The Most Important Skill To Learn In The Next 10 Years With Devon Eriksen

I just finished a conversation with Devin Ericson, who recently blew up on Twitter and social media with his harsh truths and deeply articulate insights. He is also the author of a new science fiction book titled *Theft of Fire*, and this is the first fiction book that I've read in almost 10 years. I think that is a testament to the quality of this conversation as a whole.

I came across Devin after Naval Ravikant reposted one of his tweets, and I was instantly hooked. I followed him and continued reading his content, and it was incredible. He was saying the things that I knew deep down but did not know how to articulate. Naturally, I instantly bought his book, burned through it, and now we're here.

In this conversation, we talk about how to future-proof yourself going into the age of AI, what's wrong with the current school system, and how people learn skills as a whole. We discuss why agency is the most important trait you can develop to become free, why intelligence is not a good predictor of overall success, how to find direction in life and remove dangerous self-limiting beliefs, how Devin left his career as a software engineer, built an audience, and became an independent author and creator, and much more.

I hope that you enjoy this conversation with Devin Erikson.

I want to start with that very first post of yours that I came across. It was you responding to Yuval Noah Harari, like a clip of him saying that nobody knows what to learn because nobody knows what will be relevant 20 years from now. You started it with, "That's because this dude doesn't know what education is." That caught my attention immediately.

You went on to say, "In my opinion, the Seven Liberal Arts of the modern world are:

- Logic: how to derive truth from known facts

- Statistics: how to understand the implications of data

- Rhetoric: how to persuade and spot persuasion tactics

- Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject

- Practical psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others

- Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets

- Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to pursue it."

This will set us up for the entire podcast, so I want to start with this question: What do you find wrong with the current education system, and why are we not teaching what you call these liberating arts?

Well, the root cause of what is wrong with the education system is that a third party is paying for it. We could go on all day sort of nitpicking the symptoms, but that is the disease. When something is being paid for, the person who pays for it is the customer, and it is the customer who gets served.

So when you don't pay for your education, when the government pays for your education through money that it has taken from other people, then the government decides on some level what you are going to learn. You do not have so much as a veto power because if you pack your bags and go somewhere else to some other college, you're getting the same thing because the government is paying for that either through these kinds of education grants or through the Stafford Loan program. You're not writing the checks, so you don't decide the curriculum.

When somebody else decides the curriculum that you are going to be educated from, then they are going to give you the education that is going to make you useful to them, not specifically the education that is going to make you useful to you. This is something that Cicero talked about when he discussed education, and I would highly recommend giving those bits of his writings a read because we don't really have an organized version of what Cicero would have considered education.

What we call education today is mostly actually training, and that is the kind of education that in Rome would have been given to slaves. A slave is essentially a human machine; he is property. He is going to spend his whole life doing one task, so you give him job training. Job training is not education; it is preparation to do a specific task.

In that era of history, if someone was a free man, a Roman citizen with the full rights thereof, who could carry weapons and do all the things that Roman citizens could do, it was expected that he would probably need to be able to do many different things in his life because he would be acting in his own interest. He was not a slave; he did not exist to serve someone else; he existed to benefit his society but also to serve himself, and hopefully, the two would align.

So that meant that you couldn't teach him everything he might need to know because you had no idea what he might need to know. He had no idea what he might need to know, so you taught him how to train himself. You taught him how to learn. Education is not about how to do a task; it's about how to learn a task.

We do not have systematic education in this society, in the modern West, about how to learn and educate yourself because the people who are determining what goes into education are really more focused on, "Okay, what's going to make this person a useful worker for the moneyed interests that I actually serve?"

Exactly. Beautiful. With that, it seems like agency is a massive part of that equation. The last art, so to say, could be the glue between it all. So in your eyes, what is agency, and what is the importance of it in this context?

Agency is really sort of the one most rare factor that determines highly successful people in life. If we look at someone like Elon Musk, we can say, "Oh, he's very smart," and clearly he is; his IQ is probably 150 plus. But there are lots of people banging around with 150 plus IQs—thousands upon thousands of them in the United States alone—and a lot of them are cloistered in academia. They come up with these sort of postmodernist papers, or maybe they're doing something slightly more useful like physics, but they don't get this magical effect where everything they touch turns to gold.

That's because the bottleneck is not intelligence. Intelligence is only one of the things that is needed for success. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient, and intelligence is a very narrow thing.

What agency is, is it is the tendency to initiate action to achieve your goals. We don't solve the world with intelligence. We don't look at the world and think very smart thoughts and, "Oh, I understand everything now." That's not how it works.

When we look at the world and we think very hard, we get a few things right, and we generally get most of it wrong. Then what we do is we try something; we have our guess, we test it. Some of it fails; maybe it succeeds, but usually it fails. We find that guess and try again.

What applying raw intelligence to the universe is missing is that feedback loop. What agency does—what this tendency to initiate action, what the belief that you will eventually be successful, which is what agency is—what it does is it makes us willing to take risks, and it makes us resilient to failure.

Because if you're trying something that really is an achievement worth having, that somebody hasn't done before, the first time you try it, you're going to fail. No matter how smart you are, you're going to get a lot of things wrong. So you have to keep trying again until you eliminate all of the errors from your model or from your plan.

You can't do that with pure intelligence because intelligence is just the ability to analyze. It doesn't give you data; it doesn't tell you what the universe is like. So you have to go over and over and over again, and you have to have this notion. If you're going to do that, if you're going to persist in that, you have to have this notion that, "Gosh, this problem is too hard for me to solve right now, but if I keep at it, I will learn how to solve it, and I will succeed."

Notice that word "learn." You have to teach yourself. Education is teaching yourself how to learn. Then when you go and do a hard task, you have to learn how to do the task. If you don't learn how to learn, then you can only do things that somebody already understands.

Absolutely. So what's special about the Elon Musks of this world is not intelligence; it's intelligence coupled with a very high degree of agency.

Yes, and what that reminds me of specifically with Elon, or people in general who have the thought of achieving a very high goal, but since it seems impossible to them, they just write it off as if they can't do it. Elon, on the other hand, has this massive vision. He knows that it's not possible right now, and it wasn't before, but he built the steps.

This is why I think agency is so important because you can't make yourself more intelligent. Intelligence is biological. I know that in some of your videos you disagree with that, but I want to talk about it. I think you're defining intelligence more broadly than I am. The narrow sort of analytical ability, IQ-type intelligence—you can't increase that. That is determined very early on in your biological development, and it is a physical and chemical feature of the brain. There's not much you can do about that.

But agency is a skill you can learn, and more importantly, you can teach it to your kids. You can raise your kids with the correct attitude that is going to enable them to go out and do cool stuff that is hard and fail and fail and fail and fail until eventually they succeed. So it's about beliefs, and it's about emotional resilience.

Yeah, so for those who haven't watched the video, I tried to paint a connection between Susan Cook's stages of ego development and intelligence with each of those levels. The way that I thought about it in this sense, when I read your article on what is intelligence and you defining it as the ability to tell stories, what that brought to my mind—maybe intelligence wasn't the right word for me to use—but perspective and the ability to collect, integrate, and widen your perspective to notice more opportunities through some kind of skill or self-development.

With that, the way that I think about it with perspective is that it kind of increases your ability to maybe not tell a story but to create a story because you can see further. What do you think about that?

Well, I think that the concept—whether you call it intelligence, defining intelligence broadly, or whether you call it something else—is about effectiveness. The question you're really asking is: What makes an effective human being? A person who can go out and accomplish significant goals that contribute both to his own life and to his entire civilization.

I think we would both agree that IQ is not enough because we are constantly birthing people with high IQs. A lot of the time when you read about somebody who has an IQ of 180 or 200 or something, and we interview them for a magazine or something, you never heard of this guy. Like, who the hell is Chris Lang, and why do I care?

The only reason we really care about intelligence is because it's a component of getting things done. I think what's very important is to realize that there are other components of getting things done that we, as a civilization, could be making a much better effort to teach to people who are born with this high IQ thing instead of just shoving them into government schools and then shoving them into postgraduate education and then saying, "Gosh, why is the only thing that's coming—why does academia produce nothing but criticism of old literature because it was written by dead white males?"

It's because we have confused the condition of necessity with the condition of sufficiency. For this kind of groundbreaking civilization, progress—high IQ is necessary, but it's not sufficient. We are not grooming our high IQ children for success, and that's where what education really is comes in.

Yeah, so in that case, if you want to take a stab at it, or if you have some idea about it, how could education start to shift to shape that? More importantly, you mentioned that one of the most important things you can teach your children is agency. Is that the first step on an individual parental level?

Yes, yes, yes. Because if children have agency, then even if there's something you miss, they can address it themselves as an adult because they believe they can. I like to characterize agency as belief in the existence of hard problems.

What do I mean by that? Well, there are three kinds of problems:

1. Easy: These are the things that we can do the moment we turn our hand to them with the intelligence, the skills, the knowledge, the resources that we already have. If you wanted to go down to the store and buy a carton of milk, that's an easy task. You already know how to do it; you already have the resources; you already have the techniques.

2. Impossible: These are things that you not only can't do with your capabilities and resources, but things that you don't know how to overcome the distance between you and that. There's no meaningful attempt. If I told you to eat a bicycle, you wouldn't try because you know you can't do it. Your teeth don't work that way. I'm not going to be able to hype you up with enough motivational speeches that you can tunnel to Java; you can't dig through the center of the earth. Some tasks are impossible.

3. Hard: The trick is to raise children who believe in this third category of tasks. Those are the tasks where you can't do this right now, but you can learn if you keep trying.

The way that we educate children in government schools erodes this ability because what is the definition of success in a government school? Well, you got an A on the test. That means that you answered all the questions, which were selected for having a difficulty determined by the lowest common denominator, and you didn't make any mistakes.

So if you are raised in this government school environment, and if you are sent to public school in America in your childhood, you spend almost as much waking hours there as with your parents. This really shapes people's personalities. Your definition of success is avoiding failure.

Except in the real world, the real definition of success lies on the other side of a whole lot of failure. So when you create a so-called educational environment that makes children risk-averse, especially when you do it to high IQ children, you are crippling what could be the next generation of hyper-productive people.

Right, so in that case, I'd like to summarize that in my own head as the greatest mistake is no mistake at all. For people that have already gone through this school system, who at least have the curiosity to listen to this and actually be open-minded to it, what is something that they can do or think about to practice this agency, the how to learn?

Well, start thinking about your own emotional makeup. Start thinking and trying to notice ways that you are risk-averse, that you are too afraid to do something where there's something you want that lies on the other side. You can watch a bunch of YouTube shows about success and motivational videos and whatever, but the first thing you have to realize is that belief in your ability to succeed is like a muscle; it has to be trained.

You don't go into the gym and bench 300 on the first day. So what you can do is you can first be aware of this, and you can make a plan to where you can set yourself goals that are achievable—things that you can't do right now, but they're achievable in steps.

Lifting is actually excellent for this. Lifting weights is excellent for this because you go in, and as a beginner, you pile a bunch of weight on the bar, you lift it until you can't lift it anymore, and then the next time you go into the gym, you can put on like three or five more pounds. Like, wow, I got better!

This is not only making you stronger, but it trains you in the belief that if you work at something you can't do now, you will eventually succeed. You have to teach yourself to believe in the possibility of success, and you have to teach yourself not to be ashamed of the distance between who you are and what you can do and who you want to be and what you want to be able to do.

If you are ashamed of that, if you allow yourself to be ashamed, a small amount of it can motivate you, but a lot of it will make you avoid the very kinds of tasks you should be seeking out. In other words, you have to go do something and give yourself permission to suck.

Yeah, give yourself permission to suck at it.

Awesome. Okay, so tying this back around to—I have so much to talk about—but in terms of agency, intelligence, the connections between those, making mistakes, looping back to the original post by Yuval of people not knowing what to learn: Is it possible to know what to learn, or is it just a process of making mistakes until you cultivate enough vision through that to move in your own direction?

Well, I think the further into the future you have to look, the harder it becomes to get everything right. So I might know what I need to learn in the next two months; I might have some idea of what I need to learn in the next two years. I don't have any idea what I'm going to need to learn in the next 20 years. I'm going to find that out as I learn what I need to learn in the next two years.

So if you decide in the beginning, when this child is, you know, 5 years old or whatever, and he's entering kindergarten, "This is what this child needs to learn," no, you're going to get it wrong because the world is going to change. In order to follow a moving target, you have to have a feedback loop.

So what you want to do, the way you want to structure how you learn, is not, "I make the best plan at the outset." No, my plan sucks because I don't know anything yet. I need to get moving; I need to get moving and learn as I go.

What we really need to be cultivating in children and calling it education is the tendency to move and the ability to learn as we move. Yes, the ability to figure it out, get started, do something. Time in the market beats timing the market.

You're not going to get it all right; you're not going to be perfect. You're not going to make a million dollars in your first year as an online content creator. You're not going to be the most popular show on YouTube. You're not going to write a book, no matter how good it is, that sells a million copies in its first year when no one's ever heard of you. You just have to get going; you just have to move forward and make your mistakes and learn as you go, and agency is the willingness to do that.

Beautiful. In *Theft of Fire*, when Marcus is describing the robot guard spiders of Miranda, after being attacked multiple times on the ship, he describes them as—or it may not be them exactly—but the artificial intelligence: the quote is "simple, reactive, predictable artificial stupidity."

How do I set this up with the talk of intelligence and agency and this artificial stupidity and people going through this regimented education system that many could say leads to that definition? What makes us human? What is the thing that, if we're so afraid of this artificial intelligence and what it is right now, how do we make sense of our own place?

Okay, so I think that the reason people are afraid of artificial intelligence right now is they don't really understand what artificial intelligence right now is. We do not have an artificial human; we do not have something that can replace a human or do the things that a human can do because what the defining capability of a human is the ability to look at your environment and say, "I need to learn that," and then go learn that and do it.

We can make an artificial intelligence that can play chess better than us. We can make an artificial intelligence that can draw better than—well, not all of us, but certainly draw better than me; I can't draw. I haven't devoted the time to learn; I had other priorities. But you know, these are task-specific machines, and they're no more a threat to our central humanity than a machine that can lift more than we can is.

I'm sure that a lot of people in the industrial revolution thought, "Oh no, human beings are obsolete because machines can now lift and move more than us." It's not true. What human beings do is navigate their environment and learn things and decide what to learn.

It's that executive function; it's that ability to tell ourselves stories, to look at the universe and say, "All these things I see fit together into a story, and now I'm going to tell myself another story, which is my plan, and I'm going to make my plan happen." Of course, a plan is a list of things that don't happen, but that just means you have to make another plan midway through, and eventually, you hit the moving target if you have your feedback loop running and you can chase it.

When I call these things artificial stupidity, when I call these machines artificial stupidity, they are essentially a robot with a neural net that's been trained on one set of tasks. "Okay, I'm going to protect this person," and there are numerous instances in this story where they do something very counterproductive to Miranda's real goals because they only know how to do this one thing.

They can't think about the broader context of what's going on, and so a real human being is able to outwit them despite the fact that he doesn't have the speed or the strength or the processing speed that they have. Because he's able to understand the broader context that he's operating in.

When you were talking about ego development in this other video, one of the things that jumped out at me is I don't see these as levels you move through; I see them as tools you add to your toolbox. Because even someone on what you would call the highest level of development—your philosopher king or whatever—if you drag him out and you stick his head in the horse trough and you hold him down, he's going to act on ego development level one. "I want air; I'm going to fight you."

That is not a regression or a failure; it's just he's pulling his earliest tool out of the toolbox because that's what's appropriate to the situation. So Marcus, the human, real intelligence versus the robot, the artificial stupidity—Marcus can decide what tools to use based on his understanding of the total context that he's in.

The robots only have the tools that have been provided to them by this neural net training data set, and they're unable to say, "Okay, my whole paradigm no longer applies, so I need to learn to do something totally different." They can't make that jump.

The way this ties back to what we see with artificial intelligence right now is that it is this kind of artificial stupidity, and what it's revealing is our research into artificial intelligence has actually discovered natural stupidity. Because what it's revealed is that a lot of people are only functioning on the level of this chatbot AI. A lot of people are only functioning on the level of ChatGPT, you know, because either because they're dumb or because that's how we've educated them.

Right, interesting connection there. We have created an education system that makes human beings into single-purpose tools, and then we feel threatened when we can build computer single-purpose tools. But human beings did not evolve to be single-purpose tools; we evolved to be navigators of an ever-changing environment, and we need to recapture that ability and rediscover that capacity within ourselves and stop looking to our society and to our so-called leaders for what we're going to do next.

Take responsibility for our own lives: What do I need to learn? What do I need to do? What are my goals? What is important to me? Then we won't feel so threatened by artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence won't do any of that; it can't do any of that.

Yeah, I like the distinction there where humans are natural generalists. They shouldn't be the tool because they build the tools. The cheetah is perfect for its niche, but then you put it in another environment, and it doesn't survive. Same with the polar bear. But the cool thing about being human is that we are in all of the environments because we created the parka or the coat or whatever it may be.

So AI being a tool to help us survive better in some cases, do you see that being used as mainly a tool for the person to get work done more efficiently or just be more productive for the foreseeable future?

Right now, obviously, it is at least theoretically possible to make a software entity that can do the things that humans can do. Because if you were to take a human brain and scan it and simulate the physics of every atom of it in a vast supercomputer the size of a solar system, then this would be able to function like a human brain functions. There's nothing magical about meat.

So I'm not saying that a truly sentient artificial person is not someday possible. What I'm saying is that what we have right now is a tool that does certain types of thinking, like processing, and that's going to be very useful. We could use it, and we can maybe even to some extent integrate with it, where the line between us and the tool starts to blur as we incorporate these capabilities into ourselves technologically, and that's fine.

But what a human being is really for is that executive function: deciding what do I want? What are my goals? What do I wish to achieve? Okay, how can I do that with the tools I have? And if I can't do that with the tools I have, what kind of new tool do I need to create?

When you are able to navigate your life on this level, then ChatGPT doesn't feel like a threat to you. If you are, for example, an artist, you know, people prompting DALL-E through ChatGPT is very threatening to you. "Oh my God, how will I get work? I am an artist, and all these authors are making book covers out of AI art, and they're stealing bread from my mouth, and we need to boycott them and shame them."

The problem you have there is that you have defined yourself as a tool. Don't be a tool. When you say, "I am an artist," that is a self-limiting belief because you have defined yourself in terms of this one capability, and now you are threatened by the existence of a tool that has that same capability because you have reduced yourself to the level of a tool.

Right, I'm noticing in terms of that identification with something that's rather narrow, I'm noticing a few connections here between different worldviews. One thing that I've been most interested in after following you for a good amount of time is just your worldview. I want to talk about anarcho-capitalism after this and give a brief intro to that because I'm a newbie to it.

But before that, in terms of how you make sense of the world, is there any guiding religion, philosophy, or some way of making sense that already has a label, or do you kind of just have your own way of thinking about it?

Well, again, self-limiting beliefs—you have to beware of self-limiting beliefs. I would describe my views as somewhat anarcho-capitalistic, but if I call myself an anarcho-capitalist, you know, I can do it sometimes for convenience. We don't want to fight the great linguistic crusade, but if I do it so consistently within my own head, then I have made my identity, and then I am unable to critically examine anarcho-capitalism and to critique it as a tool and say, "Does this or doesn't this serve my goals right now?"

This is one example. I describe myself a lot as an anarcho-capitalist or a libertarian, and I get other people who describe themselves as libertarians doing the sort of the favorite hobby of libertarians, which is calling other libertarians "not real libertarians."

Because I say, "Well, I would like to see seed oils banned," and they're like, "Right, that is a statist position." No, you have identified with a political philosophy to the point where you are thinking about how to serve the political philosophy, not how to achieve your goals. The political philosophy was made to serve you, not the other way around.

So the reason I describe myself as an anarchist or a libertarian is that I want to see people be free. When I understand that that is my motivating goal—to see people having control over their own destinies—I can say, "Well, you know, does what move in this specific situation allow people more control over their own destinies?"

Which is more important: the freedom to poison people or the freedom to not be poisoned?

Right, I think that's one of the things there where we can go over some of the principles of anarcho-capitalism. But yeah, with that, the nuance here is that the thing that makes a person most free isn't always absolute freedom. It's not; it's having those limitations, like the seed oils as an example. If someone doesn't have the choice or they don't know, then that's not inherently freeing.

Yeah, political philosophies have to be understood as tools, not as goals. We don't do classical liberalism to achieve a classical liberal society. We implement ideas from classical liberalism because it is good for people's quality of life, because it is good for the economic productivity of society as a whole.

But any tool that you have that you're using to do part of a project, you have to know when to set it down and when to pick up another tool. So anytime you say to yourself, "I am an artist, I am an author, I am an anarcho-capitalist, I am a Republican, I am a Democrat, I am a communist, I am white, I am male," all of these things are useful ways to describe yourself, but you have to be careful with them because any of these can become self-limiting.

Even something like "I am male," well, it's a biological fact, but I'm writing the sequel to *Theft of Fire* right now, and Miranda, for part of the book, is a point-of-view character. So now I have to write from the perspective of a woman.

The fact that I am male is the truth, but I have to set that tool down and pick up another tool of, "Oh, this is my mental model of how women work and what it feels like to be one," in order to achieve the task that I want to achieve.

So one of the biggest reasons why people are unwilling to take risks and try new things—one of the biggest things that can be a real risk to someone's agency—are these self-limiting beliefs. "I can't do that; I can't try that because it threatens my sense of identity, my sense of who I am, from where I get my sense of value."

If you're running around saying, "I am an artist, and I am worthwhile because I am a great artist," then you're not only threatened by AI that can draw; you're also threatened by doing things that aren't art because, no, you're an artist. Ultimately, we are not a tool for doing any particular task; we are here to navigate our own lives in a way that makes sense to us.

What it really means to develop as a human being is to have this toolbox, have the ability to expand the toolbox, and be able to express whatever part of our capacity helps us to do what we want.

So when I say, "I am an anarcho-capitalist," that's not about the methods I want to use; it's about my goals. It's about I want to eventually make government obsolete and get rid of it. I know there are certain things we do with government now that we don't know how to do in other ways, so I need to build a new tool, or I need to help my species build a new tool.

We don't have all the tools yet; it's a long-term goal; it's a hard problem that we will face, fail, and fail, and fail at until eventually we learn how to succeed.

Yes, really well said. That ties it back to we can't do it now, but we can build the tool. So the entire argument of, "Oh, that's not possible," or "That's crazy for thinking that way," it's an ideal that we're working towards, and building the tool so that it becomes possible.

At that point, in terms of what you want or what that goal is, it's a goal that once you achieve it may change when you realize, "Okay, this was a mistake."

Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we have to develop all our technologies along the way. We, as a species, recently figured out how to do money without a government, but we haven't yet figured out how to do criminal justice without a government. So we need another tool.

What's it going to be? I don't know exactly, but let's work at it.

On that point of doing what you want, it reminded me of a common thing that comes up with my audience or even young people—anyone in general. If, let's take an example of identifying with a goal, something that you really want to achieve and that you love and you want to dedicate your entire life to—let's say artist or art or being an artist.

With how the world is changing, do you see that as a worthy goal to pursue, or would it be a different kind of goal? The underlying question I'm asking here is: How does one find fulfillment in what they do if what they do may not be relevant or allow you to survive in the future?

The simple answer, the base level answer to this is: Whoever said you had to do one thing? Whoever said you had to do one thing with your whole life? I have done many different things with my life, and each one of them has been very fulfilling at the time that I was doing it.

Our wants change, and that's okay. We leave behind some of the goals we have achieved or the goals that we abandoned because they weren't quite right for us, but we take with us all the learning and all the learning how to learn that we picked up along the way. So we become deeper, richer, more developed characters as we go through this process.

Even if you learn to draw and then an AI comes along and draws better than you, you still learned something from that process. You've still learned how to learn to draw. You've learned how to pursue an ambition. You've learned a lot about envisioning a scene and creating it that you can now do with AI tools.

So that's the simple answer. But there's a deeper level answer to this, which I think is a little more difficult to grasp, but it's very important: What is the real reason why you had that goal? Why did you want to be an artist? Did you want to give vent to a creative impulse? If so, there are still lots of ways to do that.

Did you want to entertain people? Did you want to show the world what exists in your head? Did you want to be famous and make a lot of money? That's just as good as any other goal; that's fine. That's not shallow. What is it that you wanted out of that goal? What is it that you wanted to experience in your own life, in your own psyche, that made you decide, "I want to be an artist, I want to be an author, I want to be an entrepreneur?"

Because when we boil it down, most of our goals are about the core things that make us happy. You know, I spent many years as a software engineer, and I was told I was very good at it. I had a lot of other software engineers saying, "Wow, how did you figure that out?"

But I always found myself having this sort of friction with the people that I worked for, and I always experienced them as very shortsighted. We need to be building this or that thing for the next five years, for the next ten years, and they would be like, "Okay, here's a list of features that we need to get done by our next two-month release cycle."

"Why are you going off the rails building all this foundational cryptography toolkits to support our next five years of programming? Just write the login page or whatever."

What I realized was that eventually, I was giving vent to a creative impulse. If I had said, "Well, my life goal is to be a really great software engineer," I would have been stuck there. It would have been a self-limiting identity belief.

Eventually, you know, it took me some time; I got gray hair. But I eventually figured it out that I'm doing this because software is the ultimate set of Lego blocks, and I can create things. I want to create things; I want to bring new stuff out of my imagination and into the world.

But working as a software engineer, they don't want that because most people don't want to take risks. Most people don't want to do greenfield development of something that's never been done before because that's scary, unless you have a whole lot of agency, and then it's still scary, but you can stand it.

So I was like, "What is my real goal?" No, my real goal isn't I am a software engineer; my real goal is I want to be creative. My real goal is I want to imagine something that no one has imagined before and make it real.

So I said, "Okay, I'm going to retire early, and I'm going to start writing science fiction." It's tremendously satisfying, and now it's blossomed out into some of the political opinion writing and the sort of philosophical musings that people find interesting.

But it's all—I take something out of my brain and I show it to people, and I go, "Ooh!" That is what I really wanted out of being a software engineer all along.

So maybe if you're, you know, your skills that form your identity run up against this dead end, either because the skills have become obsolete or because they aren't serving your real purpose, you sometimes have to stop and say, "Well, what is my real purpose? What is it that I wanted out of this, and how do I find some way to get it that is more directly related to what I really want?"

Yeah, so that was the thought process there, unless that was it, of choosing to do the fiction writing instead of, let's say, indie hacking and building a tool that you could share in a similar way if you had the same audience.

Because I felt like ultimately, stories meant more to me. When I started doing this self-examination, I realized that there's something that a lot of people think that sort of genre fiction is this very frivolous thing. This is something that this attitude that you see in a lot of these sort of, you know, Sigma hacker grind set bros, or like, "I haven't read a fiction book in 10 years; I only read tech manuals."

Well, that's how you lose the culture war. That's how you lose the culture war because stories are the DNA of societies. Think about it: Elon Musk did not grow up reading *Little House on the Prairie*. I don't know for sure, but I bet he grew up reading Heinlein and Niven and Pournelle, and then he went, "I'm going to make that real."

If you think about the history of the 20th century as a whole, all the inventions of the 20th century, all this stuff that humans figured out in that 100-year period—name four that didn't happen in science fiction before they were real. I can't.

Well, yeah, maybe you could do it if you searched the internet enough, but the point is that this is a hard task. Science fiction is, in some sense, very important to our future because it is this technology that allows us to think about new technologies before they're real.

It allows us to decide how we feel about true artificial intelligence before it's real. It allows us to think about how we feel about genetically engineered post-humans and what we want to do about that possibility before it becomes real.

It allows us to lay the groundwork for how we're going to deal with new technology, and it fires our imaginations to create it. So I felt like, yes, science fiction is entertaining, but it's also important in ways that people don't realize.

Because, you know, people don't start these tech startups and build reusable rockets and catch the first stage with a giant pair of Mecha chopsticks, and then somebody sticks a microphone in their face, and he says, "Well, you know, I was really influenced by the writings of Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche."

No, he's like, "I read *Ringworld*." Stories are important because they appeal to the part of our brain that does the actual thinking. Intelligence is stories; consciousness is stories. So stories influence us in important ways.

Yes, on that subject, we previously talked on the call prior to this call about how *Theft of Fire* was the first fiction book that I'd read in the last 10 years. You asked me why that was. You asked me, "Was that just because there weren't any good books out there?"

When I thought about it, it's, yeah, nothing really grabbed my interest. So over those past 10 years, and with a lot of the things that we've talked about with the education system, the stories being put out there—how dangerous is that, and why is it happening?

It's very dangerous, and I completely understand why you haven't been reading fiction. I don't mean to mock you for it because you talk to you for 30 seconds, and anybody can realize you are an alpha male type with a four-digit testosterone level. You know that's readily apparent.

If you were to go to a bookstore and try to find some fiction that appeals to an alpha male with a four-digit testosterone level, you ain't going to find much. I think what happened there was that attitude that I have just been denouncing, where conservatives and people who were pro-Western civilization somehow decided at some point that art was for sissies.

Because a lot of artists were, you know, sort of long-haired, noodle-armed hippies, that art must be for long-haired, noodle-armed hippies, and we are going to cede that entire battlefield to them. But see, children read stories; children read fiction. If they're not reading your culture's fiction, whose fiction are they reading?

This hit me one time when, out of sheer curiosity and boredom, I was watching one of Steven Crowder's YouTube shows. He says conservative stuff, and he talks about politics, and it's all okay, I guess. But then he does this weird thing where he says, "I don't read fiction."

In this one particular show, he goes, "I don't read fiction," and he said it like he was proud of it. He said it like this was a point of pride, like, "I am a serious person who doesn't go into frivolous pursuits." Then he starts talking about how that's childish, and then he does this cartoon voice, like, "Tell me a story, daddy."

It's like, you sit here whining about how you're losing the culture war, and then you go on this whole rant about how culture is for sissies. Well, why do you think you're losing the culture war? If your children say, "Tell me a story, daddy," and you're not telling them a story, then who is?

And what values will your children absorb from that story? So any political philosophy, any cultural philosophy that doesn't have art and stories associated with it, that doesn't have a coupled artistic aesthetic, is doomed because it will not be able to propagate itself.

So, you know, it's like, yeah, there's very little fiction for you as an alpha male type with a four-digit testosterone level to read, but if we don't have that, there isn't going to be a next generation of you and people like you. There's going to be a next generation of guys who are very high anxiety and low agency, and nothing feels right, and they don't feel comfortable in their own skin, and they decide they're going to put on a dress and call themselves a woman. That's where this comes from.

We haven't—we, you know, Generation X, we stood by and let this happen. The Boomers made it happen, but we, as a society, have not created or maintained the cultural and artistic scaffolding for a healthy, strong, robust masculine identity.

Right, in that sense, did you, when you wrote *Theft of Fire* and even when you write now, did you feel a sense of responsibility with that in contributing some new way of looking at the world or potentially some unpopular way of looking at the world because of how many of your values were baked into the book and are in the writing?

Yeah, well, when you write, you're essentially tying a rope to a bucket, and you're throwing it into your subconscious, and you're dredging it across the bottom. You take up that bucket, and you pour it out on the table. It's a very psychologically vulnerable act in some ways because the fiction you write is who you are.

I felt like, you know, this—I want, when I'm showing other people who I am inside and making it into a story, obviously I want other people to approve of this and like it, but also it has to make sense; it has to resonate.

The goal of writing is to communicate something in a clear and interesting way. If it's not clear, they won't understand it. If it's not interesting, they won't read it. So the responsibility I felt was, "Okay, I need to be clear; I need to be interesting; I need to entertain people," and it has to resonate with who they are.

So I wasn't setting out to convince the world of any particular thing; I was just saying, "This is my story." The responsibility I felt was to make sure that it was a story people would like.

I think there's a lot of unfulfilled hunger for these kinds of stories right now because, you know, we're sick of post-apocalyptic despair. We're sick of fiction which is a thinly veiled excuse for discussions about pronouns. Science fiction used to be about how we were going to go out and conquer the galaxy.

I think we're ready to do that again. We're ready to work toward it. You know, there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't know how to do that we're going to need to learn, but we're ready to start doing that instead of sitting around and whining about how everything is unfair. So we need stories that have that attitude: "Yes, we're going to loop; we're going to naturally loop back around to this."

But I want to read a quote from *Theft of Fire*: "I guess I got that from my dad. He talked about ownership a lot, about his plans for us. He said the reason most people spend their whole lives making someone else rich is that they sell their time, get paid for the hours they spend on the job. See, if you're running a business and you make some money, you can reinvest it, buy more equipment, hire more people, scale up. But if you're selling your time, no matter how much money you earn, you can't buy more time to sell. It doesn't scale."

Was this belief also a part of your decision to write the book and contribute in this fashion?

Yes, yes, on the topic of ownership as well. I'm not too sure I understand that fully.

Well, when you—the basis of all civilization is property rights, which we should probably call investment rights. The basic idea is that you invest in something; you own it. You have the right to control it. Without that, there's no civilization because when you're a plebeian ape, there's nothing to own. There's nothing out there but a rock, a few sticks, and some grass.

Things only become worth having when you take material from the environment and you invest your time and effort into it. You start chipping out spear points, and no one is going to do that if someone can come along and take it from them. Their effort is wasted.

So property rights are civilization; civilization is property rights. That's fundamental. Any political philosophy like communism that goes against that is anti-civilization.

So when I talk about this, it's like, "Okay, we've gotten into a rut right now where a lot of people sell their time because they are low agency. I am afraid of starting a business on my own. I am afraid of putting my effort into something that I am going to own and try to make money off of. I want a guaranteed paycheck, so I am going to go to someone who buys my time directly, and then how to monetize that is their problem, and I don't have to worry about that, and I can feel safe."

But that makes you dependent, and it prevents you from getting ahead because you only have so much time, and no matter how much money you make, you can't buy more time to sell.

So when you sell your time, you may be safe because it's somebody else's job to figure out how to pay you, and usually, it's not too safe anymore. Gone are the days where people worked for the same company for 50 years.

But when you do that, you can't see that same level of success of, "Oh, I own something; I'm going to double down on it." You can't get that exponential growth. You know, when I write a book, I can sell many, many copies of that book. I can sell as many copies of that book as people are willing to buy.

I can sell all sorts of stuff associated with it. I can leverage that attention because, you know, when you get an audience, you start to realize that some people love your stuff so much that they want to pay you. They're happy to pay you. They're like, "You know, here's $10,000; put my company in your next book." Wow, okay, I'm down with that.

But you can never get that until you start—until you take that risk and start making something that can scale. You know, I write a book; I can sell it over and over again. You make these videos and content that helps people think about, you know, the philosophy of business and how to be successful, and people can watch those over and over and over again.

You produce it once with a limited amount of time, and it can make revenue for you forever. A lot of people, you know, sort of the socialist-leaning types think this is a bug, like, "You know, he only did three hours of work, and he's being paid tens of thousands of dollars for it."

But really, that's a feature because we want everybody to be doing things that require very little effort but have tremendous value. Capitalism rewards those people. If you can figure out how to spend four hours shooting a video and make a lot of money off it, or can figure out how to spend three hours a day working on something and make, you know, $800,000 in a year or whatever it is, then what that means is you've figured out how to efficiently produce something that has a lot of value to people.

When you sell your time, that means that you've taken this safe route, which solves that equation well enough to keep you going, but it's maybe not the best or most profitable thing you could be doing with your time.

And, you know, don't get me wrong; somebody has to do a lot of these tasks that anybody can do. We need certain things done that maintain civilization, but I think there are people out there who have the potential to produce amazing things, and they've been raised to be afraid.

Imagine if Elon Musk had been raised in a way that made him timid and nervous because it's very possible to do that to a child if you're not paying attention or if that makes you feel good or if you are a fearful person yourself and think of the loss to civilization—not only the fact that it was a loss to civilization, but that we would never have understood what we lost.

We would never have seen it. So I think there are a lot of people out there who have wonderful things in them, and they're selling their time, you know, for minimum wage, making sandwiches or whatever.

On that topic, with the way that people are raised, I was personally—I don't know how I overcame it, really, but I was raised in a Mormon household, so LDS, very strict religious, do what you're told, we're going to church on Sundays, put on your slacks, put on your white shirt, pass out bread, all that stuff.

With that, my parents made a decent living, middle class, but they were very focused on, "Hey, you need to save your money; you need to invest; you need to get a job; you need to go to school; you need to do exactly these things."

After speaking with a lot of other people, and it's just a general thing that you can observe, is a lot of people have a bad relationship with money, and so it prevents them from even thinking about making more. Or they'll see those mega billionaires and make an assumption of, "Oh, that's shallow; that's corrupt; that's evil," whatever it may be.

So they write off even things about starting a business, no matter how small scale it is. In terms of perception of money, how do you view that and making a lot of it?

Well, the attitude you talk about reminds me of the discussion we had a little bit further back about the sort of self-limiting identity beliefs. You know, "I am not a billionaire; I will not be a billionaire; therefore, I need to formulate my beliefs and my identity in such a way that I am prevented from feeling bad about that."

So I can formulate beliefs like, "Oh, they must have done something immoral to get there, and therefore I am not in the place that they are because I am not immoral, and I can take pride in that." Or, "Oh, they had a tremendous amount of luck; therefore, it's not my fault that I didn't have that luck."

Or, "They parents provided them with a certain amount of wealth and access that my parents did not provide me with; therefore, it's okay." You know, all of these sort of identity beliefs are designed not to help this person prosper but to prevent them from feeling bad about not prospering.

We will always work hardest on what our real goals are. If we're focused on defending our sense of identity and who we are right now and not feeling bad, then we won't be focused on these external goals of, "How do I get ahead? How do I make myself better?"

It may be very true that to reach sort of billionaire level, you have to be very lucky, or you have to have the right parents, or you need all sorts of other help. You know, thriving is a team sport; no one prospers in a vacuum.

But at the same time, this self-limiting belief isn't just about, "Oh, I'm not going to be a billionaire." It prevents any kind of getting ahead; it prevents any kind of striving; it prevents any kind of saying, "I am not as good as I would like to be; therefore, I am going to make an effort to become something that I am currently not."

This goes back to giving yourself permission to suck at something. You have to be a business that's just struggling to break even before you can be a business that makes a huge amount of money. If you are so ashamed of being the business that is struggling to break even, then you'll never get where you want to go.

I just finished my first year as a professional author.

Congrats!

Thank you! I will disclose fully that, you know, I managed to break six figures, but I did not make as much as I made as a software engineer. I have to remind myself not to be ashamed of that because this is the first year.

If you don't give yourself permission to start out and suck at something, then you're never going to reach the point where you're good. You're never going to build that audience or whatever it is you need to do to achieve the success you want to achieve.

You have to give yourself permission to not be there yet. If people start making excuses, you know, these ego-defending beliefs for not being there yet, then that makes them feel better in that place, but it prevents them from progressing beyond it.

So, you know, money is a measure of given, and when you start out, not a lot of people are going to give a damn about you because they haven't heard about you. But if you say to yourself, "Well, I don't want a lot of money," what you're saying is, "I don't want a lot of people to give a damn about me."

Yes, and if you say, "Well, if you have a lot of money, then you must have done something evil," then you're saying, "You know, a lot of people only give a damn about evil people." Like, what? No, no. Money is just a token that says, "I care about this thing," and it's how we use to persuade people to care.

So if you're making money—assuming you're not robbing banks or something or hitting the lottery or defrauding people or whatever—then when the money starts to come in, that is a signal that people care about what you're doing. It's a signal that you're on the right path.

It's the way people tell you what they like and what they don't like. So when you hit on a formula that starts to earn, that's not you being selfish; it's you figuring out what people like and giving it to them.

And that's so personal, right? Because the thing that I find funny—even before I was doing this in this business, and I'm sure you have too—when you would go and look at someone else's promotion, like of a book or a product, you'd always see the comments like, "Oh, you shouldn't be earning money from this," or "This is a terrible product," whatever it may be.

But it's extremely—and they're doing extremely well, and it's just those people that don't give a damn about that one thing, but they're in this reactive state and just don't realize that.

Right, and so they're essentially saying that everybody should act in accordance with their priorities, not with their own priorities. It's sort of one of the most—if you dig into it, it's one of the most anti-libertarian, sort of anti-humanity sentiments that you can think of.

Like, you know, yeah, people shouldn't spend their money how they want to spend it on what they care about; they should obey me. Well, who died and put you in charge?

Yeah, to expand on the audience part, that's something I talk about a lot because I really—I started off as, in terms of business, as like a freelance web designer. Then when I got on social media, I was doing cold outreach before that to land clients and local marketing and other things like that.

When I started to figure out my formula for social media stuff and really see the power of building an audience, there was like no turning back for me.

With you having incredible success in the first year of *Theft of Fire*, that's insane for a first year, and how much you've grown. I mean, I talk to these creators every day; that's abnormal. That is absolutely incredible.

So with that, as you've been growing, has there been any unique characteristics of the creator economy or building an audience that you didn't see before that now you see as a very viable thing for a lot of people?

Well, I can talk about what I've learned along the way, which I think this sort of ties into is that I don't like the term "content creator."

I don't either.

The reason I don't like the term "content creator" is it focuses on what you're making. You know, "Oh, I'm a content creator." Well, you know, if you paint something and you shove it in a drawer, you're a content creator. You created some content; it doesn't do you or anybody else any good as an author, you know, both of fiction and non-fiction, short and long form.

But as a guy who writes interesting things for a living, what I am—my primary thing that I'm doing in my business is building an audience. An audience doesn't mean how many people follow you on Twitter because there is an account on Twitter called "Why You Should Have a Cat," and you know, he posts pictures of cats, and he's got 2 million followers.

That's great; people like cat pictures, but that is not—they're not following him; they're following the cats. "I like cats; I follow him." But the point is that building an audience is about trust.

An audience is a set of people who trust you, where if you come out with something, you know, like if I write a book, they're going to say, "Well, I'm going to spend 20 hours reading this book because I trust Devin that I'm going to enjoy it."

Or if you come out with a video that spends 45 minutes talking about, you know, success and some, you know, obscure philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and how these tie in together, you've created enough value for them in the past that they say, "I am going to devote 45 minutes of my time to watching this."

So really what you're doing is you're creating a group of people who know who you are, and they trust you. In order to build trust, you have to be trustworthy. You have to act with integrity, and you have to act with these people's best interest at heart because they are not stupid.

They know when you're trying—when you're just interested in what's good for you. They know when you're trying to scam them. They know when you're trying to do something that 60 other people have done better, and you're just going to try to jump on the bandwagon.

So you have to be trustworthy and create real value, and some of it you have to give away for free so that they sample it, and they say, "Aha! This guy makes good stuff. I'm going to pay him because I want there to be more of this stuff that I give a damn about."

So, and that is the mistake that I see a lot of content creators making now. I focus mostly on fiction authors, but there's a lot of indie fiction authors who whine a lot about not having success.

Then you look at their Twitter feed, and every single one of their Twitter posts is some iteration of, "Buy my book! Buy my book! It's a good book!" None of it is, "Let me say something interesting right here, right now to you for free to prove that I am an interesting person who can entertain you if you buy my paid products."

So, you know, ultimately, if you're on the internet and that's how you make your money, your product is you—your ability to be interesting, your ability to be informative, your ability to be entertaining, your ability to make something where people spend some time paying attention to it, and they walk away saying, "I liked that; that was a good use of my time. I want more of that."

So there's no shortcut. There's no, "Here's the six bullet points to a successful internet influencer business where you can make millions of dollars going to cafes and taking pictures of your food."

That's, you know, people will click on that stuff, but they don't care. They don't care because it doesn't provide any value to them. You have to actually make something that people like, and you know, you have to actually be someone who's able to give them a good experience, and you have to prove that to them.

You have to not whine about that. You know, "Oh, my books aren't selling." Write something interesting!

Yeah, the way that I think about it with building an audience specifically is bringing back in the topic of agency. If you want to write a book or you want to make music or you want to do whatever creative challenge you want to do, you want to build something and distribute it, but you don't have—like, you don't want to give up control of that thing to a publisher, to a record label, to someone else who can give you the resources to make some money from that thing but also take a large portion of it themselves.

So the way I view social media now is where most of the attention is. Attention and social media are a tool to get eyes on what it is that you built or created, and you have to approach social media for what it is, which is media that people like to watch.

But now it's different for mainstream media because it's one-person media companies, in a sense, all creating content to attract people that they like individually.

With that, in terms of—did you ever want to go with a traditional publisher or the Manhattan? I've heard you say "Manhattan" before, but I'm not—

Yes, I think that's just referencing Manhattan. The word "Manhattan" emerging from my mouth is not a compliment; it is not intended as one.

I considered it when I first finished my first novel. I wanted to weigh all my options, and I realized that during the 20th century, there was a real need for publishers because you needed to do offset print runs, which typically had a five-figure cost associated with them, and you needed a financier.

So a publisher was essentially a venture capitalist during that time. They were going to pay for your printing; they were going to give you an advance; they were going to enable people who were just starting out to make a living as a writer, and then they were going to make back their money on the ones that took off.

It was a working, viable business model that provided value for everybody involved: authors, publishers, and readers.

So there were two things that broke that. The first was the internet, and the second was gay race communism. Because you had a whole bunch of people who, you know, all these publishing companies that were now sort of conglomerated together with offices in the same 10 blocks of Manhattan, going to the same parties, you know, participating in the same social circles, and they became less and less interested in what people wanted to read and more and more interested in what they thought people should read.

So they were no longer providing a valuable function to the audience because the function that publishers provided to an audience was, "We are going to gatekeep this media for you and filter out all the trash."

But they were no longer filtering for quality; they were filtering for aligned political opinions. So they did not provide the benefit to the audience, and then lo and behold, their business model started becoming less and less profitable. I wonder why?

Then the advances started to go away, and the promotional spending, especially for new authors, started to go away, and they started getting rid of their midlist. Their midlist is an incubator for your future A-listers; that's what that exists for.

So gradually, because they weren't able to serve a purpose for the audience, they also lost the ability to serve a purpose for the authors. Nowadays, I don't think book publishers really serve any purpose at all for most genres and types of books.

I think that's true. As I started looking for agents and looking for publishers, I realized that I was offered some publishing deals at certain points, especially when I got out there on my own and people figured out I could sell.

Then they came knocking, and I was like, "What use are you to me?" I can have a direct relationship with my audience where I can be more responsive to them, and I can get better feedback about what I'm doing wrong and what I'm doing right directly from them—not only from what they say but from their actions.

What do I need this middleman for? What value do you offer? I had a particular moment where I decided that I was going to be self-published, and that was when my editor, who I hired myself, enthusiastically shoved some sample chapters from my book in front of a sort of acquisitions guy from one of the major publishing houses.

He looks at this folder, he reads like the first two or three sentences, he holds it out to me like this as if I had offered him a dead spider. Oh my God!

He says, "Rewrite it in third person. You do know how to write in third person, don't you?" In more or less that tone of voice.

I realized that this man had no idea that perspective and tense are tools in an author's toolbox. I would have had to teach him how to correctly employ these tools and why *Theft of Fire* is written in first person present tense and the precise technical craftsmanship reasons why that unusual choice was made—if he could even be taught because he had the self-limiting belief, "I am an editor with 20 years of experience."

Well, that's great; you repeated the same mistakes for 20 years and called it experience. Go you! I realized that this industry was full of people who were very full of themselves and who were very full of self-limiting identity beliefs, where I wasn't going to be able to get them to look at things in a new way.

I had to go and prove that I could sell, and so I did. Then they came with the publishing deals, and I said, "Well, you know, this deal you're offering me isn't very good because the only additional feature that this offers to me is you get paid."

From my perspective, that's not a feature. You know, there were people who offered me like a $5,000 advance to sell them the audiobook rights. Like, really? Wow!

So I was like, "No, I'm going to do a Kickstarter." So I did a Kickstarter to fund the audiobook. I raised, I think, $43,000.

Nice!

Thank you to all the Kickstarter backers out there; you're amazing people! I was able to get three very talented professional actors—one for each major role—and just do it with all the bells and whistles. We're going to put out the audiobook pretty soon; all the major recording is done, and I think we've produced something really special.

It just confirmed again this belief I had: I don't need someone to give me permission to create; I can just create things, and if they're good enough, people will be interested. You know, that's that agency again. You don't wait for someone to say you can create; you say, "I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not."

There are so many new authors who are so much in doubt about whether their work has value that they will offer up 80% of their earnings to, you know, Tor Books or something in exchange for what basically amounts to a pat on the head.

So, you know, if there are any aspiring authors watching this, I'd like to speak directly to you for a moment. I know you're afraid; I was afraid. Everyone is afraid. You stay afraid even as you start having success; the fear is constant.

But you don't know if your work has any value, and maybe a few of your friends have read it, and a few of your relatives have read it, and there are some other people who leaf through it and said, "Yeah, wow, this is really good." But you know you're not sure if that's true or if they're just trying to be nice.

So you're in this difficult place where you're trying to sell something, but you don't know what its actual value is. Well, I'll tell you something: The way you find out is to try to sell it yourself.

Because if it actually has value to people, and you start getting out there and flogging it and persuading a few people to read it, if it has value, then they will start saying, "Wow, this is really good," and recommending it to their friends.

It won't be a fast process, but it does work, and that is so much better as a measure of value than whether some acquisitions guy at a publishing house is going to compliment you because they don't know what else—they don't have any special magic knowledge or insight that you do not have.

So people are out there; they want good stuff, and they will buy it if you have the courage to offer it to them. You know, it's not your decision whether your work is good enough; it's theirs. Give them the opportunity to make that decision.

That is a great way to end because I was going to ask what's your advice for aspiring authors that want to reach that. So we'll end on that because that was beautiful.

I think we touched on a lot of great topics. In terms of the audiobook, you said that's finished recording. Is there—I know we're dealing with other things—is there a date that it may be pushed back to or that you're hovering around?

We are—our sound editor is booked up till about January, and that was because we were unable to book at the time that we wanted to—complications from my wife having cancer, so that is what it is.

So we're looking at maybe changing there, but you know, maybe we want to stick with that. It's probably going to be first quarter of next year.

And then also working on the sequel again. You know, life has intruded, so there have been some delays, but we're looking at maybe spring of next year for the sequel, and this will be the second book in what is planned out as a four-book series.

Awesome! I'm very much looking forward to both of those because audiobooks are my thing. Not only was it like the first time I'd read a fiction book in a while, but I very rarely read unless it's like a physical book that I just burn through.

I think there is a big future in audiobooks, and I think there is a big future in a certain type of audiobook like this—this high-effort, high-production-value kind of audiobook. Because they started out being called books on tape, and it was just like somebody read the book onto tape.

Because, you know, you wanted to be able to listen to the book, and there was nothing beyond that; it was just kind of somebody reading the book out loud. What we're starting to discover really resonates with people is good narration and moving over into it being an audio production with real acting—something akin to a sort of a 1930s radio play.

Where they're really trying to make it into an acted piece of media, I went with that. I found some really very talented voice actors who made me go from saying, "Oh, I suppose I should do an audiobook," to "Oh, we're going to make something special."

So, you know, all the raws are done; we're just waiting on sound engineering. I directed every moment of it personally, and we had a lot of fun with that. We're very proud of what we put out.

I think it's either I'm completely delusional or this is going to be good. It's going to be good!

One last thing that I respect is that it seems like in every piece of content, even on Twitter, something that could be as short as a one-sentence tweet has a lot of quality and thought that goes into it. The same goes for the audiobook; it seems like that's a driving factor in your decision-making.

Yeah, it goes back to the integrity thing. You can't just try to cheat people. You can't just take pictures of your food and put it on Instagram and pretend you're a success. You have to offer them real value. I try to proceed from the assumption that people are smart because I want an audience of smart people. Smart people have more money. [Laughter]

All right, so with that, I'll have links to everything in the description: the book, the Substack, the Twitter account—all of them are great, so follow them! Hopefully, I'll follow up with you on how that does because I actually want to see.

Yes, absolutely!

And then outside of that, anything else you want to plug? Websites, general things that people can find?

Well, I'm not sure I want to plug it yet, but we may have another special collaborative project in the works with those voice actors.

Oh, cool!

So, okay, yeah, if you do, let me know, and I'll put the...

Yes, sweet! Devin, thank you so much. I got more out of that than you know, so I'm very excited to get this out.

Well, thank you for having me on! It was a really good conversation. I love doing these things, and it's so good to be able to talk about what I do with interesting people who really have been there and have insight into what that whole journey is like.

Yeah, the audience will benefit a lot from it too, so thank you!