Your Book Already Exists: How Doctors Can Publish, Monetize, and Build a Legacy with AI

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (00:29.802)
Hey Dan, I hope you're having an incredible time and a good day today and welcome to the Medicine and Money Show.

Dan Curran (00:46.264)
I am doing amazing and thank you for having me.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (00:50.518)
Outstanding. So hopefully St. Louis has good weather and everybody's having a good time up there this season, coming into the holidays. And my first question to you is, what do you feel the power is for being an author, getting your message out there, and why should our doctors and community care about this, and why is it so valuable?

Dan Curran (01:18.47)
Well, the name of our company is called Chapters and obviously it could be chapters of a book, but truly it means chapters of your life. And I had a background where I interviewed a lot of people, hundreds and hundreds for work and kind of journalistic purposes. And I was surprised that the smartest people I know or knew or interviewed had never really captured it. And I think it's important that a

very base level that someone somewhere will benefit by reading your story, whether it's one person 10 years from now or a million people. So and now we have technology and I'll just look in the eye and say there's no excuse. know, you everyone has a story and I know when my father passed away many years ago, I often think now I don't wonder what he would think about the politics and about love life and about work and all these things. So

You know, it just really matters. think everyone's story really matters. And the final thing I'll say on that is in the age of AI, that I think we're all going to appreciate authenticity, real, real stories. So I think everyone should tell their story.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (02:34.69)
I love that. And maybe we can talk after the show because my father, I've always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I would have him kind of spill his guts. So we would have his story. You know, he's getting up there in age. He's still doing very well. He's actually retiring in the next month. But to have that as an asset for the family and to pass it on to future generations, I think there's probably not much of a better gift that he could give us, right, to sit

with one of your team members and kind of spill all that out and have us something able to reflect back on. So I think it's an incredible journey and a very valuable thing to do for people and I applaud you for that. And so that leads me to my next question is how did you get here? What makes you so passionate about this? And what makes you the guy that we should as a community come to for this?

particular thing to do.

Dan Curran (03:38.812)
Well, I'll start with that last question and attach it to our previous little discussion on why people do books. One is you can make a really nice living. can monetize your IP. that's, I'll probably use that term too much, but again, in the context of this AI world and just in the context of us all being unique individuals and

you or your industry being part of the knowledge industry that you can monetize really, really quite easy. If you have a decent work ethic in the time, a single book can be kind of a fancy term, but atomized can be broken into blogs, social media content, consulting, lessons, speeches. So a book is kind of a gift that keeps on giving if you choose to monetize it.

about us and chapters, November of 2022 is when OpenAI launched ChatGPT. And the company I had at that time, I was getting ready to exit, but we had interviewed all these people. I already told you that we, you know, I thought, wow, a lot of these people are really smart, but they just don't know how to publish or haven't, you know, taken the time to do it. And

With Chat GBT and all these large language models, I didn't need it to write a word. When we interview people, and that's how we do it, interview the person over several months, I have plenty of content. So we have more content than we need for a book when we're done. So we reverse engineered it. So we interview people, and then all those files, those text files, someone talks it.

We trained it for thousands of hours, the technology to organize it. So very authentic, more authentic really than a ghostwriter. And this process of having a human editor ask questions, and there's more strategy we put into it with the author at the beginning, but nonetheless, it's a very, I don't know, very therapeutic exercise. I hear that all the time. So even if someone's writing a really technical book, to be able to collaborate with a human, but...

Dan Curran (05:52.89)
really allow AI to really perform its magic, and that is to organize the content. And then we have human editors and proofreaders that make sure it's correct, but it's an accelerant is our process. And then those people, we take that book and we can discuss it in a bit, but then a lot of people want to be keynote speakers or want to do more consulting or sell their knowledge beyond just the book.

And so that's how we help them is take all that IP and monetize it.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (06:26.83)
outstanding. So for you, what makes you passionate about this?

Dan Curran (06:33.34)
Thank you, you asked that and I probably subconsciously stated over that. You know, it is pretty primal. It's the stories. It's amazing. know, I've got those people at a cocktail party that likes to ask questions, probably because I don't want to talk about myself. And people would do that to me too. you tend to share a lot. And I think everyone has a story and it's kind of, we went through the genome.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (06:37.192)
Yeah.

Dan Curran (07:03.184)
project, what was that, started in the 90s and 2000s when that started. everyone was pretty excited about that. But for some reason, we're a bit late on the stories on what the life experience is. So I think we need to think of it like the Genome Project. We need to collect these stories. And again, somewhere down the line, it's going to be important to someone is my hunch.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (07:26.83)
Yeah, for sure. can tell you that, you know, every day that goes by and I think about it, not having the ability to have my dad's stories or, you know, some of the other people that have come through my life, would, it just would be a travesty not to put those down in writing and that sort of thing. So I'm right there with you. And I do agree that the tools that we have are so critically important.

important for us to use in such a way that it will bring more value to our life. Right? mean, that's really what it's about. So let's say there's a doctor out there.

kind of like me, kind of the second half of their career and they've been around the block a couple times and think that they have some value to share with the world and also they're trying to build this personal brand and want people to know exactly what they stand for and don't want other people to tell them what they stand for. What does that process look like? I find in and I'm like, okay, what happens? Take me through the process.

Dan Curran (08:35.642)
Yeah, so I'll talk about the very first step when we do contact people or when people contact us. And I think this will help frame this discussion that a book can have a variety of narratives. It can be chronological. Maybe someone just had a life, you know, that chronologically is quite a tale and they want to share it in a nonfiction narrative. But we've had many physicians, doctors, scientists,

clinicians, all spectrum, talk on a wide variety. And I'll just talk contextually what these narratives have been as I'm talking to you and thinking about it. We've had one healthcare professional doctor who suffered terribly from anxiety. And it was a secret. His second half of his career as well.

You know, through a series of events, he decided to raise his hand and evangelize that, hey, if you're suffering from anxiety, I've got your back. And his stories were, you know, really heartwarming and heartbreaking. So his story was kind of, you know, starting as a broke doctor debt and all this, and then moving through and then all of sudden, I have this other thing in my life that's affecting me. And that was what his journey.

that he shared. Another doctor that we're working with now, and we keep the names confidential, although we're, as I said, more accurate than a ghostwriter because it's your voice that we're guiding along. Everything's pretty confidential, just to tell these just general stories. Another doctor is about the business side. This person has killed it as an entrepreneur.

of a west coast practice and that book was more utilitarian about you know you know growing that that you know the group of practices that that she did. And then I've you know we had a cancer doctor that came you know suffered with cancer and all of a sudden the doctor was a patient and so there's three examples of of you know how we worked with physicians and scientists and people in health care and we've got a couple of others so

Dan Curran (11:00.344)
Again, your story, I tell this people all the time, go, I don't know what angle I want to take or what direction. And I'm like, just come on in where you're going to talk to the Oprah of Oprah's when you when you're with our editors, they're just agnostic to your story. As far as their their prejudices or their life experience, they're more like journalists. They're just trying to pull it out of you. And then there's different ways.

you know, having two or three narratives go on at one time. They can do it chronologically, as I mentioned. So just come in. If you have this story that you think you can tell or want to tell or have a couple of stories, you know, we do a great job of helping them and really just to sit back and be vulnerable. And in a very private setting, it's like this. know, Zoom calls a couple of hours every week. And after about three months, it's, you know, it's 70,000 words.

And every it's one last thing it's I use the statistics all the time. It's 96 % of people who write books are so happy they did it. It was it's such an accomplishment whether it sells one copy or a million. it never you gonna not feel good that you got this out.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (12:14.446)
Yeah, I can definitely see where that's the case. So, um, we mentioned a couple of the benefits, right? Your family gets to hear the stories. You get to get it out there into the world. It's now a legacy piece of, know, who I am, what I do, personal branding. This is, these are my moral and these are my morals and ethics. Are there any other benefits that I'm missing that, that you see after a doctor or whomever get through writing a book and they say, you know what?

This was so awesome because of X.

Dan Curran (12:48.73)
Yeah. I'll give you a spectrum of just what we see, and I think it's probably across publishing. There's people that would like to write a legacy book. That is just any you, me, your grandfather, your grandmother, anyone out there, mother, father, that want to leave it for their tribe, close tribe around them, their family. So that's at one end of the spectrum.

then there's others that would like to, maybe a little bit of ego in a good way, would like to get this book. Maybe it has a pretty strong point of view. And I'd like, again, my tribe, my broader tribe of my peers, my associates, my family, associations, whoever. And I really want to upload it or get it onto Amazon and go through the whole process of publishing. it's a lot of steps, but not

It's not going to medical school to publish a book. You can figure it out and self-publish and there's hybrid and traditional publishers that we can help you get that out into the world. Then at the other end from Legacy Book is those that want to monetize to whatever degree. So they want to speak, whether they're doing it pro bono and they've already made their wealth and they just want to get out there and speak maybe in their community.

But I'd say a good third of our clients, if not more, they 100 % want to monetize it. And there's a lot of ways to monetize it. One is speaking. One is the opposite of speaking. Maybe you just want to be a consultant or one-on-one. Maybe you want to sell curriculum, classes, consultancy, or even use it as a loss leader for your practice that you give the book away and people can download it. And then it drives business back to your whatever.

type of practice you have. So there's a lot of different ways. And right now the people that are really monetizing it, if you are a good public speaker or feel like you can be with some practice, the checks are pretty big. It's pretty nice lifestyle. As long as you don't have a couple of little kids at home and you don't mind traveling, it's a seven figure business for thousands and thousands of people.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (15:08.718)
So I'm a doctor, I go through your process and I have this book, I have this asset now and I want to monetize it in the ways that you said. How does it work once you get through your process? Do you help them get a hybrid publisher or kind of help with the self-publishing or how does that work?

Dan Curran (15:36.74)
Yeah. so, so we, our goal is to capture your wisdom, knowledge, life experience, and really turn it into an amazing manuscript. Nothing, no publishing, no speaking. None of that can happen until you do that. So we're maniacally focused to do that. And for those who are listening that don't know the publishing industry, there's three avenues. and we help, we help, connect you.

to one of these three. One is self-publishing, and it's really just you Googling or us helping, figuring out what are these 10 steps so I can get a book cover design and get it on Amazon. Very simple, and we help people do that all the time. The other one is hybrid publishers, where you pay a company, and they will do all the marketing, they'll do all the cover design, upload to Amazon, and really try to get you a best seller and really do

lean into the marketing. Then the third is what we all know is traditional, which is you generally get an agent. You don't pay anything in the short term, but if a big publisher or one of the big five want to take on your book, then you'll spend a year or so going through some more editing process to do that. In the nonfiction space, that is really, we got to be careful what names we use nowadays. I guess it's Elon Musk and Hillary Clinton. So it's

It's for big iconic names. If you go to the airport, you'll notice the nonfiction shelf is getting smaller and it's the, you know, those big five, they just want to sell millions of books. So that's why, you know, politicians, all these people get advances. What smart money is doing is self or hybrid and that the if you're an author, you you're leaning into it as well. So not everything is going to be done for you. You had to.

really want to put yourself out there on social media and if you really want to drive sales. But all of that now, especially with what we do, it's just so much easier than it used to be. So there's a lot of options. We help with all of that. I'm going to hit pause on all that and say we have a new product that we're really excited about and we're launching it now. And I'm excited about telling you about it for chapters, but just

Dan Curran (18:03.952)
The real story here is just the magic of AI. is, obviously there's a lot of things that aren't great about AI and there's a lot of chatter about that. But we have a new product called the Living Library and really think of it as a website. And in the future now and moving forward, our clients will be able to, sell books, but most people aren't going to read your book. mean,

maybe a thousand, three thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand million. That's still hundreds of millions of people that will not be reading the book again, unless you're a celebrity type. But most people now don't even consume content that way. The book is a mark of accomplishment. It's very, very important. It's a great corpus, a great collector vessel for all your thoughts. But that content in our living library, this website,

can be what's called atomized, it can be cut up. So if someone just wants to read one chapter, they can come and do that. If someone wants it in Spanish, they can come and get the book. If someone wants it at a certain grade level, they can do it. Or if someone just wants worksheets from your book, and think of a thousand other ways that you can atomize that book. And that's where modern authors are going, that's where modern publishers like ours is, we wanna be

contextual and omnipresent in whatever type of media you want to. So it's pretty mind blowing. I guess what's mind blowing is that's done instantly. Once I get your thoughts, we have it edited and it's authentic and all the things you want it to be. It can be in Portuguese in two seconds. know, it's just pretty, pretty amazing where we can go with it now.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (19:52.897)
Yeah, it's pretty serendipitous that you and I are talking right now because it is very possible that while we're talking, my book gets published. Thank you. So.

Dan Curran (20:03.834)
Yeah, nice. Well, congratulations. Yeah, so you know, yeah, I hope you can jump in if I get something wrong because you you can't the process.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (20:11.15)
Well, I am going through the process and I had zero idea what I was getting myself into and thankfully I had a good person to kind of help me along but

I completely understand what you're saying. And I think that for me to get these frameworks out of my head and get them down on paper, and because we have a 10 set process for doctors to go from green investors to savvy investors. That's what the book is about. And I...

Dan Curran (20:49.009)
You

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (20:53.226)
It was so much easier to write once I had the frameworks out of my head and down on paper and knew what the steps were, why they were there and all those sorts of things. So can, does that ring true to you as far as being on the other side where you're trying to, it's not really an outline. It's really about getting the nuts and bolts out and take copious amounts

of information and put it down into stepwise actionable things. Is, is, am I on the right track here?

Dan Curran (21:32.092)
Yeah, you're on the right track. The way you did it, you know, if someone can do it themselves or someone gets a ghostwriter or whatever, you know, I'm a big, big fan. All we're doing is saying, hey, this technology that really didn't exist until a few years ago, I think to the ghostwriters, to the editors, to the authors, to the publishing industry can be good. think AI can save publishing to be blunt.

because you're opening the aperture, so to speak, cause modern writers, I know this anecdotally are starting to go to Substack or Tik Tok or, know, they're like that book, you know, Ryan, that took me, you know, nine months of my life and I got sick of it and blah, blah, blah. There's just new ways to capture it and just make it a little bit, you know, and if you're, you're Hemingway, be Hemingway, go, you know, drink a bottle of scotch and drink all the, you know, write your book. So we're not.

We're not interrupting that space. We're just saying, can we open that aperture and get more people into the fold because of all this great wisdom like you're doing? So to answer that, kind of go back to what you said, is that we do it all the time. Almost all of our authors, but not all, and you don't have to, so I want to say you don't have to have a 10 step program or have a framework or have something, right? Some architecture to whatever they want to talk about it.

Again, if you think we're, or if you see that we're talking to people weekly and those texts recording voice goes into our vessel, it's being organized, it's no different. We would take snapshots, could take PDFs, take whatever of those charts and processes, and we put it into the large language model as well. And our large language model doesn't know the rest of the world. just, it's like a digital twin brain of yours, and we're just putting it in there. So we're really an accelerant.

That's at the end of the day, can be, you know, the old way or the new old world, new world. can be the same book. It's just we just made it go a little bit or a lot faster. That's all. So, yeah, if you have chicken scratch, if you have podcast, if you have TEDx talks, if you have symposium talks with horrible fluorescent lights, doesn't matter. We just need the text files. And as long as you are saying, yes, this this aligns with what I want.

Dan Curran (23:58.748)
communicate in this book, then we can take it.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (24:02.572)
Yeah, so this was taught to me and really the reason I went down this road and the monetization piece that you were talking about really rings true to me because I didn't put all this together. I actually had a consultant that helped me to figure out why I wanted to do what I did.

the sort of the reality was, all right, Ryan, if you have a book and you have this 10 step process, and obviously there's 10 steps. And so what you can do now is if you are going to do a speech or a keynote, you take three of those pillars, you take your favorite three, right? And you talk for an hour on those three pillars. And it makes your job of writing that speech so much easier, where now you already have the framework,

you have the stories that are already in the book and you, you know, maybe expound on them just a little bit here and there, whatever the case may be. But the outline is there. If you have a, like, let's say I did a one day talk or a one day class on investing for doctors, I would take maybe three or four of those and we would just talk about those pillars and then we'd say, all right, we're going to do the next one. We're going to talk about two or three more, whatever the case may be. And so now it's like a, it's

it's almost like you're picking these out for the different purposes and you're going to put, say I'm going to talk to cardiologists, I may pick this pillar, or if I'm going to talk to colorectal doctors, I may take this pillar, whatever the case may be. And so now you have, like you said, just vast amounts of different topics, different things that you can mold this asset into. Is that

Is that kind of what you're saying here?

Dan Curran (25:54.712)
Yes, and I think we're talking primitive right now and it'll note it'll just only get even more insanely efficient in the coming years. And right now we we we're not even using all the tools personally at our company and what we can do in our clients, just not enough hours a day and not enough, you know, imagination because you could do anything. So what you just said, yeah, if you're talking to

you know, first year residents versus people who have been docs for 20 or 30 years. It's a few, you know, prompts on our, on, from your living library on our platform. And voila, you have a speech that yes, it ladders up to the three steps or 10 steps, but it's contextual to their life experiences. So all of that is, and right now you could still do that through, you know, some of the public tools, but

We're just trying to make it easy and have one system to where you can do it. You can even go to chapter nine, making this up and say, hey, I personally liked it. Everyone that read this book liked it. And I want to start my next book based on chapter nine. We can instantly do an outline from that, the technology that we have. So the whole goal is to make life easier. And one thing I want to back up and talk about your three steps or 10 steps. This is a little bit off of

script here, but all of our clients and a lot of speeches, I go on keynotes that audience, whether it's PhDs or tired assistants have been working all day, whoever it is, people are really appreciating simplicity. And so and it's not simplicity in the depth or density of the content, but just framework. OK, what I'm sitting down, someone's getting ready to speak.

Tell me in the first minute, what are you going to talk about? And it's just as an aside, I've been talking to our team about it. People are just starting. It's almost rude not to do it any other way. So I think if we come back a thousand years from now, there'll be 10 step processes and three steps just because we were just all tired and busy and it just really, really helps. It's kind of an agreement. Hey, you're going to synthesize and make my life easier and share some really solid wisdom.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (28:21.162)
I truly believe that's what a thought leader is, is taking it because we're so overwhelmed by data and things are just coming at us a million miles an hour all the time and to take the mental sort of lift off of that and be like, okay, here's all this information. What I'm going to do for you today is I'm going to put it like this and I'm going to give you four actionable things to take away. And this is how

how you think about it and this is how you walk through it. This is the mindset that you should have all the different aspects, but based on those three principles, right? And to me, that's, you know, that's the content I consume as well. And I found it, find it super valuable. And every once in while I'll be like, man, that was good. And why didn't I come up with that? Right? Like, so I think it's how humans learn. I think there's a lot of human

psychology to that. think there's a lot of almost like we're bound at this point in our lives by the amount of data and we can't sift through it. It's just it's kind of freeing in my mind to be able to grasp that.

Dan Curran (29:35.1)
Yeah, I need to practice this a little bit more, I just even talking to you here, the amount of people earning, you know, really nice living or secondary income from speaking, whether it's in person or Zoom calls. I just talked to a new client. She has 40 speeches booked already for Q1.

next year and I know how much and it's not little money. And by the way, they fly you generally in the meals. And, know, like I said, unless you have a couple little kids at home, it's, it's, it's, there seems to be a big market. I just know that anecdotally. can't, can't prove it, but it just seems like our people are really busy and, and, and people want to be with people.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (30:24.706)
Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of our society that's kind of going away, right? People being around people. We're all behind our desk on computers and doing social media. And I think that there are people are starving for that. I you saw it in COVID for sure, where it just, know, they were missing a piece of their life. And I think that books and talks and all those sorts of things really

I think they're pivotal for humanity. What would you say to that?

Dan Curran (30:59.452)
I do, and I need to get the exact date when the first bound book, whether it was written by a bunch of monks or whenever, because that relic is still relevant. It's just from a monetization in publishing, it's a real artesian industry. I think the newspaper industry has already kind of gone down a path of getting beat up and no telling where it's going to end up, but it's kind of...

kind of dealt with reality music with Spotify, you know, it's dealt with reality. The book industry, although those airport nonfiction shelves are getting smaller, it is still a mark of, of stature when someone has written a book. And I, and I think everyone really appreciates it. Someone took time out of their life to put something, you know, there's just a general agreement that everyone's like, man, you know, hats off. She took some time to.

capture your thoughts. I, know, back to your question, I think it's really relevant and it's in our world because the book is just the beginning because you can do a lot more with it. As I've mentioned, it's just a great corpus, a great thing to capture. imagine going to legacy books that if you capture it and if you're blessed to have children and they capture their stories, you know.

Pretty soon, or after a hundred years, there's a lot of stories to be told, or to be shared. So it's nice that you can pass it on, but hopefully someone else will attach themselves to your story and your family and add to it.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (32:42.422)
Yeah, and there's another aspect I don't think that we've uncovered here and that's near and dear to my heart and probably a lot of the people who resonate with my content is that it doesn't matter if you're a W-2 employee, it doesn't matter what you're doing in your life, to write a book, publish it, and sell it, now you're an entrepreneur. What would you say to that?

Dan Curran (33:08.956)
Well, the first thing I would say, congratulations, you're an author, which is pretty cool title to have if you do do it. I think people work up to it they get it and then all of a sudden, oh man, I'm an author. I get to call it, you are an author. And so I think that's a nice accomplishment, even if it's just for yourself. Like, hey, I went through this effort and now it's easier.

To your other question, whether it's a 1099, W-2, disabled, anyone that has a phone, just take recordings of your thoughts. That's what I would say to you. Just don't worry about what I'm doing. If you can't, don't have the means or life is kind of tough right now, I would say just grab that recorder and start talking. Start taking pictures of your charts, your...

know, scratch sheet of papers, just take pictures because technology is an equalizer. I have those tools, you have those tools, billionaires have those tools, we all have that tool as long as you get, if you have that phone. And after you capture about a month or two or a year's worth of voice recordings, guess what? You have a book. You're just needing an organizer and technology can organize that. It might not be the best book, might not be able to afford the editor that you really want to have, but

There is, there's now a library of who you are as a person. So it's, that's what I tell people. Just, just record a don't, what a shame, you know, if someone didn't hear your story. And I have, I'll just tell real quick. I've had two, just so happens, veterans that, that were Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. And I'm telling you both of those people, rural, poor.

horrible things happened to them. The stories needed to be told, you know, one's a quad amputee. One's, one's already passed. and, they were poets. They were, they were poets. I mean, they were poets and it was crazy that, that they, that, you know, you would have never known you would have, you know, unless this horrible thing happened in their life, they wouldn't have ever written a book. So what, what, the poverty we all live in by not.

Dan Curran (35:29.016)
hearing their stories and hearing their poetry. So it matters, you know, it matters.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (35:35.424)
it does matter so how does the pricing structure work for something like this are there different levels or there's just a one one thing or how does it work

Dan Curran (35:46.8)
Yeah, so again, I'll give it contextually. The cost of a cell phone and a recording, we all know how much that is. So I would just tell anyone who's listening, just record. And I hope by me, I'd love to help you, but do that first. So the cost to start your book is near zero if you can record a message. If you come to someone like us, well, you have a choice. you went...

to get a Ghostwriter. Ghostwriter's anywhere from 30,000 to 300,000. Generally, really good ones around 70,000 to 100. So we're an alternative. We're big cheerleaders for Ghostwriter's, but we're an alternative to that because you get an editor, our recording and our technology simplifies and accelerates the whole process. So we are around 20 to $25,000 for chapters for a full manuscript. And for that,

You can, we have many payment plans. You can pay it monthly over a year or two. You can get a big discount if you pay half. So there's a lot of flexibility there. And then you also get a lot of love, what I call the X factor. You get the human editor, but we have a couple of other editors, proofreaders, they'll never meet, but people who are behind the scenes do an attribution and citation. So you don't have to worry about that. If you throw out quotes or statistics, we'll get them for you.

And for that, we'll get it all wrapped up and it'll be ready for you to publish. And I will say, and it happens all the time, I mentioned about a third of our clients are full-time speakers, but even the ones that monetize just a bit, that money for us, and even if you go to a hybrid publisher, it can be easily paid back. It doesn't take more than a few speeches. So whether you use us or someone else, I, again, go out and write that book. And if you have a...

the wherewithal that you want to monetize your wisdom in that way through consulting, speaking, et cetera. I mean, just back of the napkin math, it doesn't take very long. It can happen pretty quick to pay back what you're paying a ghostwriter or paying someone like us.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (37:56.655)
So the doctors out there, I would imagine that if I were back in 2016 and I would have run across this piece of content, it really would have made me think about, want my legacy to continue. That's really what we're talking about here. And depending on the type of book that you're writing. But I would imagine that a lot of the doctors are in that boat.

Dan Curran (37:57.02)
Thank

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (38:24.614)
And I think that we may have been able to make at least a few people out in the world realize that. so hopefully it's a lot more. this content gets out there and gets spread like wildfire because I truly do think it's valuable. But once our audience has realized the value in what we're talking about today, I'm going to give you the floor because I

want the people to be able to get a hold of you and get their questions answered and really understand what service that you're selling. And so I'm going to give it to you.

Dan Curran (39:07.47)
Yeah, well, thank you again for chatting. So my email, which is easiest way, just it's simply dan at chapters dot io chapters plural io dot io dan at chapters dot io. And I also wanted to mention if you are thinking about a book, thinking about it for legacy purposes or on the other end of the spectrum as a monetization tool, I would love to chat with you about just your

what your ambitions are and no charge. And I have a big Rolodex too of different types of publishers, academia publishers, all types. So, which step tails into the next thing I was gonna mention is, if you have what I would call a dense book, maybe more for academia or highly technical, would love to talk to you about that. We do those books all the time. If it's in certain categories, we've got lots of great.

peers and friends of ours that are in that space. we sometimes we get highly religious books. Well, a lot of our books that we have people will talk about their faith. No problem. But if they start talking about in depth passages from whatever biblical book that they're using, then that's better left. And a lot of times people want that distributed to to a religious, to religious stores and so forth. Same with

medical books, the distribution's different. So I would help you, you know, with our network on who we've heard is, you know, do a great job and just help you get started. And even if we don't work together, so I'd love to help you on that. Our website is chapters.io, chapters.io. And that's, we would just love to help you. I think I've articulated what our business model is. The most complicated part is me talking about it. It's actually very simple.

spending about 90 to 100 days, a couple of hours a week, having some truly wonderful conversations with really smart editors that are very inquisitive. And you don't need to think about a first draft. You don't need to think about a book title, but just come present and we can get that book out of your brain. The book already exists. We're just trying to extract it from your head to...

Dan Curran (41:35.868)
to the paper, so to speak. So, would love to work or help you network or just talk about your journey as wanting to be an author. Would love to speak personally.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (41:48.601)
Well, that's, that's awesome. And as always, we're going to do a little heart to heart here at the end of the podcast. And if you follow my content, this is what we do. I truly believe that as a doctor or a professional person that's in the public and people are watching you do what you do, you truly are, you truly do have a personal brand, whether you know you do or you don't.

And it's people like Dan that can help you show people what you present yourself to be and not have them tell you what you are because that will happen. And I think that it's incredibly valuable to your business, number one, for you to portray yourself instead of other people portraying you. And I think it's also a...

an honor for your family to have that out in the world of who you actually are because as we all know, things go sideways, things get upset, and sometimes people get a reputation that they shouldn't have. And this building this personal brand from a standpoint of being a morally and ethically good person,

It will help you, I truly believe, get that message out there. And there's a lot of us that have a message that it doesn't get out. And that is a shame because I truly believe that as we're beating the drum for whatever heel we're standing on, which mine is teaching doctors to be good investors and not get dependent on the system, that even if it's that you just change one person's life,

The ripple effect of that will change hundreds if not millions if not billions of lives down the way because that person is going to teach it to their kids, that kid's going to teach it to their kids, and so on and so forth. And the butterfly effect, I believe, is truly real. And I think we're put on this planet to change the world.

J. Ryan Smolarz, M.D., M.B.A. (44:04.13)
And I will always believe that and you couldn't beat it out of me if you tried. So as we move through this journey, whatever your journey is, hopefully it's as an investor. If you're following this content, I'm going to be here standing on the hill trying to defend it. And I'm trying to help each and every one of you out there who wants to learn, do that as well. And I want you to teach me. And so I think that for you to find me is very easy. MedMoneyShow.com.

show.com and you can book a call with me. There's a little button there you click and we can have a conversation if you're starting your investment journey. I don't sell anything. I'm truly passionate about this. I really, really, really want you to go through the process that I went through 2016. I didn't know where we banked. My wife took care of all that. I didn't know anything about money, never taken an accounting class, ended up in business school and here we are today.

And you don't have to go that route. There are resources out there that can help you. There are resources out there that can help you not fall into the pitfalls that I have fallen into and that sort of thing. We do our community groups as a board of advisors. We don't advise you to do anything. We're just there to balance ideas and thoughts off of each other and try to take out the biases that we all have in investing. So we'll be beating the drum and we'll be here and hopefully a lot of you reach out

to Dan and write your book and carry on your legacy. But above all else, think like an investor.