THE AUTHOR

Bookshelves line the walls of his office. Hundreds of old, rare books fill them.

THE AUTHOR gestures to them.

"I haven't read 90% of these," he says, "but they make for a great backdrop for photos."

I ask him which books make up the 10% that he has read.

"Hmmm…" he says, running a finger over several of the book's spines. "Yeah, okay, make it 100%."

He laughs. "Now what the fuck are we here to talk about? Oh yeah—money!"

People really should give more credit to Jeff Bezos.

Nobody adapted to the post-scarcity economy faster than he did. He saw which parts of his empire were still viable, and which parts wouldn't be, and he moved fast. When people heard the news that he was laying off 550,000 people... those reactions were incredible.

Of course there were the outraged people. The ones doing the online activism thing. Tweeting at Bezos! Like that was going to change his mind.

But, you know, for most people, it was just shock. At the layoffs, yes. But also at the realization that there existed a man with the power to lay off over half a million people. I mean, my god. The discourse around Bezos had been aggressive for years up to that point, but mostly people just talked about his wealth in dollar terms. You know, "Billionaires shouldn't exist!" and all that. I think very few people appreciated how powerful Bezos was even without the money.

And, look, I gotta tell you. As a student of power—I loved it. I thought it was exquisite, that move. No hesitation.

Without question, the best part was when he streamed the announcement to the entire company. He didn't apologize. He just walked through the reasoning. He said Amazon was in the business of selling and shipping commodities. But now, because of the reps, that needed to change. His exact words were, "After the first unit of any commodity is produced, the marginal value of subsequent units quickly approaches zero." (Laughs)

I couldn't believe he hit 'em with that Princeton shit. People watching the livestream were sort of following along, but they hadn't figured out what he was getting at. So he just gave it to em straight. He said, "We have to get out of the business of delivery, of retail, of every business involving commodities."

In other words, any Amazon business that didn't involve digital media or other "irreplicable products" was getting shut down. I thought, Wow. What a power move!

As someone who sold millions of books on Amazon, I wouldn't have guessed you'd be so enthusiastic about the changes. This was the final death of the printed books, no?

No, no. It absolutely was not the death of print books.

Half my revenue came from Kindle sales and Kindle Unlimited readers before that point anyway. And I immediately started selling hand-signed print copies of my books on my own website. Pay me two hundred bucks a pop, and I'd write you a little personal note in the front matter.

So, no, print books did not get killed by this change. They simply became more rarefied, more personalized. Same thing had already happened with music, you know. It's the reason vinyl records came back. Now, if you're a band, you put a little personal note on there, directed to one person only, and suddenly you've got a high-demand physical object you can sell.

So what: The exchange value of physical books and albums is zero now. That's fine!

You just gotta sell books with higher psychological value, sentimental value. That's what a personal note from the author adds to your book purchase.

Bezos deciding that quickly to lay off half a million people was incredible for me and my business, because it was such a shock to the system. It created a demand for answers, and that's what I do with my books. I answer questions.

All of a sudden, a lot of people wanted to know: "What the hell do I do with myself if that happens to me?" That very same day, I got started on my book, "The Ancient Philosopher's Guide to the Post-Scarcity Economy."

I had it finished and available for sale on the Kindle store exactly one week later.

I've sold six million copies since then.

I hadn't realized that you wrote the book so quickly.

Oh yeah, after I've been doing it all these years, it's gotten easy. I mean, just about all of my books are repackaged bullshit quotes from dead Romans and Greeks.

See, the universities, they created this expectation a long time ago that to be enlightened, one must understand the thoughts and deeds of the ancient Greco-Roman man.

Our grandfathers had to learn Latin, and read a bunch of Ovid, and Livy, and Plato or whoever the fuck. At some point we stopped making that shit mandatory in school, but we still go through the motions of pretending to respect the institutions invented by all those dead guys. You know, senators have to act a certain way, and all that.

A lot of people in the West carry around a sort of shame about their lack of exposure to this stuff. Some of them feel they might respect themselves more if they'd also had to memorize a bunch of useless trivia about a failed Mediterranean empire.

I exploit that feeling.

My books serve up the ancient knowledge that people so crave, and I write it simply, so it goes down easy. I cook up a trite little lesson, drop in some references to mythological stories and maybe, like, a little bit of paraphrased history, and then I put it in a cute little package. "THE ANCIENT LAWS OF NATURE." Or, uh, "THE STOIC GUIDE TO LIFE."

You've seen all my books, right? People eat this shit up.

You serve them a little reheated wisdom in a Roman soupbowl and they think, "this guy must really know what he's talking about!"

You sort of make it seem easy. Aren't you worried that your readers are going to see this interview and have a negative reaction to it?

To my readers, I would say, hey! If you're feeling offended right now, just remember Marcus Aurelius. In his book of meditations, he said, "Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."

Somethin' to think about, huh?

And anyway, nobody is gonna read your fuckin' book, kid. Relax.