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Two articles

The Average Guys Outsmarting Wall Street on Prediction Markets

How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency

A fun pair of pieces published two days apart.

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An event

Emmett Shine is one of the main reasons all the millennial companies look like they do. This is not shade; this is fact. In addition to having an exceptional personal website URL, Emily Sundberg writes Feed Me, a daily newsletter “where the dealmakers and strivers get their gossip.” I personally would not go that far but I do not write headlines and I also subscribe to Feed Me so perhaps I am striving to be a striver.

Anyway. On Wednesday, I went to hear the two of them chat. I enjoyed it. Listening is an underrated skill.

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A project

We have been toying around with the idea of starting something. This is vague and unformed right now. Claude, however, wrote us a business plan. Everything good starts with a business plan.

Related: This is cool.

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A swim

I continue to improve at swimming, which is fun. Before last month, I had never been in the 1:3x per 100 yards consistently. These times are not good, but they are better, and that’s not nothing. You could even argue that it’s something. I also purchased a new Speedo, which might have something to do with the progress. We’ll see how slightly better times in a 25-yard pool translate to the open water in a few weeks. I also started occasionally putting swim workouts on my watch. In theory, the watch helps with pacing by vibrating but I don’t know what any of the buzzing means and I’m too stubborn to look it up so I just keep swimming while my watch has a fit on my wrist. Good times.

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A Q&A

Okay, bye bye.

For a few years, a small part of Neil Buethe’s job was to call up and yell at me. Or perhaps, more accurately, have a frank exchange of ideas. Neil was chief communications officer at the U.S. Soccer Federation, an organization he joined in 2003. I was covering the United States men’s national team. We always had productive conversations. We can certainly agree that clickbait headlines are no one’s friend.

Last year, Neil stepped away from his full-time role at the federation—although he’s still an advisor to the president—to launch 18th and Prairie, a soccer-focused boutique communications, media, and content agency. He works with federations, teams, and companies to help navigate the fractured and confusing American soccer ecosystem.

I called up Neil to talk about the importance of relationships in comms work, why Alexi Lalas might be the best journalist in American soccer, and why America isn’t ready for this summer’s World Cup (in a good way).

But we started, as one does, in Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Three Point Four Media: Your first job was at the Baraboo News Republic. How did you end up there?

Neil Buethe: I had interned at US Soccer in Chicago, and I was looking for a full-time gig. I was in Wisconsin and dropped off my resume at the Portage Daily Register up north. I guess all the small newspapers were connected somehow because the editors in Baraboo reached out, I interviewed, and I got the job. I lived in Madison and drove 30-40 minutes every day. Baraboo is the smallest city with a daily newspaper, and they needed content.

I was there for about 10 months, and I wrote two stories a day. I learned so much from everyone who worked there, many of them who still do: how to find stories, how to present ideas, how to write, how to make things relevant. I covered so many random topics. All these deer were getting sick and the venison wasn’t safe to eat, so they made huge piles of deer and burned them. That was big. I covered the highway expansion and pollution from a World War II ammunition plant. I really appreciated my time being there, and I became a much better writer.

One of my first jobs was writing eight posts a day for a New York City media blog. It was rough, but you learn a lot quickly.

I covered the county board and the sheriff, and interviewed candidates for governor when they came through Baraboo. You learn to ask good questions and build strong, meaningful relationships. Before I left, I went to tell the sheriff I took a job with US Soccer. He sat me down and made a point to tell me how much he appreciated the work I had done and that he felt I always tried to do it fairly. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot throughout my career, especially when I moved to the PR side of things.

Covering someone fairly and writing what they want to hear are not the same thing. It’s always nice to work with PR and comms people who understand that distinction.

As a comms person, you have to manage up with your bosses at times. Sometimes you have to tell them that they need to take a little bit of the bad with the good because the bad is accurate or fair. They shouldn’t want a puff piece, necessarily. They should want an authentic story. It’s my job to provide the journalist with as much context and insight as I possibly can, so when they do write the story, it’s balanced.

The best journalists are the ones that you can have tough conversations with. I’m not going to agree with everything you write, but I’m going to respect what you do. Did I agree with everything Grant Wahl wrote? No. But we could have a back and forth. To me, that’s the trademark of someone who is legit, knows what they are doing, and is professional.

A journalist should want to get the story right. And part of that is knowing what US Soccer is saying. Gather all the string and then weave it into a story. Decide what is spin and what is truth.

For sure, although I never use the word spin. I’m not trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. I’m trying to provide the context you need to understand the issue or story. If I felt like you were wrong about something, I’d explain why.

Alexi Lalas loves to stir the pot. He plays a character on TV. He likes to say controversial things at times. But I will tell you this: Alexi Lalas would call me more than any other media member out there, asking me about something that was going on. We would have a debate about it. I would give him the context from the US soccer side and he would give me his two cents. Sometimes he would agree and other times he’d say he didn’t believe me. But he would always take the time to understand our side before he went on a rant. People are always surprised when I say Alexi was probably one of the most, if not the most, professional people in soccer media.

Alexi is very good at his job. There’s a reason he’s one of the most famous male soccer players in America. Switching gears a bit: this sounds more antagonistic than it’s meant to be, but did you intend to stay at US Soccer for 22 years?

If you would have told me back in 2003 that I would be there for 22 years, I would have been incredibly surprised. I had a few different opportunities to go to other places. I had really good conversations with Real Salt Lake when they first started, which was only a couple of years into my time at US Soccer. I talked to the Seattle Sounders a couple times about joining them.

Whenever those opportunities came up, I’d take a step back and compare them to the opportunity I had with US Soccer. I was so lucky. I got to do so many different things over the course of my time with them. I started doing basic comms work and launching a website, which we didn’t have in 2003. Then I moved into the youth national team role. I got connected to so many amazing coaches, like Thomas Rongen and Sigi Schmid, and players who went on to the full national team. My relationships with those players were built when they were 15, 16, 17 years old, and I still have those relationships today. I also got to start our content division from scratch. We were trying things, seeing what worked and what didn’t. Eventually, I was overseeing the whole department, which was a new challenge, and working with Jurgen Klinsmann and his pedigree.

But yeah, I never thought I would be there that long. I knew I wanted to transition at some point in the last few years. The World Cup this year was a marker for me. What US Soccer is doing is unbelievable right now: the growth of the organization, the building of the National Training Center, and the revenue that’s coming in. There’s still so much opportunity, but I also knew for myself I wanted to be challenged in a different way again.

Tell me about 18th and Prairie.

Right now, I’m still an advisor to US Soccer, helping president Cindy Parlow Cone with all her communications. But I was curious about starting my own agency. When I started thinking about it more seriously, I realized pretty quickly that doing it before the World Cup was going to be better than after the World Cup. A lot of brands, federations, and teams were looking for help in the lead up to the World Cup. They were curious about how to navigate the media landscape in the United States, specifically in the soccer space. I was able to provide helpful insight. I was doing it on my own at first, then realized I should start something more formal so I launched 18th and Prairie.

I’ve been working with EA Sports, the German DFB, and Capelli Sport, which has Cape Verde in the World Cup. There’s so much opportunity in the future: the Olympics in ‘28, the Women’s World Cup in ’31, and maybe some other big events and tournaments.

How much of a catalyst do you think this summer’s World Cup will be? I keep hearing people refer to it as a transformative moment for the sport, but I don’t know. I think the sport is already here.

I go back to 1994 being such a pivotal moment in my life. My dad and his friend took me and my friend to a game in Chicago. My dad didn’t know anything about the sport. But now those people like me who were impacted by ’94 or have been impacted by soccer over the past 30 years are dads and moms, and editors at newspapers or producers at TV stations. They understand how amazing the sport is. Their kids have grown up with it in a different way. The impact of the World Cup will be phenomenal on the kids who really care about the sport. It has an opportunity to bring all those casual fans into the tent, too. Soccer is part of the fabric of American life now, and the World Cup will bring even more excitement and awareness, and drive people who have been flirting with the sport to get more into it. I don’t think America is ready for the World Cup, and the impact it’s actually going to have. It feels quiet right now, but it’s going to get loud real quick.

I’ve always felt like what MLS needs is more time. It needs kids who go to games to grow up and become fans and bring their kids. You can’t really fast-forward that process although you can, to your point, enlarge the tent.

And it’s not just Major League Soccer, and the job they do, which is amazing, especially their in-game experience. I love NWSL and USL and how many markets they are in. I love going to Madison Forward games. I’ve been a season ticket holder since day one. They’re talking about bringing a USL team to Green Bay, and I’ve been having conversations with them. That’s so exciting. USL is in all these communities across the United States. There are kids that get to go to those games and experience a sport in a way you and I never had the opportunity. That matters too, right? Because it’s your team, your local sport experience.

I love the Packers because they were in my backyard, and I used to go to the games. I don’t have a relationship with any other sports team like I do with the Packers. We’re building soccer teams in all these communities, and that’s amazing.

Longtime readers know the Three Point Four Media origin story by now: a couple of freelance journalists put their heads together to help brands big and small tell their story. We don’t list “ideation” as a service on our site or in our capabilities deck, but I’m starting to think we should. We’re very good at it. Back when we were freelance journalists, ideas were our currency, our single most important stream of revenue. The best freelance writers aren’t necessarily the people writing glossy cover stories—though they are obviously very good at their jobs—but the kind of guys like your friends at Three Point Four who can constantly and consistently pump out good ideas and (this is crucial!) work to improve those ideas collaboratively with editors. I’ve been really happy and grateful to be back in that space the past month for our clients.

Onto the links.

An article

At this point, my monthly installments in this newsletter are a long-running bit about my attempt to be both bored and more focused. Loved this David Epstein piece in The Atlantic about focusing on one thing at a time. This bit resonated with me:

Simon believed that technology now delivers so much information that it exceeds our capacity to attend to it. “The design principle that attention is scarce and must be preserved is very different from a principle of ‘the more information the better,’” he said. How would we live and work if we prioritized the principle that attention is scarce? For one thing, we wouldn’t check email ­77 times a ­day—the average in one of Mark’s ­studies.

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A project

New work for Dr. Steve Klein in Stat News, exploring the risks of using AI in addiction medicine.

What troubled me most was the possibility that patients might mistake simulated empathy for genuine human connection. For me, the art of medicine requires the ability to connect authentically with my patients. That connection is bidirectional, intentional, and therapeutic. With AI, we risk losing that connection.

Read the whole thing here: Using AI in addiction medicine could be particularly risky

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A concert

Destroyer’s Dan Bejar played The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor on a short solo tour that came through Ontario and Michigan. I’d seen Destroyer with the full band before, but it was a treat to see Bejar in a small club with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a hilariously large mug of beer. He played a setlist that spanned his entire career. He did a funny little bow after each song. He played a song called “Cue Synthesizer”… unplugged. To quote friend-of-the-newsletter and Pitchfork deputy director in a post-concert text exchange:

Seeing Bejar in a small room like this, there’s something kind of melancholy about it to me because the feeling I have is that I’m watching a megawatt famous songwriter like Dylan do a tiny little underplay.

Anyway, Bejar is special. Go listen to 2011’s Kaputt today, which Bejar once described as his attempt to “make a record that sounds like you put it on at the salon or a dinner party, something that people wouldn’t instantly request to be taken off.”

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A video of Paul Thomas Anderson talking about martinis

No clue when this is from or where it was filmed but I was just made aware of it and it’s terrific.

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A run

We got the band back together in Brooklyn last week. A very nice workout through Red Hook and along the Brooklyn waterfront: 4x3 minutes hard with 3 minutes walk/jog rest. I almost got hit by a truck. I really like running this loop when I’m in town because it looks kind of like you’re giving Strava the middle finger. We finished at an Italian spot where we bought huge sandwiches.

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Some advice from our lawyer!

Max Zidel will tell you that one line in a contract can mean you’re “screwed” if a project goes sideways. A good lawyer can help you figure this out, and Max is a very good lawyer. After nearly a decade at a big New York law firm and armed with a background in creative writing, art history, and theater, Max went out on his own and launched Studio Legal with Cece Xie. The pair started Studio Legal because they felt they could help artists and creative businesses navigate a rapidly changing digital landscape. They represent artists, galleries, designers, writers, photographers, creative agencies of all kinds, content creators, foundations and non-profits, collectors, brands, your good friends at Three Point Four Media, and more.

We called up Max to talk about what creatives overlook in contracts, how to protect yourself from massive financial liabilities, that one time he went to a world-renowned clown school, and when to not overlawyer things.

Three Point Four Media: Tell me about the time you went to a famous French clown school.

Max Zidel: [Laughs] When I was in university, I took an elective class that was literally called “performance.” This class, it turned out, was a clowning and mask class. It was probably one of the best classes I took. But years later when I was transitioning out of being a corporate lawyer and launching Studio Legal, I realized “I need to do something I love that will get me out of what I’ve been doing for the past seven years.”

My friend who is a working actress told me she always wanted to do a seminar at École Philippe Gaulier, the famous clown school. I went to study with Philippe Gaulier for a week in France with my friend, and it was incredible.

Are you clowning on the weekends now, or was it just a palate cleanser after years as a corporate attorney?

It turned out to be a palate cleanser. In my wildest dreams, there was a part of me that thought this would be the beginning of a new career in... something.

Well, it was the beginning of a new career! And I do think I actually use lessons from it all the time. If things weren’t going well when you were onstage, they would always tell us, “Sell tickets! You’re not selling tickets!” So you always had to reinvent yourself to make things more interesting to the audience. I think about that all the time, because so many things in life, especially in this industry, are about getting people engaged. How do you get people to want to work with you and get excited, and not just view it as a transaction for whatever you’re doing in the creative world?

How does your background working at a huge New York law firm and your background in creative writing and theater inform the way you work with clients at Studio Legal?

If we’re talking about creative work, we talk about creative work; that’s where the work begins. I genuinely feel connected to what my clients are doing. The big law part couldn’t be more useful when you actually have to solve problems and get in front of the other side, because the other side is often armed with very, very successful big law lawyers.

I was recently on a case with an artist client where they found their work being used in a massive company’s advertising campaign without their permission. I had to get on a video call with the lawyers in an attempt to settle the case, and there was a genuine shock in their eyes when we got on the call and they realized, “Oh my God, this artist has, like, an actual lawyer.”

Things escalated very quickly in a good way, and we reached a resolution quickly. It was so cordial. I realized in that moment, having worked at a big law firm and knowing what to say, what to do, and how Fortune 500 companies think about things, actually got us to the end much quicker and ended up with a much better settlement for the client.

How is AI changing the way you write contracts?

It depends on which side of the deal you’re on. One side might care about whether the other side is using AI to make creative work. When I represent creatives, I don’t worry about that because I want them to have as much leeway as they need to do whatever they want to do. Especially on the commercial side, if our clients want to get to the end faster using AI tools, I have no problem with that (though I have massive issues with AI on an ethical and societal level, especially its impact on creative industries—but that’s a separate conversation).

Sometimes we have to come up with language now in contracts that says something like, “not only does work have to be cleared and it has to be done by you, it has to be solely done by you, and original in all respects.” For some work, it’s important to not have AI involvement, like if you’re doing visual design for a bespoke collaborative product where you don’t want anybody to think it’s AI. You want it to be associated with this specific person.

AI is fundamentally changing law in many ways, which is that obviously people are using it to get legal advice and to draft contracts. I find a lot of the stuff now that we’re getting involved with was sloppily made by AI. Sometimes a new client will share their LLC operating agreement with us, and I won’t recognize at all how this template was generated, why it looks like this, why it says what it says, and it’s often erroneous in a lot of parts that make things very complicated.

I would love for more people to be able to use freely accessible AI tools to get legal help, but I cannot say that I’m very impressed with where they’re at right now.

Noah and I spun up an LLC with LegalZoom when we started Three Point Four. What are some important steps for people forming an entity?

This is a great question. The first step is always, am I going to make a corporation or am I going to make an LLC? That’s something you often want to talk with an accountant about. Forming an entity is pretty easy. I encourage people to use LegalZoom and other platforms. Forming an entity is often not a good use of lawyer time in terms of costs.

The biggest thing people starting a company with more than one person miss is step number two: The operating agreement. This is your bible for what happens if you want to do x, y, or z. For example, if someone wants to leave the relationship, what happens? It’s crazy, but one of the most common disputes I work on is where one co-founder or creative partner is in dispute with another.

By the way, the ones from LegalZoom and these other platforms, they don’t usually work for a more than one-person organization.

I was just thinking, “Huh, I wonder what our operating agreement from LegalZoom looks like.”

Hopefully you’ll never need to worry about it!

What are some key terms or clauses in contracts freelancers or studios usually overlook or aren’t careful about?

Limitations on liabilities and indemnities are the most overlooked in my experience. If you’re working on a project where there’s the capacity for something big to go wrong it’s important.

A limitation of liability basically says: no matter what happens if I was wrong and you were to try and recover from me for that mistake, the most you can get from me is x dollars, which is typically based on the fee that you actually paid me. This is important, because sometimes you get creatives who are charging a very low fee because they want to get involved with something, and then it comes back to bite them later.

Indemnity is the other way around. It’s the responsibility of the person who is giving indemnity to pay if something goes wrong. For example, when creative businesses get hired to do something, a big company might use a standard procurement agreement, and that will have the creative business or creative indemnifying them for things that go wrong. Meaning, if something goes wrong related to the work, they have to pay. So when you look at a contract, you don’t want to gloss over that, because that is financial responsibility for you.

You don’t have to overlawyer this. If you read that indemnity, and think, “None of these things could ever possibly happen, all I’m doing is writing copy,” it’s okay, it doesn’t really matter. I’m not trying to be a stickler about things that don’t matter. But if you’re dealing with production, a physical thing, or something with a lot of moving pieces, you might want to look at the indemnity section to say, “I don’t ever want to be on the hook for those things. Let’s take it down a notch.”

We’ve done a lot of work for big clients—Google, The North Face, Nike, Dropbox—and I feel like all the contracts we get from big clients are boilerplate and more or less the same. Am I being naive? The one thing I always push back on is the portfolio exemption, which allows us to share work on our website, or payment terms.

There is no such thing as a nonnegotiable contract. There are contracts that are pretty nonnegotiable because of leverage or industry norms. For example, you’re dealing with a huge company, they’re already paying you a good fee, and they genuinely won’t negotiate any of the main terms for that fee. It’s still worth trying. But most of the time, if there’s something unreasonable, that doesn’t reflect the deal, or that isn’t fair, for example, from a portfolio point of view, you can change those things if you know what to ask for.

If your agreement doesn’t reflect the deal or it’s missing key pieces, that’s a problem. Sometimes, when you actually get on the phone with the client and you ask why the contract specifies payment will only be made three days after the work is approved, all of a sudden the client remembers they had agreed some percentage was going to be paid up front. Those things absolutely need to be in there. A huge part of my job is actually expanding on and improving critical commercial terms the parties never actually discussed.

And the portfolio usage piece you mentioned is an important commercial term, because built into your fee is this ability to share work. We are always adding that in.

Don’t be afraid to push back where you think it’s okay to push back?

Be clever. You have to know your counterparty. A huge part of our job as lawyers, especially in these industries, is knowing what’s appropriate to ask for. It’s silly for us to send a very extensive redline. That’s not client-friendly lawyering. We need to always think about what are the three things we actually need to ask for?

So we have it pretty easy as writers and strategists, huh?

Writing and strategy is definitely a pretty low risk, because you’re not dealing with physical things. You don’t have really much clearance to do. Event producers, you really need to think about this stuff. Ad campaigns, where you’re taking on all the commercial production and dealing with multiple creatives and licensing terms, you have to figure that out from the start.

What we end up dealing with most is scope creep. But we’ve been adding this clause you gave us that basically says if we end up doing anything beyond what we’ve agreed to, we will have a conversation about what that costs.

You nailed it, scope creep is a big one in your field. And it’s important, because you can end up doing so many iterations when the client doesn’t know what they want. I love that clause you’re talking about. That’s a good example of how Studio Legal has taken lessons from things we’ve done over the past seven years and keep improving it all the time. Every year, I add a word or take out a few things. I am always thinking about how to adjust that clause. That’s something else I love about what we do too: Every matter I work on, I feel like I’m learning and constantly able to improve things for our clients.

Before we started Three Point Four Media, we were both freelance journalists. At the beginning, we assumed that since we were responsible enough to run our own small businesses, which is what freelancing is, it wouldn’t be that hard to do it together. That has, more or less, been true for the last eight years.

It’s never been more true than since the beginning of this year. By accident and design, each of us is working on a couple projects that don’t really involve the other person. We still talk in the mornings, consult, and keep each other in the loop, but I’m doing 95 percent of the work on two projects and he’s doing the same on two others.

I guess what I’m saying is find a business partner you can work, or not work, with.

An article

Neil Hacker goes deep on “the world’s most complex machine,” ASML’s extreme ultraviolet lithography technology. The fact that we can make semiconductors is astonishing.

To make them, a droplet of liquid tin is released into a chamber and hit with a single pulse of light, which melts and flattens it. As the droplet continues to fall, a second, more powerful pulse vaporizes the tin, creating an extremely hot plasma that emits light at the narrow wavelengths needed for extreme ultraviolet lithography. The light beam is then concentrated by reflecting it across a series of slightly concave mirrors so flawless that, if scaled to the size of Germany, their imperfections would be measured in millimeters. Engineers need to use mirrors, rather than the glass lenses used in standard lithography, as almost all solid materials absorb light at such short wavelengths.

The chips are three nanometers, or roughly 25,000 times thinner than a human hair.

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A video

We’ve talked about ultra runner David Roche and his YouTube channel before in this space. He and his wife, Megan, are turning David into a lab for high-performance. His latest efforts are focused on high-carbs, eating 120-180 grams of carbs per hour while running. This is nuts. It also seems to be working. (Marathoners and triathletes are also into the high-carb revolution.) We can talk about the shoes, but it’s increasingly clear that carbs are vital as well.

What I like about David’s videos are he both explains how he’s adjusting his training and thinking about nutrition, and also provides guidelines for more normal endurance athletes. I’ve been trying to hit 75-90 grams of carbs an hour on runs or rides of over an hour. When I do it right, it really helps. Gels, man.

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A project

We paid our taxes. This always feels like a win for some reason. Look, we’re a real business!

Bill spent our refund check on University of Michigan basketball team championship apparel. It’s only fair since Michigan’s tax rate is so much lower than New York’s.

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A coffee shop

High Beam on Court Street opened in recent weeks. Does this neighborhood with one million coffee shops (there is literally another coffee shop in the photo of this coffee shop*) need another one? Of course; one shouldn’t have to walk more than three blocks between third or fourth-wave coffee shops. This company started in Red Hook, although I have never been to that one, which is surprising given the amount of time I spend in Red Hook and the number of coffee shops I experience.

Lovely spot. Clean and minimalish but not in an Apple Store way. A great backyard for when it gets a little warmer. The second time we went, we couldn’t get in because a man was blocking the door with a stroller and his dog. But you can’t fault the establishment for the patrons.

* Assuming you count Dunkin’ Donuts as a coffee shop, which you should.

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A run

This is a silly slightly-more-than-12-mile route that I would not recommend. The new park on the East River is quite nice but otherwise Houston Street is impossible to run across, the west side and financial district are a mess of construction, and the Manhattan Bridge is unchattable due to constant subway traffic. We did pass the same group of dudes going back and forth on the bridge. We all nodded at each other the second time. Slow game recognize slow game.

It did successfully serve its purpose of being a run, so there’s that.

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A Colby!

In The Blink of an Eye, which he wrote and stars Kate McKinnon, Rashida Jones, and Daveed Diggs, recently won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at Sundance. He’s on tap to direct The Comedy Hour with Tim Heidecker and Tatiana Maslany attached. Colby also writes Hollyweird, a newsletter that’s part journal, part advice column, and part demystification of Hollywood’s inscrutability. It’s excellent.

We talked about the correct number of projects to be doing at one time, when to say no, and the Medicis. It always comes back to the The House of Medici.

Three Point Four Media: Hollyweird is very informative and helpful in explaining what seems like a confusing business. Back in the day, I wrote a couple pieces about the finances of freelancing. I hope they were helpful for other people, but I was surprised by how helpful the exercise of viewing my life/job/work through a wider lens was for me.

Colby Day: It’s very reassuring to be like, “Oh, it is this hard for everyone. Is this normal, right?” Doubly so in an ecosystem where you don’t ever get to know what anyone else is doing, except for the part that is most shiny and successful.

Whenever anyone asked me about freelancing, I’d always tell them one key to success was to treat it like a job and not an art project. Hollyweird has a similar point of view. You show your effort in a way that is truthful without being obnoxious.

That’s the perpetual artist problem. For better or worse, it is a numbers game. It’s easy to divorce the math from that equation a little bit. But it is still a math problem. And opportunities are one of the inputs to that, right? The more opportunities you create for yourself, the more statistical likelihood of success you have. That can mean living within an ecosystem where you are juggling 35 things at once. That’s good for the business, maybe bad for the art. For me, there’s a push-pull about what’s the livable amount of things that I can juggle. The number has to be high for it to be a sustainable career.

As your career has progressed, has that number gotten higher as you’ve gotten better at time management? Or lower because your success rate is higher?

One of the first things my manager told me is “What you have to consider with any opportunity is do you need this money? If the answer is yes, you have to pursue the opportunity.” The first three years I was living in LA, I said yes to everything. That’s why I started to write year-end reviews. I had so many plates spinning, and none of them were moving forward. I spread myself so thin that I didn’t have the bandwidth to pick the thing I cared about and push it ahead. Once I got the second job in Hollywood, I tried to recalibrate. I was able to raise the threshold for saying yes and give myself a bit more bandwidth to very actively focus on a project while also having a handful of less high-touch projects in the works.

Getting to the point where you can say no is very freeing. Saying no is a wonderful feeling.

The advice I give people early in their careers is that I have never regretted saying no, even when it meant I had to get a different job or quit a job. Every no I’ve ever delivered, I have felt relieved afterwards. But the first equation in a career is “Do I need it?” If you need it, there’s no no.

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I talked to The Black List’s Franklin Leonard a few weeks ago. In The Blink of an Eye appeared on the list in 2016. That’s a long time ago! And also maybe not? Time in Hollywood is strange.

It’s crazy that it was 10 years and also that feels totally right. The script was the first thing I had when I moved to LA that was really popular. I had a lot of meetings about it. Every meeting was, “This is really cool. Good luck.” It was brutal. After a few months of that, I had a meeting where someone said they weren’t going to do the movie, but they did vote for it for The Black List. It never crossed my mind that it could appear there even though I grew up reading all those scripts. I credit my manager and agent for sending it to everybody they knew. The Black List is a combination of movies that are definitely going to get made and movies that probably aren’t. Mine was in the latter category.

So many meetings ended with people saying come back when you find a director or money or actors. I was 25. How was I supposed to do that? It took a very long time to find the partner who thought we could make it and make it at a price point that wasn’t Interstellar. We went through three or four different combinations of potential directors and producers between 2016 and 2020. Andrew Stanton read it and got in touch, and all of a sudden the stars aligned. There aren’t many people like him who can command that level of studio attention with that level of creative freedom. He also really cared about my script and what I wanted the film to be. With Andrew, we had a path to do it that wasn’t there before.

Are you getting paid for all these fits and starts?

Here’s the issue with getting paid: The moment you get paid, you lose all agency. Early on, I had a couple of people offer to option the script. I felt like if I said yes, I would give up control of what happens. It could become a totally different movie. I asked if they could guarantee that I would be the only writer, and everyone said, “No, of course not.” So I said no. It was a lot of money to say no to, but it was a project that really needed an advocate. I didn’t believe that I’d found the partner who wanted to make the movie that I thought it should be. It was sweat equity for a very long time. There’s a trend in media to defer the development of the material onto the artist. I was in a meeting with a very senior person at a studio. They asked me who I could get to direct the film. Why is that my job? That’s your job. There’s a feeling that once the artist has everything in line and mostly guaranteed, then they sign on.

That’s risk-adverse, which isn’t surprising.

We have a system that was built by carnival guys in the 1920s who wanted to have a bigger circus than their rival. It’s become a business run by guys who have consulted for McKinsey. The business was started out by weird egomaniacs who loved entertainment, and now it’s run by weird egomaniacs who love spreadsheets. Doing less is preferred by a big business. In the current system, the onus is to make less than you used to make, which doesn’t compute with taking risks or trying things.

Now you’re on to The Comedy Hour, which will be your director debut. There’s a story about it in Deadline and actors attached, but how real does it feel? When do you breathe a sigh of relief that it’s actually going to happen?

A movie is only real once the audience is seeing it. It’s a really complicated puzzle to go get money for any movie, and especially for your first movie. We’re looking to close up the rest of the money that we need. It seems pretty likely that we’ll succeed but also: it’s Hollywood. I have to operate within the Hollywood ecosystem of “This is definitely happening. I will will it into existence. I am telling everyone that this is the date that it’s happening. They need to get on board and we’re going to go do it,” and also pursue a second, third, or fourth job at the same time, so that if it gets delayed and doesn’t happen when we hope it will, I can go do that other job.

I’m splitting my focus on prep for a movie that we want to go make this year, and also what else can I write that will pay my rent and keep me insured under the guild health insurance? The whole business pivots on the ambition to go make the thing and practicality of at any point, some rich person might stop me.

The rich people can enable you. The rich people can stop you.

We used to have Medicis. There are a couple Medicis left in the world, and we’re all hat in hand going to talk to them. If you have any billionaire readers, artists would love it if they ponied up a tiny bit to the rest of us to go make cathedrals.

A billion dollars is so much money. One of your bios reads, “He prides himself on writing generous stories that trust their audiences.” That’s a lovely sentiment, and seems very accurate.

I think audiences get it. I think they’re smart. They’ve watched movies their whole lives. There’s this weird trend of what if they’re not paying attention? That’s a race to the bottom and self-defeating. If you demand that people focus, they will either focus or not, and that self-selects who the audience is. I’d like to hope that the audience wants to watch the movie that they’re watching.

That reminds me of the cable industry destroying the bundle to try to compete with Netflix. They didn’t consider the inevitable outcome of sacrificing the cable bundle. There’s a parallel where if you don’t trust your audience not to be on their phones, they are going to be on their phones and eventually they stop watching movies completely.

There’s this tail chasing thing about trying to make more of what people want. I think people don’t know what they want. We don’t know what people want. It’s a losing battle to presume we could guess. That feels like a slippery slope. You should make what you want to make.

One of the best pieces of advice I received as a young reporter was to shut my mouth. Let your subject talk. Don’t interrupt. Whatever you do, let the silence hang. This is an especially effective way to get good quotes. People say stuff when they’re nervous or trying to fill silence. They say what they’re actually trying to say at the end of a long windup.

So much of our work at Three Point Four Media is driven by a business goal (we need to say x about y) that I sometimes let the strategy get in the way. My creative services brain overrides my journalist brain, and I interrupt with questions about those specific business goals rather than letting the client talk. Lately, I’ve been trying to employ the reporter’s approach to client interviews and what do you know? The work is better. Listen! You might hear something good.

Onto the links.

An article

We are very familiar with the product naming and subsequent arcane legal process here at Three Point Four Media. (Email us, and we’ll tell you all about the excellent naming project we worked on for The North Face.) Which is why this Cut piece about brand naming resonated. It really is an art! One we’re good at.

“This is what I tell people: Just because it’s creative, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.”

Noah tells me this regularly.

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A project

Our client The Grad Team is off to the annual The American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers conference in New Orleans next week. We designed their booth and put together a geofenced and geotagged ad campaign for the conference. New frontiers here at Three Point Four.

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A song

Anytime someone, usually my mother, asks me to describe Kurt Vile the only thing I can think of is it’s a vibe, man. Totally useless and trite, but also 100% accurate. Kurt’s new single is a vibe, man.

***

A run

Quick altitude camp in Mexico City last week. Running intervals at roughly 7,400 feet is unpleasant, but I am just putting in the #work to keep up with Noah whenever I’m in Brooklyn for official Three Point Four business.

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Speaking of former journalists, please enjoy this Q&A. We’ll have another interview for you next week.

So I called Ann-Marie up to talk leaving journalism, learning to make mistakes, and the tyranny of short-form video.

Three Point Four Media: Why was now the right time to make the jump?

Ann-Marie Alcántara: Two things. The first: AI is moving so fast, and if there was ever time to make a career move, it’s now while there’s still time to learn alongside AI.

Two: There is only so much news about layoffs and the business shrinking that you can take as a professional and continue to believe in staying long term.

As someone who left the journalism world for similar reasons, I get that. Did you grow up wanting to be a reporter? Or did you fall into it?

I fell into it. I always liked reading and writing as a little kid. I was a total bookworm. But I studied environmental studies in college. I was considering going the science research route, until I realized I didn’t like it. I wanted to do ecological studies, and that means long hours outside. I just didn’t enjoy that, so I pivoted to science communications.

Those Nature Conservancy internships on your resume make a lot more sense now.

Yep. Most importantly, marketing and PR internships paid versus journalism, which did not at the time.

You ended up interning at BuzzFeed and Mashable in the mid-2010s. What a time to be there.

It was the heyday of those companies. There was so much opportunity for an intern. At Mashable, especially, they let you learn how to write and figure things out. The BuzzFeed fellowship was designed to get you a full-time job at the end of it. I did all the fun quizzes and things that BuzzFeed was doing. Everyone was young, and the company was really young, too. I learned how to find stories on the Internet, which sounds silly to say in 2026, but it’s a skill. There was a margarita cart on Fridays. It was a great time to learn.

Those two companies were very serious about the journalism, and they allowed you to be human, to make mistakes, and to learn. A correction shouldn’t be the end of the world.

It seems fair to say that journalism was not a calling for you in the way it is for some people. It was something you found a way into and were good at. I feel the same way about my career. And I think that made it easier for me to get out of journalism, to think about other ways to use the skills I developed, and to start something like Three Point Four Media. Does that track with your experience?

I went to a liberal arts college where you can’t literally major in something like a career. There’s no accounting major at Vassar. That’s partially why I never felt like journalism was the calling. I liked writing, learning about people, listening, and reading stories. The marketing and PR internships were journalism-adjacent so I learned a little bit of how it works. I never went to J school. My identity isn’t wrapped up in being a journalist. I never broke through with the Twitter media crowd. Some of my colleagues and friends who were journalism majors did tours of The Wall Street Journal and other places in college. To me, it seemed impossible to get to those places.

I come from a low-income background, so it always comes down to money, too. To some extent, I have to follow the money. I don’t have a fallback. I have my Chase account that still says “College” on it. That’s all I’ve got.

All of that made it easier to think about leaving. I feel like I reached a natural end point. I didn’t want to start another beat and take a long time to get acquainted there.

You mentioned AI earlier. How are you using it?

I’m still in the beginner stages of using AI. Even though we were allowed to use it at the Journal for certain things, it felt wrong. I never wanted to use it for my writing. I was being paid for my reporting and writing skills. I love it for research, especially now that I’m freelancing. I’ll use it for something like dumping a report in and asking it to pull out the most important stats. I want to try to learn how to vibe code. That’s aspirational right now.

What’s the perfect job for you?

One where I can combine my writing with trend spotting. I’m really good at spotting trends early and knowing what is going to become a bigger moment across sports, beauty, fashion, and beyond. I’ve been writing a newsletter every other week for an agency, and the things I write about become much more popular and covered by major outlets a few weeks later.

That level of awareness sounds exhausting. Do you feel like you have to know what’s going on all the time? How do you get away?

I try not to have a crazy amount of screen time. I can unplug. The biggest tool I use is the bookmark tool. It sounds simple, but it works. If I see something interesting, I’ll bookmark it. It’s a good way of staying on top of things without having to constantly live what’s happening. Three’s a trend, right?

Being at a big publication taught me that you can wait. You don’t always have to be first. You can tell a better story if there are more ways to tell that story.

It’s also different reporting for The Journal, which doesn’t need to be first, and probably shouldn’t be first, versus writing for a marketing agency that’s trying to be as early as possible.

Totally. At an agency, you want to create the campaign that brings something further into the mainstream. You need someone who’s really early.

Along those lines, what comes after short-form video? Or do we live with short-form video taking over forever?

We’re all just living in Quibi’s world.

Speaking of being too early.

Podcasts now are all becoming very video-based, which is great for someone like me. I really don’t like podcasts.

And the AI fruits! At first I was like, “This is so stupid. Why am I watching this?” And then I watched 20 in a row. I couldn’t pull myself away. Those are quick and easy, compared to two or three years to make a season of television.

Which is ridiculous. They are like eight episodes long.

It’s part of the same conversation though, right? Even if you grew up in a world that didn’t have seasonal TV, you still want to be entertained and always have something fun to watch after work, after school, or in between classes. Short form video offers that. Traditional TV takes too long, and it’s harder to consume. We’re in the short-form world for a bit longer. I don’t know what comes after. Back to the written word, maybe.

Molly Young is driven by curiosity. You never know where a conversation with the New York writer will lead. You start talking about gardening and the next thing you know you’re contemplating purchasing a hard-wired printer and never reading the newspaper on your phone again. Every time I talk with Young I leave with a list of scribbled down ideas, a good book recommendation, and some sort of harebrained scheme to change the world (or, at the very least, my internet consumption). I met Young years ago at Rupert Murdoch’s short-lived newspaper The Daily (RIP), where we worked on the features desk, played backgammon at Jimmy’s Corner after work, and tried, with varying levels of success, to convince publicists to let us profile their clients for an article that would only appear on an iPad.

These days, Young is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine where she writes features and essays like “My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’” and “The Mad Perfumer of Parma.” She publishes zines and books with her husband, the designer Teddy Blanks, via their eponymous company Young Blanks. And she writes the delightful newsletter The Life and Errors of .

Three Point Four Media called up Young to talk about gardening, work habits, and why surfing makes her a better writer.

Three Point Four Media: What are you obsessed with right now?

Molly Young: Not to be an old lady, but I am obsessed with gardening, which is obviously not ideal in New York City. But our apartment does get south and east exposure, so there's enough light that I can garden inside. It’s a real dopamine hack, because you get up every morning and you go to look at your plants and all of them have changed overnight in some way. Since I started growing plants, I’ve stopped shopping recreationally. There's something about plant husbandry that answers the need for the dopamine hit that online shopping used to provide. So that's good for the wallet.

It’s a good balm to the asynchronous nature of life nowadays, where you can do things via email or social media and you’re not existing in the same place and time as other people. Plants very much require you to exist in the same time and place.

How are we working these days?

I'm completely dysfunctional when it comes to my attention span and habits, and every day is a battle to reform them. I have a little Post-it on my wall that I'm looking at. [Reaches for Post-it note.] It says “email three-to-five times a day.” So I only check my email three-to-five times a day. That’s a rule.

I have the Freedom app enabled on my computer, which prevents me from doinking around and doing bullshit. And I leave my phone bricked. The novelist Catherine Lacey told me about Brick. We met for a drink one night at Old Town, the great old bar in Union Square, and it came up that I had my phone on me but I always kept it off. I would carry around the phone in case of emergency, so it was this inert object in my bag. Brick is a little magnet you put on your fridge and can program it so that it turns your smartphone into a dumbphone.

There are so many other things to look at in New York besides my phone.

I started using the app Opal recently after I read ’s New Yorker piece. It’s like Nicorette for my phone. It’s shocking how effective these things are.1

It's such a relief. You occupy a completely different temporal landscape when you're not running those things in the background of your mind.

Now that I have a kid, all of this makes me feel like an idiot or a baby; because it’s such a simple behavior modification. It’s like teaching a kid to say please and thank you and basically become civilized, and this is now what I have to do to keep myself civilized. The rewards are tangible enough that once you get past a certain threshold of anxious attachment and once you’ve discarded that it becomes easy and self-perpetuating. Have you found that?

I feel like I’m completely rewiring my brain.

I also find having a printer really helps. [Laughs.] The only good printers are Brother printers—that's a hot tip. I did a bunch of research. I've had a million printers. Brother printers are the best because they don't require a subscription. It's just a box that you plug in and out comes the paper. There’s no software and it’s not wireless. I wanted a printer that was not wireless because those things never work.

So I have a printer and if there’s something online I want to read, I print it out. I print out the crossword.

So we’re printing full articles?

Killing trees by the dozen, yeah.

What’s next for you? You just left your post as book critic at the Times.

I left the books department, but I’m still on contract at the Times Magazine, which I have been for years now. The longer reported pieces and essays are more my speed.

Book reviewing was good. It was instructive to try it and find out that I'm not the best person for the job. It’s a difficult job and there’s a handful of people who do it really, really well. In the end, I’m not so interested in being an arbiter of things. I’m not interested in telling people what to read or not. I wanted to write more features. I wanted to write zines. I wanted to try to write a book.

What can we expect from Young Blanks? More zines?

I love the production model of zines. I think it's really interesting right now, especially because book publishing is always in a crisis. It’s a big unwieldy machine. It’s really difficult to get published if you’re an aspiring author and the hurdles and barriers to entry are so high and so opaque.

For me, the zine is this fascinating in-between object. It’s longform, but I put a lot of images and art into them. I’m very attentive to the design and typography. I care a lot about that stuff, as does Teddy, who designs them. Zines are a way of communicating a voice, perspective, and subject matter in a form that is accessible to produce and accessible to buy. It also offers a model of publication that is useful for people who couldn’t penetrate the big publishing world.

Our zines are sold in bookstores. We can print them in the U.S. They’re not super expensive to create. They’re definitely not lucrative, but they pay for themselves and at the end of the day I want somebody to pick it up and see a design detail or turn of phrase that will capture their attention and rewire their minds.

It’s also getting those voices out into the world.

It's true. There's also something special about the fact that this is writing that doesn't exist online. There's a line from the last Mission: Impossible movie—not the most recent one, but the one before that—where one of the characters, it might be Tom Cruise, says, “I have to go offline to a place where the entity can’t find me.” That’s the only thing I remember from that movie. There are certain things that should be reserved for an offline space where the entity can't find them.

So for something like Sleepy Hollow Motor Inn, how do you decide what to take to your agent or editor vs. publishing it as a zine with Young Blanks?

Publishing has certain formats they're comfortable and equipped to handle. They can do novels. They can do big non-fiction books. They can do memoirs. There are certain conventions and word count ranges associated with each one.

Zines are these hybrid works where they're 10,000 words too long for a magazine story and far too short for a book. Sleepy Hollow was part investigation—I spoke with police and did a lot of reporting and archival work—and part Covid memoir. That's not a format that a publisher would really look at. So if I have something that doesn't fit into one of the available molds that that publishing offers, I just make it myself.

What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a story for Harper’s about architecture, which is not something that I know much about. One of the privileges of writing for a great general interest magazine is they'll trust you to figure out a subject if you're not an expert in it. It’s kind of slow right now, honestly.

It’s that time of year.

I’m surfing. Although now there’s been shark sightings in the Rockaways. I moved away from California to get away from sharks. Why are they here?

I’m fascinated by surfing, but both risk averse and accident prone so I’ve never tried it. It seems like fly fishing or golfing where it’s this lifelong meditative pursuit and no matter what level you’re at you can always get better or learn something new about it.

Totally! It's very meditative. And you can do it well into old age, because you can do it in a way that's not super physically demanding. You go to Hawaii and there's, like, 80-year-old dudes who are sphere shaped out there shredding.

Never worn sunscreen, the color of deeply-tanned leather.

A mahogany! Surfing is good because it forces you to read nature in a way that's intellectually demanding: to think about the conditions and to manage your behavior among other people, other animals, and other forces.

It requires a different, animal kind of intelligence. I think it helps me as a writer. It forces me to pay closer and sharper attention to different things. Maybe that’s a way of deluding myself into thinking that surfing is somehow productive.

That makes sense. I’ve found that canoeing or fly fishing or running really helps reset my brain. You gotta get outside.

In my mind, the distinction is between hard thinking and soft thinking.

Soft thinking is when I'm outside, just kind of ambiently aware and receptive; that's where all the really good ideas come from. Hard thinking is when you're applying yourself like a tool or a boring instrument to a problem. You need both, obviously. But the soft thinking is where the magic happens and if you go too long without that you get dried up, man.

Now that you’re freelance again, what does your relationship with editors look like, is it a mix of assignments and going to your editor at the Times Magazine and saying “I’m obsessed with this thing, I want to write about it”?

A bit of both, luckily. Most writers tend to write more interestingly and better on things they have some kind of native interest in. So the trick is to be interested in as many things as possible, to make yourself as perceptive and curious as possible—rather than having a very narrow pool of passions.

Do you still like writing profiles?

Love profiles. I do it less often, because even in the 15 years that I've been doing it, it's gotten harder. You have less access. Unless you’re Gay Talese, the strength of a profile correlates directly with the amount of access you have. So if you have an hour with somebody, you're going to write a Wikipedia entry with some great adjectives, if you're lucky. I will only do a profile if I can get some pretty serious access.

What is the minimum amount of access you need to write a celebrity profile?

More than two days. This is why I don't do celebrity profiles. I'm so demanding. [Laughs] I want to see them on set. I want to see them working.You have to see somebody at work. You have to observe somebody doing the thing that they do. And it's hard to get somebody to agree to that. They have very little reason to.

What celebrity do you want to profile badly?

Other people have made this point, but there are two ideal times to profile somebody: early in their career or at the end of their career. You want to get somebody when they have very little to lose.

If someone's at the end of their career, they've done what they need to do and they can speak more freely. They can let their freak flag fly a little bit more. If you have someone at the beginning of their career and they're quite hungry, they are more motivated to open up. But when you get someone at the mid-career point it's hopeless. You just get these canned quotes.

I feel like you can get access with someone whose last few movies were pretty bad.

Oh! Tom Cruise. He would be amazing to profile, because he's simultaneously a great American figure and a deeply bizarre man who is so private. I'm fascinated. I would love to know what makes him run, literally and figuratively. But Tom Cruise would never let me hang out with him for two weeks straight.

Changing gears. We came up in a totally different world where New York was more affordable and there were more opportunities. What kind of advice would you give to a young writer trying to break into the industry now?

We didn't know how good we had it back then! We came up with all these different outlets that helped writers hone their voice. I get a lot of questions from younger writers about how to develop their voice, and the only way to do that is to live an interesting life. Most frustrating answer, but it's also the most fun answer.

Some of those opportunities still exist. The difference is that there's very little guidance. So anyone can start a Substack, but then you're out in the wilderness without the benefit of an editor who will basically teach you how to write. When I wrote for the Observer, taught me how to report a piece just by his editing. David Haskell at New York Magazine took me under his wing and in the act of editing my terrible drafts taught me how to write. If you're writing for Substack, you're not getting the benefit of a mentor.

Self-publishing and Substack can be a real double-edged sword. A lot of writers don’t know how to self edit.

And you don't have the stamp of an institution to hide behind. You're ripping open your robe and shaking your whole naked self to the world. But if you’re willing to learn in public and distinguish between useful and useless feedback it’s possible to improve. There is a real value to putting out things that are a little bit rough around the edges. I don't see any shame in that. I think that can be quite interesting, to create an environment in which that's possible. And we're not just flogging people for a little misstep.

What you’re saying is you want 2011 Tumblr to come back.

Always. Always!

Bill was in New York City this week. A Three Point Four Media reunion. We went running. We had dinner. We had lunch. We went running. We drank coffee. We didn’t have any morning meetings. We probably talked about work less than we do during a normal week. It was all quite lovely.

Next week, he’ll be back in Michigan, I’ll be in Brooklyn, and the 9 a.m. Zoom calls will resume. Back to normalish.

An article

A wild one by Jesse Barron. “Transference in the Afternoon” tells the story of a Manhattan hedge fund dude and the therapist he had a years long affair with and then sued for taking advantage of him. No sides taken, just a slow, steady unspooling of facts. Humans are so weird, man.

Jimmying, but make it x-rated.

***

A book

I have been reading this book in 5-15 minute increments before bed, my favorite low-cost, accessible intervention that might improve sleep. I will be honest: I am not entirely paying attention, the whole point being to fall asleep after all. So far, it’s fine.

According to the unbiased source Penguin Random House, “What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.”

I will report back.

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A show

Paradise, season two. We’re (mostly) out of the bunker, wandering around the world, looking for our families. James Marsden, who has been dead almost the entire show, makes every scene he’s in so much better. The whole thing is very entertaining, if a bit absurd and confusing. Quantum-entanglement? Sure.

I like how all the disparate narrative threads seem to be leading back to one central location to conclude season two, as opposed to some other shows where characters spin off into the distance, getting further and further from one another. That’s probably harder to do than it looks.

This Defector piece about all the silly cover songs is accurate.

***

A project

Doing a lot of work. No time to explain it all, not that I could.

***

A run

“Higher relative effort and heart rate zones show you pushed hard despite the slower pace.” You’re running slow and your heart is going to explode. Thanks Garmin AI.

My fitness journey is going super well.

Back next week with a Q&A from a real live screenwriter. Until then, cars:

Rory has worked on all sorts of stuff besides old cars: Legislative politics, Jalopnik editor-in-chief, Autoweek publisher, a stint in marketing at RM Sotheby’s. We called him up to talk about the shifting automotive ad environment, starting a new publication, and the fastest way to get out of a car dealership with the car you want.

Three Point Four Media: Why did you decide to start a media company in the current environment?

Rory Carroll: I fundamentally think there is a real business there. In autos especially, there’s more interest than ever: old cars, new cars, hobby, culture. There is a huge, active audience that spends money and there is a huge industry that wants to talk to them. Our thesis is that the mechanisms or the infrastructure of media and social media are not connecting the two sides and the flailing and misalignment is creating a bad experience for everyone involved.

When I got to Jalopnik, we were doing 300,000 impressions a week and we got up to two million+ impressions a week. It really didn’t make a huge difference in the business. To get there, we had to focus on speed and volume, sometimes in a way that degraded the content and the product. As a reader on the internet now, you feel disrespected, you feel like these people think you’re an idiot. People deserve something better, both readers and the marketing side.

What do you mean by misalignment?

The main thing is that the basic currency of all these digital media businesses is display ads and programmatic. Almost everyone making content for the internet is in the business of serving these ads that I don’t think anyone really believes are effective. They never see the other side of that equation, where the publisher is incentivized to make super low-cost clickbait and slop to goose the numbers and impressions on the ad. The reader is getting super low-value commodified content. It’s not fun to read, and it’s a super annoying ad experience.

How do you realign that?

The ideal for how to bridge the gap is the reader has to feel like they are getting real value out of the site and the marketer has to feel like they are getting real connections to those readers.

When we were building Alloy, we spent a lot of time on the phone with CMOs at car companies. The one thing that stuck with me really early on is one of them said, “10 years ago, I could spend a bunch of money on Jalopnik or one of these other sites, get a ton of impressions, and go to my boss and say, ‘We got 10 million impressions for X number of dollars.’ And my boss would say, ‘Great job.’ Now if I do, they say ‘How many cars did you sell?’” If you can answer that question, that’s the holy grail for publishers.

But publishers aren’t in the business of selling cars, right? You’re in the business of writing about cars and recommending cars. Why did that mandate for CMOs change? Is it because numbers drive everything now?

There’s so much data out there, there’s an expectation that everything is going to be tracked. Previously, you could get away with the idea of awareness. Marketers would go to Car and Driver or auto websites and say, “Hey we love your magazine, but your readers don’t buy RAV4s, and we need to sell RAV4s.” Car and Driver could come back by explaining that their readers recommend RAV4s all the time. That still happens, but the car marketers are under pressure and more conscious of ROI.

Alloy doesn’t have ads. From a business standpoint, what is the right mix of subscriptions, events, and brand partnerships?

It’s unclear, to be honest. We’re a few months in. We have membership revenue, we have some pitches on the horizon. Everybody goes into this with an idea of what it’s going to be like when it’s live. Then it goes live and you adjust. Stuff has to happen away from the site and from social platforms. Events will be a huge part of that. Our merch is part of that, too. The car thing is so able to deliver on big, meaningful, and very rich experiences in real life.

You can watch someone’s old weird frankencar on YouTube, but it’s more fun to see in person, and there are car companies, liquor companies, and direct-to-consumer companies that would pay to be part of that in a way that you and the Alloy team wouldn’t find offensive.

Exactly. The whole experience of car culture is electric, and it’s so rare to have something like that where you can be so engrossed. That’s where the power of this thing is.

You can also capture a lot of photos and videos at those events that can be used in service of the brand partners.

I hate using the word brand partners, but it doesn’t have to be gross. It feels gross when Mark Zuckerberg is stealing your data and selling it to someone else. But if I’m in the process of building a race car and I find a specific tool through a brand partnership that solves a huge problem for me, that feels good.

You’ve had a lot of jobs in and outside of journalism. You worked in legislative politics, marketing, you were the publisher at Autoweek, you worked at RM Sotheby’s. How have all those various jobs shaped the way you work and what Alloy is?

I have a lot of friends who are great journalists and blissfully unaware of the sausage making process. Obviously, I’m not. I’ve bought ads before. I’ve bought programmatic before. I’ve been on all sides of it. I’ve sat in all the rooms there are to sit in.

We never would have gotten here had I just been a journalist. Alloy is what it is because we spent a ton of time thinking holistically from every angle of the business.

What have you learned in the last year that you wish you’d known when you started Alloy?

We launched with the smallest investment possible to launch the site. We probably could have launched with some more capital to flesh out the total offering better. Something that would have allowed us to do a launch event, assign bigger features, do more video. The stuff that is on our master plan, but show a little bit more of that to start vs. launching in this minimally viable state. Now, we’re six months in and have a body of work, but we’re constantly explaining to people that this isn’t representative of the full thing.

Couple car questions for you before we go. Car dealerships are depressing. The last two cars I purchased, I had an unpleasant experience at the dealership. What’s the best way for a normal person to buy a car?

Car companies spend billions of dollars on engineering the perfect car, and it always comes down to some Midwestern asshole sitting at his desk at the dealership who is not interested in selling the car. Imagine if that was Apple’s model!

Tom McParland at Jalopnik has written a lot about how the process should go to minimize the pain. Find the exact car you want, email the dealer directly, and ask for an itemized quote for the exact VIN number. Then do all of the negotiation via email. If they won’t do it via email, go to a different dealer. A lot of them will tell you it’s illegal to send quotes via email, which is not true. They will just lie. It’s a crazy business! It’s one of the only things in modern life where people are openly lying to your face.

Negotiate everything via email, then you should be able to go in, sign papers, and leave.

What’s your dream car? Does it exist?

That’s a really tough question. My stock answer would be an 8-litre Bentley from the 1930s. I have this incredible sensory memory of leaving a car show in Florida massively hungover in a rental Toyota Camry and an 8-litre Bentley came by us at 100 mph, and the top of the tire on the Bentley was at the roof of the Camry. But realistically a 100 Series Land Cruiser from 2003.

A Land Cruiser is a sensible car for a dad in Northern Michigan. You can justify that one.

[Laughs] My next car will probably be a 20-year-old Toyota.

Most creative service industry contracts are boilerplate. They all say more or less the same thing in more or less the same way. Guardrails and indemnification and what not. Even when we’ve signed contracts with big global companies the language was nearly identical to Three Point Four’s standard contract. Yet contracts almost always get redlined: Let’s change 15 days to 30, add in some protections around expenses, we’d like to include an additional clause about gross negligence, etc. One thing I wish someone had told us when we started Three Point Four is that you can ask for stuff during this process. They call it negotiation for a reason! Maybe it’s my midwestern nature, but I was always under the impression that we had to blanket accept whatever the client’s legal team sent over.

When I started freelancing many moons ago, the most valuable piece of advice I got came from Noah: always ask for more money, if they say no you’re still going to write the story. The same goes for contracts: Ask for stuff. If you request a minor change or different terms with a valid reason, they will probably say yes. And if they say no, you’re probably going to sign it anyway.

Onto the links.

A book

No article from me this week. Just reading the nutrient rich meat-and-vegetables part of the newspaper and dedicating my precious reading time to the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. I’m about 80% of the way through the first book and thoroughly enjoying it. I’d been Knausgaard curious for a while but never made the plunge into his extended universe of six extremely long and detailed volumes of autofiction. It’s hefty; glad I’m reading it on my Kindle.

Question for the Knausgaard heads in the audience: Should I start reading criticism and interviews now, or wait until I’ve finished the series? I like being blissfully unaware of subtext and what people think, but perhaps some supporting material would enrich my reading experience.

***

A project

A new piece for Acumen America exploring their recent investment in Malama Health, a start-up that provides Doula-led maternal care to Medicaid populations.

Malama is at the intersection of two huge priorities for Acumen America: Advancing health equity for Medicaid populations and supporting the evolution—and reimbursement—of the care workforce. Mothers on Medicaid should have access to meaningful and continuous support from pregnancy through postpartum. Malama is making that future real.

***

A new client

We got the greenlight on a scope from a new client this week. Top secret. We’ll share more when the work is done.

***
A movie

Casino does not get enough love in the Scorsese canon. Any De Niro and Pesci vehicle is a fun, but Casino is a riot. Pesci swears in a singular way that takes the American language to places it’s never been before. De Niro is so compelling as a narrator, I could listen to him read medical records. Sharon Stone is terrific. I would love to see this one on the big screen someday.

***

A virtual bike ride

It’s mud season here in Michigan, so I am spending quite a bit of time riding my bike in the basement. Some of the people I ride bikes with loathe the indoor trainer and find it dull, but I love it. Pick a workout, press play, and suffer. You’re trapped until it’s over, and you can’t get hit by a car.

***

Next week, another Q&A. Right now, the one and only .

She got her start leading the social teams at Bon Appétit and Epicurious, where she won a Webby award and a National Magazine Award for social. These days, she writes Link In Bio, a must-read newsletter about all things social media, and consults for brands like CAVA, Google, and more. We called up Rachel to talk about the halcyon days of social media (Valencia filter on everything), yet another pivot to video, and whether or not people actually use Threads.

Three Point Four Media: What would you do with a week free from social media?

Rachel Karten: I’ve done that! I drove the California coast and knit a hat. I do things with my hands because that’s what is usually busy holding a phone.

When you go on vacation do you delete socials from your phone?

I don’t delete socials, but I turn off push notifications so I’m not seeing alerts. Also, I enjoy posting on social media about things like going on vacation. It doesn’t always feel like work for me. I don’t doomscroll on vacation.

What early-era social media tropes do you miss, like celebrity dog accounts?

I miss the mundane, like Sad Desk Lunch. I really do miss the Valencia filter on my lunch! We’re all so addicted to the algorithm it would never work anymore.

Why won’t that work anymore? The algorithm won’t spit it out?

The algorithm won’t spit it out unless you’re Martha Stewart. It’s fun that she posts in a way that’s so clearly her, so there’s the tension of a celebrity posting like a normal person. But for the average person it’s not going to capture the eyeballs these platforms need.

You’re over 100,000 subscribers now. How has the amount of time you’ve put into the newsletter changed as your audience grew?

When I started my newsletter, I treated it like my full-time job. I was consistent. I reported things out as if it was the only thing going on.

The first two years of Link In Bio, my entire income came from consulting work. I wrote the newsletter on the weekends. I wrote it at night. The biggest thing is not even necessarily the amount of work, but it’s when in the day I would work on it. Now, I can wake up and work on it. My work went from majority consulting to majority newsletter.

How do you decide what goes behind the paywall for Link In Bio?

I send two newsletters a week: One on Tuesday, one on Thursday. The Tuesday newsletter is for the person who’s at a brand who has a brainstorm later that day. What can I provide them that’s going to make them immediately better at their job? That is my paywall because that is my expertise in the field. The Thursday newsletter is an interview. I keep the interviews free.

The reason I started the newsletter was to show social media is hard, interesting work. I want those interviews and that knowledge to feel accessible to anyone. If I’m writing about Zohran Mamdani’s video strategy, that’s a universal thing that a social person might be interested in, or somebody who’s into politics, or somebody who lives in New York. It feels important to keep that open and free.

We don’t do a ton of social work, but I find the newsletter really fascinating and relevant to our work at Three Point Four. Is there a pretty good mix in your audience?

I hear all the time, “I don’t work in social, but this is fascinating.” I like that. When I’m thinking of stories to write, there is a social angle to everything. If social is just the way in, you might find it really interesting for other reasons.

I had a dispatch from the head of social for the Philadelphia Eagles. She broke down what it was like working for the Eagles the day they won the Super Bowl. That’s a human interest story. While telling that human interest story, I’m still able to tell the story that social media is not just the intern posting. “Look at how talented this person is!” That’s always what I want people to come away with.

Would you prefer the newsletter is the only thing you do, or does consulting work help shape the newsletter?

I say—and now it will be on the record—that I always want to consult. Consulting makes me a better writer. It helps me understand the social media ecosystem. It shows up in the newsletter, although maybe not in as direct of a way as one might imagine.

What does that consulting look like? Are you doing social strategy? Execution? Are your days managing social accounts behind you?

I pitch post ideas, work on campaign rollouts, and guide overall strategy. I’m still working on things that show up in the feed. I’m not pressing post anymore, but I was doing that for clients not so long ago. And that’s not to say I’m above ever doing it again. That’s the best part of working in social! I hear from a lot of social directors who tell me, “I’m just a manager now, I miss being in the weeds, I miss coming up with that weird video idea.”

How much social and strategy work is contract these days?

There are still lots of great in-house jobs. A lot of agencies and brands have great social teams, but maybe don’t have the video team to execute on what is now becoming another pivot to video. There are some really great social video freelancers who are probably very busy right now.

Tell me about this new pivot to video. What’s it look like?

[Laughs] The way that algorithms work now, serialized video content does well. Instagram is testing Reels as the homepage. There are a lot of clues that video is becoming what social media is at this point. Social media is video now, and you need a video plan full stop.

Is that why I see so many videos from random marketing talking heads anytime I log on LinkedIn?

Yes! The platforms incentivize it. They’re pulling the strings. That’s not an accident that’s happening.

Do brands have a choice? Or can companies consciously say, we’re not going to do this?

With LinkedIn, you can still say you’re not going to do it. Soon, maybe not! With Instagram, I cannot think of a fast-growing account this year that does not post video. Whereas with LinkedIn, there are brands that post just words. And Threads! People are on Threads...

People do use it?

People use Threads. They do.

For what? I feel like an old person every time Instagram tries to send me there. I feel so unmoored.

Threads is good for fandoms, TV show discussion, and sports talk. When I log on there, it always feels like there are five topics that it’s serving me posts about. If your brand is in any of those conversations at a given time, it can be a good place.

What are your favorite brand accounts doing right now?

The best brands are not using their social to tell every story they possibly can. They’re telling one story really well over and over and over again in a really entertaining way. I talk about them all the time, but Craighill is one of my favorite brands on social. They are doing these amazing industrial design breakdowns of their products told in a really universal way that would make anyone interested in industrial design.

They’re not trying to post their product photo or let me know when there’s a sale. They’re just using social in this “top of funnel let’s get people in the door through amazing storytelling” way. We come from an era where the Instagram feed was where we talked about everything. The best brands right now are very focused and using social in a very deliberate way.

Does the “just have the intern post it” myth still persist?

Internally, marketing leadership understands the value of social 100% now. When I first started, somebody would comment, “What intern posted this?” and it would stay there. Whereas now when somebody does that, your commenters will go to bat for you. There is a discourse in the comments now.

Does it make sense to count the life of a business by the number of computers you’ve had during its existence? Probably not. But if you did, I’m on number three as a member of the Three Point Four Media founding team and co-chief newsletter writer. So is Bill.

My latest choice: A 15-inch MacBook Air because it would arrive much more quickly than the 13-inch one. I will, at least in theory, get a $300 rebate for my 2020 MacBook Air that works but pauses for 5-10 seconds every few minutes. Same, computer, same. I’m looking forward to that not happening anymore. Productivity around here is low enough as it is.

A good ride so far. Here’s to another three.

An article

This profile of long time Esquire writer Tom Junod in, uh, Esquire, is a little weird. A bit hagiographic: “How do you write honestly about one of your heroes, about a man who has inspired and intimidated you in equal measure?” Full of ridiculous quotes: “‘I have met the actual Michael Jordan,’ Wright Thompson told me. ‘And I was a lot more intimidated to meet Tom Junod.’” Some interesting reckoning with the past:

I don’t really know why this story exists. Does the average Esquire reader even know who Junod is? Maybe! The average person? Definitely not.

Anyway, I enjoyed the piece despite all my whining.

There’s a nice moment where the writer and Junod go to a record store to look for an album by world’s most overrated band (fight me), Geese, and can’t find it. Big win.

***

A book

Perfection is “A scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be.” This is not how I would describe it, but whatever. It’s also very short. Leah says someone told her the ending was devastating. Can’t wait to get there.

***

A project

The Grad Team is live. We (read: Bill) oversaw the redesign of this site. Concept, copy, execution, etc. All the things. We learned so much about college commencement-related conventions. Don’t sleep on NAACO.

The Grad Team team was great. A lovely bunch of people.

And a shout out to Hien and the Huck Finch team for designing and building the site.

***

A show

Expectations for Knight of the Seven Kingdoms were low. But it’s shockingly good. Smart, fun, contained thoughtful. All of the stuff the last few seasons of Game of Thrones were not. A show worth watching even if you don’t like GoT or fantasy. There is a lot of mud.

This is very cool from a television as art perspective, although spoilers probably:

***

A run

Parkrun started in the United Kingdom as a weekly 5k. It’s not a race, although there’s a timer. A chill experience for all-comers. A little more than six months ago, someone started a parkrun in Brooklyn Bridge Park. All four piers, and back in a straight line. A silly course, but a lovely place to run, especially for parkrun tourists, people who travel the world running in different parkruns.

I went to my first one last weekend. There were a little over 250 people running and walking on a chilly Saturday. The plan was to run around 20:00. That did not happen. Ended up finishing in 18:13, just beating another guy who I traded spots with the entire time. (Not that it’s a race!) At the finish line, he and I started talking. He was visiting from London. I said it was my first parkrun. He gave me a challenge coin. I graciously accepted, apologized I didn’t have anything to trade him, and jogged home. I’ll be back. I’m a parkrun person now. Come join us.

***

Next week, another Q&A. Right now, Franklin Leonard!

Franklin thought this was a one-off experiment. It was not. Word got around, he saw the value, and The Black List became how new screenwriters get discovered. The count, two decades on: more than 400 produced movies including four Best Picture winners. Today, The Black List is a platform with education, programs, expansions into theater and fiction, and, of course, the annual list.

Franklin hopped on a call to talk winding paths, the mistake studios make by not investing in R&D, and why screenwriters are like pro athletes (and should be paid like them, too).

Three Point Four Media: I wanted to start by going way back. Before moving to Los Angeles, you worked at McKinsey. How did you end up there?

Franklin Leonard: The investment banks and management consulting companies came to campus in 2000 during Harvard’s intercession. I had been growing my dreadlocks for a couple years. One of my friends said they’d give me $100 for every management consulting company or banking offer I could get without cutting my hair. I felt pretty good about my resume and my academic record. I ended up interviewing with McKinsey, BCG, and a few others. I didn’t know what these companies did. I went through the recruiting process. I got three offers—made $300—and it became clear to me that McKinsey had the best reputation. And by best, I mean they were the one where everyone else wanted to work.

I didn’t want to be a consultant, but it was a nice thing to have in my back pocket. I ended up deferring for a year. I worked on a congressional campaign from May to November, and then went to Trinidad because I had won a traveling fellowship from Harvard. My mother’s father is from there. Initially, I planned to study multiracial democracy. I ended up writing a weekly column for The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian about the overlap of Trini and U.S. culture, and going to a lot of Carnival parties.

Your bio says “Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur.” How do you manage everything?

Not particularly well. The vast majority of my time is spent running The Black List. The entrepreneur part has really emerged as the dominant feature of my work life. As Hollywood continues to change, I’ve realized that my greatest value is in making the most valuable platform for writers in the industry. That’s where my time is best spent.

As far as film and television producer, there are a few projects that I’m involved in, but I’m rarely the lead producer. I have greater value trying to build a really effective platform than I do trying to get any individual movie made.

The cultural commentary part: some of it is just Twitter, if I’m being totally honest with myself. But also increasingly, whenever I’m in New York, I’ll be on the panel at an Abby Phillips show. I’m a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. I do a little bit of writing for them. When I feel particularly moved by a moment politically or otherwise, I’ll either write a longform essay on Substack or an editorial somewhere. I don’t think about that as a formal role as much as the other things.

Most likely, The Black List will be the first line of my obituary.

Is the cultural commentary something that could benefit The Black List? Is it something that might get you in trouble?

It’s a really interesting question. It all comes from the same root. The reason I founded The Black List is that I think there are some systematic problems with the way the industry functions that result in less good outcomes for everybody. In the case of The Black List, it’s that writers in Hollywood are undervalued relative to what they contribute to the future success of the film. Data and economic studies show this to be true. The industry doesn’t have an efficient platform that allows for a meritocracy vis a vis writers. If you’re an aspiring screen or fiction writer, most people in the industry would still tell you, “move to LA, get a job at Starbucks, and network until someone pays attention to you.”

And that’s terrible. As a black person from West Central Georgia, I’m aware of just how uncorrelated the ability to move to LA and the ability to write a good screenplay are. I’ve tried to build a solution to that problem. If you are great, you can put your work in front of somebody who can do something with it, regardless of who you know, where you live, and what social access you have.

Most of my cultural commentary—and even though it’s in my bio, I will admit a discomfort with calling myself that—comes from the same source: There are these messed up systems. Someone should fix them, or at least call out that they’re messed up.

Are other jobs in Hollywood (directing, producing, and acting) more meritocracies than writing?

This would be a fascinating PhD thesis in economics. One of my fantasies is to go get a PhD in economics and write on the economics of culture. As a person who relies on data quite a bit to come to conclusions and resists conclusions based on instinct, here’s what I’d say: The big challenge around the lack of meritocracy for writers is that knowing whether a script is good requires reading an entire script. You can know the script is bad in 10 pages, but you have to read the entire thing to know that it’s really good. That’s an hour and a half minimum, and there’s a super abundance of material. No one can read everything, or even most things, so the people that are in the important seats reach for the things that are close to them. That means the stuff that’s already in the system at the highest levels, or the stuff that is part of their social world. Is there racism and sexism implicit in some of that? Absolutely. But I actually think it has more to do with the fact that there’s too much stuff to read. They have to triage somehow, so they rely on signals from people that they trust about what’s good. There’s bias implicit in that system.

Directing is the same thing. You need a lot of resources to direct something. Less than in the past, but you still need to be able to make something in order for people to judge it. As a result, opportunity lines up more with access to the resources to make something. But then once you do, it’s easier for people to watch it than to wade through a screenplay.

As an actor, you’re limited by the roles that are available to you. In some ways, they have it worse than writers. A writer can write a script anywhere in the world, whereas an actor needs someone to give them a role.

I can’t honestly rank them based on least and most meritocratic with any confidence. I genuinely hope somebody does that as a PhD thesis.

We constantly hear about the dearth of writing jobs in Hollywood. What’s your impression?

There’s always a market for incredible work. The market contracts and expands based on a lot of factors. But if you have written an exceptionally well-executed screenplay for a high-concept idea, someone is always gonna buy it. I wrote an essay called “The Moral Case for Selling Out” about the fact that the industry desperately needs great ideas, brilliantly executed.

That said, sustaining a career is harder than ever. I started in 2003. For the next couple decades, there were open writing assignments. In between writing your brilliant spec idea, you could go write for X, Y and Z. Even if there was no realistic chance of that movie getting made, you were getting reps in and you were bringing in income.

Today, the number of OWAs is way down. The studios are not investing in R&D the way they previously did. There are fewer jobs in television, which is another way to sustain your life and livelihood as you develop your craft. Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Weiner, and Bill Lawrence did not start as major writers. They started writing for mediocre sitcoms, and then they wrote something brilliant that became a big thing. There isn’t as much of a ladder. In the past, you could be good enough to get a job and then you got better. Those jobs are fewer and fewer today.

Netflix, and the response to Netflix, has a lot to do with this. Netflix shows up with a massive budget and makes a ton of content. All the other studios think they need to launch their own streaming services and fill their pipeline with content to compete. This also coincides with the pandemic, when everyone is at home watching streaming services. There is massive demand and overabundance of supply, particularly episodic stuff. The demand curve and the supply curve shift out.

At some point, these streaming services realize subscription is maybe not the best business model and they might not be able to achieve limitless growth. They cut back on content spend, and there are not as many jobs.

That sounds like freelance writing in the 2010s. There were a handful of VC-backed publications that paid well. For a while, it was good. But the business model didn’t work so they folded. There were fewer opportunities for writers, who are in infinite supply. That’s hard. We can have a conversation about who gets the remaining opportunities, what structural impediments are in place, and how to overcome them. The Black List is one example of changing the balance in the screenwriting and fiction world. On the other hand, I get frustrated by this idea that anyone who wants to be a writer should be able to be one. Not everyone gets to do what they want as a profession.

My argument around why the studios—and why capital generally—has to spend more on developing the ladder is that if you want to optimize for getting the best movies and TV in the long run, you have to invest in developing what will become the best talent. It’s like a soccer team investing in their academy system. You can 100 percent rely on buying the talent that exists in the world, but a better business strategy is investing some money in training the kids in your area. The best ones will play for your team. They won’t cost as much as buying a world-beater from somewhere else.

I tend not to get involved in moralistic arguments, particularly as it applies to business. I don’t know what the studio heads’ morals are, but I think I can reasonably assume that they do want to make money. If I can make the argument that by investing more in the inputs, in this case writers, they’ll make more money—if I can make the argument that if they invest more in equity—they’ll make more money, maybe they’ll be more likely to do it. I’ve learned over time that this isn’t necessarily true. They have other incentives beyond making money, which is ironic in a capitalist system. But I tend to start with that argument as a show of good faith if nothing else.

The other thing I’d say is that people, and especially writers, devalue their own work by thinking that anybody can do it, and that anybody who makes even a modicum of effort deserves to do it. We don’t think that way about professional athletes. There are roughly the same number of writers who get a movie made every year as there are players who get drafted by the NFL. We know how hard somebody has to work to be an athlete of that standard. I will never understand why people feel that they can spend six months writing a screenplay and have a multi-million dollar movie. It’s a craft. The people who sell million-dollar scripts have invested time in becoming very good at what they do. As a culture, we need to respect writers more. Doing so allows us to appreciate the work and compensate the writers more fairly.

There’s something about writers downplaying their own talent and their own ability. It’s whiny to complain about how hard it is to be a writer.

Yes, there are undeniably harder jobs that are less appreciated relative to their value. Teachers come to mind immediately.

I get that. I also think that it feels weird to complain about something you are good at. We fetishize struggling through things and improving in skills you are bad at. People should become professionals in things that they are good at, that come easily to them.

There’s a Japanese concept, ikigai. It means something like “a reason for being.” Do the thing you’re good at and then work super hard at it. When we talk about the people who will have the opportunity to make this their entire career, that is a small number of people. In all probability, those people have some gifts, but they also spend an extraordinary amount of time taking that gift and turning it into a craft.

I keep coming back to the professional athlete example. LeBron had a lot of innate gifts. So did Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi, and frankly all of the greats. The thing that everyone around them will also tell you is that their work ethic is also absolutely freak show. You get the best stuff when you have someone with real gifts who also has a real commitment and a love for what they do. They’re going to make it hard for themselves because that’s the standard they’re going to hold for themselves. That’s what allows them to touch greatness. I don’t know very many Hollywood writers who I personally think are amazing who don’t work really hard.

So I do think it’s important for people who don’t have that job to be the hype man for the people who do amazing things. I take it upon myself to be the hype man for writers. I know how painful I find writing. Anybody who can walk into a room by themselves and create worlds on pages, I’m going to tell everybody how amazing that is. As a general rule, it’s a good way to live your life. Find somebody that you think is amazing and impressive, and make sure the rest of the world knows how amazing they are.

Onto the links.

An article

Terrific profile of American cross country skier Jesse Diggins in the Times Magazine. Her pain tolerance is very well documented, yet I never tire of hearing her talk about just how deep she can dig. Even she knows it’s kind of excessive:

“This is the healthiest sport in the whole world—except at the very top of the sport. The way we do it is maybe not that good for us.”

She bruised her rib in her first race at the Olympics. Look at her wheezing in agony at the finish line of the 10k, where she won bronze.

***

Another article about an American cross country skier

‘He’s got that farmer’s strength.’ Ben Ogden, and a silver medal long in the making.

Ben Ogden won the first men’s Olympic medal in cross country skiing in 50 years this week. The Washington Post spent some time with Diggins, Ogden, and some other American skiers at their training base in Ogden’s home state of Vermont over the summer. I love this anecdote about how he was inspired to get stronger because of a 70-year-old dude who could throw bails of hay really far at the farm Ogden worked on as a teenager:

“I was young and strong, and I did a lot of pull-ups and stuff,” Ogden said by phone Wednesday from Predazzo, Italy, a resort town just up the road from the Olympic cross-country venue in Val di Fiemme. “But there was like a 70-year-old guy that worked there who could throw hay like four times as far as I could. It kind of bothered me.

“Who knows how old he is now? And I’m that much stronger and fitter, and I guarantee he could still throw a bale way farther than I could. That was kind of the world that I grew up in. I always respected the people who just want to put their head down and get s--- done.”

***

A book

I read Lauren Rothery’s Television in two sittings. The novel is told through three narrators navigating the film and television business in Los Angeles. There is drama and ennui and drunken scenes at the Sunset Tower and long meandering sentences. I loved it the same way I love Bret Easton Ellis or Joan Didion’s novels about seemingly empty Californians. It’s a world far away from my Midwestern upbringing and I enjoyed inhabiting it for 239 breezy pages.

***

A grammar lesson

I have some Mexico travel booked this year, so I’ve been working with a tutor twice a week to brush up on my Spanish skills. I studied Spanish in college and then worked in a restaurant my first year in New York a very long time ago. But, over the years, my Spanish has deteriorated. It’s always been perfectly effective in Spanish speaking countries, but mostly to talk to cab drivers about LeBron James and servers about mezcal.

I found Gustavo, a Mexico City native, on the website Preply and he has dramatically improved my Spanish in four weeks. I had a solid foundation but forgot essential things, like conjugating verbs in the past or future. It’s incredible how much more productive a conversation is when you can talk about something you did and something you’re going to do.

***

A ski

It has been a truly remarkable winter in the upper midwest. After a recent ridiculous cold snap we’ve been treated to bluebird days and ideal conditions. My favorite big dumb race of the year is next weekend: The American Birkebeiner (also a TPF client).

If you missed it last week, please read this most excellent Q&A with the most fabulous Megan Angelo.

Now that you’re back, hello again. I met Megan in the olden days when we worked together at Business Insider’s illustrious Media vertical. (RIP The Wire. RIP journalism generally.) She and Glynnis MacNicol understood where the media was going and what it meant in a truly prescient way. I was present most of the time, too.

Megan went on to write for outlets including The New York Times, Glamour, Vogue, and Romper, which has the best name of all of them. She’s currently finishing up her second novel. We talked about why robots can’t report, teaching kids, picking your spots, and the black hole that is book publishing.

Three Point Four Media: You pop up randomly in one of my feeds occasionally. I read your writing and think, “Aw, Megan” and then I think “I wish Megan wrote more.” What are you working on now?

Megan Angelo: Mostly the book. It’s gone through a lot of different iterations. It has turned out to be about an Elon Musk character that we know on page one is getting murdered. The rest of the book looks at the people close to him and tries to figure out who kills him. The characters in the book are also into gene editing. It’s a thing we hear about the Silicon Valley guys doing recreationally. Pronatalism is step one, embryo screening is step two, and then actually editing your embryo is step three. Editing your embryo means you could pass on whatever modifications you made. No one in the United States has done that to our knowledge yet. It’s a red line in the scientific community. But I just kept thinking about it in the same way I was thinking about social media when I wrote Followers. Any minute I’m going to open my phone and read that Elon Musk did it. I keep feeling like it’s one of those things that is about to happen, and that’s where I love to live when I’m thinking about fiction.

I’m also teaching at Cedar Crest College, and I am writing for Glamour once in a while. I'm working on a story right now about a woman whose husband was taken by ICE in a pretty dramatic fashion. I pick my spots.

I like that. I pick my spots, too. Many fewer spots than you. But still: spots picked.

I have taken up so much of the internet. It’s someone else’s turn. I am only writing things that I think are actually worth someone’s time to sit down and read.

High volume doesn’t work anymore, either. It’s much better to write one good thing a week or even a month than 10 fine things and hope one of them goes viral.

Twitter is a huge part of that, too. I don’t go on Twitter at all, and that’s where I used to find everything that I was going to read that week. What is everyone reacting to? Let me read this. Let me maybe write about it. There are a lot of breaks in the communication pipeline that used to get us from not reading something to reading it.

You have a Wikipedia page. That’s very fun. Have you looked at your Wikipedia page?

Someone showed it to me. Whoever wrote it made me a year younger than I am. So thank you. That’s the only way I know it’s not my mom. She’s a stickler for accuracy.

There’s a great photo, with a caption: “Angelo in May 2019.” Something about that strikes me as so specific and bizarre.

There should be a protagonist of a cozy mystery who is a little lady making Wikipedia pages.

I really loved Followers, which was smart and ahead of its time. Book publishing is such a mystery to me. Did you have any sense of what constituted success? Was there feedback on the sales or the next book or anything? It’s such a black box.

I thought that as somebody in media, it was going to be easy for me. Not so much the writing part, but the industry part. I thought it would be very adjacent to the kind of publishing and stories you and I had done. I would just get it more than somebody who didn’t have that experience. I did not.

I wrote Followers in a vacuum. I thought the topic was super relevant, but I had no sense of the book industry or what would work.

After Followers, I felt like I had to deliver another book in 18 months. I don’t even know who said that to me, but it was what I set out to do, and I just could not do it.

I'm the person who used to write five articles a day. I really did not think I was going to have a problem writing a second book in 18 months. That’s about how long it took me to write Followers. But I did. I just crashed and burned over and over. I just couldn't do it. I started a couple of books. I was still watching the numbers for Followers. I felt like I had to deliver something like Followers, something that felt of the moment.

It was also Covid. Followers came out in January 2020, so most of my appearances were virtual. The time that I would have been out on the road, hopefully getting more writing done, all changed.

I can’t really tell what influenced the difficulty I had most. Was it Covid? Was it little kids? Was it the expectation? I’ve thought about it a lot, and I still don’t know. I couldn’t really get my head on straight until I started this book, and even that had to go through a lot of different iterations to get there. Now that I’m almost at the end, I’m not sorry that it took this long. I don’t have any formal training or an MFA. I think you just have to do it again and again until you get better. I don’t think I would have wanted what I thought was ready to sell three years ago out there right now.

Did you know in the back of your head that what you were writing wasn’t ready? Or did that realization come later?

I’m very good as a writer at deluding myself when it comes to delivery. I will say to my husband every week, “I’m finishing the draft this week.” I will say to my agent, every week, “I’m going to be at the end of the revision this week.” I told my agent the other day that I wished she could see me in any other sphere of my life, like journalism, PTA, kid’s birthday parties. I am a nailer of deadlines. I don’t understand why I can’t seem to gauge where I’m at in a fiction project at any time. She told me she had seen this 1,000 times with people like me and that writing fiction is just a different alchemy from everything else. You need to take the time you need. There were minor revelations along the way where I knew it, but I still don’t think I know it. I have to learn it every single week. On Friday it’s like, “Okay, I’ll try again next week.”

Are you writing and then scrapping stuff? Or staring at a blank computer screen?

I’m never blocked. I’m cursed with a complete lack of writer’s block. Every day I get up and I write. A typical day for me, genuinely, could be 5,000 words. In earlier jobs, I wrote so much. It’s not hard to move the muscle. But my brain is always behind. I’m really good at writing 60 pages in the wrong direction. That’s kind of my MO.

I heard a story one time about the creator of Euphoria. He rewrites a script from page one whenever he gets notes. The person telling me that story thought it was a crazy way to do things but I was thinking “kindred spirit.” Just the guy I want to be aligned with: the mind behind Euphoria. But I start on page one every time. I have to rewrite, or at least retype, every single word. I can’t copy/paste to save my life. I can’t cut in line to save my life. I’m retyping the whole draft every time. I don’t know why.

I also love plot. I have a lot of plot all the time, and so I make a lot of mistakes in plot. Then I have to go back and change so much, or I have too many plots going and I have to go back and pull some out. I am The Morning Show.

How is teaching? What do the youth think about everything?

I love teaching the youth. This is my first semester teaching a journalism class. It is a tiny women’s college. Nineteen hundred kids. It’s a very working class, middle class student population. It’s a very progressive school, but I didn’t know if they were going to care about journalism. They don’t trust the media at all.

I’m a month in. It’s been incredible. They have a huge appetite for journalism. They have great journalistic instincts. I feel like they’re trolling me with how easily they get everything. They are so good with fast deadlines. They have a huge appetite for the truth. They’re highly attuned to the way every system is not set up to serve them, and it’s time for the systems to break. The only piece that’s missing is they don’t know the path. They don’t know where to go to get a journalism job with a living wage that they can rely upon. I can’t really lie to them on that front.

Nobody does, kids.

We’re muddling through it together. If somebody figures out the true new model to fund journalism, the talent and the appetite is there.

I think the only thing that’s future proof is a beat, something you have a deep knowledge on. In the class, we started with beat reporting that’s adjacent to their existing expertise. There will always be a need in some form for expertise. AI is not beating us at expertise yet.

There will always be value in being able to report. I don’t have a lot of faith in the robots covering a local fire.

Pretty much the whole class has been about Minneapolis so far. We talk about Minneapolis every day. If robots are replacing on-the-ground reporting in Minneapolis, the question isn’t so much about how good the robot is, it’s about who owns the robot. If we already had robots who could report, I don’t think the robots would be telling us the truth.

I’m coming into teaching at a time when everything is about AI and how to handle AI in the classroom. All I can think to do is talk it to death with them, let them talk about it, and let them experiment so that they can see it fail. I don’t want it to be held up as this thing that makes everything easier if the professor would just let us use it. We crash test dummy quite a bit in the journalism class.

This is a little old man yelling at clouds, but you gotta struggle a little bit.

Yes, friction is good. Friction is what college should be in so many ways.

As proprietors of a small business, we get a lot of emails. Some of them are fun like hey we’d like to work with you on a project. Most are rote and dull, logistics and what not. But, with increasing frequency, people are emailing Three Point Four Media to ask us if we need a loan. Here’s a typical one that I just received:

I’m checking in because we recently approved a similar operation with a $1.35M working capital line at roughly 1% monthly, enabling them to move forward on a large project. We structure this without personal guarantees and explore terms without affecting credit scores.

Does this sound like what you’re seeking for Three Point Four Media?

Family offices want to give us money. PE companies want to give us money. Banks want to give us money. We don’t want any money.

There’s no larger point here. We probably ended up on some list and now we get three or four emails a week from various places with cash to burn. The I’m launching my political campaign and bought your phone number from the DNC of small business experiences.

I have started sending the above gif back in response. So far, no one has followed up.

An article

Paul Tenorio tells the wild tale of how former Everton star and Major League Soccer coach Adrian Heath was kidnapped in Morocco where he went to see about a managerial job. Some truly unbelievable details in the story:

In the pitch-dark room, Heath remembers hearing the call to prayer in the morning. What came next surprised him. The wife and toddler son of the man in his 30s came into the room. Neither looked at him. The little boy — Heath guessed he was about four — watched a cartoon on the TV. At one point, the wife went grocery shopping. Later, she put a backpack on the kid and took him to school. Heath remembers the young boy turning back and looking at him. They made eye contact.

The takeaway: Turn on Find My Friends.

***

Another article

Kerry Howley is an immediate click for me. Her latest from Minneapolis… damn.

I don’t know. I’m not an activist, a protester, an organizer of anything. I move about the world pretty freely. It was news to me that a federal agent could, without consequence, execute a woman in her car in response to a traffic violation. The world is not what it was yesterday. We reconsider our limits. We recalibrate our relationship to power.

It is the misfortune of Minnesota’s ICE contingent to have invaded the state with the second-highest levels of social trust, trailing only Utah. Many activist networks were formed in 2020; we are seeing, Petrus says, Minnesotans call upon the “muscle memory” of the George Floyd protests. In mid-January, a neighborhood organization for a part of town called Whittier put out a call for a meeting to organize a “Neighborhood ICE response”; more than 800 people showed up at the local elementary school and formed a tidy line extending well beyond the door. (“Why a line?” I ask someone later. “Because we are in Minnesota,” he says.) In the cafeteria, in their big coats, adults struggled to get their legs through benches attached to long lunch tables. Because there were too many Minnesotans to fit in a single room, officials and parents and teachers went room to room giving the same speeches about how to help neighbors in hiding. They then gridded out the rooms, dividing the neighborhood into smaller subdivisions. Close neighbors met one another (“Oh, you live on the other side of the museum”) and formed hyperlocal Signal groups. At the first sighting of an agent, someone could ping the group and draw them outside. Their favored tactic was noise. They would make it impossible for ICE to conduct raids in secret.

If the whistle is the sound of resistance, the sensation is the never-ending vibration of a half-dozen chats on the phone in your pocket and all the anxiety that suggests.

This is an aside but describing The Free Press as “our leading chronicle of the knowing sigh” is perfect perfect perfect.

***
A third article

A lot of good writing this week. This Francesco Pacifico piece is part travel guide, part writing advice, part philosophical diatribe. A lot to consider. Is everyone, everywhere terrible? If so, what is to be done?

So I’m resisting describing the bar and the neighborhood. Every description will put the described people in the AI eye of Palantir while bringing more international investors to this part of town.

Just imagine a paragraph here where I tell you what the trio has missed by only asking the yes or no question about cold brew and by not paying attention to anything else. Imagine the interesting descriptions of the owners of the coffee shop. The outrageous life the older owner has lived. The sketchy past. The sketchy present, for crying out loud. Imagine me romanticizing the owner’s life and then waxing poetic about the younger owner, a real legend in local night life. Just imagine the Zolaesque description of the bar’s regulars, the various cliques, the debauched sex life, the romantic drug-addled breakdowns. A whole Mubi watchlist of city types. Imagine me writing copy for this corner of the city so it’s there for real estate to come and get it.

To write fiction or narrative nonfiction these days is to fuel real estate speculation. Think about it. Can we still write in good faith after the Gomorrah and My Brilliant Friend multimedia franchises jump-started Naples’s belated gentrification?

Everything is tourism and everything is real estate.

I do think the existence of takeaway coffees is a better example than cold brew, but that’s a minor quibble.

***

A project

We played a small role in helping Flourish Ventures announce their latest investment. We learned a lot about Brazilian healthcare: “Large hospitals employ 50–100 people solely to manage revenue cycle operations, which consume 4–6% of operating budgets. This is a structural inefficiency that the system can no longer afford.”

At Three Point Four Media, we’re proud to have a less time-consuming billing cycle.

***
A game

Some genius ported Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 into a web browser. Whoever did it for president.

That’s all for this week. Next week, coming in hot with another Q&A. Until then, let’s talk about being lonely and isolated. Happy Saturday.

Sometimes an email reads stronger than the actual message. A note that seemed foreboding is a formality. Feedback that seems like the end of the world is actually straightforward. A seemingly curt email is simply someone giving you the information you need, nothing more, nothing less.

Right now we are putting the finishing touches on a new website for a client. We’re at the quality assurance phase (aka QA), which, for those of you not in the biz, means we are ensuring everything works and looks right. I used to overthink this kind of thing—what did I do wrong?—but now I realize that it’s just a part of the process. It’s a group of people collaborating both creatively and logistically to make something work.

No one is actually mad. Everyone just wants to get it right. Onto the links!

Subscribe now

An article

I loved this New Yorker story about the heroes and thrill seekers that volunteer for Backcountry Unit Search and Rescue (BUSAR, for short) in the Great Smoky Mountains. Fun fact: It’s America’s busiest National Park. (I would have guessed Yosemite.) There are all sorts of details about hairy rescues, how the BUSAR team trains, and what drives a person to sign up for excruciating search and rescue missions. I can’t stop thinking about the phrase nothing scared him more than the wind:

He was telling me about it over sandwiches in the park, at a picnic table beside the Little River, when an acorn the size of a golf ball very nearly fell on my head. Sharbs went “Holy shit!” Then he said, “Also a big killer in the park? Falling tree branches.” Dead, dangling limbs are called widow-makers. Jonathan Dee, the park’s medical director, who is a family physician, told me that a patient once asked him which of the park’s wild animals frightened him most; he said that nothing scared him more than the wind.

***

A movie

Saw Hamnet. TPF Review: Incredible acting. Way too sad. Grief porn. The entire theater was sobbing for two hours.

It did, however, make me want to see everything young Billy Shakespeare’s wife—and the real star of Hamnet—Jessie Buckley has been in.

***

A printer

Finally broke down and bought a printer. I will miss my walks to the Ann Arbor Public Library to print official Three Point Four Media, LLC documents. Memories! One time I sent a sensitive financial document to a printer at a different library branch—somehow if you’re on the library wifi you have access to any library printers you’ve previously used?—and a very kind librarian called the other library and they immediately shredded all the documents for me. That’s public service.

I went for a Brother, because that’s what friend of the newsletter Molly Young suggested when we chatted over the summer. It’s great so far, no notes.

***

A book

I am very slowly making my way through Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache universe. Just finished the second installment, A Fatal Grace. I didn’t like it as much as the debut, Still Life, but it was nonetheless a real pleasure to read. Mystery novels really are page turners. I especially liked all the scenes in the cozy Quebec bistros lit by fires and filled with crunchy baguettes and big red wines.

***

A ski race

Speaking of people getting into trouble in the wilderness. This weekend is the Noquemanon Ski Marathon, a 50-kilometer cross country ski race in Marquette, Michigan, that I look forward to every year. The forecast is brutal and borderline dangerous. The TPF coaches and front office have advised me to sit this one out. Frostbite and frozen corneas are nothing to mess with. We’ll spend some time in the sauna and be back stronger for 2027.

The guy we did this Q&A with last week knows a few things about arctic weather.

“I didn’t know anything about polar expeditions or shipwrecks,” Sancton says. “I had to learn these things for myself. And I hope I’m able to convey that enthusiasm and curiosity on the page. Things that seem magical to me, for a specialist might seem pedestrian or so obvious as to not merit mentioning.”

Neptune’s Fortune, out this month, chronicles the history of the Spanish galleon San José, which sank off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1708. Loaded with gold, silver, and emeralds worth billions of dollars today, the San José was long the holy grail for archaeologists, money hungry treasure hunters, and shipwreck enthusiasts. Sancton, who by day is an editor at The Hollywood Reporter, tracked down Roger Dooley, the enigmatic Cuban archaeologist who discovered the San José in 2015. He spent four years with Dooley, a trove of historical documents, and the politicians and activists fighting for the wreck’s riches. The result is a page turner that is equal parts swashbuckling pirates and bureaucratic nightmare. It asks the question, to whom do the spoils of this conquest truly belong: the indigenous people whose ancestors were forced by the Spanish to mine their own lands, the treasure hunters who discovered it 300 years later, or the country whose waters it lay in?

I called up Sancton, my old colleague from Vanity Fair, to talk about writing habits, why outsiders write the best stories, and how to fact check pirates.

Three Point Four: I’m amazed at your discipline. You wrote half of Madhouse on your Metro-North commute. What were your writing habits like for Neptune’s Fortune with a full-time job and family?

Julian Sancton: I was remote at the beginning, so I did not have those two blissfully quiet trips on Metro-North every day. For Neptune’s Fortune, it was mornings and weekends. I don’t know if I want my bosses at The Hollywood Reporter to read this, but working remote if you don’t have something to do in the middle of the day you can—if you’re disciplined enough—just open the Word document, which is the hardest part of writing. Whenever you have a free moment, you can get a few sentences done.

My goal every day was an exceedingly achievable one: 400 words. That’s when I was writing. There was a year of pure research. But when I was in writing mode it was 400 words a day, seven days a week.

You never took a day off?

I would feel really guilty if I did, and I would make up for it the next day. By the way, I didn’t always hit my goal! But it’s about showing up.

There’s this mythic romantic ideal of the writer sitting down at the desk to write. But that’s not really how it works for most people. I liked what you said about sneaking in two sentences. Did you find it was easy to get into Neptune mode? You could pull up the doc and write?

It’s the same thing that happened with Madhouse. If I was walking to the train, walking the dog, laying awake at night, my thoughts were always on Neptune. That was my default mode. And the hardest part, as I said, is opening the Word document. Once you’ve opened it, it’s like taking a cold plunge. The hardest part is getting in. Once you’re in, you feel great.

With kids, you realize that sneaking five minutes of writing in when you can is the only way you’re going to finish the book.

What was the seed of the idea that sparked your interest in this story?

It started because I’d finished Madhouse and I was under pressure to come up with another idea. [Laughs.] The trick is not only does it need to be a good idea, but you need to be assured that it hasn’t been written about, that you’re not going to get scooped, and that you’re capable of doing it and it fits with your sensibility. The most important thing is that the sourcing is there. Because there are plenty of amazing stories about pirates I’d be interested in writing but those pirates didn’t leave a whole lot of notes behind.

There’s not much historical documentation.

Not at all! I was figuring out if I wanted to do another wild sea story and pigeonhole myself. What interested me even more than boats was obsessives. I’m obsessed with obsessive people. I kept thinking back to what are the crazy stories that I could revisit? It was 2021, and had been five years since I’d read about the discovery of a Spanish galleon and the greatest sunken treasure in the history of the world. I remember thinking that the amount of treasure, which was reported to be in the billions, must have been a typo.

I figured I’d look into it and see what had happened. Surely something had happened in the five years since I’d read about it. Turned out it had only gotten more chaotic: More suspicion, more accusations thrown on either side, more of a legal clusterfuck. I started calling around and the people credited with finding the shipwreck in 2015 wouldn’t speak to me. It was impossible to reach them.

I finally got a call from my protagonist and pitched it as an article to Vanity Fair to test whether it had legs as a book, and they accepted it.

That can make it easier to sell to the publisher because you have a sample chapter that shows there is some commercial appeal.

That’s what I thought! [Laughs.] I ended up writing and reporting 18,000 words for the proposal. That’s a quarter of the book, most of which you’re not going to be able to reuse.

And there’s a chance that a publisher might not buy it. Do you also have to think about the economics of it? Is this idea commercially viable enough for me to get a proper advance?

Yes! I’d always wanted to write a book. My father is a writer. My grandfather was a writer. That’s what I considered the most noble calling. Unfortunately, it’s not the most lucrative one. When I was pitching Madhouse, I tried to figure out the bare minimum I would write it for and I landed on $50,000.

$50,000 effectively turns it into a loss leader and passion project.

Exactly. I realized, when I was writing the proposal for Madhouse, that I was not pursuing it because it was lucrative and would make a ton of money but because I like adventure stories, which happen to be a popular genre and a relatively healthy sector of the nonfiction market. Luckily, I ended up getting an advance that was well above what I had set out as my minimum.

Now I have to keep doing this kind of book! [Laughs.] Fortunately, these are the kinds of fun stories I gravitate to, the ones I want to read, and the ones I want to write. These are book versions of the movies I want to see. They’re like Indiana Jones. So it doesn’t feel like selling out to pursue this kind of story. It feels natural.

With the work we do at Three Point Four, we find it’s really helpful to come to our client work as outsiders. Subject matter expertise helps, yes, but oftentimes the best stories you read about sports are by generalists not by a baseball beat writer. Have you found it helpful with your books to be an outsider and not an expert?

Absolutely! You’re the first person I’ve spoken to who’s identified that thought process. I didn’t know anything about polar expeditions or shipwrecks. I had to learn these things for myself. And I hope I’m able to convey that enthusiasm and curiosity on the page.

Things that seem magical to me, for a specialist might seem pedestrian or so obvious as to not merit mentioning.

You’re able to parse what is interesting and what is academic and actually tell the story.

I know nothing, so I need to understand it and come up with metaphors, analogies, and ways of describing things that allow me to to understand them, and in turn help others understand them. That ends up being the same thing you were saying earlier: Great sports writing or great science writing is frequently by curious people who are able to find stories other people wouldn’t think to look at or wouldn’t think of as remarkable because they see it all the time.

Did you realize how many words we see in the newspaper are maritime in origin, like scuttle, riposte, broadside? They’re all over your book.

Masthead! It did strike me when writing this book. It’s funny that I’ve fallen into this niche of maritime books when I’m a piss-poor sailor.

Your protagonist and the entire treasure hunting community is known for tall tales. As a reporter, how do you separate embellishment from fact and 400-year-old legend from something that is actually in the historical record?

For certain historical accounts that I relate, if I have a doubt about their veracity, I make sure to raise the doubt in the reader as well. I offer a disclaimer: This may not be true, but it is a story that was told and so it’s worth telling.

With my protagonist, Roger Dooley, of course I had my doubts. Everybody called him a liar. Everybody said he was a con man. He speaks fast and loose and clearly embellishes. He has a haphazard train of thought. My journalistic spidey sense was telling me that this guy was not to be believed. But nevertheless I had access to him! Over the course of four years and hundreds of hours of interviews I got him to tell and retell his stories from different angles. You triangulate all of that and over time the sediment is the real story.

A lot of his life took place behind the veil of totalitarianism in Cuba, so it was hard to access people from that long ago from such an opaque country. But everybody confirmed the stories he was telling, minus this or that detail that was either misremembered or slightly embellished because he can’t help himself. Over time, it actually warmed my heart to realize the extent to which Roger actually was this character. That everything he said turned out to be largely and mostly true.

Here’s an example. I asked him to see his degree, because he claimed that he was a maritime archeologist. “Funny story about that!” he told me. “My wife got so mad at me that she burned all my papers.” I thought, well that’s convenient. Then I talked to a curator at The Met who is a Cuban archaeologist and recently left Cuba who told me that Roger was the authority in Cuba. He was the archaeologist everyone looked up to.

Have as many sources as possible, be as skeptical as possible, and know that tall tales and yarns are part of this world. If you let somebody talk for hours and hours, if it’s a lie they’ll contradict themselves. If it’s true, that truth will come out.