Kobe Bryant spent 15 years writing every day because he wanted to become the next Walt Disney. Now, Jimmy Soni is telling that story. The first part of our conversation is Kobe’s secret obsession with writing. Then we got into why Michael Lewis once wrote under a pen name, why the publishing industry is broken, and why Jimmy loves writing with AI. Highlights: 1. The world is a conspiracy designed to prevent you from writing. 2. Jimmy sees himself in a battle against that world to find four hours per day to do focused writing. 3. “I’m researching” is often an excuse not to write. People spend decades researching books they never write, and it’s a writers' job to come up with ways to get research done without falling down a black hole. 4. Using AI to write is like using a very sharp knife to cook. The tool might make it easier, but you still have to cook the meal. 5. If you can’t out-write the AI, what are you doing writing in the first-place? 6. Find a Model Book to serve as the "plaster cast" for the book you’re writing and study it obsessively. Jimmy wanted his book, “The Founders” to be like “The Everything Store” by Brad Stone, and read it more than 20 times to understand what made it so good. 7. People think that being a professional writer means going to a lot of cocktail parties. Nope... the reality is that the craft of writing involves showing up to work every day, putting away the distractions, and focusing for many, many hours. You go to bed early, you wake up early, you get your work done. Do it every day for months in a row and you’ll have a book. 8. A problem with traditional publishing is that the entire system is predicated on your book being a hit within the first two weeks. If it’s not, publishers largely give up and move onto something else. 9. What looks like a talent gap is often just a focus gap. Amateur writers severely underestimate just how much time and effort goes into great books. 10. A/B test the cover art for your book. It’s so easy, so cheap, and the saying is true: People judge a book by its cover. 11. Before Michael Lewis was “Michael Lewis,” he wrote under the pen name of Diana Bleecker because he was writing about Wall Street while working on Wall Street, and didn’t want people to know who he was. 12. Michael Lewis was an art history major at Princeton, and once recounted that a lot of Renaissance-era paintings look quite similar. But if you want to see the idiosyncrasies, look at the toenails. That’s where the artists would lose their steam or put in the most individuality, so they’re some of the most distinctive parts of the art. Many fields have an equivalent — a place where you can find hidden answers, if only you know where to look. 13. Ambition is fuel that can burn relatively clean for a little while, only to become dirty later on. Jimmy says: “For the true greats, the sustained motivation needs to come from something deeper. It needs to come from love. That’s the only sustaining force there is.” 14. Kobe built his own publishing company because he didn’t feel like the big publishing houses could deliver the level of quality he demanded. 15. Kobe once spent two weeks redesigning the barcode on one of his books because he wanted it to blend more fluidly with the back cover design (no traditional publisher would do something like this). I've shared the full conversation with Jimmy Soni below. The first ~25 minutes are about Kobe Bryant. The rest is about a hodgepodge of other topics. If you'd rather watch the full thing on YouTube or listen on Apple / Spotify, check out the links in the reply tweets.