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

I just finished a conversation with Devin Erickson, who recently gained significant attention on Twitter and social media for his harsh truths and deeply articulate insights. He is also the author of a new science fiction book titled *Theft of Fire*. This is the first fiction book I’ve read in almost ten years, and I believe that speaks volumes about 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, which was incredible; he articulated things I knew deep down but had not been able to express. Naturally, I immediately bought his book, burned through it, and now we’re here. In this conversation, we discuss how to future-proof yourself in the age of AI, what's wrong with the current school system, and how people learn skills overall. We explore why agency is the most important trait you can develop to achieve freedom, why intelligence is not a good predictor of overall success, how to find direction in life, and how to eliminate dangerous self-limiting beliefs. We also talk about how Devin left his career as a software engineer, built an audience, and became an independent author and creator, among other topics. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Devin Erickson.

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

And you went on to say this: In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are logic, which teaches how to derive truth from known facts; statistics, which helps us understand the implications of data; rhetoric, the art of persuasion and recognizing persuasion tactics; research, the process of gathering information on an unknown subject; practical psychology, which involves discerning and understanding the true motives of others; and investment, which focuses on managing and growing existing assets.

And agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue and proactively take action to achieve 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 the 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 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. If you don’t pay for your education, and the government pays for your education through money it has taken from other people, then the government decides, on some level, what you are going to learn. You do not have any veto power because if you pack your bags and go to another college, you’re getting the same thing because the government is paying for that too, either through education grants or through the Stafford Loan Program. You’re not writing the checks, so you don’t decide the curriculum.

And when somebody else decides the curriculum from which you are going to be educated, then they will provide you with an education that is designed to make you useful to them, not specifically the education that is meant to make you useful to yourself. This is something that Cicero discussed when he addressed the topic of education, and I would highly recommend reading his writings on the subject. We don't have a fully organized version of what Cicero would have considered education. What we refer to as education today is mostly training, and that is the kind of education that would have been given to slaves in Rome.

A slave is essentially a human machine; he is property and will spend his whole life performing one task, so he is given job training. Job training is not education; it is preparation to provide a specific service. In that era of history, if someone was a free man, a Roman citizen with full rights, who could carry weapons and engage in all the activities that Roman citizens could, it was expected that he would need to be able to do many different things in his life because he would be acting in his own interests.

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. This meant that you couldn't teach him everything he might need to know because you had no idea what he might need, and 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, regarding how to learn and educate yourself. The people who determine what goes into education tend to focus on what will make individuals useful workers for the moneyed interests they serve. Exactly. Beautiful. With that, it seems like agency is a significant 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 its importance in this context? Well, agency is really one of the rarest factors that determines highly successful people in life. You know, if we look at someone like Elon Musk, we can say, "Oh, he's very smart," and clearly he is, with an IQ probably exceeding 150.

There are many people with IQs above 150—thousands upon thousands of them in the United States alone. A lot of these individuals are cloistered in academia, producing postmodernist papers, or perhaps engaging in something slightly more useful, like physics. However, they don't experience the magical effect where everything they touch turns to gold. This is because the bottleneck is not intelligence. Intelligence is only one of the factors needed for success. It is necessary, but not sufficient. Moreover, intelligence is a very narrow aspect.

So what agency is, 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 say, "Oh, I understand everything now." That's not how it works. When we look at the world and think very hard, we get a few things right, but we generally get most of it wrong.

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

Because if you're trying something that truly is an achievement worth having—something that nobody has done before—then the first time you attempt it, you are going to fail, no matter how smart you are. You will get many things wrong. Therefore, you have to keep trying until you eliminate all the errors from your model or your plan. You can't accomplish this with pure intelligence alone, because intelligence is merely the ability to analyze. It doesn’t provide you with data.

It doesn't tell you what the universe is like. So you have to go 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. Right now, but if I keep at it, I will learn how to solve it, and I will succeed.

Notice the word "learn." You have to teach yourself. Education is teaching yourself; it is learning how to teach yourself. Then, when you face a challenging task, you have to learn how to complete it. If you don't learn how to learn, you will only be able to do things that someone else already understands how to do.

Absolutely. So what's special about the Elon Musks of this world is not just intelligence. It's intelligence coupled with a very high degree of agency. Yes. What that specifically reminds me of, with Elon or people in general who have a strong desire to achieve very high goals, is that when these goals seem impossible to them, they often write them off as unattainable.

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 has built the steps to make it possible. Yes, and this is why I think agency is so important. You can't make yourself more intelligent; intelligence is biological. I know that in some of your videos you disagree with that, and I want to talk about it. I think you're defining intelligence more broadly than I am. The narrow, sort of narrow-band analytical ability, IQ-type intelligence, cannot be increased. 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 it, and more importantly, you can teach it to your kids. You can raise your children with the right attitude that will enable them to go out and do cool things that are difficult, to fail repeatedly until they eventually succeed. It's all about beliefs and emotional resilience. Yes, indeed.

So, for those who haven't watched the video, I tried to paint a connection between Susan Cook-Greuter's stages of ego development and intelligence at each of those levels. When I read your article on what intelligence is, and you defined it as the ability to tell stories, it brought to mind that perhaps "intelligence" wasn’t the right word for me to use. Instead, I think "perspective" and the ability to collect information, integrate it, and widen your viewpoint to notice more opportunities through some kind of skill or self-development might be more fitting. With that in mind, I believe that perspective increases your ability not just to tell a story, but to create one, as you can see further and grasp more complex ideas. 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? Correct. A person who can go out and accomplish significant goals that contribute both to his own life and to the entire civilization. I think that's a good point.

I think we would both agree that IQ is not enough. We are constantly bringing people into the world with high IQs. A lot of the time, when you read about someone who has an IQ of 180 or 200, and we feature a few of them in a magazine or something, you often wonder, "Who is Chris Langdon? Why should I care?"

And the only reason we really care about intelligence is that it's a component of getting things done. I think it's very important to realize that there are other components of getting things done that we, as a civilization, could be making much better efforts to teach to people who are born with this high IQ. Instead of just pushing them into government schools and subsequently into postgraduate education, we should consider why the only thing that emerges from academia seems to be criticism of old literature because it was written by dead white males or, for example, Michel Foucault constructing rationalizations for his controversial views. It's because we have confused the condition of necessity with the condition of sufficiency.

You know, for this kind of groundbreaking civilization to progress, high IQ is necessary, but it's not sufficient. And we are not grooming our high IQ children for success. And that's where the question of 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 ideas about how education could start to shift in order to shape that, it's important to note that you mentioned one of the most crucial things you can teach your children is agency. Is the first step at 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 adults because they believe they can. I like to characterize agency as belief in the existence of hard problems. Nice. What do I mean by that? Well, there are three kinds of problems.

There are easy tasks, and these are the things we can accomplish the moment we set our minds to them. With the intelligence, skills, knowledge, and resources that we already possess, we can take action. For example, if you wanted to go to the store and buy a carton of milk, that is an easy task. You already know how to do it, and you have the means to get it.

Resources: you already have the techniques. However, there are impossible tasks—things that you not only can't do with your capabilities and resources, but also things that you don't know how to overcome the distance between you and those tasks. There won't be any meaningful attempts. If I told you to eat a bicycle, you wouldn't even try.

Yeah. Because you know you can't do it. Your teeth don't work that way. You know, I'm not going to be able to hype you up with enough motivational speeches for you to tunnel to Java. You can't dig through the center of the Earth.

Some tasks are impossible. So, the trick is to raise children who believe in a third category of tasks. Those are hard tasks. These are the tasks where you can’t do it right now, but you can learn if you keep trying.

And 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 correctly, which were all selected for having a difficulty determined by the lowest common denominator.

And you didn't make any mistakes. If you are raised in a government school environment and are sent to public school in America during your childhood, you spend almost as many waking hours there as with your parents. This really shapes people's personalities. The definition of success is avoiding failure. However, in the real world, the true 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 high-tech, IQ children—you are crippling what could be the next generation of hyperproductive individuals. In that case, I would like to summarize that in my own head: the greatest mistake is no mistake at all. For those who have already gone through this squandered system and still possess the curiosity to listen and be open-minded, what is something they can do or think about to practice this agency in how to learn? Well, start by reflecting on your own emotional makeup. Notice the ways in which you are risk-averse, where fear is preventing you from pursuing something you desire that lies on the other side. You can watch a bunch of YouTube shows about success, motivational videos, and so on.

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 walk into the gym and bench 300 pounds on the first day. What you can do is first become aware of this and make a plan where you set achievable goals—things you can't do right now, but can accomplish in steps. Lifting is actually excellent for this.

Lifting weights is excellent for this because you go in as a beginner with a bunch of weight on the bar. You lift it until you can't lift it anymore. Then, the next time you go to the gym, you can add three to five more pounds. It's like, wow, I got better! This not only makes you stronger, but it also trains you to believe 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. Because if you are ashamed of that—if you allow yourself to be ashamed of that—then 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 fail. Yeah.

Give yourself permission to suck at it. Awesome. Okay, so tying this back around to the original post by Yuval, I have so much to talk about in terms of agency, intelligence, and the connections between those concepts. Making mistakes is an important part of this process. Is it possible to know what to learn, or is it just a process of making mistakes until you cultivate the necessary skills?

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 of 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, five 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 isn't ideal because I don't know anything yet. I need to get moving and learn as I go.

And so, you know, what we really need to cultivate in children, and call it education, is the tendency to move and the ability to learn as we move. Yes, get started—get started, do something! Time in the market beats timing the market. Yeah, you're not going to get it all right; you're not perfect. You know, you're not going to make a million dollars in your first year as an online content creator, and 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 has ever heard of you. You just have to get going. You just have to move forward, make your mistakes, and learn as you go. Agency is the willingness to do that.

Beautiful. In "The Theft of Fire," when Marcus is describing the robot guard spiders of Miranda after being attacked multiple times on the ship, he outlines specific characteristics of these creatures—though they may not be the exact spiders themselves. The quote is, "simple, reactive, predictable, artificial stupidity." I find myself pondering how to frame this discussion. With the conversation surrounding intelligence and agency, alongside this notion of artificial stupidity, we consider the regimented education system that some argue contributes to this very definition. What, then, truly 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 that they don't really understand what artificial intelligence is at this moment.

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 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 it and do it. We can create an artificial intelligence that can play chess better than we can. We can also create an artificial intelligence that can draw better than, well, not all of us, but certainly better than me—since I can't draw.

I haven't devoted the time to learn. I've 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. And, you know, I'm sure that a lot of people in the Industrial Revolution thought, "Oh no, you know, human beings are obsolete because machines can now lift and move more than us." But it's not true.

What human beings do is navigate their environment, 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. I'm going to make my plan happen."

And 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. Eventually, you hit the moving target if you have your feedback loop running and can chase it. When I call these things "artificial stupidity," and when I refer to these machines as "artificial stupidity," they are essentially robots with neural networks that have been trained on one set of tasks. Okay, I’m going to protect this person.

There are numerous instances in this story where the characters engage in actions that are very counterproductive to Miranda's real goals because they only know how to do one thing. They can't think about the broader context of what's going on. As a result, a real human being is able to outwit them, despite lacking the speed, strength, or processing power that they possess. This individual understands the broader context in which he is operating and is able to act appropriately.

You know the real insight about ego development that stood out to me in this other video is that I don't see these as levels you move through; I see them as tools you add to your toolbox. Even someone at what you would call the highest level of development—your philosopher king or whatever—if you drag him out and stick his head in a horse trough and hold him down, he’s going to act at ego development level one. He will instinctively cry, "I want air! I'm going to fight you." This is not a regression or a failure; he is simply pulling out his earliest tool from the toolbox because that response is what is appropriate to the situation.

So, Marcus, the human, represents real intelligence, whereas the robot embodies artificial stupidity. Marcus can decide what tools to use based on his understanding of the total context he is in. The robots, on the other hand, only have access to the tools provided to them by their neural network training data set. They are unable to recognize when their entire paradigm no longer applies and cannot learn to do something completely different. They can't make that leap. This ties back to what we observe with artificial intelligence today: it often reflects a form of artificial stupidity.

And what it reveals is that our research into artificial intelligence has actually uncovered natural stupidity. What it shows is that many people are only functioning at the level of this chatbot AI. A lot of people are operating at the level of ChatGPT, either because they're uninformed or because that's how we've educated them. It’s an interesting connection.

We have tried; we have created an education system that turns human beings into single-purpose tools, and then we feel threatened when we can build computers that are also single-purpose tools. However, human beings did not evolve to be single-purpose tools. We evolved to be navigators of an ever-changing environment. We need to recapture that ability and rediscover that capacity within ourselves, and stop looking to our society and our so-called leaders for guidance on what to do next. It is time to 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 this; it can't do any of that.

Yes, I appreciate the distinction you're making. Humans are natural generalists; they shouldn't be seen merely as tools because they are the ones who build the tools. The cheetah is perfectly adapted to its niche, but if placed in a different environment, it doesn't survive. The same is true for the polar bear. However, the remarkable thing about being human is that we can thrive in various environments because we invent items like parkas and coats, allowing us to survive in different contexts.

So, AI is a tool that helps us survive better in some cases. Do you see it being used primarily as a means for individuals to get work done more efficiently, or just to be more productive in the foreseeable future? Right now, it is at least theoretically possible to create software capable of performing tasks that humans can do. If you were to take a human brain, scan it, and simulate the physics of every atom in it using a vast supercomputer the size of a solar system, then it could function like a human brain does. There's nothing magical about biological matter. 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 performs 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. That's fine. However, what a human being is really for is that executive function: deciding what we want, what our goals are, and what we 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 own life on this level, then ChatGPT doesn't feel like a threat to you. You know, if you are, for example, an artist, people prompting DALL-E through ChatGPT can feel very threatening. Oh my God, how will I get work?

I am an artist, and all of this... These authors are making book covers out of AI art, and they're stealing bread from my mouth. You know, we need to boycott them and shame them so we don't support this. Well, 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. 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 identification with something that's rather narrow, a few connections between different worldviews. One thing I've been most interested in, after following you for a significant amount of time, is your worldview. I want to discuss anarcho-capitalism after this and give a brief introduction, as I'm a newbie to it. But before that, regarding how you make sense of the world, is there any guiding religion, philosophy, or framework that already has a label?

Or do you kind of just have your own way of thinking about it? Well, again, you have to beware of self-limiting beliefs. So I would describe my views as somewhat anarcho-capitalistic. 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 consistently within my own head, then I have made that my identity, and I am unable to critically examine anarcho-capitalism and critique it as a tool, asking whether it serves my goals right now or not. This is just one example. I often describe myself as an anarcho-capitalist or a libertarian, and I encounter others who identify as libertarians engaging in the favorite pastime of libertarians: calling other libertarians "not real libertarians."

Because I say, "Well, I would like to see seed oils banned," and they're like, "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 freed. When I understand that my motivating goal is to see people have control over their own destinies, I can ask myself whether a specific action allows people more control over their own lives. Which is more important: the freedom to poison people or the freedom not to be poisoned? Right.

I think that's one of the areas where we can discuss some of the principles of anarcho-capitalism (ancap). However, the nuance here is that what makes a person the most free isn't always absolute freedom. It's not just about that; it's about having certain limitations. For example, when it comes to seed oils, if someone doesn't have the choice or is unaware of the consequences, then that's not inherently freeing. Yes, I agree with that.

Political philosophies have to be understood as tools, not as goals. You know, we don't engage in classical liberalism to achieve a classical liberal society; we implement ideas from classical liberalism because it is good for people's quality of life and benefits the economic productivity of society as a whole. But any tool you have that you're using for part of a project must be set down when it's no longer useful, and you need 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. I'm currently writing the sequel to *Theft of Fire*, and Miranda is a point-of-view character for part of the book. So now I have to write from the perspective of a woman. The fact that I am male is true, but I have to set down that tool and pick up another one—my mental model of how women experience life and what it feels like to be one—in order to achieve the task I want to accomplish. One of the biggest reasons people are unwilling to take risks and try new things is that self-limiting beliefs can pose a significant risk to someone's agency.

I can't do that. I can't try that because it threatens my sense of identity, my sense of who I am and 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 just a tool for accomplishing a specific task. We are here to navigate our lives in a way that makes sense to us. What it really means to develop as a human being is to have this toolbox, to have the ability to expand that toolbox, and to express whatever part of our capacity helps us achieve our goals. Yes. So when I say I’m an anarcho-capitalist, it’s not about the methods I want to use; it's about my overall goal.

It's about my desire to eventually make government obsolete and eliminate it. I know there are certain functions we currently rely on the government for that we have yet to find alternative solutions for. Therefore, I need to build a new tool or help my species create one. We don't have all the tools yet.

It's a long-term goal. It's a hard problem that we will fail and fail and fail and fail at until eventually we learn how to succeed. Yes, really well said.

And that ties it back to the idea that we can't do it now, but exactly, we can build the tool. The entire argument of "oh, that's not possible" or "that's crazy for thinking that way" is an ideal that we're working towards by 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. However, we haven't yet figured out how to administer criminal justice without a government. So, we need another tool.

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

Sure! Here’s the text with correct capitalization and spelling: "Yeah. On that point of doing what you want, it reminded me of a common theme that comes up with my audience or even young people—anyone in general. Let's take an example of identifying with a goal: something that you really want to achieve, something that you love and want to dedicate your entire life to. Let's say art, or being an artist."

With how the world is changing, do you see pursuing a worthy goal as essential, or would you consider a different kind of goal? The underlying question I'm asking here is, how does one find fulfillment in what they do if their work may not be relevant or sustainable in the future? The simple answer, at its core, is: who ever 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. We take with us all the learning and all the skills in learning that we picked up along the way, allowing us to become deeper, richer, and more developed individuals as we go through this process. So even if you learn to draw and then an AI comes along and draws better than you, you still learn 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, which you can now do with AI tools. So that's the simple answer. However, there's a deeper level 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 ambition?

Why did you want to be an artist? Did you want to give vent to a creative impulse? If so, there are still many 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 valid 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 and 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. 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 experiencing a sort of friction with the people I worked for, and I often perceived them as very short-sighted. They would say things like, "We need to be building this or that thing for the next five years or 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." And they would wonder, "Why are you going off the rails building all these cryptography toolkits to support our next five years of programming? Just write the login page or whatever." What I realized, eventually, was that these people didn't trust me because I did what was good for them rather than what they asked me to do. But I was also giving vent to a creative impulse.

And it's like 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, you know, I eventually figured it out. I'm doing this because software is the ultimate set of Lego blocks, and I can create things. And I want to create things. I want to bring new ideas out of my imagination and into the world. However, working as a software engineer, they don't want that.

Because, you know, they don't want to. Most people don't want to take risks. Most people don't want that. They tend to avoid greenfield development of something that's never been done before because that's scary—unless you have a whole lot of agency. Even then, it can still be intimidating, but you can handle it.

So I was thinking, what is my real goal? No, my real goal isn't that I am a software engineer. My real goal is that I want to be creative. My real goal is that 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.

And it's tremendously satisfying, and now it's blossomed into some of the political opinion writing and philosophical musings that people find interesting. But it's all about taking something out of my brain, showing it to people, and hearing them say, "Ooh!" That is what I really wanted out of being a software engineer all along. So, maybe if the skills that form your identity run into a dead end—either because the skills have become obsolete or because they aren't serving your real purpose—you sometimes have to stop and ask yourself, "What is my real purpose? What is it that I wanted out of this? And how do I find a way to achieve that that is more directly related to what I really want?"

Yeah. So, what was the thought process behind choosing fiction writing instead of, let's say, indie hacking and building a tool that you could share with a similar audience? I felt like, ultimately, stories meant more to me. During my self-examination, I realized that many people view genre fiction as a very frivolous pursuit.

And this is something that reflects the attitude you see in a lot of these so-called sigma mindsets, hacker grindset bros. They're 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. And, you know, think about it. Elon Musk did not grow up reading "Little House on the Prairie." You know, I don't know for sure, but I bet he grew up reading Heinlein, Niven, and Pournelle.

And then he went, "I'm going to make that real." You know, if you think about the history of the 20th century as a whole, with all the inventions and developments during that hundred-year period, can you name four that didn't occur in science fiction before they became real? I can't.

Well, maybe you could do it if you search the internet enough. But the point is that this is a hard task. So, you know, science fiction is, in some sense, very important. It is 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 also enables us to consider our feelings about genetically engineered post-humans and what we want to do about that possibility before it becomes real. Furthermore, it lays the groundwork for how we're going to deal with new technology, and it ignites 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—catching 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 and Nietzsche." No, he's like, "I read Ringworld." Yeah.

Stories are important because they appeal to the part of our brain that does the actual thinking. Intelligence is stories. Consciousness is stories. Therefore, stories influence us in significant ways. Yes.

On that subject, we previously talked on the call before this one about how "The Theft of Fire" was the first fiction book I had read in the last ten years. You asked me why that was and wondered if it was simply because there weren't any good books out there. When I thought about it, I realized that nothing really grabbed my interest over those past ten years. Considering a lot of the things we've discussed regarding the education system and the stories being put out there, how dangerous is that? And why is it happening?

Yeah, it's very dangerous, and I completely understand why you haven't been reading fiction. I don't mean to mock you for it. You talk to someone for 30 seconds, and anyone can realize you are an alpha male type with a four-digit testosterone level. 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 wouldn't find much.

Because I think what happened there was the attitude I have just been denouncing: conservatives and people who were pro-Western civilization somehow decided at some point that art was for sissies. They thought that because many artists were, you know, sort of long-haired, noodle-armed hippies, art must be for long-haired, noodle-armed hippies. They chose to cede that entire battlefield to them. But, you 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 Stephen Crowder's YouTube shows. He discusses conservative topics and talks about politics, which is 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 said, "I don't read fiction." He said it as if he were proud of it. He conveyed it as a point of pride, as if to say, "I am a serious person who doesn't engage in frivolous pursuits." Then he began talking about how that attitude is childish.

And then he does this cartoon voice like, "Tell me a story, Daddy." And it's like, you moron. 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? Any political philosophy or 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 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 in anxiety and low in agency, and nothing feels right. 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. Yes, we haven't—Generation X stood by and let this happen. The Boomers made it happen. However, as a society, we have not created or maintained the cultural and artistic scaffolding for a healthy, strong, robust masculine identity.

Right. In that sense, when you wrote *Theft of Fire*, and even when you write now, did you feel a sense of responsibility in contributing a new way of looking at the world or potentially an unpopular way of viewing it? This is due to how many of your values are embedded in the book and in your writing. You’re essentially tying a rope to a bucket, throwing it into your subconscious, dredging it across the bottom, and then pulling that bucket up and pouring it out on the table. It's a very psychologically vulnerable act in some ways because the fiction you write reflects who you are. I felt that, when I am showing other people who I am inside and turning that into a story, I obviously want other people to approve of it and like it.

But it also has to make sense. It has to resonate. You know, 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. I wasn't setting out to convince the world of any particular thing; I was just sharing my story. The responsibility I felt was to ensure that it was a story people would enjoy. I believe 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 that is just a thinly veiled excuse for discussions about pronouns. We were going to go out and conquer the galaxy, and I think we're ready to do that again. We're ready to work toward it.

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 whinging about how everything is unfair. So we need stories that have that attitude. Yes. We're going to naturally loop back around to this, but I want to read a quote from "The Theft of Fire." I'll go straight into it.

It was the equal share thing. 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, getting paid for the hours they spend on the job. You see, if you're running a business and you make some money, you can reinvest it. Invest it, buy more equipment, hire more people, and 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. Yes. Yes. On the topic of ownership as well. Yes.

I'm not too sure I understand that fully. Yeah. Well, when you consider that 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, and you have the right to control it. Without that, there's no civilization because when you're a plains ape, there's nothing to own. There's nothing out there but a rock, a few sticks, and some grass.

And things only become worth having when you take material from the environment, invest your time and effort into it, and start crafting spear points. No one is going to do that if someone can come along and take it from them; their effort would be wasted. So, for progressives, if someone can come along and take it from them, their effort is wasted. Property rights are essential to civilization. Civilization is built on property rights; that is fundamental.

Any political philosophy, like communism, that goes against this 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 have 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 from. 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. I don't have to worry about that, and I can feel safe. However, that does make you dependent, and it prevents you from getting ahead because you only have so much time. No matter how much money you make, you can't buy more time to sell. When you sell your time, you may feel secure because it's somebody else's job to figure out how to pay you, but usually, it's not as safe anymore. Gone are the days when people worked for the same company for 50 years. By doing this, you can't achieve the same level of success as owning something and doubling down on it. You miss out on that potential for 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 also sell all sorts of things 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 work 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 place, book." Wow! Okay, cool. I'm down with that.

And, but you can never, 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 help people think about 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 generate revenue for you forever. Many people, particularly those with socialist leanings, view this as a flaw. They argue that someone should not be paid tens of thousands of dollars for only three hours of work. However, this perspective misses the point; it is actually a feature of our system. We want everyone to engage in activities that require minimal effort but provide tremendous value.

And so 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 if you 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, it means you've taken this safe route, which solves that equation well enough to keep you going, but it may not be 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. You know, 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.

Child, if you're not paying attention, or if that makes you feel good, or if you are a fearful person yourself, think of the loss to civilization. It’s not just the fact that it was a loss to civilization, but that we would never have understood what we lost. We would never have truly seen it. I believe there are many people out there with wonderful talents and abilities, yet they are selling their time for minimum wage, making sandwiches or whatever. On that topic, regarding the way people are raised, I was personally raised in a Mormon household, and I still don’t know how I overcame it, really.

LDS is a very strict religion where you're expected to do what you're told. We would go to church on Sundays, put on our slacks, put on a white shirt, and pass out bread—all of that. My parents made a decent living; they were middle class, but they were very focused on financial discipline. They emphasized the importance of saving money, investing, getting a job, going to school, and following a specific path. After speaking with many people, I've noticed that a lot of them have a poor relationship with money. This negatively impacts their ability to think about making more, and they often ridicule mega billionaires, assuming they are shallow, corrupt, or evil. As a result, they dismiss the idea of starting a business, regardless of how small it might be. In terms of perceptions of money, how do you view that, especially concerning the idea of making a lot of it? The attitude you mentioned reminds me of our earlier discussion about self-limiting 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. 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, you know, "Their 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, that all of these sorts 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 we do—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 to get ahead and how to make ourselves better.

And it may be very true that to reach a 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 progress in 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. Yeah.

You know, 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.

And I will disclose fully that, you know, I managed to break six figures, but I did not make as much as I did 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 struggle with something, then you're never going to reach the point where you're good. You know, you're never going to build that audience or whatever it is you need to do to achieve the success you want. You have to give yourself permission to not be there yet.

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 commitment and concern. When you start out, not a lot of people are going to care about you because they haven't heard of you. But if you say to yourself, "Well, I don't want a lot of money," what you're really saying is, "I don't want a lot of people to care about me." Yes.

And if you say, "Well, you know, if you have a lot of money, then you must have done something evil," then you're implying that a lot of people only care, or most people only care, about evil people. Like, what? No. No.

Money is just a token that indicates, "I care about this thing." It is what we use to persuade people to care. So, if you're making money—assuming you're not robbing banks, hitting the lottery, defrauding people, or engaging in other illegal activities—then when the money starts to come in, it is a signal that people care about what you're doing. It's a sign that you're on the right path. It's the way people communicate 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 in this business—and I'm sure you have too—was when you would go and look at someone else's promotion, like for a book or a product. You'd always see 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 profitable, and they're doing extremely well. It's just those people who don't care about that one thing, but they're in a reactive state and just don't realize it, right?

Yeah. So they're objecting to the fact that someone else cares about something they don't care about. They're essentially saying that everyone should act according to their priorities, not their own. If you dig into it, it's one of the most anti-libertarian, sort of anti-human perspectives.

Sentiments that you can think of include the idea that people should be free to spend their money however they want on what they care about. They should not have to obey someone else's opinions. Who died and put you in charge?

To expand on the audience aspect, that's something I talk about a lot because I really started off internally. I began my career as a freelance web designer. Before getting on social media, I was doing cold outreach to land clients, along with local marketing and other strategies. Once I figured out my formula for social media and truly recognized the power of building an audience, there was no turning back for me. With your incredible success in the first year of Theft of Fire, it's amazing to see 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, but now you see as a very viable thing for a lot of people? I can talk about what I've learned along the way, which I think sort of ties into this: I don't like the term "content creator."

I don't either. The reason I don't like the term "content creator" is that it focuses on what you're making. You know, "Oh, I'm a content creator." Well, you know, if you paint something and you burn it or shove it in a drawer, you're still a content creator. You created some content.

It doesn't do you or anybody else any good. As an author, both of fiction and non-fiction, in short and long form, I write interesting things for a living. My primary focus in my business is building an audience. However, an audience doesn't just mean how many people follow you on Twitter. There's an account on Twitter called "Why You Should Have a Cat," and it posts pictures of cats. It has two million followers.

And, you know, great, people like cat pictures. But that's not it; they're not following him, they're following the cats. They like cats. I like cats. I follow him.

But the point is that building an audience is about trust. An audience is a group of people who trust you. For instance, if I write a book, they will think, "I’m going to spend 20 hours reading this book because I trust Devin that I'm going to enjoy it." Or if you release a video that spends 45 minutes discussing success and some obscure philosophy of Marcus Aurelius and how these ideas tie together, you have 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 creating a group of people who know who you are and trust you. To build that trust, you have to be trustworthy.

You have to act with integrity, and you must keep these people's best interests at heart. They are not stupid; they know when you are only interested in what benefits you. They can tell when you are trying to scam them. They recognize when you're attempting to do something that sixty other people have done better, and that you are simply trying to jump on the bandwagon.

So, you have to be trustworthy and create real value. Some of that value you have to give away for free so that people can sample it and think, "Aha! This person makes good stuff. I'm going to pay him because I want there to be more of this content that I care about." This is the mistake that I see a lot of content creators—particularly indie fiction authors—making. Many of them tend to complain about not gaining traction, yet when you look at their Twitter feeds, every single post is some variation of "Buy my book." Yes, "Buy my book; it's a good book."

And 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 create something where people spend 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 are no six bullet points for a successful internet influencer business where you can make millions of dollars by going to cafes and taking pictures of your food. That’s nonsense. People may 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 create something that people will like. And, you know, you have to be someone who can provide them with a good experience; you need to demonstrate that to them. And you shouldn't complain about it. You know, "Oh, my books aren't selling."

Write something interesting? Sure! When it comes to building an audience, I often reflect on the concept of agency. If you want to write a book, create music, or take on any creative challenge, you aim to build something and share it with the world. However, there's a common hesitation: you don't want to relinquish control over your work to a publisher or a record label. While they might provide you with the resources to monetize your creativity, they often take a significant cut of the profits. This balance between maintaining ownership and achieving financial success is a critical consideration for any artist or creator looking to make their mark.

So the way I view social media now is that it is where most of the attention is. Attention and social media are tools to get eyes on what you have built or created. You must approach social media for what it is: media that people enjoy watching. However, it's different from mainstream media because it consists of individual content creators, in a sense, all creating content to attract people they like personally. With that in mind, did you ever consider going with a traditional publisher, like Manhattan? I've heard you mention Manhattan before, but I'm not sure.

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

It is not intended as one. I considered it when I 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. Yeah.

Because you needed to do offset print runs, which typically had a five-figure cost associated with them, you needed a financier. So a publisher was essentially a venture capitalist during that time. They were going to pay for your printing, provide you with an advance, and enable people 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. However, two things broke that. The first was the internet.

And the second was gay race communism. Because you had a whole bunch of people—publishing companies that were now sort of conglomerated together with offices in the same ten blocks of Manhattan—going to the same parties, participating in the same social circles. They became less and less interested in what people wanted to read and more and more interested in what they thought people should read. As a result, they were no longer providing a valuable function to the audience. The function that publishers provided to an audience was to gatekeep this media for them and filter out all the trash. However, they were no longer filtering for quality.

They were filtering for aligned political opinions, so they did not provide benefits to the audience. Then, lo and behold, their business model began to become less and less profitable. I wonder why. Eventually, the advantages started to diminish.

And the promotional spending, especially for new authors, started to decline. They began getting rid of their mid-list titles, which serve as an incubator for future A-listers. This is what that category exists for. 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.

So, 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 publishers, I realized this. I mean, 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. Yeah.

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. I can be more appealing to them and 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 also from their actions. What do I need this middleman for? What value do you provide?

Do you offer? I've had a lot of pushback from this attitude at events like science fiction conventions. In one conversation, I mentioned that I don't think publishing houses add any value for new authors, and he absolutely blew up. He threw a temper tantrum and called me a sociopath for some reason.

And I later learned that he was an editor from a major publishing house. So I was standing between this man and his livelihood. But of course, he had this self-limiting belief: "I am an editor from a major publishing house." However, I quickly realized that the value wasn’t there. It was just a useless buffer in the relationship between the author and the audience that actively disrupted the quality of the feedback loop. There was a particular moment when I decided that I was going to be self-published. It was when my editor, whom I had hired myself, enthusiastically shoved some sample chapters from my book in front of an acquisitions person from one of the major publishing houses. He looked at the folder, read the first two or three sentences, held it out to me as if I had offered him a dead spider, and said, “Rewrite it in third person. You do know how to write in third person, don’t you?” in a tone of voice similar to that.

And 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 explain why "Theft of Fire" is written in the first person present tense, as well as the precise technical craftsmanship reasons behind that unusual choice. If he could even be taught, that is, because he held 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. Good for you. I realized that this industry was full of people who were very full of themselves and held self-limiting beliefs about their identities. I knew I wouldn't be able to get them to look at things in a new way, so I had to go and prove that I could sell.

And so I did. And 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 that you get paid." From my perspective, that's not a future. That's not a feature. You know, there were people who offered me like a five thousand dollar 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, and I raised, I think, $43,000. Nice!

Nice! And thank you to all the Kickstarter backers out there—amazing people. I was able to get three very talented professional actors, one for each major role, to bring it all to life 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 has confirmed again my belief that I don't need someone to give me permission to create. I can just create things, and if they are good enough, people will be interested. That's that agency again.

You don't wait for someone to say you can create; you just do it. You say, "I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not." There are so many new authors who are filled with doubt about whether their work has value that they will offer up 80% of their earnings to, you know, tour books or something in exchange for what basically amounts to a pat on the head. So, if there are any aspiring authors watching this, I'd like to speak directly to you for a moment. You're afraid.

I was afraid too. Everyone is afraid. You know, 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. There are also some other people who leafed through it and said, “Yeah, wow, this is really good.” But 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. If it actually has value to people, and you start getting out there, vlogging about it, and persuading a few people to read it, then you’ll see its true worth. If it has value, 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. This is a much better measure of value than whether some acquisitions person at a publishing house gives you compliments, as they often don’t know what sells.

They don't have any special magical knowledge or insight that you do not have. People are out there, and they want good things; they will buy it if you have the courage to offer it to them. 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 who want to achieve that? So, we'll conclude on that note because that was beautiful. I think we touched on a lot of great topics. Regarding the audiobook, you mentioned that it has finished recording.

Yes. I know we're dealing with other things, but is there a date it may be pushed back to, or a timeframe you have in mind? Our sound editor is booked up until about January because we were unable to schedule at the time we wanted to.

Complications from my wife having cancer. It is what it is. We are considering making some changes, but we might want to stick with our current plan. It will probably be in the first quarter of next year.

And then I'm 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. This will be the second book in what is planned 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 the first time I'd read a fiction book in a while, but I very rarely read unless it’s a physical book that I just burn through. I think there is a big future in audiobooks, especially in a certain type of audiobook like this—high effort, high production value. They started out being called books on tape, where someone simply read the book onto tape because you wanted to listen to it, and there was nothing beyond that. It was just someone reading the book aloud. What we're starting to discover really resonates with people is good narration, evolving into audio productions with real acting.

Akin to a sort of 1930s radio play, where the creators aimed to transform it into an acted piece of media. I embraced this concept and sought out some exceptionally talented voice actors who truly inspired me. I transitioned from thinking, "Oh, I suppose I should do an audiobook," to realizing, "Oh, we’re going to make something special." All the raw recordings are complete; we're just waiting on sound engineering. I directed every moment of it personally, and we had a lot of fun with the process. We're very proud of what we have created.

So I think it's either I'm completely delusional, or this is going to be good. It's going to be good. That's one last thing that I respect. It seems like in every piece of content, even on Twitter, something that could be as short as a one-sentence tweet, there's 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 know, you can't just try to cheat people. You can't just take pictures of your friends.

"Post it on Instagram and pretend you're a success. You need to offer genuine value. I try to operate under the assumption that people are intelligent because I want to attract an audience of smart individuals—after all, smart people tend to have more money."

Yeah, all right. So with that, I'll have links to everything in the description: the book, the substance, and the Twitter account. All of them are great. Follow them!

Hopefully, I'll follow up with you on how that goes because I actually want to see. Yes, absolutely. Outside of that, is there anything else you would like to promote? A website or general information that people can access? Well, I'm not sure I want to promote it yet, but we may have another special collaborative project in the future.

"Works with those voice actors? Oh, cool! So, okay, yeah, if you do, let me know, and I'll put the link. Yes, sweet Devon, thank you so much! I got more out of that than you know, so I'm very excited to get this. Thank you for having me; 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."