Jonathan Small: 12:22
Okay.
John Corcoran: 12:23
It was only on in a couple of different markets. It had Marc Summers of Double Dare on it, and Arthel Neville eventually became the co-host, the two of them, and it was filmed on the old Johnny Carson Tonight Show set. Leno had moved his set over to the next studio over, and so I was just in the thick of it every day. I’d see Leno’s car parked out there. Different cars every.
Jonathan Small: 12:45
Day. Car?
John Corcoran: 12:46
Yeah. And whatever celebrity was going to be on The Tonight Show would be walking through. I’d pass by them half the time . It’s fun and exciting being in those places, but to be in the lot.
Jonathan Small: 12:56
I always wanted to work on a lot like that. It was that I live in LA and I have not had that experience. But I always there’s something. Yeah, incredible.
John Corcoran: 13:02
You see those gates you draw and when you live in LA, you drive past those big gates, you know, and sometimes you see people going in and people driving.
Jonathan Small: 13:08
Around their golf carts. You know, it’s kind of always seemed really kind of magical to me. What was that?
John Corcoran: 13:14
Like, though? Were you working at the Game Show Network? This is about 2013, it looks like.
Jonathan Small: 13:18
Yeah. 2013. So it was an interesting job. So at that time I was kind of pretty immersed in digital video. I had kind of graduated from doing editorial work to doing video work, where I was kind of helping to produce videos.
And again, I had no background really in the video. I had to kind of teach myself about that, but I knew a lot about the sort of the YouTubers of that time that were popular. And I knew a lot about, you know, what kind of content was resonating. So the Game Show Network hired me to create a division of their company that created game shows for Gen Z. Basically, that would be that it would live on YouTube as the main platform.
John Corcoran: 13:54
So that’s pretty early in 2013 to do that, because at that point in time, a lot of these mainstream media companies were worried about YouTube cannibalizing, cannibalizing.
Jonathan Small: 14:04
I think they tried to do well, I think maybe later they got worried about it because it only lasted for three years. But in the beginning they were very excited about it and they brought me on. They said, look, we want to know that our demographic is pretty old, right? And people who watch game shows, as you can imagine, are pretty old. And we want to bring in a younger generation, and we don’t know if we can bring them in through the network, but we want to kind of look at other channels.
So at the time, YouTube was, well, YouTube has always been what it is, but at that time it was. There was no TikTok yet, so it was really the only game in town. So we created something called door three, which was a channel in the game show Network universe that basically created game shows that would appeal to the kids. Right? So and so the hosts, instead of being, you know, stand up comedians like Steve Harvey, we’re like Glozell, who was like a popular YouTube star at the time and all these kinds of popular YouTube personalities were the hosts.
And then we’d have these game shows. Some were shot, you know, some had pretty big budgets and were shot, you know, in, in like studios and others like, were shot like at our office, you know. And so we had all sorts of some that were very popular, you know, the channel ended up having about 300,000 subscribers by the end of the, the end of my run there. Unfortunately, I think Game Show Network wasn’t. This happens a lot where companies are excited about getting into digital, but they don’t really have the infrastructure to support it financially, like they don’t have a team, an ad sales team that’s, you know, out there, you know, selling, selling, you know, digital content to advertisers.
They just they’re not set up for that. And so there was never really a financial plan. It was really just an editorial plan for it. And it got to the point where I think they had to cut some corners, and they ended up just 2 or 3.
John Corcoran: 15:47
It was a cost for them and they didn’t generate enough revenue for them.
Jonathan Small: 15:51
They didn’t generate enough. I didn’t I never understood exactly how they were going to generate revenue from it. But they could have it could have been a real, I think could have been a great success. But, you know, they had a whole change of regime. When I worked at Game Show Network, it was called GSN.
I’ve noticed they’ve gone back to the Game Show Network. They seem to have embraced what they were trying to like to become new and modern. And it seems like the decision has been made recently to kind of kind of embrace the retro. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Exactly.
John Corcoran: 16:18
Yeah. I mean I don’t watch it very often, but I imagine, you know, a lot of the content is old game shows from the 70s. I mean the.
Jonathan Small: 16:25
Most. Yeah, the most popular show was always Family Feud, no matter how many new shows they brought on Steve Harvey’s Family Feud. Richard, I don’t know if they had Richard Dawson’s at the time. At the time, Stoney.
John Corcoran: 16:37
Anderson, what’s his name? Who died a few years ago. Louie Anderson was a host.
Jonathan Small: 16:42
I think he was a host, too. Yeah, Sony owned it. So they owned a lot of intellectual property that I really wanted to get my hands on. Like they owned The Gong Show, which I wanted to resuscitate as a digital version of The Gong Show, but unfortunately, that was not that IP that I was unable to access. But yeah, it was interesting.
It was really interesting to be in the television side of things. I had never worked for a TV company before. And, you know, I liked all the perks of it. Going up to a cafe, you know, that had free frozen yogurt. It was kind of fun for me.
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 17:15
And I’m curious, how did that come about as an opportunity for you, having been more of a writer for many years? So I had.
Jonathan Small: 17:22
If you backtrack a little bit, I had worked at this company called Break.com, which a lot of people don’t remember. But before YouTube there were a few websites that were really targeted at men. And Break.com being one of them. And Break.com became DeFi. Com eventually.
But Break.com would show basically the kind of things that we people remember YouTube for in the early days, the kind of people falling off of their skateboards and, you know, all that kind of stuff. Very popular. They created a I was one of their first employees, and they ended up creating a network of websites all geared towards men, lifestyle sites and mixed martial arts sites, etc. I ran those and then they said, we got to get into video. John. And I said, okay.
And so I hired a whole team of video people. We built a studio. This was, you know, a very specific time in history where it was like before YouTube cannibalized and destroyed all these companies.
John Corcoran: 18:14
There was before a lot of crowdsourcing. They kind of thought that they needed to create all the content.
Jonathan Small: 18:18
Exactly. And we were, you know, again, our big you know, the UGC was the big money earner. But UGC was unmonetized because a lot of advertisers didn’t really want to be around that content. So the decision was made to create our own content that was a little bit more palpable to advertisers, but that our audience would also like. So that’s kind of how I got into video.
It was sort of by default. I was creative. I was the head of editorial. And they said suddenly they made me the head of editorial and digital. And, you know, my secret was always to surround myself with people who really know this space better than I do and, you know, make decisions, but let them make you know, I’m not going to pretend that I know how to direct a video.
I would hire somebody to do that for me, I would have a production coordinator that was, you know, had years at HBO who knew how to pull together shoots. And, you know, I would learn on the fly from these people. But I was really kind of more directing than actually doing the sort of the heavy, heavy lifting of actually shooting a video.
John Corcoran: 19:16
I want to get to right about now, which is your podcast and now your book. But before we get to that, I know you’ve had a long business relationship with entrepreneurs and even was editor in chief of Green Entrepreneur magazine for a number of years, so talk a little bit about that.
Jonathan Small: 19:34
So entrepreneur, I had thought my days after I left the Game Show Network, I had thought my days of being an editor were kind of behind me. I thought, oh, well, that industry doesn’t really exist anymore, but you know, it still exists. And Entrepreneur is one of the few companies, Entrepreneur media that actually has a print magazine business and an online.
John Corcoran: 19:53
And I had their editor on , he’s Jason Pfeiffer. Yeah. Yeah. He’s an interesting cat because he’s put a lot of effort into building up his own brand on LinkedIn and things like that, while he’s also an entrepreneur.
Jonathan Small: 20:08
Yeah, he’s I’ve used him as an inspiration. And because he’s very good at brand, his own personal brand. And I’ve asked him, you know, he does a lot of speaking. His name is Jason Pfeiffer. He’s done a lot of speaking engagements where I know he gets quite a bit of money.
And so I’ve always been very curious about how he did that. But yeah. So as entrepreneurs they brought me on because they saw an opportunity in the cannabis industry. Now this was 2000 and I don’t know, 17 or 18. And the cannabis industry was just starting to become a burgeoning industry.
The CEO of the company was involved personally in the cannabis industry. He had he invested in a few companies and they were very excited about where that was going and wanted to be sort of on the front lines as a mainstream publication in covering cannabis, not the lifestyle so much of cannabis, but the, the, the, the business side of this side. Yeah. And honestly, I’m not a cannabis consumer in particular. I probably shouldn’t admit this, although I have admitted it publicly.
I’m not a big cannabis consumer. And I was very interested in the business side of it because it was really like capitalism gone crazy. It was like, you know, what do you do when you have this industry where everybody’s basically selling the same thing and and watching companies, you know, how they would differentiate themselves and, and make decisions and market themselves was really fascinating to me. And I really, actually liked meeting a lot of the people in the industry. So they hired me to do an initiative called Green Entrepreneur, which was a cannabis website and magazine and podcast that was all about the cannabis industry.
And I did that for three years. I got very involved in that industry, met a million people and built that product. Now, the sad thing about that experiment is that the cannabis industry started to kind of do a nosedive, starting with kind of the beginning of Covid and has still has continued to nosedive. Entrepreneur again became concerned about the losses. There were also some complaints from advertisers about the entrepreneur content being the cannabis content being on the main website.
And some of the you know, it’s you know, it is still it’s.
John Corcoran: 22:24
Still.
Jonathan Small: 22:24
Federally illegal. Yeah. Right. Banks and there were certain banks that didn’t were not comfortable being around it. And so a decision was made to cut that.
I stayed on as an Entrepreneur for two more years just doing, you know, writing for them regularly. I hosted a website for them, sorry, a podcast for them called Dirty Money, which was all about financial crimes. It was a true crime podcast. I was very involved and still am very involved with entrepreneurs, but I don’t work for them full time anymore. But it was an interesting experience to do kind of again, like pivot to like I went from game shows to cannabis, like, what the hell?
Like me, my career has been very unusual.
John Corcoran: 23:04
I’m curious, you know, I’m sure you have older relatives or relatives in states where cannabis is not legal yet or even like us. Like me, I mean, I still carry around some baggage, even though it’s legal on a state level here in California. What was it like for you either like when you joined that, you said, oh, I’m going to. Hey, family. I’m going to be editor in chief of, you know, Green Entrepreneur magazine.
They’re like, what are you smoking? Probably. And then also, what was it like when the setback when they said, we’re going to cut this?
Jonathan Small: 23:34
Yeah. I mean, so the first question, you know, luckily my mom my dad’s no longer with us, but both my parents were hippies. So they smoked cannabis. They were not strangers to it. So they thought it was funny.
In fact, my mother’s boyfriend wanted me to, you know, bring him cannabis all the time, you know, to New York where it wasn’t, it was only legal. And I’m like, dude, you’re gonna get me arrested.
John Corcoran: 23:56
You want me to bring it? First of all, I’m writing in a magazine. It’s not like we have pot around here. Like, you want me to get it on a plane and take it.
Jonathan Small: 24:02
Although I was running a magazine, but you can only imagine the amount of cannabis that was delivered to my door.
John Corcoran: 24:07
I imagine there must be. I mean, it was.
Jonathan Small: 24:08
I could have opened a dispensary. I had so much cannabis at my house, and we would have parties, and I would just give it away to people because people would just send me free stuff all the time. But so I, you know, I never I guess maybe it’s because I live in Los Angeles. There was kind of a cool clout to being in the cannabis industry. I never was there when we were applying for loans or, you know, like preschools, and I had to tell people that I worked at Green Entrepreneur.
It made me a little bit uncomfortable like that. I would be associated with, you know, an illicit industry that is illegal in many states. But I never yeah, I never really had a hang up. I think what bothers me now is, you know, a green entrepreneur is completely gone. It has no blueprint because there is no you can’t find it anymore. And it’s a little sad because, you know, I still have the magazines in my collection here.
But an entrepreneur made a decision to just take it completely off the internet so you can’t find any of the stories. You know, I worked on thousands of stories. Yeah. They’re not, they’re not there. So in some ways, it’s almost like a three years of work is kind of in the ether is no, no.
So I can’t point to it if somebody asked, “Hey John, you know, tell me what you’ve been working on, I can’t say, oh, look at this incredible feature we did at Green Entrepreneur because it doesn’t exist anymore. Yeah. So that part is a little bit of a bummer, but I understand the decision that they had to make. But it’s just, you know, it was a lot of my life given to something that.
John Corcoran: 25:32
So you’ve done a true crime podcast. You’ve done a podcast that was about cannabis. And then you find your way back to your original love, which is writing with the Right About Now podcast.
Jonathan Small: 25:43
Yeah. Well, right about now was actually the first time I had started right about now. It was a class. I had taken a class in digital marketing. I’m always one of these people that always kind of tries to kind of understand new things that are happening and kind of be up on what’s going on.
So I felt like I didn’t know enough about how to market myself in the digital world. So I took a course, and one of the assignments was to create something that would promote the business you were trying to promote In the digital world. And the idea that I came up with to create a podcast to promote my, at the time, ghost writing business. And that podcast was called Right About Now. And I put out a few episodes and I loved it so much.
I just loved everything about it. It kind of combined my journalism background with my love of interviewing people with my sort of, you know, music production, you know, deejaying background. Everything was like what I loved. And so I continued doing right about now as a podcast independent of this class. That class was long gone and people started, you know, noticing it, noticing what I was doing. And at one point, somebody who I knew at Sag-Aftra, the union, the Screen Actors Guild, said, hey, you know, I noticed you have a podcast.
We’re trying to do a podcast. Do you know anybody that could help us, you know, create, you know, launch this podcast? And I said, I said, I can do it. I can help you do it. You know, I didn’t. I had never thought about being a podcast producer, but I knew everything about podcasting, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t help them do it.
And so that was the beginning of my first assignment as a producer of podcasts, rather than just being a host and doing my own podcast. So Sag-Aftra was my first client, which was a great client to have. They’re a wonderful organization. And I’ve been working for them for the last five years, and I help them basically produce their podcast every two weeks. They’ve included.
John Corcoran: 27:27
During the SAG strike. What was that like?
Jonathan Small: 27:31
That was hard. That was really interesting because that was a time when the podcast was really useful as a way to communicate with the membership. The most challenging thing about that was the host, the two people who.
John Corcoran: 27:42
Hosted it, couldn’t.
Jonathan Small: 27:42
Do it. Right. Yeah. Were the people that were the busiest. Right.
So it’s like the host is a guy by the name of Duncan Crabtree-ireland, who’s the national executive director of who’s pretty much the number two in charge after Fran Drescher, who’s the president. And so he was never available for good reasons. He’s always negotiating. So it was always like, all right, Duncan, we’re going to record this at 1:00 in the morning at some hotel in, you know, Prague, wherever you’re trim now, Prague, wherever you’re traveling. It was always traveling around and, you know, and he was I mean, he was really always game.
He loves doing podcasts. So. So that was good. But it was always the challenge. It was always trying to get him and get the guests to be available because they were so busy in the strike in strike mode.
But I think the podcast probably helped in terms of, you know, just communicating what they wanted to communicate to them.
John Corcoran: 28:31
Yeah, I mean, that’s one of the challenges, right? And in that kind of situation, are they trying to communicate to their membership and keep them aligned during, I mean, what was it, nine, ten months or something like that? That was it.
Jonathan Small: 28:43
Felt like forever. Yeah, it was.
John Corcoran: 28:44
It was almost a long strike.
Jonathan Small: 28:46
It was a really long strike. And I could tell it was going to be long from the very beginning because, you know, they would be like, oh, we’re not even going to meet with them for another two, two months. You know, like the, the, the am PTC, I think it is, which is the, the organization they were negotiating with, you know, was just really playing hardball and holding out. And so there was a lot of downtime. And then there was a lot of not downtime, like very intense negotiations.
And then, you know, trying to get our message out there. I say our the Sag-Aftra message out there to the, you know, to the to the to the world, to the membership and trying to mobilize people. We did a lot of episodes that were about the strike captains. And I went, I actually would go sometimes with my microphone to the picket lines, and I live right near Paramount. So I would walk over to Paramount and stand at the gates with my microphone and interview a bunch of people on the lines.
I met a lot of really interesting people. As you can imagine, there are a lot of you.
John Corcoran: 29:39
Bunch of celebrities were down there too.
Jonathan Small: 29:40
Yeah, yeah for sure. And when you have a lot of actors, you know, striking, there’s a lot of creative ideas. And like they had little they had little like groups like they had, you know, the Latina actresses for Sag-Aftra. And they would have like they would do little dances and with music. And there was the stand up comics for Sag-Aftra, and they would do a whole routine like just, you know, on the picket line.
I remember going to the Disney picket. And, you know, they were screaming at Iger. And I mean, it was just it was , it was pretty. It was pretty. It was interesting to see how it was done.
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 30:15
And what people forget about that is that a lot of those actors are working actors who they’re not Tom Hanks, they’re not like big celebrities that have lots of money in the bank. And it really, you know, was a struggle for many of them. Yeah.
Jonathan Small: 30:28
And they still, you know, unfortunately it hasn’t really come back to where it was. And we just did an episode about how that’s not really the strike. It’s it’s it was more, at least from Sag-aftra’s perspective, that really wasn’t the strike that did that. That was where the business was going anyway. And, you know, but a lot of these people, Hollywood is not returned to what it was pre strike and maybe never will.
And so a lot of these people like you’re saying people who were not in the top, you know, 1%, 0.5% of actors who are pretty much the entire Sag-Aftra membership, is having to do what I’ve had to do a lot in my career, which is pivot and try to figure out what you know. How can my skill set be applied in other ways other than the things that I usually sit on?
John Corcoran: 31:13
In an interesting spot, having been in journalism, having seen the change in the magazine industry and content marketing and even the Screen Actors Guild and even Hollywood, how, you know, maybe I think that the the growth in content marketing and the growth in user generated content on platforms like YouTube have taken eyeballs and attention away from the traditional media platforms, taking people away from visiting, going and seeing movies in the movie theater or watching TV on NBC or ABC or CBS or, you know, those sorts of things.
Jonathan Small: 31:47
UGC is definitely something that has cut into, you know, the traditional media landscape. I mean, I think if we think of our kids like that, my kids don’t really watch television. They watch YouTube. They watch TikTok. I mean, my daughter scrolls.
She knows about television, she knows him, and she watches, you know, she’ll go to Netflix and maybe watch a series that she hears about. Or she likes to watch, like old stuff, like, you know, I don’t even remember, but she watches kind of like classic stuff. But it’s interesting, like they don’t consume media the way we do. Older people do. And so that’s affected the industry quite a bit.
John Corcoran: 32:24
And it scares me a bit because I got young kids and I really want to limit, you know, I’ve limited their consumption of YouTube because I just see them watching this stuff and I, I know I sound like an old dude when I say this, but I mean, you know, I see them watching stuff that just seems insane. And I worry about them having like the attention span of a gnat.
Jonathan Small: 32:43
I worry about that too. And then I just think, okay, didn’t our parents say that about us with television? And like, you just hope that this isn’t completely damaging their brains. But if you have kids of a certain age, it’s really hard to not think that it’s not having the most positive effect. I mean, we could have a whole separate podcast about the effect of social media on kids, but it’s it’s that kind of and, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever fallen down the rabbit hole of just scrolling through, like, Instagram.
I mean, I can, I can, it’s hard not.
John Corcoran: 33:09
These days. You just somehow like, wait, how did I get here? I’m flicking through these stupid.
Jonathan Small: 33:14
Things, and they just have the algorithm and it’s so seductive. And, you know, they’re showing me all these videos that I want to watch of, like, you know, old baseball games from 1984. Like, it’s like stuff they just know stuff that I’d be interested in. And it’s, you know, it’s crazy. I can see.
Yeah. They do. Do they serve the same stuff to my kids? Yeah. So yeah, I try to limit it.
I feel like the more we limit it, the more they want it. So I almost want them to get sick of it on their own. I do think that my daughter, when she can get it, she’s like, I can’t, I can’t look at my phone anymore. Dad, can we take a walk? Can we do something else?
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 33:48
Another one we haven’t really touched on because I want to transition to talking about the book version of right About now. But before we get to that, you’ve also edited some big bestsellers. And so there’s another industry publishing, book publishing, you know. Is there a place today for the role of a big, meaty, definitive book, you know, emotional intelligence, the science of success that, you know, gets a ton of media attention and really kind of changes the narrative around a topic, or it makes us think in a different way.
Jonathan Small: 34:21
I like to believe that books will always have a place. I know that they’re probably not as important as they were maybe 25 years ago, but they’re still kind of a cachet and a credibility that comes with the book rather than, you know, reading an article or reading something online. Just the weight, literally the weight of a book. I just think the publishing industry has changed so much that you don’t, you know, I’m still kind of a snob, like I still believed or was a snob until about a year ago that, you know, you had to have a major publisher publish your book in order for it to be anything in order to be legitimate. Right?
Like me and it’s one of the reasons I had never published my own book, because I never had to really, I thought it was a good enough idea to even present to a publisher. And so I just didn’t go that route. I wrote a lot of books for other people, like you said, and I edited a lot of books for other people. But I, in talking to Anna David, our mutual friend who has her own indie publishing company, she kind of convinced me, look, it’s good to have a book out there for your own brand, for your own publicity, for your own just just for your own ego, you know? And maybe it doesn’t have to have like, random House or Penguin behind it.
Like, maybe I can just be a small publisher like hers, but I can use my various channels to publicize it. And she convinced me and I did it, and I’m really happy I did it. And I’m not embarrassed to tell my snotty media friends, you know, they’ll always say, oh yeah, who published it? I’m like, well, I don’t say it’s self-published because I feel like for some reason I still can’t go there. But I say it’s I say it’s an indie publisher.
And that’s true. It’s not self. I didn’t publish it myself. So I think there’s less of a stigma around that. And also it just makes more sense economically now for writers to do that, because it kind of takes out the middleman.
You can do it much quicker. You know, in my book, I wrote it and it took me like about six months to write it. And then, you know, when Anna got her hands on it, it was like a 2 or 3 month process and all of a sudden it was available. That would be unheard of in traditional publishing. It would be years until my book would be, you know, released.
So I think there’s a lot of advantages. I feel like that’s a big difference that we’re seeing now. And I think there is still an advantage to having a book. It just might be distributed in a different way than the old days. Right?
John Corcoran: 36:34
Right. And let’s talk about the book that you came out with. So right about now, it was first, it was a podcast. It became a book. You’ve interviewed some amazing authors.
Andy Weir, the author of The Martian. A.J. Jacobs, who I’ve had on this podcast.
Jonathan Small: 36:50
Oh. You have. Oh. He’s great. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 36:51
Yeah, he’s a super entertaining guy. Fun to talk to. Talk a little bit about that, about those different conversations. I went into the book.
Jonathan Small: 36:59
I had always wanted to make a, you know, basically I had interviewed like over 200 really, like you mentioned some really interesting authors. Max Brooks, who wrote The Zombie Survival Guide, the son of Mel Brooks, David Grann, who wrote The Killers of the Flower Moon. So there were a lot of people I interviewed over the years that I thought were really interesting, but I never could figure out exactly what to make the book about, like. And so I, the first thing that inspired me is I. Terry Gross, who is the host of Fresh Air, put out a book a few years ago that was kind of like a best of her podcast, and it was kind of like.
John Corcoran: 37:33
Has done this too. Yeah. And it was different volumes.
Jonathan Small: 37:35
Right. And it was kind of like excerpts and but it was really kind of an oral history type of thing. It was just, you know, transcripts, but like portions of interviews and you know, and I and I thought okay that so I won’t just do that. You know, the fact that she had done that and Tim Ferriss had done things like that seemed to me like that could be a way. But then I was like, well, what am I going to do?
I felt like I needed to focus because I talked about it. So, like, just like your show, we talk about so many different topics. I didn’t really want to write a book. And one of the things I always found the most interesting in my interviews is, it is kind of like the way you open up your story. Your podcast was like, I always kind of get their origin story, like how these people got started as writers, because I always find that kind of inspirational and I just love a good origin story.
I mean, I love a good origin story in the movies. You know, I love The Godfather two. I love, you know, Star Wars, whatever it is. Like. I love origin stories.
Right? And I think there’s a reason they’re so popular in Hollywood. And so I thought, okay, I’m going to focus on the origin stories, that that’ll be the focus, because I pretty much always universally asked my guests what, you know, how they got started. And a lot of them had some really interesting stories. So I collected the ones that I thought were the most interesting, the most diverse, and I put them all into a book.
I obviously told my own origin story. I explained a little bit about why I think origin stories are important not only for writers, but just in general for entrepreneurs. I’ve actually written an article for Entrepreneur recently about, you know, why businesses should have their own origin story. Like what the significance of like, publicizing an origin story is. I mean, you think of, you know, Apple or Nike, they have great origin stories.
Starbucks, you know, and so there’s something about that.
John Corcoran: 39:14
There’s some great content marketing, you know, great grist for content marketing. Exactly.
Jonathan Small: 39:18
And I think sometimes we forget. I think sometimes companies and individuals forget that that might be a good way to market yourself. So, I focused on that. That was my focus. And you know, I had a lot of interesting stories to tell. I mean some that come to mind, you know, I mean, Kristin Hannah, who is like one of the best selling authors of all time, she wrote She Has the Women, which has been like a bestseller now.
Like it’s on the bestseller list. I think it’s been the best seller for the last, I know, 20 weeks. She had just written that book and came on my podcast to talk about her story. And, you know, she has one of those stories where she wanted to be a lawyer, and she was studying to be a lawyer, and her mother got sick. And as a way to kind of bond with her mother, they wrote a book together because they always wanted to write a historical fiction book together.
And that was kind of their bonding thing. And then her mom passed away, and she put the book in a box, and when she was pregnant, she took the box out of the shelf and started looking through it and said, I really this is actually a pretty good story. I’m going to finish this, and I’m going to finish this book, and I’m going to submit it to a publisher, and the publisher or the agent looked at it and she said, well, you don’t really know how to write a book yet, but you do. There’s something here. So think you know what my advice to you would be like, go back and revise this.
So she went and read every bestseller that was out at the time. She read like all the best sellers and started figuring out like, what is the formula here? Like, what is it that I’m missing and figured, you know, smart enough to figure out, okay, there is a formula and I think I can get it. And she redid the story using that formula and sold her first book and that to me, and never became a lawyer again. So, like, you know, people like you think of somebody like a Kristen Hannah like, oh, she probably, you know, went to, you know, had been writing her whole life and went to, you know, college to be a writer.
No. Like she kind of fell into it. And that was actually what I found with a lot of the origin stories of the writers interviewed, is that they never intended to be writers they liked reading. There was a common thread where they did like to read, but they didn’t think they were going to be writers, they just, or the kind of writers that they would become. They just kind of fell into it.
They were open enough to new opportunities that these things fell on them. I mean, another story like Max Brooks, who I mentioned, who’s the son of Mel Brooks, had a lot of expectations of this guy growing up, son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks are your parents, right? So there were a lot of expectations that he would be this comedy writer.
He even got a job at SNL but was miserable. Never felt like he was his dad. I mean, he’s a really funny guy. No, Max is a friend of mine, but he never felt comfortable in that kind of writer’s room environment. And really, what he loved was zombies and like, comic, like comics and, you know, and so sort of on the side, he started writing this zombie survival guide, which wasn’t a joke.
It was real like he imagined. What would a survival guide look like if there was actually a zombie apocalypse? And he sent it to his agent, and his agent said, this is not funny enough, you need to make this funny. He said, no, no, I don’t want this to be funny. This is not supposed to be funny.
And the guy was like, I don’t know if I can sell this thing. And he did sell it. Probably, you know, with Brooks name helped, but it didn’t do that well because it was being marketed as a comedy book and people were like, this isn’t funny. And then he was able to get Zack Snyder, who I guess is like a yeah, you know, a frontman from a huge heavy metal band who’s a real comic nerd and a zombie guy to put him on his podcast.
John Corcoran: 42:44
Is he from.
Jonathan Small: 42:45
Yeah, from Twisted Sister. Exactly. Zack Snyder put him on his podcast and said, and Max started talking about zombies in a way that was real. Like, it was like he took zombies seriously, as if they were a real thing. Because that’s the way he thinks about zombie apocalypses, right?
Like, it’s not that it’s like, really going to happen, but he considers it from a military and kind of like survivalist standpoint. And that really caught on with Zack Snyder’s audience and he suddenly found a whole new audience. So anyway, those are kind of some of the origin stories that I love to tell. And I just found, like, there was a lot of AJ got a great one. You said AJ Jacobs was on your show.
He has a great one. I mean, they all had different kinds of ways, but none of them were expected. I don’t think you can plan your career. Like I think you and I have seen that, right? Like we thought maybe like when we were 22, we were going to be one thing.
And we think.
John Corcoran: 43:37
You can see how it’s going to go and it never does. Yeah, it never does.
Jonathan Small: 43:41
And you just have to be open to the unknown and sometimes make some leaps.
John Corcoran: 43:46
And The Martian, Andy Weir, that’s a crazy one too, because I think he published that as a serial, maybe on a blog or something. It was.
Jonathan Small: 43:53
A blog. He was giving it away for free. Yeah. I mean, he was basically just a computer, you know, nerd, like an IT guy. And he just.
But he loved kind of like he had a side kind of passion. And that was, you know, space exploration and science. And he was writing this, imagining what it would be like if somebody had to survive on Mars and, you know, very well researched stuff. And his audience, his free blog audience was like, this is great, but can you like I don’t want to read it on a blog. I want to like, put it on, like put it in a book format or on a Kindle.
John Corcoran: 44:28
Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Small: 44:29
And so he did that, but again, he didn’t charge. And so people are reading for free. And then eventually I think he was like, you know, if I charge them $0.99, I might even make some money. And, you know, the rest is history. Like it became one of the best selling books.
And then, you know, it became such a popular indie book on Amazon that book publishers took notice. And then, you know, they, they, they gave him an advance. And then he wrote, they actually distributed the book, you know, under a big major publishing. So he got a big publishing deal. But his whole thing was really just write about what you love, and the audience will come.
Like, he wasn’t trying to write a science fiction book. He was just trying to write about what he thinks would happen if a guy got stranded on Mars and had to survive on his own. Right, right.
John Corcoran: 45:14
You know, there’s so much good research science. Yeah, there are many great books about writing or the process of writing. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott comes to mind. On writing by Stephen King. I’m actually reading one Right Now by William Goldman, the long time screenwriter.
Adventures in the Screen trade.
Jonathan Small: 45:30
Great book. Nobody knows anything, right? What is it? Here’s the thing about nobody knowing anything.
John Corcoran: 45:34
Pretty much. Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. Where did you see your book fitting in?
Jonathan Small: 45:39
Great question I see it I mean, God, if I can be mentioned in the same phrase as is bird by bird or or or on writing by Stephen King, I would be thrilled. But I do see it as being a book that you would maybe give to somebody who is looking for inspiration as a writer. It’s not a how to book, it’s more of a book of great stories that will get you motivated and make you realize, hey, I can do this too. Like, I think it’s very relatable. There’s probably some story in there that will probably feel like, oh, that’s me, that was me, that’s me right now, or that was me five years ago.
And not only for people who are aspiring writers, but for people who are writing now, who are kind of hitting roadblocks. It’s nice to read about your peers who have been successful and that they’ve struggled too, and that they never, you know, had any designs to, you know, they never thought they were going to be successful and look what happened to them. So I sort of see it in that kind of inspirational category. Motivational kind of category. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 46:39
I want to go way over, so I apologize for that.
Jonathan Small: 46:42
I want to wrap up enjoying talking to you.
John Corcoran: 46:44
Yeah. No, this has been really interesting and I love the different paths in your career and everything. I’d love to wrap up with a question that I call my gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude, especially to peers and contemporaries, maybe mentors, people who’ve been with you in your career journey, maybe different steps in the way, and especially if they’re still with you. You know, sometimes people default to mentioning their family or their or their friends or something like that.
But I love to give you opportunities for any peers, contemporaries, you know, others out there who are doing similar things as you in your industry, although you’ve been in multiple different industries. Yeah. Any anyone in particular you’d want to shout out and thank?
Jonathan Small: 47:26
I mean, that’s a you know, I always feel like I really should have like, I it’s a kind of great sadness in my life in that I never really found a mentor that I could really that could really, you know, and maybe because I wasn’t looking for one, but who really could help me along various phases of my career, there have been different people at different stages of my career. So early in my life, it was my dad, because my dad was a Hollywood screen composer who did movie music, right? So we lived in New York, but my dad was always out here in LA doing these movie scores. And like you said, you know, roaming around the Hollywood lots. And they would, you know, when he was in a movie, he would get his special designated parking space that he could have on the lot.
And that was, you know, but as soon as the movie was over, his parking space would go away, which is such a Hollywood thing, right? You’re only kind of famous for fleeting moments. But he was always an inspiration because I grew up with a dad who was who made a living being creative. And so, you know, I just remember, you know, waking up at three in the morning and hearing my dad banging on the piano And, you know, being very frustrated and but always just, you know, I thought growing up, that’s what you did. Like you made you create things for a living and people paid you to do that.
I didn’t realize that my dad was such an oddball, that there weren’t a lot of people doing that, that most of the people, you know, a lot. And so that was my first early inspiration. And then later it just became various people I was working with. I had a mentor at my first job at a children’s magazine, two mentors there, women who were, you know, at least ten, maybe 5 or 10 years ahead of me in their careers. And they really believed in me.
And, you know, I remember one time, you know, they would always tell me how great things were, how great things were. And then one time I handed in some copy and I got back like, no notes and then a few negative things and no notes. And my, my mentor said to me, that’s when you know you’ve arrived, when I don’t have to keep telling you how great you are anymore, you know, you’re great. So now I’m just going to start telling you, you know what you need to change and what you need to fix and stuff. And I thought that was so interesting.
And I’ve done that to some of my employees, you know, to say, you know, once you get to a certain level, the expectation is that you’re going to be good. So don’t keep looking for that praise because you know, you know, you’re good enough. You know you’re a big deal. So those people taught me that. And I’ve just yeah, over the years I’ve had to find different role models in different areas that I’ve, that I’ve been in.
But unfortunately there’s no real one. It’s sad because a lot of people I interview will talk to me about how, oh, you know, I had this mentor or I’m part of a mentor group. I will say, and this is kind of a weird thing, but it’s just coming to me now. I’m okay, so I have a therapist, you know, I guess I’m a Jew in LA. I have a therapist.
Right? And she told me she had convinced me to. She said, you know, I have this men’s group that I’m. We meet once a week. I pick, you know, six guys that are my clients, and I sit in the room.
But you basically I don’t do that much. I you guys just talk and about whatever is on your mind. That has been really transformative for me because I don’t think men have enough opportunities to really talk to each other honestly about stuff that’s going on in their lives. And, you know, I have a lot of friends, but we don’t have those kinds of conversations. And so that has been I don’t know if that’s a mentorship as much, but that has been something that has been incredible.
If I had to give a blessing, that would be something that has really changed my life in the last few years. Just having this group of guys, total strangers, you know, that I’m just able to talk to about, you know, things that I’m facing in my career, things that I’m facing in my love life or whatever. It is like honest interaction with fellow fellow guys. I think that would help the world if there were more groups like that.
John Corcoran: 51:01
And I think it would be even better if it was all former Jakes from Cosmo.
Jonathan Small: 51:05
I’ve started a group, put together a book. Yeah. Doing a Facebook group of just former Jakes. I met one former Jake. Yeah.
We should start like this. Yeah, we probably have a lot of great things to talk about.
John Corcoran: 51:17
Yeah. For sure. This is a lot of fun. Jonathan. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you, learn more about the book and the podcast?
Jonathan Small: 51:25
Yeah, the best place to go is rightaboutnowmedia.com that is the home of all things John. It has my book where you can order it. I teach classes. I’ve started to teach some writing classes so you can find out about those. I’ve got one that I’m teaching next actually later this month that I’m kind of freaking out about, but it’s going to be great.
It’s the first time I’ve ever taught it. It’s about how to use AI as a writing partner. I’ve decided to embrace AI rather than run away from it and cower in the corner, since I think it’s here to stay. So so. But right about now, media.com, you’ll find out all about that stuff.
John Corcoran: 51:59
Excellent, Jonathan, thanks so much. Thank you.
Outro: 52:05
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