sort of come to tolerate this about you. But it is I, I don’t know why it works for me, but it does.
00:14:34:54 – 00:14:54:45
Jimmy Soni
I spent basically seven days a week working on PayPal for several years, and it was every morning. It was Thanksgiving. It was Christmas. I mean, it was everything. It became the totality of my life. It sort of became like the sun in the center of the solar system and everything else kind of orbit around it. Yeah. And I think there’s a few reasons.
00:14:54:50 – 00:15:09:12
Jimmy Soni
One is just time you sort of have to put in the time to make a book of this length. Right. And to, to deal with subjects who are in the news as often as some of these people are. You know, multiple of the people I wrote about took companies public during the time that I was writing about them.
00:15:09:17 – 00:15:27:11
Jimmy Soni
Right. That’s part of it. The second is, you know, you you when you spend that amount of time, you come up with insights and angles that haven’t been done before. There’s a very easy call it like a clip job way of doing the PayPal book, where you just kind of take everything that’s already been written and you just kind of stitched together, and then you put it out in the world.
00:15:27:16 – 00:15:52:19
Jimmy Soni
I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to add new knowledge. Right. And so the the problem is like doing that actually takes time. I remember there’s this moment when Max is in the when the story begins with Max legend, and he’s in Ukraine, and I start the story with Chernobyl for reasons that readers will appreciate. But I went on like a, you know, must have been like a two week thing, just understanding Chernobyl, right?
00:15:52:19 – 00:16:16:23
Jimmy Soni
And like, really like reading papers from that era, trying to get my head around it. I did maps of where he lived relative to future Nobel, and I would kind of calculate distances, and then I would sort of, you know, convert from kilometers to miles and whatnot. And so I had this thing of I did go dark. And it’s very funny that you described it that way, because I’ve had multiple friends of mine say, well, you emerged from, you know, your, your book cave.
00:16:16:38 – 00:16:38:18
Jimmy Soni
But I think of that as a big part for me of the way that I bring the story to life so that the benefit for readers is they will know that I was obsessed. Right. And I, I have this I’m going to like, just like talk for a second about, you know, there are people I know who operate this way, who write this way.
00:16:38:18 – 00:17:01:59
Jimmy Soni
Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the book, The People book people may know is Seabiscuit. She did a book called unbroken. She has, I guess. I don’t know if it’s still referred to this way, but at the time she was writing about it to produce chronic fatigue syndrome CFS, and because she has CFS, she is frequently like bedridden for long was, I don’t know, her current current state, but was bedridden during the writing of those books for long periods of time.
00:17:02:04 – 00:17:22:34
Jimmy Soni
But once you had enough energy to do, was just read newspapers that were, accounts of things happening in the period that she was writing about, like the war years or the Seabiscuit years. And, and she became like, she would, some piece of writing she did where she talked about how you basically because you only have enough energy to do that.
00:17:22:39 – 00:17:42:50
Jimmy Soni
She was inhabiting that era all the time. And there are World War Two pilots who have read her description of planes in unbroken and said, yeah, she nailed it. Right. And so do I think this is like a healthy way to live. Like to live a life? Probably not. It’s the reason I take a decent amount of time between book projects.
00:17:42:55 – 00:18:09:10
Jimmy Soni
But. But I spent every day of the last several years I printed out this long, blog from the 90s. I don’t even remember what the name of it is, but it would basically link to like, interesting internet trivia from like 1995 to 1999. And I would kind of start my day by reading that. And just to kind of get a feel for, you know, slow internet connections, Y2K as like a looming threat.
00:18:09:12 – 00:18:09:27
Jimmy Soni
Right?
00:18:09:39 – 00:18:31:46
Agent Palmer
It’s funny, I, I understand that on such a level because it’s when and I haven’t done a lot of movie reviews of late. I used to probably do a lot more than I do now, and one of the reasons is, first of all, there’s a lot coming out and not necessarily all of it’s some of it’s enjoyable, but not all of it’s worth writing about.
00:18:31:46 – 00:18:58:10
Agent Palmer
But I was writing about older movies, and while it’s not the same, it is I’m trying to review them as they were. It’s really hard to take a movie that was made in 1985, or any movie in 1985 and go, well, it doesn’t hold up to movies of the 90s and early aughts. Well, of course not. But if you’re reviewing it that way, no one’s going to go back and view it as a classic or whatever it is.
00:18:58:10 – 00:19:18:20
Agent Palmer
Right? So, you know, I, I did when I was reviewing, I did a review of WarGames, which is one of my favorites, and it’s a classic, and it was hard for me to write it. I watched that movie like three times over the course of four years with the intention to write about it, and then you sit down and you go, yeah, I can’t, I’m not there.
00:19:18:20 – 00:19:38:16
Agent Palmer
Like, you have to get in the headspace because it’s not fair, not only to the people that are coming to it fresh, but to people that remember it, remember it in that way. And so. Right. You have to get in that headspace because not everything, you know, as more things come out and you consume more things like those things aren’t fair to to.
00:19:38:18 – 00:19:38:34
Jimmy Soni
No.
00:19:38:45 – 00:19:41:32
Agent Palmer
To the reviews or the story as a whole.
00:19:41:37 – 00:20:15:03
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, I it’s funny you say this. One of the things I told my friends is don’t tell me anything that’s going on in the news about the people I’m writing about. You know, unless it’s like, insane, like they died, right? Yeah. But don’t but sort of, I, I created a little bit of a firewall to block out, you know, 2020 and 2021 and 2022, Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Max Hunter or David Sachs, because that I can’t have that pollute my understanding of who these people were when they were working between 1998 and 2002 to build the company that became PayPal.
00:20:15:08 – 00:20:31:32
Jimmy Soni
And I had a very hard time doing that. I mean, you know, at one point someone was like, oh, Ellen’s on SNL. And I was like, don’t you know anything I don’t like? It’s not gonna work. And I in my I did this section at the end of the book called like, it was like a note on sources and methods or something.
00:20:31:37 – 00:20:57:07
Jimmy Soni
And I point out at the very beginning that the most valuable stuff was not spending time with these people. The most valuable stuff was that there’s this website that Stanford has kept called the E corner, and the E corner has old videos of Peter Thiel, Max legend, Elon Musk from 2003 and 2004. And they’re giving it’s Peter and Max giving one presentation and Elon giving another.
00:20:57:07 – 00:21:15:41
Jimmy Soni
And they’re just talking to students. They’re not rich and famous. I mean, they might I think they were wealthy, but they weren’t famous, right? They’re not the people that we know as the mass today. You know, they’re sort of you know, you can just tell this is not this is not the stage at TechCrunch in 2020. This is like a bunch of Stanford students in front of a classroom.
00:21:15:45 – 00:21:46:18
Jimmy Soni
But those were pay dirt, right? Those videos, because they were closer to the action. They were less polished. And and I always had I was always fighting against this tendency to look at everything that happened from 2002 to 2022 and like, have that inform the writing. And to be fair, like some of it was during that period and like it was reasonably important, but it is the hardest thing, I think, for a lot of contemporary people who write history to just like actually wall yourself off, right?
00:21:46:18 – 00:21:53:15
Jimmy Soni
Not be active on Twitter, not be getting every update. And to actually sort of immerse yourself in the era that you’re writing about when.
00:21:53:15 – 00:22:12:48
Agent Palmer
You go back to the Claude Shannon era, because obviously stuff’s not so widely, you know. Yeah, you have I mean, Bell Labs was fairly good, I think, at documenting things. But you only have one source, right. Like and so was it, you know, how was that by comparison.
00:22:12:53 – 00:22:33:50
Jimmy Soni
You know, it’s you’d be surprised I would say that, you know, you can. It’s a great question. The Claude Shannon work, you have primary source documents that are written in his own hand that are at the Library of Congress. Right. So you have letters and you have notes and you have marginalia in books, and you have various things he’s built you have things in museums.
00:22:34:04 – 00:23:02:18
Jimmy Soni
I also did have access to his family. So I had access to his children, his late, his late wife. And I had people who were his collaborators and colleagues and like various correspond. Okay, who had very vivid memories of their interactions with him. And it also kept journals and notes and documents and things. He I also know, you know, there are he was famous enough, just famous enough to be interviewed.
00:23:02:18 – 00:23:23:05
Jimmy Soni
And some of the audio and the video from those interviews was captured. And so I remember once actually stumbling on this like long lost audio recording and and being, which has been like the greatest day ever as a researcher. Right. But there were things available that could put me back in the mind of a scientist working in the 20th century, in that era.
00:23:23:10 – 00:23:43:36
Jimmy Soni
And then I made a point to also visit the places that he lived. So we visited, you know, his home in, in Winchester. We visited MIT, visited in Arbor, and Gaylord, Michigan. And so we sort of stitched together the life that way as well, much harder. And like, you’re never going to get it again.
00:23:43:36 – 00:24:00:00
Jimmy Soni
You’re never going to get it quite right. But I think the point is, you know, you sort of I often sort of talk about these books. You kind of like accept it. If you’re going to do this. You have these roommates who are like always with you, you know, like essentially like a roommate that, like, lives with you all the time and is always talking to you.
00:24:00:12 – 00:24:31:57
Jimmy Soni
Right. And, and, you know, it’s like, weird. It’s like Elon was your roommate for five years or whatever, right? So it sort of makes you like it shapes you. But I think the end result of that, and this is what I’ll get, is sort of to bring the point to a close. The point is, I have heard from people who were not involved in the story, but who know all of the protagonists in the story and what they’ve told me that they really enjoy about it is like, as one person put it, like, oh, you, you definitely captured who they were sort of good and bad, right?
00:24:32:02 – 00:24:58:22
Jimmy Soni
That, that what, what I was able to do, I think, and I hope is capture at least a portrait in time of who these people are that was recognizable to the other people who that who know them. Right. And, and I and I that’s like when I got that note, I just remember being being overjoyed because it was really what I was going for in the like, intense, obsessive like, okay, let’s like study Peter Gould’s chess games to see if there’s anything to learn there.
00:24:58:33 – 00:25:18:04
Jimmy Soni
Okay. Let’s like, do a full history of the McLaren car so I can understand, like why did you buy this car for $1 million? Okay. Let’s like go look and see if there’s like, post Chernobyl photos, like, oh, you know of Ukraine that I can it was in service of trying to get a portrait that again that even people who know them would say, yeah, this is like largely, largely accurate.
00:25:18:09 – 00:25:39:03
Agent Palmer
Where does this all come from though? Like, did you always want to be an author? Like, I feel like that has because like everything we’ve just spoke about makes me feel like you wanted to be a researcher at some point because you’ve done all this massive research and there’s no way, you know, ten year old Jimmy’s like, I want to write a book and spend seven years researching them, right?
00:25:39:03 – 00:25:46:31
Agent Palmer
Like that doesn’t people want to, you know, I want to write a book. Just sit down and write. That’s what they think. So, like, where does all this start from?
00:25:46:36 – 00:26:05:07
Jimmy Soni
You know, it’s a great book. It’s a great question. It’s like, I’m not. Any answer I give I think is going to be kind of imperfect because everyone I know who does books or really does anything like your podcast do, like it’s a welter of motives, right? You sort of like have maybe there’s like motives that occupy 20 to 40% of it and then there’s like another bucket.
00:26:05:07 – 00:26:12:58
Agent Palmer
And another thing just based on when you ask, you know, oh, like, oh, I had a great day. I had a bad day. Yeah. This is working. This is not. Yeah. No, I mean.
00:26:13:13 – 00:26:34:12
Jimmy Soni
And the story, the story behind these things changes as you go along. Sure. And who you really sometimes you need to tell yourself the story about it because it sustains the difficulty and the anxiety and everything else. What I would say is, I grew up just loving books. Like, it was like the thing that I did in my spare time was I was reading all the time.
00:26:34:17 – 00:27:01:17
Jimmy Soni
And so, like, I grew up like, I loved, like, the encyclopedia Brown series. I love like, Brian Jack Mosler, Matt, the Red wall series, multiplier amount of mayo. I would read Garfield comics like an obsessive, like a crazy person. I loved, like, peanuts. I mean, I was a just a I would read anything I could get my hands on, and that was just a habit that stuck and as time went on, I noticed that my interest gravitated to history.
00:27:01:22 – 00:27:19:22
Jimmy Soni
And I started to just also the so that happened. And then I also just started to recognize, like, wow, there are certain kinds of writing that are just such quality work that I’m very impressed by it, meaning I was just drawn to quality writing. And then, like the natural sort of like seconds next step is, okay, maybe I could do this.
00:27:19:27 – 00:27:36:18
Jimmy Soni
I started to do a little bit of writing in my spare time. I wrote for school papers. I wrote for the yearbook. I did all that, sort of like check the nerd list, right? And then when, you know. And then I kind of had the good fortune of being able to do a book with a friend. Rob Goodman.
00:27:36:23 – 00:28:08:06
Jimmy Soni
And, like, one thing led to another. I would say that the intense obsessiveness, you know, what I just described as sort of like passion, like, it’s just like interest in a subject. Yeah. I think the intensity and the obsessiveness like it and the depth of research is, I think like it’s going to sound a little weird, but it, I feel a sense of obligation to my subjects when I write about them and to like, kind of people 100 years from now reading about them.
00:28:08:10 – 00:28:27:13
Jimmy Soni
So I have this like, sense that, like, your subjects deserve like really good research. Like, meaning if you’re going to have the chance to write about Elon Musk, like you really should go for broke, you know, if you’re going to have a chance to write about Claude Shannon or about Peter Thiel or about any of these people, you really should, like, try like there’s some element of just like you should try.
00:28:27:18 – 00:28:47:54
Jimmy Soni
And then part of it is, I think about books that I have read that have really moved me, that were written from a long time ago. And I appreciate the rigor. Right. So there’s this book I’m looking at right now. It’s it’s called A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. It’s a fantastic book. Three short to 200 some odd pages.
00:28:47:58 – 00:29:16:17
Jimmy Soni
It’s an account of the sinking of the Titanic. Right. So no great surprises here. We sort of know how that story ends. But what Walter Lord did is he found every single living survivor. Or at least as best as I can tell, he found every survivor he could, and he interviewed them. But then he found, like, the people who built the ship and the maps and the this and that and what is a very tight account, you can tell, is just brimming with research.
00:29:16:21 – 00:29:39:16
Jimmy Soni
And he has so many observations and insights that he was able to do. Despite the sinking of the Titanic being one of the most widely covered events from that era. He’s writing like, I think, a 50 some odd years later and just just a magnificent job, right. And he used this sort of it’s like, go for broke, talk to everybody who will talk to you.
00:29:39:21 – 00:30:18:04
Jimmy Soni
I the books I enjoy most are the books where the author has done that. Okay. And and so for me it’s also about producing something that like when I read it is giving me joy. And, you know, I’ll give you a small example to maybe illustrate the point, which is when I was doing the research on Ellen, one of the things that I did is I went to the archives of the student newspaper of the first university he attended, which was in Canada, and I searched through, an embarrassingly large number of student newspapers over the years, I mean, a significant number of years for the word mosque.
00:30:18:09 – 00:30:32:49
Jimmy Soni
And the problem with optical character recognition for the word musk is that the word music can pop up the, you know, music and pop up. A lot of variations can happen. But I would just scroll day after day after day, and I just press the arrow and look at the next thing and look at the next and look at the next one.
00:30:32:49 – 00:30:52:36
Jimmy Soni
I mean, this is over. I mean, it was like days and maybe even weeks of this. I did the same thing for the archives at the University of Pennsylvania. The upshot of what I just described is that in the book, I managed to find the advertisement that Elon took out for the first business he ever built, which is called Musk Computer Consulting.
00:30:52:41 – 00:31:17:00
Jimmy Soni
And I could run a little riff from the ad in the book. I also found a long lost student government platform when he ran for and lost election to you. Pence student government and. But in both cases, I found something out that was about his character that I was able to show readers this is the person who, you know, who is this Elon at age 19 and 21 or whatever it was.
00:31:17:04 – 00:31:35:39
Jimmy Soni
And so the thing about it is that you can imagine it’s sort of like an Indiana Jones thrill when you find like a freaking student government platform that nobody has found. Right? And you’re just blown away by it. Like it’s like an amazing document. And I, you know, you can’t sort of I can’t tell you that. That’s logical.
00:31:35:39 – 00:31:59:36
Jimmy Soni
It seems actually pretty illogical. The whole hunt I described. But I also don’t want to underwrite estimate. Like when I found that I, I was so happy, like it was like a part of it that was just joyful. So there’s this is a long way of saying, like, I can’t tell you exactly where it comes from because there’s multiple motives, the motives, the posterity, the the motivation to make sure your subjects feel like you’re doing a good job and that you feel like you’re doing justice.
00:31:59:36 – 00:32:07:13
Jimmy Soni
Your subjects, the sense of like just enjoyment I get from it, which sounds a little, you know, crazy or whatever, but, well, I mean.
00:32:07:18 – 00:32:28:48
Agent Palmer
It doesn’t because, like, I, I get to, I mean, I for better or worse, I get my endorphin rush on a weekly basis, right? Like, I post a blog every week and every two weeks I post a podcast and and that means that six times a month I get to say I’m done with a project. Not every seven years.
00:32:28:53 – 00:32:51:07
Agent Palmer
Write six times a month, I get to go. I did that like boom, yeah, done right. And so so I get that on a on a smaller, more consistent basis. I get that I don’t necessarily get the big wins. I think I think what you’re describing in the victories in research as well as the victory and, you know, publishing or the first draft being complete.
00:32:51:07 – 00:33:11:23
Agent Palmer
Like that’s something to, right. But I get that because we’re trying to put something back out there. And I think, yeah, it comes up on this show quite a bit because I feel like I well, probably because I manifest it, but like, we’re never going to be 5050 input and output because we all consume too much.
00:33:11:28 – 00:33:32:47
Agent Palmer
Yeah. But at the same time, we’re trying like some of us are making an attempt to put something else that we’re not just bottomless holes consuming something which we’re still taking the time to put something else out there. And that’s maybe, maybe it’s, a character thing, I don’t know, but like, there’s some of us that are trying the other way.
00:33:32:47 – 00:33:35:11
Agent Palmer
We’re not just consuming.
00:33:35:16 – 00:33:59:58
Jimmy Soni
I know. Look, I, I mean, preach, like, that’s like it. It’s a big I don’t know that I consciously think about that because this is kind of what I do. But I totally agree with you. And the days I felt great were days that I produced the writing. And, and I would say my consumption of media was at a minimum during the times I was producing media, if that makes sense.
00:33:59:58 – 00:34:26:08
Jimmy Soni
Like, sure. And so I agree with you. I think with the ambition to create, anything and the, the willingness to put it out there, right, and make it substantive and make it have high quality like that’s a, that’s something we should nurture. It’s something we should celebrate. And I suspect that like that you’re right that we’re all kind of consuming more than we produce.
00:34:26:13 – 00:34:46:18
Jimmy Soni
But I like to think that I can tip like you suggested. Like tip the scales at least a little bit in the other direction. Right? Yeah. And then I think, I think the other thing that, you know, you know, author or creator or podcaster and I’m sure you can appreciate is you can ignore it is the other part of it that’s validating is when you connect with some like two things.
00:34:46:18 – 00:35:02:54
Jimmy Soni
One is when like your audience just like tells you something was great. That’s always a good feeling, right? People want their stuff to be like. But the other thing that’s cool. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this at all, but I find that people I never would have met at any other moment in human history, I can suddenly connect with.
00:35:02:54 – 00:35:23:19
Jimmy Soni
And the thing that brings us together is something I’ve created and that’s very cool. Like it’s very, you know, we we are in an era where I’m a student from, from Singapore. Right? Me like a handwritten note a couple days ago. And I remember just thinking, like we had he had read the book, we’d connect it over Twitter.
00:35:23:24 – 00:35:41:14
Jimmy Soni
Then he had asked me for my address to send me something. I had sent it to him. He had sent it to me. And like at no other moment in human history, would that have been possible? Yeah, I find that to be the other part of it. That’s really it’s very validating because, you know, you the thing it’s not just like producing because anybody could produce, you could produce in a Google doc, right?
00:35:41:23 – 00:36:03:08
Jimmy Soni
And not have it ever see the light of day, but producing and then kind of shipping or publishing or exporting or broadcasting or putting your episodes available for download, it puts you in a collision with all of these like, crazily interesting people. Right? And so I do find like that’s a big part of it for me now is I get energy from those people like, listen, I want to, you know, I want to hear what in the book resonated for them.
00:36:03:08 – 00:36:04:46
Jimmy Soni
I’m sure your podcast is similar.
00:36:04:51 – 00:36:36:28
Agent Palmer
I it is, but for me, I find it on a more happenstance for the content creation part I, I use Twitter and the random algorithm of it, I guess as a way to, get guests that, have either never been on a show before or who I’m just meeting or seeing in the ether for the first time, and it’s like, oh, well, you know, because, you know, there’s occasions where, you know, after a recording somebody would be like, so that was fun.
00:36:36:28 – 00:36:57:27
Agent Palmer
But like, why did why me? And I’ll be like, oh, well, I just saw a tweet and I thought I’d ask, right. Like, it’s that simple. And if I wasn’t looking at Twitter or they hadn’t tweeted the thing or didn’t come into my algorithm or whatever, I never would asked them. And so now I have these relationships that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, and it’s just like, oh, but I took the chance.
00:36:57:27 – 00:37:16:18
Agent Palmer
And I was like, yeah, why not? Because I’m not. Yeah, I and I think part of it, I want to help tell a story of some kind, whatever it is. And so I don’t need to get the most famous person and I don’t need to get the no name. And if I get anything in between there, it’s perfect.
00:37:16:18 – 00:37:35:34
Agent Palmer
Like, I’m okay with that. Like, right. As long as you can talk to me, we’re good, like we’re golden. So I’ve had a lot of people on my show that I’ve been their first podcast. I may be their only podcast, right? Because nobody else, you know, it’s just a random person on the internet that’s like, I’m interested in your story.
00:37:35:34 – 00:37:58:53
Agent Palmer
Would you come over on my show and talk about it like, and it’s just that simple where it’s like, yeah, I mean, look, I still like hearing from my audience, but for me, it’s it’s that extra piece of like, I just gave this person a platform. They never had one before. And. Right. And I like I know going in, I have to do a lot more legwork if you’re not.
00:37:58:53 – 00:38:16:12
Agent Palmer
Yeah. You you you’ve spoken. You’ve been a speaker. It’s not necessarily part of being an author. But now I think it, it, it kind of cards part and parcel. But I’ve had people that I know were uncomfortable like they were they were happy for the opportunity, but they were like, I don’t what am I doing here?
00:38:16:12 – 00:38:16:59
Jimmy Soni
Like, you write.
00:38:17:03 – 00:38:17:22
Agent Palmer
And.
00:38:17:30 – 00:38:18:18
Jimmy Soni
That’s great.
00:38:18:18 – 00:38:51:18
Agent Palmer
I don’t mind that. Like, I know it’s more work on my behalf. Like I have to carry the conversation a little bit more. They’re less likely to say, okay, and what about you? Right. Like it’s just it, but at the same time, like, I’m okay with it and it kind of adds to it’s something else. Right. And I yeah, I got that from I got that from Marc Maron because one of the things I noticed was the he always has a fairly elevated celebrity status on his show, right?
00:38:51:18 – 00:39:14:51
Agent Palmer
Whether it’s in art or music or, you know, right. Anything like most of those people have done something right. But what I learned was as a listener, I learned more from the people who I didn’t know beforehand. Right. Like, yeah, okay. Like I’m really excited because he has like so and so on and I know them like he had slash on and I was a big guns and roses fan like growing up.
00:39:14:51 – 00:39:33:23
Agent Palmer
Right. Like that’s cool. But he had a no name blues guitarist all. And that I learned more from because I yeah know them I didn’t know their stuff like that. And so for me it’s all about like, well, how can I do that on a smaller level? Like, yeah, giving people a platform that wouldn’t otherwise have a platform.
00:39:33:28 – 00:39:36:39
Agent Palmer
And yeah, I’m going to learn something. I mean, that’s the other thing is.
00:39:36:44 – 00:39:44:57
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, that’s true. We do get we get we get the benefit of like actually learning. The part of it sort of fires all that, the dopamine receptors in the brain.
00:39:45:00 – 00:40:09:55
Agent Palmer
It really does. And so like I, I enjoy that part of it too. But yeah, but I will say like I’m, I try not to have the same conversation all the time as well. And so it’s a, it’s there’s a balance there. I can’t just, you know, because when I was first starting this show, the blog had existed and I had people that were like, why don’t you just talk to authors?
00:40:10:00 – 00:40:33:12
Agent Palmer
Because in my circle, I’m one of the few people that are reviewing books, like, right? I’m not I’m not the only reader, but there aren’t a lot of people that are like taking the time to read a book and then actually write about it. And I was like, look, I will have authors on my show. Like, I want to be able to give them a platform, but I’m not just going to talk to authors.
00:40:33:17 – 00:40:33:48
Jimmy Soni
Authors.
00:40:33:51 – 00:40:45:27
Agent Palmer
Because I don’t want to get into a habit where I’m like, okay, well, I mean, I do ask every author, like, why do you do it? Because to me, yeah, it’s not an easy road. Like, I feel like.
00:40:45:29 – 00:40:45:53
Jimmy Soni
It’s.
00:40:45:58 – 00:41:07:13
Agent Palmer
More than almost any other profession. It’s the one that’s the most amount of work for the most amount of chaos is what I’ll call it. Because maybe the book will be great. Maybe it won’t. Maybe you’ll get a second chance. Will the second chance work like there’s so many X factors in it? I don’t know, like I, I like I, I’m the master of my own domain.
00:41:07:13 – 00:41:37:04
Agent Palmer
Like I hit publish and I pay the bills for the hosting of the blog and the podcast. I don’t have to worry about a bad show or a bad blog like I do, because I want my standards to be high and I always want to make it like, accessible. And you know, either educational, entertaining, or informational. But you have a little bit more writing on it, like the next one is very much potentially hanging on this one, right?
00:41:37:18 – 00:42:07:56
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, I yes, yes. And, I mean, you say that I’m like, maybe I should give up, but your podcast. Yeah, but but but I know I would say yes. And also, you know, I think that there are it’s interesting to like, think about that, that there’s so much riding on it. I think that what in my case, I feel that there’s a lot riding on, like an individual project as a self-contained thing.
00:42:07:56 – 00:42:25:50
Jimmy Soni
Okay. Meaning I do feel the risk and I’m like, I like putting this thing out in the world. What if I got something wrong? All that stuff I’m not necessarily thinking about, like how one will affect the other. Okay. I think that’s partly because of just what I do is not like, you know, I’m not doing sequels of my book over and over and over again.
00:42:25:50 – 00:42:51:49
Jimmy Soni
I wrote about Cato the Younger. I wrote about called Jen. I wrote about, you know, Silicon Valley. And so I have this the advantage I have is I get to pick the next thing that I’m interested in and then apply this same template, meaning that the template of just like ridiculous amounts of hard work and like a lot of obsession for a number of years, and I don’t see the success or failure of one book as necessarily influencing the next.
00:42:51:50 – 00:43:10:31
Jimmy Soni
Okay. It shapes how I approach it. There are things that I did during the writing of PayPal that I learned while writing. The founders, and I’ll apply that to other things, but I’m not. I don’t feel the weightiness of and I think I may have earlier in my career, but I don’t feel the weight of like, oh, it’s all, you know, it’s all or nothing.
00:43:10:31 – 00:43:32:10
Jimmy Soni
With this book, I will. I will agree, though, that you’re right. It’s a little bit nuts, like the years of investment into something where you don’t publish any of it before it comes out, and then you put it out and it like, has to work. It’s like you’re doing like avatar, right? But without James Cameron’s, like prior successes or, you know, and that that is a little scary.
00:43:32:14 – 00:43:36:55
Jimmy Soni
But it’s why you have friends and readers and free readers and editors and all that stuff. I mean, now.
00:43:36:55 – 00:43:55:21
Agent Palmer
That you’ve had books come out, does it feel less like, is there less of that now because you are standing on the shoulders of previous books? And it’s like, I did that. I accomplished that, that went over well. And now I’m doing this one. And does that help going forward?
00:43:55:26 – 00:44:12:05
Jimmy Soni
No. Oh, here’s what I would say. It let me let me actually answer the question because I think, you know, particularly people who are listening, who are writers or who are trying to do writing or who want this sort of to want to do this sort of thing. I would say the answer is, is kind of like I’ve to sort of answer in two ways.
00:44:12:10 – 00:44:37:17
Jimmy Soni
No, in the following sense, which is, I now have the obligation of an even higher dive the next time, because the people I wrote about are sufficiently big and interesting and sort of like world historic and so the bar is like elevated now to like, choose an even bigger topic. And you sort of have like the question that keeps running around in my head of like, well, who is like bigger than, you know?
00:44:37:22 – 00:44:59:42
Jimmy Soni
And like, you know, it was like at that same level, you kind of are like, oh, I’ve got to like pick somebody amazing. That’s like the way in which it’s not. But but I will say that the way that it is, is, I feel more confidence as a writer and as a researcher now. I kind of know what the process will be once I’ve chosen my topic and got my publisher on board.
00:44:59:47 – 00:45:19:06
Jimmy Soni
I kind of know what the next, let’s say, like, I don’t know, 5 to 10 years. However long a book takes. I know what that looks like now. I’m not groping in the wilderness anymore. I’m actually like, I know exactly what I would start doing, the websites I’d use, the tools I’d use. I have a system. I have, you know, frameworks, Google Docs and all that stuff.
00:45:19:10 – 00:45:37:44
Jimmy Soni
So the process is easier. But I would actually say that at the front end, the choice of topic and the choice of like commitment and investment is where the hard part is. You, at least for the kind of writing that I do again, it’s this might be very specific to like narrative nonfiction of the variety that I do.
00:45:37:49 – 00:45:59:42
Jimmy Soni
You have to be very careful what you sign up for, because you’re living with it for so long. And so you have to just like, really choose very wisely what you what you end up committing to. And I think that’s the part of it where I’m a little scared. Like, I like kind of need to pick something that will engage readers and engage me and be sufficiently difficult that I feel like I’m not just like climbing the same out.
00:45:59:42 – 00:46:17:48
Jimmy Soni
And again. Right. Like to me, the, the worst thing I could do is like, you know, founders two eBay Strikes back or, you know, like that would be just awful. I want to not become, you know, like it’s a real temptation to just copy yourself over and over again and to, like, do the same thing over and over again.
00:46:17:53 – 00:46:29:05
Jimmy Soni
And I mean, like, you know, like, that’s that’s not the style of work I want to do. I kind of want to just like, blow up the, the, the script a little and like, pick something that nobody expects.
00:46:29:06 – 00:46:45:08
Agent Palmer
Well, here’s the question. How much time did you give yourself between the Claude Shannon book and founders? And I mean, as we stand right now, you know, founders came out this year. So how much time are you going to give yourself for the next? I mean, that’s two questions, but still like, yeah.
00:46:45:13 – 00:47:05:42
Jimmy Soni
No, I’d have to I’d have to look back. But I think it was like a good six months to a year. I mean, it might have been even longer than that. And I, I was it wasn’t as long as it should have been, but it was enough time to get me to, like, walk away from Shannon a bit and, like, kind of give, give myself some breathing room before I said the next one.
00:47:05:47 – 00:47:21:22
Jimmy Soni
But the the question of, there’s this period. So here’s like a lot of authors would say, it’s like there’s a period right after the book launch where you basically hate the book and you hate all things related to books in general. So you go through this like 3 to 5 months of like, I’m never doing a book again.
00:47:21:23 – 00:47:31:28
Jimmy Soni
Like, like if you if we done this interview in March of 2022 and you’re like, oh, what are you working on next? Like anything but books, I’m never doing a book again. Not going to happen. It’s too much for all the reasons you said.
00:47:31:29 – 00:47:51:49
Agent Palmer
No, I don’t look. So here’s the thing, right? I’m helping a friend with a documentary. A full length documentary. And I was talking to a friend of mine, and he goes, how’s it going? I was like, hey, it’s going well. Like, you know, because of the podcast, I was able to help make some movie. Like who? Who thought I could do that right?
00:47:51:49 – 00:48:11:37
Agent Palmer
And I helped produce it by, you know, helping produce shows and this, that. And the other thing is he goes, so would you do it again? And I was like, I don’t know, like the it’s twofold, right. Like one I now know, like when we first got into it, we, we, we just said yes. Like we maybe we can maybe you don’t know what you’ve got now.
00:48:11:43 – 00:48:29:28
Agent Palmer
Right? Because I know what, what what it entails. Maybe I’d say no. Right. Like. Yeah. And and that’s I feel like you have to deal with that in between every book because every book’s different. But you’re also like, well, I learned a whole lot, but I know you wouldn’t. Yeah.
00:48:29:33 – 00:48:43:04
Jimmy Soni
I know what it takes. And the thing the thing about it is that, you know, like you do, we’re we’re getting into some pretty, like, deep, like existential and or, like, therapy type stuff. Right. But it makes it more fun.
00:48:43:09 – 00:48:46:24
Agent Palmer
So that’s all I create. That’s the creative process by.
00:48:46:32 – 00:49:09:18
Jimmy Soni
Yeah. But if you can imagine like it’s like one of these like and again I’m not I’m not prescribing this anybody but like you know you can imagine like waking up at 4:00 in the morning on like a Christmas morning and getting to work on the book before your kid wakes up so that you can get the work done that day and then going back to it like later.
00:49:09:22 – 00:49:28:48
Jimmy Soni
You know, that was my life for a number of years. And I’m not it’s not it’s not a complaint. It’s not like a woe is me. Yeah, that was just what my process was for this specific book. But I don’t think that given that I know that that’s the way it’s going to be, that you can never, once you’re in it, actually divorce yourself from it.
00:49:28:53 – 00:49:46:23
Jimmy Soni
I am very careful, especially at this stage, to say I’m going to be choosy about what comes next, because I’m not going to I’m not farming it out. I’m not outsourcing my research. I’m not like using a team of fake writers, you know, or like writers to like and putting my name. I’m not I’m not a brand. I’m not like my name.
00:49:46:23 – 00:49:59:24
Jimmy Soni
But it’s like if I drop three other people wrote the book, it is. I know what it requires. And so I’m very careful about it for the same reason it sounds like read the documentary. You’re like, I know what this takes, and I’m not going to, like, say yes to any project that comes along.
00:49:59:24 – 00:50:27:14
Agent Palmer
Yeah, I it’s it’s weird because in the creative space, people are going to be like, well, you should be creating something. And so yeah, that’s fine. But I mean, you know, given your skill set, you could, jump into the newsletter space, which I know you’ve dabbled in. You could jump into the blog space. You could probably. I mean, you’ve been you’ve done the speaking circuit so you could do the part, like there are any number of other avenues if you, if you so want them.
00:50:27:14 – 00:50:45:59
Agent Palmer
Right. And yeah, it also leads me to this, which is a dangerous question, but like how much of this stuff do you have to do? Like, I know you don’t have to do my show, but you still have to do press when a book comes out. And, so when a book comes out, you do all that stuff and, and you’ve been through the, I guess.
00:50:46:03 – 00:50:57:15
Agent Palmer
Well, I get can I say like, you’ve been through the wringer twice, you’ve had a book published and you’ve done all the press. Do you enjoy that part of it, or is it like, did you adjust to it?
00:50:57:19 – 00:51:19:03
Jimmy Soni
No, I, I will say I love it. I love it more when it’s conversations like this. I write like five minutes, which is like the greatest hits and the goofiest stories. Is not that fun, right? It’s just not because you’re not. Nobody’s I’m there and you’re sort of a circus performer, right? Like, oh, look, the bear is going to stand up and juggle or whatever.
00:51:19:07 – 00:51:21:53
Agent Palmer
This is the least funny the first time that.
00:51:21:58 – 00:51:45:11
Jimmy Soni
It is fun, the first time there’s like, anything is on the person, but then you sort of realize what role you’re playing, but an hour and change on the creative process with somebody who’s also going through the creative process where we’re talking about not just like, you know, the juiciest bits of the book, but where we’re actually talking about the struggle to create something new in the face of your own desire to just consume.
00:51:45:24 – 00:52:07:22
Jimmy Soni
And then how you manage that. This is this is fun. This is and it’s, it’s, you know, sort of it’s like elliptically about the book, but it’s not really about the book. Yeah, right. I like if people get excited and I’m sure you this is your view, if people get excited about your work and they want to talk to you about how you do your work, it’s a very fun thing to talk about.
00:52:07:27 – 00:52:30:26
Jimmy Soni
But that’s not the nature of all press that is associated around a book. And so I would say, like I met, I really like it. But I think the other thing that people underestimate is that the most work you do in marketing, almost any product is in like the actual product design and development and creation. Meaning like word of mouth is a driver of my sales more than anything else.
00:52:30:26 – 00:52:54:11
Jimmy Soni
Like, sure, I can do podcasts and I like them, and I can do Q and A’s and all the all the rest. But ultimately, like part of what’s driven the success of at least the founders and I would say to some degree, Claude Shannon is fans of those topics, recommended the book to other fans of those topics. And I need to do some pushing, you know, to get that first little bit of like, the wheel turning, like you have to overcome that first hurdle.
00:52:54:12 – 00:53:14:06
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, but the work really happens in the years when you’re just struggling to make sure stuff jumps off the page or like, sounds right in the ear. In your case, though, that’s the marketing. Like the marketing is the actual creation of the product, which like I think some people might sound like a cliche, but it is actually one of those cliches that is true, right?
00:53:14:15 – 00:53:32:32
Jimmy Soni
It is. It is the reason that certain companies spend nothing on advertising and others have to spend tens of millions. Right? It is genuinely the case that great products take on a virality of their own, with a little bit of effort. Right. And it doesn’t mean you can be foolish, like you can’t wall yourself off from I’m not going to do any press.
00:53:32:32 – 00:53:49:28
Jimmy Soni
I’m going to be so good. Everyone’s going to know that’s like, that’s that’s the other extreme. Yeah. But I would say that part of what’s been nice is that I think very smart people like yourself have like, read these books, enjoyed them and recommended them to other people. And you’re not doing it because I’m shilling or paying you or any of that.
00:53:49:28 – 00:54:10:20
Jimmy Soni
It’s just you happen to really like the subject. I do think that it’s one of the things that makes some creative industries, like podcasting and books, a little different from others, which is, they’re kind of bathed in generosity. Right? There’s actually like a very generous spirit within the domains that you and I are in. Meaning most people are willing to help other people out along the way.
00:54:10:34 – 00:54:26:18
Jimmy Soni
Right? So I and I don’t know if all authors in this way, but most would be most authors I meet who are older than me will take time to mentor me and help me out, right? We don’t call it mentorship. There’s no contract. Well, Walter Isaacson will take time to, like, answer emails, talk to me about end notes, walk me through what he did with Steve Jobs.
00:54:26:29 – 00:54:34:45
Jimmy Soni
Right. In the same way, I try to make sure that I do that for authors who are kind of on the on the come up, I imagine podcasting is pretty similar. I have.
00:54:34:50 – 00:54:58:17
Agent Palmer
A mentor. I guess you would say I, I email him maybe once a year and I don’t use his name and I’ll never invite him on the show, even though he’s a fairly big name. And that’s because I, I want to keep that with me almost. Right. Like I can’t I and I’m not saying they wouldn’t come on the show I, I’m, I, I’ve just never going to ask because I want to keep it that way.
00:54:58:17 – 00:55:24:39
Agent Palmer
And I’m always here like I’ve taken calls, that are just like people that are curious and helped other people out. And I think that I think it’s the creative space in general. I mean, podcasts and book is one thing I think. I think too, you know, I started watching Twitch and people playing video games, they’re always getting bombarded in chat with like, how do you do this?
00:55:24:39 – 00:55:43:35
Agent Palmer
And they always tell. They always answer the question, yeah, which I, I enjoy. Do they answer the questions I want to hear? No, probably not because I’m not I’m not interested in starting up. I’m interested in why you’re doing this. And it’s not something else, but I yeah.
00:55:43:39 – 00:56:00:35
Jimmy Soni
I think meaning you know, what I mean to say is like there’s less there’s less like, preciousness about sharing ideas and process in our industries than in some others. I never feel like anything I do is a state secret. People like, how do you write a book? I’m like, get excited about something. Wake up every day, feel miserable for a few hours.
00:56:00:35 – 00:56:22:52
Jimmy Soni
Do that seven days a week, five years. You have a book like, you know, and not everybody necessarily wants to do that. I mean, I don’t know how many people would want to, like, read all the emails from the year 2000 on Thanksgiving. It’s not that enjoyable for some people. Meaning it doesn’t feel like there’s like some great secrets that you and I are keeping from other people, that there’s enough for me and fire to go around.
00:56:22:53 – 00:56:44:53
Agent Palmer
I yeah, no, you’re right. I think it. What’s the cliche like? Oh, you got lucky. Well, I worked really hard to get lucky. Right. Like. And that’s that thing where it’s like, No, like, that’s not, Yeah. It was hard. Like, I put myself in that position. Like, if I didn’t work hard, if I didn’t, you know, you know, do the editing.
00:56:44:53 – 00:57:04:28
Agent Palmer
Like, who writes? No, I edit like, you don’t have to, you know, or like, when I write the blog, I’m throwing it to another friend for just another pair of eyes, which is, yeah, I feel like it’s important to at least hold myself to a standard, right? Like, yeah, there’s a lot of work to get lucky and to be found.
00:57:04:33 – 00:57:25:56
Jimmy Soni
Right? But, you know, to be fair to we’re not we’re sort of like we did the drudgery part of it. It’s also a ton of fun. Like it’s it is the opportunity to, like, make. I mean, if anybody listening is thinking about diving headlong into some element of their creativity and they haven’t necessarily taking the plunge for whatever reason.
00:57:26:00 – 00:57:46:39
Jimmy Soni
So the thing I can tell you is it’s like it’s life changing. Once you do it, you become a different person on the other side of a creative project, no matter how small it is and the actual thing that you’re doing that I’ve have in my head, the visuals always relate to the way I think about it is always like the creative project pulls you along as much as you’re pushing it along.
00:57:46:39 – 00:58:06:57
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, right. And so something will happen where you put this thing in the world and you push to make it happen. But it’s also kind of like pulling you in the direction of making you a new person. Right. And and I don’t, I don’t quite have like the, you know, probably the brainpower at this hour to like really drill down to what that is.
00:58:07:02 – 00:58:29:52
Jimmy Soni
But I think it’s like one of the most powerful parts of creativity is that you’re so shaped by the things you make, and that’s really cool. Meaning for anybody particular, I would say younger people who are like listening. There is real value in like allowing yourself to be shaped by these projects. I built a whole new discipline, in my life just around doing this book.
00:58:29:58 – 00:58:46:21
Jimmy Soni
Now, could I have done that without the book? Yeah, sure. But, like, did it help that I had a deadline, a contract, readers, I, you know, stuff. Certainly. And I went from, you know, it’s like sort of like you learn to wake up at 4:00 in the morning, like you learn to do all of these things. You learn that order.
00:58:46:23 – 00:59:07:11
Jimmy Soni
AI is a really good transcription service that doesn’t cost as much as some of the others. Right? You learn that Google Sheets and Google Docs can be your friend and take away some of the anxiety about losing data. You learn that Scrivener is like a fantastic system for creating raw material for books. These are all things that you get to learn along the way, and it ends up being a ton of fun.
00:59:07:22 – 00:59:23:26
Jimmy Soni
So I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all sort of doom and gloom. There’s a lot of upside and you become a different person, which is a really cool thing.
00:59:23:31 – 00:59:45:17
Agent Palmer
Content creators, which at this point includes everyone releasing something into the world for others to consume via video, audio, image, text, or any combination thereof are more and more relying on each other for assistance. Tips for marketing, help with planning, a shoulder to cry on, and people to celebrate with sheer. Each content creator has their own community. This show has listeners.
00:59:45:17 – 01:00:11:05
Agent Palmer
Jimmy’s books have readers, but we look to each other because there is an inherent understanding. We both hit publish just in different ways and at varying frequencies. But as you just heard, the similarities in our processes are only differentiated because of how often we start and finish projects. And we aren’t alone. There are fellow podcasters I know, other authors and content creators whom I enjoy following that also have their own creator communities.
01:00:11:10 – 01:00:28:33
Agent Palmer
Well, many of us work solo or solo ish, meaning there could be some helpers. A lot of the work comes down to us, and we can all relate to that. With the added benefit that we’ve all accepted somewhat public roles for our creations. And that means there is an expectation of content that we can also share with others.
01:00:28:44 – 01:00:52:00
Agent Palmer
But no matter what, we’re creating things for your enjoyment, but also for ourselves too. Very few people get into creation for the sake of everyone else that other people enjoy it or want to consume. It is usually a wonderful byproduct. And another wonderful byproduct is that, as Jimmy stated, we are shaped as much by the things we make as they are by us.
01:00:52:05 – 01:01:13:41
Agent Palmer
An example of this would be this podcast, specifically how my answer to why do you do this has evolved over the course of the episodes that you’ve heard it asked. I would guess I’ve answered the question at least 5 or 6 times during the course of this show so far, and I know that my answer has evolved because I have those of you who have been around since the beginning probably already know that.
01:01:13:50 – 01:01:34:35
Agent Palmer
But for those of you that haven’t, just know that if you keep listening, I’m sure you’ll hear that evolution too. So go on and do the thing. Start that book, podcast, painting, comic, or whatever it is you want to create, and remember that who you are at the start is in who you will be when you finish. Thanks for listening to The Palmer Files episode 82.
01:01:34:49 – 01:01:55:00
Agent Palmer
As a reminder, all links are available in the show notes. And now for the official business. The Palmer Files releases every two weeks on Tuesdays. If you’re still listening, I encourage you to join the discussion. You can tweet me at Agent Palmer, my guest, Jimmy Soni at Jimmy A Soni. That’s Jimmy a show and I and this show at the Palmer Files.
01:01:55:05 – 01:02:25:45
Agent Palmer
You can find more information about Jimmy at Jimmy soni.com that show and I where you can also find links to his published works and see his essays and some of his talks. Email can be sent to this show at the Palmer Files at gmail.com. And remember, you’re home for all things Agent Palmer, including reviews of Jimmy’s books. Is Agent palmer.com?
01:02:25:50 – 01:02:33:39
Unknown
You.
01:02:33:44 – 01:02:42:12
Unknown
See?
01:02:42:17 – 01:02:52:41
Unknown
Me.
01:02:52:46 – 01:03:02:04
Unknown
On.
01:03:02:09 – 01:03:04:27
Agent Palmer
All right. Jimmy, do you have one final question for me?
01:03:04:29 – 01:03:23:53
Jimmy Soni
Yeah, let’s let’s try. Let’s try this one on for size. And you can not. We can not go down this road if you don’t want to go down the road. But one of the things that that I and many of the people I know who are creative struggle with is like anxiety about the creative process, about the, the, the, the outputs, about being criticized.
01:03:23:53 – 01:03:34:57
Jimmy Soni
Just anxiety as a big, scary, hairy ball of stuff. Yeah. And I’m curious what tools or techniques, if any, you use to manage that for yourself.
01:03:35:02 – 01:04:02:20
Agent Palmer
I suffer from what I would call social anxiety to begin with, which is completely and utterly unrelated to the creative problem. I think. I think to answer the question, I have to go. Back in high school, I was creative person, right? I was writing poetry of a few short stories, and in college I wrote for the school paper and, you know, kind of got out there, right?
01:04:02:20 – 01:04:26:54
Agent Palmer
And you did a few social things, student government and all that stuff. And then I was working in retail, for like seven years and after a post college and that at that time, somewhere in there is when something snapped and I became riddled with anxiety first socially. Right. And I worked through it. And I don’t take any medication.
01:04:26:54 – 01:04:48:22
Agent Palmer
I don’t look, I don’t necessarily think it’s the greatest idea that I don’t take medication, but it’s my process, right? Like how I work through it. And so everything else is super easy by comparison, right? Like if I put out a blog post and somebody’s like, oh, you misspelled something, right? All right, well, you read it and I’ll change it, like, that’s fine.
01:04:48:27 – 01:05:13:36
Agent Palmer
You know, you got something wrong in your podcast. All right, well, I can’t I can’t change that. But, you know, I, you know, thanks for listening. Right. And I think that part of it is because of the social anxiety. The other stuff is, so small it’s to be insignificant. However, however, I will say it wasn’t always like that.
01:05:13:50 – 01:05:41:16
Agent Palmer
I think. Yeah, I think that’s me answering this question in 2022, where the blog is ten years old and the podcast is over two, maybe three years old, I don’t I don’t pay attention anymore. Probably it’s probably three. But I guess the question, the answer is ten years ago or 11 or 12 years ago when I started the blog, published might have been a little bit more anxiety ridden, even given all the other social stuff, because I’m putting something out into the world, right?
01:05:41:16 – 01:05:54:27
Agent Palmer
When you when you have a blog for more than a decade and you’ve hit publish more or less every Thursday for that entire decade, the anxiety starts to go away because you’re so used to putting something out there into the world.
01:05:54:32 – 01:05:55:01
Jimmy Soni
Right?
01:05:55:03 – 01:06:20:05
Agent Palmer
And so any feedback, I’m just thank you for like because because I, you know, I’m both of these things are passion projects right. Yeah. So it’s it’s just a thrill that somebody took the time. Right. Right. And it doesn’t matter if you’re my best friend or my father or a stranger, you took the time to listen or you took the time to read.
01:06:20:10 – 01:06:42:28
Agent Palmer
And so in that regard, the anxiety’s a lot less, also for better or worse. And I do have a, I guess, what you would call a team of editors, right? I have a bunch of friends who I throw drafts to before I hit publish, just so somebody else can see it. But it still all lies with me, right?
01:06:42:28 – 01:07:13:31
Agent Palmer
So I’m. I don’t have a team. If I feel comfortable enough to hit publish on anything, it’s met my standard. Right. And I know, obviously, we’re all human. Nothing’s 100% going to be perfect all the time, especially when you do it weekly for more than a decade. Right? Like, of course I got some stuff wrong. And of course, there’s still misspellings and, you know, but the other part of it is, and this is the important piece, you could still read my first blog post.
01:07:13:36 – 01:07:34:45
Agent Palmer
I’ve grown. I don’t take that shit down like that stuff out there. And it’s also for me, you know, a couple years ago when I had the the ten year when I wrote about the ten year, the decade. Yeah. It was literally like an offhand comment to my main editor. Chris was one of my best friends.
01:07:34:45 – 01:07:49:16
Agent Palmer
He’s my main editor. He edits most of my stuff, and I was like, you know, ten years is coming up, but I don’t know if I’m going to write about it. And he’s like, I will come because he lives only he lives about 90 minutes away. It’s a drive, it’s a haul. But like, he’s like, I will come down there and punch you.
01:07:49:16 – 01:08:11:31
Agent Palmer
You’re, you’re gonna you’re gonna write about this, right? And so. Right. I think there’s also a part of it where it’s like, you look back, you know, I yeah, I did a special thing for 300 posts. Why 300? Why not? Because I missed 250 and I didn’t. Yeah, whatever. But, like, you don’t pay attention to milestones until they’re there.
01:08:11:35 – 01:08:12:21
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
01:08:12:26 – 01:08:32:59
Agent Palmer
And I’m not a big anniversary or celebration guy to begin with. Just in general, because I’m always on to the next thing. I don’t want to wait. Yeah. So I’ve taken the time occasionally, and I look back and I see, you know, maybe the word counts gone up and then gone down and then got back up and then gone down like average.
01:08:32:59 – 01:08:53:38
Agent Palmer
And, you know, or I, you know, I wrote a lot about, you know, there were a lot of music reviews and there were a lot of books. Was there a lot of movie? And now it’s kind of balanced out or whatever, like it changes and it it’s interesting to follow along, but, you know, if anybody out there who’s just hearing this for the first time wants to go back to my blog, you can see the entire revolution.
01:08:53:38 – 01:09:00:08
Agent Palmer
You can pick random pages from one to whatever. I’m up to now and see, kind of see.
01:09:00:08 – 01:09:00:52
Jimmy Soni
What you’re done.
01:09:00:52 – 01:09:01:42
Agent Palmer
Yeah, it’s.
01:09:01:51 – 01:09:10:47
Jimmy Soni
And that’s great. That’s amazing. I mean, you built sort of a living archive for yourself, right? You sort of without unintentionally wrote your own biography through through it.
01:09:10:58 – 01:09:30:03
Agent Palmer
It’s kind of and I do wonder too, like occasionally I write like quote unquote from the desk of Agent Pulver. Right? In order to just write about something that’s not consumed or not an event or not something that happened, I don’t know. I know there’s like, I’m friends with like, mommy bloggers who what? That’s what they write about.
01:09:30:03 – 01:09:55:54
Agent Palmer
They write about their life. I write about my life maybe twice a year, right? Yeah. So it’s not something I do often, but I think the anxiety for publish diminishes like they’re very much. Is it diminishing returns with how many times you hit the publish button? And yeah, I think that answering the question now, like, yeah, my other anxiety is part of it because it dwarfs anything that the internet can throw at me.
01:09:55:59 – 01:10:12:17
Agent Palmer
You know, when when I get heavy breathing and nausea because I’m in a strange place for the first time, I have to find, you know, I have to do my things to get through that. That’s nothing compared to accidentally hitting publish on something and being like, oh, I didn’t mean to do that yet. Like, let’s bring that back.
01:10:12:17 – 01:10:29:07
Agent Palmer
Let’s put that back in. Yeah. I mean, it’s but at the same time, the first publish book, blog, podcast, it doesn’t matter. The first one that’s nerve wracking. The second one, you’ve been here before. Okay.
01:10:29:07 – 01:10:30:18
Jimmy Soni
You’ve been here before.
01:10:30:23 – 01:10:46:46
Agent Palmer
You know, the third one. The fifth one, the hundredth one. You know it. It’s it’s it’s still nerve wracking, right? Because you’re still putting a piece of yourself out there. Like, I don’t spend years with my projects, but I do spend hours with them, which I guess would be the equivalent.
01:10:46:46 – 01:10:49:57
Jimmy Soni
Of adds up. Yeah. So that’s the same thing. Same muscle.
01:10:50:08 – 01:11:13:25
Agent Palmer
Yeah. And so yeah, there’s a there’s a part of it that’s like, oh man. Like I’m still do it. That’s the other thing. Like I’m still doing this. Yeah. And I’m still, you know, I still get nervous before every podcast. I don’t get nervous hitting, publish on the blog anymore. But the nerves before I’ll, you know, this is live to tape basically.
01:11:13:25 – 01:11:32:20
Agent Palmer
Right. But the nerves tell me I should still be doing this. Like, the day is great. The day I get on mic and I’m not nervous. I feel like that. That’s. That tells you something. And I think you should listen, like, does that mean I need to take time away? Does that mean I need to? I don’t know, I think that’s.
01:11:32:20 – 01:11:34:51
Agent Palmer
Yeah, that’s for ourselves to figure out, but.
01:11:35:00 – 01:11:36:29
Jimmy Soni
Right.
01:11:36:33 – 01:11:55:57
Agent Palmer
You know, I’m, I’m fascinated by process and my process is evolved. It’s not the same. Like, I have one that works, but they all still change, right? And, I mean, I don’t know about your writing process, but I will tell you, like, I’m very. I’ve turned into a strike while the iron is hot kind of a guy.
01:11:56:11 – 01:12:15:32
Agent Palmer
So I could sit down in a weekend and maybe have three good ideas and write to half of them. And then I could go two weeks where it’s like, I have to write something. What’s it going to be? Yeah, I don’t have that inspiration. But you get me that first line and I’m gone. Yeah, I just need I just need the line, right.
01:12:15:36 – 01:12:26:52
Jimmy Soni
That’s amazing. That was an amazing I’m so glad we went down that right. I was like the best I mean yeah well and it can cut out by a piece of praise after. But that was amazing. No.
01:12:26:52 – 01:12:52:26
Agent Palmer
Well I could keep it in because I’ll tell you this. I get questions about the creative process often enough that just like going back and reading my first blog, listen to. I mean, I would like you to listen to all of my notes, but if people ask you about the creative process all the time, especially in the one final question, and I, I always have a different answer because I’m always in a different place after.
01:12:52:26 – 01:12:53:10
Jimmy Soni
Years of life.
01:12:53:15 – 01:13:09:14
Agent Palmer
So like my answers evolved. And if we have this conversation again in a year, which was like, yeah, we should, it’ll change and I, I right, I think it’s, it’s part of what you were talking about where like the doing the project changes you.
01:13:09:19 – 01:13:09:40
Jimmy Soni
Yeah.
01:13:09:40 – 01:13:20:44
Agent Palmer
Well continuing the project also, it doesn’t have to just be like one static project, like a dynamic or an ongoing project will also change you. So that’s true.
01:13:20:49 – 01:13:21:18
Jimmy Soni
That’s true.
01:13:21:18 – 01:13:35:47
Agent Palmer
Yeah. And I don’t I also don’t know to what end, which I guess is a right. It’s it’s a massive plus because I don’t know where I’m going, but I also don’t have an end. So I it yeah. I don’t know.
01:13:35:52 – 01:13:48:58
Jimmy Soni
That might be a good thing. The end is, is it’s help. I mean it’s the, you know, the sort of that that’s it’s not a bad thing to not have an end. It means that your reasons for doing it, the consistency, it has a lot of integrity that way.
01:13:49:03 – 01:13:54:42
Agent Palmer
I yeah. And for right now I’ll, I’ll just keep on keeping on.
01:13:54:47 – 01:13:56:06
Jimmy Soni
But I you know and that’s great.
–End Transcription–
This transcription was processed by PalmerTech 3.1 and may contain errors for HUMINT (human intelligence).