Jay, what's happening?

What's going on, man?

Super excited to have you on because this is long overdue

for many different reasons. The two of them being number one, you are now the wildly popular host of

a seeking wisdom show called The Exceptions, which we're going to talk about. But you're also a newly,

a newly minted author with a book out. So congratulations on that. I've seen a ton of, basically my judge for if anything is successful is like, do I see a lot of tweets about it? And so congratulations. How is, when did the book come out? A couple weeks ago? October 1st, yeah, self-published first book. October 1st dropped. I was doing a pre-sale before that, which maybe explains some of the tweets because I'm very lucky to have a lot of people that are interested in my work and they were like excited before it came out, but it is officially live now in all formats. And how would you describe? So I want to talk about seeking wisdom. I want to talk about what you've learned from these companies, but I also want to talk about the book. But before we get into the book, I want to know about the process of writing a book because this is something that, you know, you see like, okay, everybody knows books. There's a big process to, but I want like as a marketer behind the scenes, like, what have you been going through the last, well, I guess the last three, four weeks is the fun part now because the book is out and correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, rewinding back, like, when did you decide to do this and like, what's the whole process been? I love that you went right here because I had a phone call or a video chat, rather. I did a Zoom call with like 25 of my newsletter subscribers because people were so interested in this process that I said,

why don't I just talk about it? So the first moment where I said to myself,

proactively, I'm writing this book before there was a name, was December of 2017. So like,

for those interested, the timelines are important. So December 2017, I begin to draft what they

call a book treatment, which is basically a blurb, kind of like the front and back of a book jacket when you read like, what's this all about? You pick it up in a store. You draft a blurb and then you do an outline and that together is called a book treatment. And I started to compile that plus a whole lot of stories and research from my podcast in December of last year. And it came out October of this year. And that's a fast process. So that's like the first thing that people need to know. Okay. And then you decide to do that. And then I want to know the process for writing the book. Because to me, I don't know how I would even do it. Is it like one hour a day? Is it, you know, you commit time every day or do you break it off in chunks? Like,

where the hell do you even start? I don't, I have no idea. Right, because it's not, it is not my full-time job. It supports the job. My full-time job breaks into two halves, which is public speaking. So I'm on the road several times a month giving keynotes and then creating documentaries in audio and now video for brand clients like Drift.

And so there's a lot of big blocks of deep work. and then creating documentaries in audio and now video for brand clients like Drift.

And so there's a lot of big blocks of deep work I need, and it's hard to interrupt that with

writing.

So I did two things or three things, really.

So the first started long before that December go mark, which was I was building my own podcast

Unthinkable and logging all these stories and working them and errating them and getting feedback on them for like two years. So I love that process actually. Like I think there's a bunch of people. So there's, I think there's kind of two ways to do that. I mean, there's two ways I've seen that. So there's like the Tim Ferriss style, which I don't know if you love that or not, which is basically he took every, you know, he took 100 podcast interviews and was like, here's a book. But the other one that I'm actually finding right now is Scott Belsie. He has a new book called The Messy Middle. And what's interesting is his process for that book was just like while he was running his company, he was kind of just saving all this

like personal stuff in Evernote. And it's actually something I just picked up from him.

It's like, I've always kept a swipe file, but I've kind of kept the dedicated notebook about

drift and unique things that are happening here because I want to be able to write a book about

this place one day. And I've just like, I think that will make

the inevitable writing process easier because I have some, somewhere to go off of. Yeah. And if I could make one observation on that. So, well, I think it's endemic to the way I like to write. I'm over a reporter in that I'll like, I'll do some personal storytelling. But this book and my show are not like about me or necessarily like my advice. It's all about story. And then I distill the story into

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