Latest / Author Hour / Paul Zak on the Neuroscience of Immersion and Why Every Good Book Is a Sitcom

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Paul Zak on the Neuroscience of Immersion and Why Every Good Book Is a Sitcom · Author Hour

• speaker-0: Paul, I really appreciate you coming on here. It's it's exciting to finally chat on the record. speaker-1: Absolutely, Eric. Thank you. speaker-0: Before we get into the nitty gritty here, would you just give us a bit of your background? I know you're a three time author, but what's the career path and personal history that led you to start writing books? speaker-1: Yeah, it's a good question. I'm a professor at Claremont at Graduate University and run a busy behavioral neuroscience lab there where we develop knowledge and technology so people can live longer, happier, and healthier lives. And when I'm working with graduate students, I always emphasize to them that we should not only be making contributions to the scholarly literature, but we should be improving society in our work. And so we do the use it as a screen. Is this a project we want to spend? A project takes a year. sometimes longer. Do you want to spend a year of your life working on this thing? Do we have any impact besides two dudes who are going to read it in some obscure journal? I I'm not interested in that. So perhaps I'm delusional enough to think that my work has broader impact. And one way I communicate that is by writing books. speaker-0: I love that. How how many of your students have you talked into writing something other than papers? speaker-1: That's a good question. When they're in the lab, they're just research monkeys because they're getting trained to be independent scholars. I don't know. I've had over a hundred PhD students. I try to keep in track of all of them. But no, I don't know how many have written books. That's a good quote, good point. speaker-0: Yeah. I mean that that kind of tragic gulf between useful papers and applied, you know, knowledge in society is I think something that could do with a little more attacking. And and I think AI is gonna help us attack it, but so do people like you who, you know, do the work to simplify and broaden the audience for your work. Well that's not about speaker-1: Yeah, I think there's an abyss there between useful research and communication. So many funding agencies, particularly private foundations, but increasingly the NAIA NIH and others, do want their funded researchers to communicate to the general public. And I think the general public's paying for this in one one way or another. They should get a return that's not an obscure paper. So, first of all, we could talk about not writing obscure papers, which we I work very hard to do. But also for for other, you know, rich researchers. You can you can write a blog, you can be on a podcast, you can give a TED talk or TEDx talk, right? So there's all kinds of ways to package what you're doing so that it's accessible to the general public. So even when I write scientific papers with my students, we want to be as inclusive as possible. Again, perhaps I'm delusional, but I want you to understand exactly what we've done. So a journalist, a regular human can read most of that paper, maybe the technical part they don't get, but they can read. The title, the abstract, the introduction, and really understand what we're working on and get a sense of the effort we've made to write in a clear way, in a responsible way that allows almost anyone to understand what we've done. So I gave a guest lecture at a colleague's class two weeks ago, just had them read some of my technical papers. And I said, Hey, you're you're not in a technical field. These are management students. You're not you can skip the ma the technical part. That's only You everything else you can understand, right? That that's okay. speaker-0: I love that so is this the I know you're coming off your third book now, but I I I think it's particularly interesting sometimes to look at that original book and book idea. Was that the motivation for your first book? Was to sort of translate your academic learnings into something that was accessible to a broader audience? speaker-1: Yeah, I'm on my fourth book, actually. So the first book came out of kind of fundamental work I had done showing that this neurochemical oxytocin that most people have heard of, that was my original research. No one was focused on that from a behavioral perspective in the early two thousands. And then kind of discovered something really big, got in the journals, got me on TV, gave a TED talk. And even prior to the TED talk, I said, this we again, you it's not one scientific discovery. It's a portfolio of findings that tell us something. in in our in our case, something important about human nature, nature of good and evil. This goes back to, you know, the book of Genesis, right? This is one of the ultimate questions. Are we human beings innately good or evil? And we had a lot to say about that. I had lot to say with all my helpers and collaborators. So I'm using the royal we here because it really is a a group endeavor. So yeah, so that, you know, that led to my first book, The Moral Molecule. And then in my lab, and maybe this is helpful for for listeners, You know, we for successful research programs, so have a lot of research going. We do 15, 20 projects a year. So big big big busy lab. Some of those are one offside and they don't don't go anywhere, and that's fine. We can publish that. But the successful research programs run eight to ten years in my lab. And so after eight or ten years, again, you have this portfolio of findings. You have what causes this, what inhibits this. You have, you know, you really have a great sense of of what's happening. And because we do applied behavioral neuroscience work, we're really always focused on problem solving and not kind of just kind of deep issues on how a nerve cell works or something. And so very very human focused. And so after eight or 10 years, no one sometimes, you know, no one wants to read 12 or 13 or 14 scientific papers. But if you can package it in a book, you can, you can again share this with a larger audience. And again, I I feel like that's an important part of my job as an educator, as a, as a researcher, someone pushing the frontiers of knowledge. But as you know, that can't be, you know, fact, fact, fact, hypothesis, proof, whatever. It's got to be full of stories. And so one of the things that allows me to write books is that my lab has an open door policy. I love to have people come in and bring problems to me, partially because I'm just curious about everything and why should I think of every good idea to work on, but also because I'm a cheap bastard and neuroscience is expensive. And so you show up my door, you know, with a suitcase full of money and go, Hey, we have this problem you want to work on. I'm like, hey, if I can work on that and you can help support the lab, that'd be great. And so we do a lot of field work. And so I'm just involved in a lot of weird situations where, you know, the the the place, the setting, the people generate a narrative that can illustrate a larger scientific point in the context of storytelling. So this I I really use narrative nonfiction as my approach. speaker-0: Yeah, lovely. Is there should we focus on immersion the is the sure as as the the book or do you want to deep dive on it I any of the others? speaker-1: We we got this focus on immersion, sure. speaker-0: Okay. I that one sort of jumps out to me as like the, you know, maybe the broadest universal appeal, just the the science of of happiness and understanding, you know, right who who lives happy lives and how everybody can can work towards that. How did that book in particular, let's just like use that as a case study of kind of like what came out of the lab, what were we learning, what papers got published, and how did that sort of develop into the book itself? speaker-1: And again, it always th that book starts with a story, which is again, I'm not clever enough to make up stories, but starts with me getting my ass chewed out by intelligence operator who just got back from Afghanistan from interviewing terrorists to try to get intel for the war on terror. And because of some of the discoveries we'd made in the lab, like wanted to know how to use oxytocin to get more intelligence from people. So probably illegal, which I told him, but this guy was really nose to nose. I mean I I'm six four. This guy's probably six five and had thirty pounds. I mean, like he was a he was a beast and he was like super intense. Like he, you know, needed a little vacation, I think. But in any case, so it really came out of the war on terror on how could we identify combinations of brain signals that capture I'm gonna use one bad word extensive listeners, cover yours. that's sort of the give a shit measure. How to get you to care for all the things your brain's doing, how to get you to care about this thing right now. Yeah. And care means I can it I induce an action. Caring, I I don't believe in self report. I'm a behavioral guy. And so I want to see like, could I communicate in a way that motivates you somehow neurologically to take an action? And so we began running experiments on that and ultimately identified this network in the brain that's a combination of brain signals that I've named immersion that seems to be that kind of givea shit measure. And And then built a company to commercialize this because every customer wants a better experience. Every business wants to increase what's called customer lifetime value, right? The the that have that customer be loyal in return and get more money because from that customer because they're so pleased with the experience they're having. And so in the experienced economy, there hasn't been really good measurement tool other than kind of bogus self-report. Did you like it? Again, I I want to know is did it shake up your brain so much that you were just turned on and excited? So that got me working with movie studios and working with educators and right. So again, for me from a writing perspective, once we develop a tool and that tool is made available to the world, all kinds of people are using that tool in ways I wouldn't have never expected. Right. So being able to go into a theater and help theaters turns out to be very expensive and most plays lose money. So being able to give them a tool to say, hey, what works in this play? What doesn't? Not just asking the audience, because they don't know, but their brains know. And that's really interesting. And so again, you can see how this enlightens the story. So for my writing, it's really narrative first and then science light. Right. I'm always going to come back to the science because what do you care about my opinion? I mean, maybe it's an informed opinion, but Again, the stories and from a writing perspective, the stories are meant to illustrate a larger scientific point. And they might be a little science. So I'm hoping that as I write my books, that people do learn a little bit of neuroscience and also learn to be critical. I I always say that my books, like, you know, we've done this research for 15 years, still could be wrong or still could be, you know, could be improved or whatever. So that's the way science it evolves and changes. But as far as I can tell, most of it, because we've replicated it many times. In different settings, is probably right. And then again, the point of the book is not to give you stories and teach you some science, but give you some takeaways. So in that book, if you remember, the immersion book, each chapter ends with five things you can do. So here's kind of the summary. You read all the stuff, you you understood the stories, maybe you got the science, maybe you didn't. But if I want to be a better educator or provide better corporate training, here are five things I can do based on this chapter. And so I kind of like that approach. some other authors do not like that. They think, if I've written clearly enough, then why do I need to summarize for you? But my perspective is your brain is a very lazy organ because it's so expensive to run at full speed. So let's make it easy for you. Again, I want to communicate as clearly as possible. Tell you the stories, tell the applications, what happened when I showed up at the Sony studios and helped them make Which is a true story, help them improve the movie trailer for the Transformers Bumblebee movie and a couple others. Like that's fun, right? Like how do they make movie theater movie trailers? Why do they care so much about them? So you have to go into the kind of economics of that. How do they get paid? And so there's a bunch of storytelling. And then I show up and then you know, whenever you show up somewhere, weird things will happen, right? Yeah. Every for writers who are listening to this, I think every good story s starts with in my case, I met a dude. So I think if you're writing, you think about that. I met this dude and then something happened, right? Like, okay. So Sony had this problem. They need to get butts and chairs. So I met a dude and he said, Hey, we need your technology. Can you come out to the Sony Studios in Culver City, California, and help us use 'cause I was on version one of the techs. It was still pretty clunky and just help us. I'm like, I want to see you use it. So we're trying to make this technology better. And then I guess spent a couple of days on the Sony set and then I met another dude and then I get it end up being in some movies and it's a long story. speaker-0: Very cool. What what did you tell them or show them? speaker-1: So the way movie trailers are made is that they they have companies just make trailers and they make basically rough cuts and they make bunch of them. And so what we did is we measured or they measured using my technology the the value that the brain got, the sort of give a shit measure for those rough cuts. And they took the one that on average was best and then began to edit it and then test it again and then edit it in a way that not only is more valuable to the brain, like, I really am interested now in this seeing this movie, but also ends on a high note and that's really important from a brain perspective. Like you put a lot of tension in your brain and now to find out what happens in that movie you've got to buy a ticket. And so speaker-0: Literally measure. Like you got people watching this brain watching the Transformers trailer with like what helmets on or sensors. speaker-1: So the the innovation is that we wrote so much software that can get these signals from wearables. We can get data from the cranial nerves, like the brain's output file. So y you know this Arthur C. Clark quote, right? Every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So it it turns out your brain's connected to a body and they talk to each other. And one of the ways they talk is through the cranial nerves. So this is part of the book, and maybe this is interesting for the people listening. It turns out that you can pay people to take drugs in your lab. Who knew? So once we identified the neurochemical constituents of this valuation network in the brain, I've called immersion, we can pharmacologically manipulate those systems and trace out the pathways from the cranial nerve to the heart. So if I have a standard sports, you know, heart rate sensor, we can do a bunch of math and translate very subtle changes in cardiac rhythms into what the brain's telling the body about its need for metabolic resources to process this experience. speaker-0: super interesting. speaker-1: And that's why it's a it's, you know, software as a service. Anyone can do this. It's it's made you know, with all due respect. It's made for the nineteen year old intern who's at a an event and a at a movie screening or whatever and could just wave a wearable over an iPad and go, Hey, we wanna measure your brain activity. It's anonymous, you know, can we put a wearable on your arm? Sure. Again, if you gotta wear a helmet, right? Yeah. So there's there's something. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah. So in science we talk about ecological validity, right? If I'm putting in a MRI scanner or something noisy or sterile lab, it's not really ecologically valid. It's not what people normally do, but people wear these things and people sit in movies. And so it's really valuable data. And I think that's why the book is important, even for people who don't want to measure it. Like, we measured 50,000 brain activities. Neuroscientists just don't get to get that much data because they're stuck in a lab. But we have this technology that, you know, people on six continents use every day. And so a lot of times people send me that data and go, hey, it's their data. They're paying for a subscription into our software. But like, hey, we got these interesting results. We're not really sure what they are. Could you help us with this? And then sometimes that data is so interesting, I'll say, Hey, if we suppress the name of your company, we would actually my lab would like to do more research and maybe publish something on this, which might help you, or maybe you don't care, or, you know, would you give us permission to use the data you collected? So again, a lot of that movie studios, blah, blah, blah, is because I have a whole army of people collecting data for me. So again, think from a writing perspective. Think of the the ways you can scale yourself. So you don't have to do everything and you have, you know, other people who are helping you. And that could be research assistants, it could be a lab, it could be but field trips. speaker-0: Audience, clients, like there's a lot of people who have decades of results from their work. And I think a lot of times you're exactly right, sort of sit down and confront the blank page on their own and try to like dredge up memories. But you know, you could probably in a one hour recap with a client that you met with five years ago or helped a few years ago, like just collect that story and that becomes the first draft of a chapter just by recording a one hour chat. speaker-1: Yeah. I mean one way exactly right. One or one way to do that is I use you know a Google calendar and I can just go back and just look at all the appointments I had on where was I traveling to? yeah, I was at this conference where I met the dude who set me up with the whatever. And so, but I do like that hook, right? Which is if you think of the story as I met this person. Mm-hmm. I met I was on a plane, I met this weird person, right? Yeah. And then we started talking and they're like, holy crap, you're interesting. And so again, I think those are little hooks for each chapter. And I do think one of my dear friends who's a you know real full-time professional writer said, you know, writing a book is like writing a a sitcom, right? Not only after you do you need a hook after every chapter, so they turn the next page, but every section change. You need a hook throughout. So I think, you know, I think of writing as I'm weaving this oriental rug and I'm gonna pull some threads out. I'm not gonna not tighten all the threads right away. I'm gonna I'm just gonna pull a little. And by the end of the book, it's gonna be a beautiful rug. But I'm going to drop in some little hooks here and there and just let them open let them stay open for a while. So my first book, The Moral Molecule, which is nature of good and evil, you know, just in writing this, good and evil is again there's there's no religious or spiritual component to that. I'm science guy. My mother was a was a former Catholic nun. Dropped out at some point, wasn't the her thing, but she kind of tortured tortured us children to be like hyper-religious. And so You know, as writing, I'm like, okay, that's an interesting little tidbit that I can just drop in. Cause you don't want the Paul Zach story, you want the science story or the insight about nature. But that's a little little thread that was dropped into chapter one and got picked up in chapter four, and then it's closed in the final chapter. So I think from a writing perspective, again, I don't wanna depending on the kind of book, you know, I don't wanna actually pull all the threads. I don't want to close every story I open within that chapter or within that section of a chapter. You let them write. speaker-0: Yeah, I like I like the idea of sort of opening parentheses. And you you need to have those open loops, you know, in fiction and in nonfiction, like st starting a mystery and sort of leaving it open and teasing along. That that's like a really enjoyable thing for a reader. That's you know, when you're not just doing like how clear can I possibly be business writing, especially for a long form, it gets more important to have those like engagement hooks and curio curiosity loops. I I'm curious what you know, shifting a a little bit like What benefits you've gotten from the books? Like what has changed as you've sort of added author to your academic career? What doors has it opened? What relationships has it started? What, you know, where has it gotten you? What's it given you? speaker-1: Yeah, I think for the immersion book in particular, you know, part of that is to close this 10 year research program. So it's that's the way I get to put this to bed. It's also promoted to the company, which is called Immersion. So, you know, there's a second win. And then the third win is I remember the when that book came out, which is twenty twenty two, within the first month of the book being released, because you guys are so smart on on marketing, helping us market our books. I booked more paid corporate talks than the cost of the book in the first month. So now I'm getting a return on that, which is really nice. So again, I'm trying to do the the triple dipping wheel and then maybe this is good for others. Again, most people are not gonna make money from the book itself. I think that's fair to say. There's some exceptions, goggins, is exceptions. But you're gonna make money by promoting your business, by promoting your your ability to speak and communicate and That gets you on podcasts and right. And so you can kind of build up your own personal brand. And so I think the book is a good way to do that. So that's certainly has done that. For me, because I've been on the road for 20 years giving talks, I do feel like I need something new to talk about. Right. I don't want to talk about the work at inoxytocin, you know, in two thousand five. you know. Yeah. I mean, yeah. If if if there's a corporate client that really wants to hear about that or whatever, yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. It's it's It is my greatest hit. It's my, you know, jumping jack flash or whatever. They speaker-0: You always gotta play it. You know. speaker-1: the audience wants it. In the line. But I also want to talk about the new things. And so I think it's it's really important that authors continually kind of recreate themselves. My lab's doing a lot of work in AI now for for obvious reasons. You know, what what is it doing to the human brain? What's it doing to human agency? Does is it gonna increase or decrease our ability to thrive as human beings? That's a good hot topic. I can run with that for a while. Right now it's in the, you know, year one of this eight year research program. So who knows, you know, what we're gonna find. Probably will turn into a book eventually. But I think y you know, looking for the new new thing is still kind of important. So for me, I'm doing a book every two, three years. Yeah. because I have these multiple research programs running in my lab. So I have enough material. And so I think that's a that's a fairly good pace. A of people do one. Do you know they'll do one book and that summarizes a lot of their They found in their life. And I think there's nothing at all wrong with that. I think it's just great. And again, I think there is a sense of closure. Once you've written a book, sometimes when I give talks, people go, you afterwards you're signing books or whatever. And people go, have you read, you know, some pop neuroscience book? I'm like, no, no, I I contribute to the leading edge. Like I'm in the journals. Like I don't read other people's pop, you know, it'll just make me unhappy because it won't be precise enough. And so yeah. So one, you know, once the book is written to me, that part of my life is over. We're not doing a lot more work in that area and I I don't want to hear more about it. I'm kind of done. Because I've again I spent ten years on this, right? So it's speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: the Yeah. But people will spend an entire lifetime in and you know, at age fifty five or sixty or something and write a book. So I do think for personal branding it's really important. I think there's nothing better than a book from a branding perspective. speaker-0: I and your most recent is the the little book of happiness, scientific approach to living better. How d is that similar to it's it's the culmination of one of these long term research projects? speaker-1: Yeah, and it is a it's a little book. It's 8,000 words. And it that one has a free app, has a QR code for a free app in it. And it's just a manual on how to live better. And that came about because of a dude, right? Because I I got no, I started, you know, I give these public lectures on thriving and happiness, and people start asking me, like, give me 10 things to do. And I and I can I can do that. But I started thinking, gosh, you know, I've been accumulating this knowledge for all these years, and all the research for that book. Done and was done years ago. I mean, it's still happening a little bit, but I thought, can I encapsulate that into something little? And so I do think this is a question for you. I since I'm talking your ear off now, but I do think from what I've read, books are getting shorter. And 8,000-word book is very short. And there was a reason to do that. I just wanted to make it a manual, something you can live with for six months and you try these activities and you have an app to show you if you're getting happier or not. But I do think people should think about. you know, books that are twenty five or thirty thousand words. I think there's nothing wrong with that. Is that your experience as well? speaker-0: I I agree completely. I think there's there's a study that's showing that books are getting shorter. And that's no surprise, right? I mean, we're we're they are competing with dopamine machines that are readily available in the phones. I think people have a a a shorter attention span and a l just a little less tolerance for an overwritten book. And and why should they, right? Like how quickly can you deliver the value? I think especially in in nonfiction is Is a perfectly reasonable thing for a a reader who recognizes that sort of their time is at a premium to to ask of an author. And I I love reading, you know, I would rather reread a great short book three times as a reader that like really hammers it home than sort of have a point belabored over a longer book that just doesn't do as much to stick with me. My other theory on this is that people only recommend books they finish. So as an author, having a book that is finishable and very easily so really increases the like the virality of the book in the sense that people talk about it and recommend it because, you know, they've fully comprehended it and there's not like a twist ending where all of a sudden it sucks and they're out there, you know, recommending it to people having not finished it themselves. So I think there's some wisdom in that. speaker-1: Yeah. And also I think this is why I think the Scribed Media a la carte model is so valuable, which is you need an outside person, an editor, who will go through and go, You gotta cut this thing down. You got, you know, here's some suggestions. Okay, I like the you know, I've I've published with traditional publishers who kind of dictate to you. I like the having the control to say, No, actually I really need these this chapter in there. I need these four pages, as opposed to having to fight with someone who goes, Well, we we own your Frickin IP, so we're gonna do whatever we want with it. speaker-0: Yeah. It's a very especially when you have, you know, in an app or a a business or, you know, you you wanna build the relationships off of this book. You have a personal brand you're trying to build. You don't want a a sort of a controlling partner with different incentives and goals than you. And a lot of people do find themselves in that situation for for ultimately like a relatively trivial amount of money given where advances are for most people these days. So yeah, the the freedom and the speed that comes with self publishing, I think is you know, increasingly relevant. And, you know, you're a great example of like you're you're on the news, you're on the TED stage, you're, you know, publish multi published author. You've been published in traditional. And, you know, just the the trade off of like, no, I I I want control, I want speed, I want editorial support, but ultimately like the flexibility and ownership that comes with self publishing so that you can use the book how you want in your career and you can get the book that really fits your needs. speaker-1: Right. Yeah, exactly. I should say I am working on book number five. I thought I was done with four, but I got another another one going, so I'm gonna talk to you guys in you know, some months from now. speaker-0: You wanna you wanna tease anything or speaker-1: Don't. It's such a good idea. I don't want to give it away. So it's it it's it's one of those things where you know, it's one of my my hooks when I'm on stage giving a talk. And everyone just lights up on that. And you think, okay, I'm just using it as a hook to get into something else I want to talk about. But like, okay, people really care about this thing. So again, I think for for authors or potential authors, you can stress test your ideas by putting them out there on a podcast or on a stage or in a blog or whatever in an interview. And then kind of see if it resonates or not. And this one I I did, you know, I tried it out on a bunch of people I knew, like, would you be interested in a book on this topic? Like, yeah, hell yeah. I buy that. I'm like, well, okay. That's all my brain too. So maybe I should write that book. But you'll be on the the role of AI now in in writing. I think so. In the scientific journals now, when you submit scientific papers, you have to say, Did I use AI to, you know, do any part of this thing? Are you guys concerned? Is it a good idea, bad idea? speaker-0: D do the journals treat you differently if you did? speaker-1: We haven't used so I did train a combative co-author. I I fed in an I made an agent that f absorb all my research and then I made it be mean to me basically so show me the error. So I will do that. I'll have it say like, Am I missing something? H is this arj argument logically consistent? So I'll kind of very lightly use my my AI co-author, but it's very light. It it might be do a final you know, run through with papers written. So I don't know. I I I haven't seen anyone treat differently. They ha they I got my first AI scientific reviews, which by and large were very good. Almost better, actually much better than human reviews, because humans are just too biased. Where an AI reviewer, you know, is pulling from the corpus of the and it's it doesn't it's not nasty, right? It's just speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: I'm sorry, but I cut you off. AI in writing. I'm curious about speaker-0: That seems like one of the functions that AI would be naturally superhuman at is just the ability to sort of contextualize much more broadly than any one human can can store. And that's kind of that's kind of where I use it. I find it still not great at like a line by line. Editing and it it misses sort of your like tone or focus a lot of the time. I I don't really use it because of my normal process, I don't use it to generate, but I have found it very useful in saying, like, hey, you know, here's a 50,000-word manuscript. I'm pretty sure I've duplicated some ideas or some phrasing or some sentences. Like, can you help me find redundancies across this? And when you've worked on 10 different versions of a manuscript and you've been working on it for two years, like it is very difficult to read. And maintain the mental context to remember what you've edited in and out. And so it's really helpful for some of those. You know, it powers transcription tools and grammar tools and things that are naturally helpful. And it can give, you know, I find it helpful sometimes for like generating options of like, hey, this is my best chapter title. Come up with 50, come up with a hundred. Like can we, can we to make this alliterative? Is there, you know, a synonym that's but ultimately like I I find human taste is still a very relevant part. And if you generate if you generate a bunch of slop, it's very hard to edit. But as like if you take something human generated for the most part and use it to either add ideas or do research or help you hone and deduplicate and really be deliberate about your phrasing, then that can be a really help. It's like exactly the way you phrase it, sort of like a genius co author, where you don't ever have to take the recommendations, but you You know, it pays to solicit them sometimes 'cause it it suggests something that you love that you wouldn't have noticed or thought of on your own. speaker-1: I I would think of this as augmented intelligence, not artificial. It's just augmenting your intelligence, right? Yeah. Can you tell me I do all my books in in audio because I love audio books. I have read, and I don't know if you guys are doing it yet, also AI generated audio voices. There's something wonderful about having a human. I've had the same voice actor do my last two books with you guys. And his name is Rich Miller. He's wonderful and he he's human, right? But Yeah. Now it seems like the AI bots are almost as good as humans, or maybe as good. What what's your view on the audiobooks? speaker-0: It'll be a gradual transition. I think it will most will eventually transition due to cost. You know, it's it's so much cheaper to get a even if it's in eight out of ten or nine out of ten, like AI performance, but it's half the cost or one-tenth the cost or one percent of the cost. You know, most people are not most books are not able to afford a human audiobook unless they're subsidizing it with another business or something like that. And so I think. A lot of books that are not necessarily budgeted to do that will get a a good or solid or decent AI audiobook over time. I've seen rapid progress in the tools. And I think where we'll have a phase where a human with taste will need to sort of direct the tool to perform the way you want it to, in the same way that like a good director sort of teaches an actor or shows an actor you know, where you want the emphasis and where you want the emotion and where you want the speed and that human taste of like knowing what's going to sound good to a human is still necessary to close the gap between, you know, a f a five out of ten or an uncanny valley and something that sounds good. But I think that gap will close over time. And I think eventually AI will be quite good at that. But I think for, you know, the the very best audiobooks I've ever heard are often still human performances. I don't know. I I really don't know what happens at the very, very tippy top of the power law. You know, whether there's something about like, you know, you had hands in your human hands in your chocolate chip cookies that like we can't explain why, but you can still feel the difference be i for a feeling that's almost supernatural. Like I I have a suspicion that's somewhere up there, like some people will be able to tell whether or not it's human, but that's more that's probably like a woo-woo opinion, even from a like very techno optimist guy. speaker-1: Well, even yeah, I I'm optimistic too. But yeah, I think even the breathing and the I did my first book. I did the audiobook, the Random House asked me to do it. And it's very hard. And like learning how to breathe and how to articulate and not sound like a robot, you you really need a a a great actor. But you hear sometimes I'll buy audiobooks just based on the narrator, like a famous actor's doing it. And you're like, what a voice. Like it's again, maybe I gets get to know. But anyway, I what I like about again your business so much is I can choose. Do I want an audiobook? It's not I get to choose the voice actor or maybe eventually AI. But you know, again, having that impose on you from from Brandon House was like, Okay, you have to do the audio book because it's such a personal book and we need you. I'm like, Wait, I am an actor. And so, you know, I had to go find some voice people I knew in Hollywood and have someone train me and speaker-0: It's hard work. You have a great voice, but it's still, you know, it's it takes days to record, which people and it and it is hard work and you gotta practice and and people underestimate the the lift and how skilled really good narrators are, you know. Right. I I've heard authors I I don't narrate my own books just because I've heard authors sort of take it on and it you could just tell the difference between like a really polished personal one. I'm I'm really glad when they are personal books and people do them. coach people generally that way, but you gotta be know you're biting something off, you know. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's been so fun to talk to you and I do think everyone probably has a book in them and you know, having different options on how to bring that out. I have one more question for you, if I may, in our remaining zero seconds. speaker-0: Fully flipping this interview on me. yeah. speaker-1: No, I'm so curious about the whole thing, because I love to write to write every day. I just love it so much. Between my scientific work and blogs and working on the book. What about y if books go fully digital, what about books that are embedded with audio and music and video? Is that something you've thought about? speaker-0: I've seen I've thought about it. I've seen a lot of different sort of attempts at this come and go at different levels of technology. I expect they'll sort of merge and blend. Like what's kind of interesting now is almost every YouTube video has subtitles and almost ever and the short forms ones do too, but those platforms aren't designed for long form in quite the same way. You know, Kindle is move moving like the Kindle reading experience and the audio closer together and you can merge them in some books, which is pretty interesting. I think the physical book form factor is like very enduring and and it rewarding to users in ways that sometimes audio and and digital are not, though I own a lot of Kindle books and a lot of audiobooks, and I I appreciate them for their own unique superpowers. I wouldn't be surprised if some sort of hybrid thing came out, but I expect that anything. sort of if you're going for dopamine, then I think you'll sort of end up merging with something more like movies or or audio. And so the like you end up with these kind of groupings of taste. And so I'm I'm I'm always a little dubious of like a platform innovation in books, just because it seem I've seen so many people try things and fail for various reasons. It's it's difficult to get like a a massive leap in improvement, I would say yeah, from from a form factor that's so old. speaker-1: Interesting. Yeah. I I in my immersion book a couple of times I said was talking about a specific commercial we measure measured or like, okay, finish this chapter and then, you know, go go speaker-0: Why? speaker-1: go watch the thing. And by the way, how my you guys are really nice to you frame the titles and put here. So y my flag's hiding my happiness book, just my immersion book. So yeah. I keep it in my background whenever I'm I'm on camera, I want to make sure they see my book covers. So very nice of you guys to do that. speaker-0: I I I've got mine hanging on the wall over there. It's a lovely little gift for, you know, memento for crossing an incredible finish line, navigating a maze. And, you know, I love seeing them kind of up next to people's diplomas because I think it's sort of a, you know, an equal achievement in many cases. You you've sprinkled a lot of this throughout the conversation, Paul, but I'm I'm it's one of my sort of closing questions and you may have more to give. W what advice do you have for someone who's sort of considering they're flirting with making the commitment to write a book of of the time, the effort, the money, you know, take us back to when you were sort of on the fence. And what would you say to somebody who, you know, calls you up and says, Should I give this a go? Is it worth it? You know, how how can I decide whether to make this my priority? speaker-1: I mean, I think one of the important things about someone said this famous about writers is writers write. And so you can kind of test the market, test your own skill, find your voice by writing short things. Just take take one of those customer stories or take one of those weird anecdotes that you had and just turn it into a eight hundred word blog. Share with some friends or find a place to post it. So my first book I was really had trouble finding my voice because I was both writing the book but also a character in the book, and yet you don't want the Paul Zach story, certainly. And so I had a blog on psychology today and would get, you know, normal I get like a thousand reads, which is fine. And one of those got a quarter million reads. It's called How to Run a a con. And I talked about myself as a kid and I got I worked at a gas station and I got conned out of a hundred dollars. And so, okay. So I can tell the story, but also be a character in the story. So it kind of helped me find the voice for that. So I think Number one, write, just write every day. Just practice. See, see, try it out. Ask your dear friends to listen to you, or even try the story out loud. You can read it and and get some feedback. The second is it's a humbling experience. And I think the two best writing books, Stephen King's book on writing, which is like 120 pages. The thesis of that book is it's you know, disgorge yourself of everything. And then the beauty of writing is the polishing. And so just just dump it out. All the stuff in your brain, just dump it out. And it can be polished up later. I think that's great advice. And Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art. Yeah. One of the best books ever written on the history of life, in my view, worth rereading every year. You just have to do it a lot, right? But that's where the helpers come in. That's where your friends, that's where an editor. And so if you find a place where you can just put this up, your company blog or your Facebook page or whatever, whatever people post stuff. And just ask for feedback. And you know, people people can be mean, but you actually want mean, right? You you want to say, hey, that story was too long, or you know, you seem to have wandered or whatever. So, and by the way, there's just tons of great online resources, classes people can take. There's just wonderful writing resources. So even my science education, I would I love my English classes and my philosophy classes, and I just studied writing. I studied how to write and took online courses and read lots of books and you know, read books for style and not substance. Like, how do they structure this book? So I think the key, here's the last thing I'll say. The key to writing a book is structure. Once you have structured what the pieces are going to go in, then you just it just plug and play. So really think about how to structure that. And if you read other good books for structure and you can see how they put these puzzle pieces, this oriental rug that we're weaving together. it'll be super informative. Same thing with movies, right? If you if you are a movie aficionado, you can see you know what they did, how they pulled this back in, how they close the loop. And anyway, you're writing a sitcom. Every book's a sitcom. It's got it's gotta have interesting characters, they have to have a crisis, and then you gotta close the loop. There's gotta be a couple of laugh lines in there. And and if you're laughing at yourself, if you're like me, you're a doofus and you get all involved in stuff that you have no business being in. And and yet you still are kind of useful in some way. That's that's a pretty good story. speaker-0: I love it. That's that's great fun. Thank you, Paul. And where would you send people to follow you, follow along, read your books, learn from you, become happier? speaker-1: thank you for asking. You can get information on the company at get immersion.com or immersion with i. And my website's now Paul Jzack.net because the dot com got stolen through some awful AI bots in Indonesia. So working getting that back. But anyway, Paul Jzat.net, you can email me. If you're listening, you have questions, I'll answer You people can email me. speaker-0: Awesome. And we've got the two most recent books are Immersion, The Science of the Extraordinary and The Source of Happiness, and The Little Book of Happiness, A Scientific Approach to Living Better. You wrote The Moral Molecule before. And what was the second one? speaker-1: The second one was called trust factor, the science of building high performance companies, I think. speaker-0: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Nailed it. And a fifth one coming soon that remains an Enigma. So stay tuned for more. speaker-1: I know who to talk to when I'm ready to publish. speaker-0: Yeah, we're we're standing by and excited to work with you again. Thank you so much for taking the time, Paul. Appreciate you.