Derek Thompson

She told me what ideas were terrible and what ideas were good.

process of writing a proposal, writing a promise for a book was its own one, two year challenge.

But then we got that and then we send out the proposal to a bunch of publishers and the publishers say, we either don't think this idea is promising or we do think this idea is promising.

I went around, I talked to all the publishers who thought the idea might be promising and

And then there's a little bit of a bid for the book.

Different publishers will put down certain amounts of money.

And typically you go with whoever agrees to pay you the most.

That's sort of the story of how the book went from no idea to being published.

But the really interesting thing about books and audiences is how many different audiences there are for a single book.

The publishers.

So my agent was my first audience, right?

I had to impress

her with the idea why did you pick her by the way Derek I picked her because she had this lovely combination of being incredibly unsentimentally intelligent but also motherly in tone and approach and I kind of loved that combination did she publish somebody else did she publish somebody else on your team or something

She had worked with some people who had been at the Atlantic, like Josh Green, I think, works with her, and Megan McArdle.

I think Jonathan is an agent, a wonderful writer.

All of them are.

But it's interesting just how many audiences there are.

First, your audience is your agent.

Your next audience is your publisher.

Then your next audience might be sort of like TV producers or people like you, you know, podcast producers.