"All I need is ya'll to pronounce my name
It's Kanye but some of my plaques, they still say Kayne"

Agree though, book sucked.

Ryan,

Any chance with that you would post Evan's email with contact info taken out for your readers to see how to compose a pr email?

I became friends with Evan via facebook and after sending messages back and forth, I told him you could probably help him out a lot. I'm glad he got in touch with you.

Did you go to the LA Times Book Festival?

Handler was there at a very small tent, I just walked by, didn't know he'd be featured in a blog post or I might have said hello!

Re:Art Students
What I don't like about this thinking is that you and Ben are discouraging college for the lottery of bloggery.
There's not enough information in his account to infer anything solid. What's his Phd in? Is it like Doreen Virtue's Phd? Is it in history, sociology? He doesn't say, maybe he's doing something where 4.0s are plentiful, like mechanical engineering*. Doesn't his expensive medical condition devalue his 3.9 to at least a 3.5?

It seems to me that most of the time your audience is other bloggers. Wouldn't there be more valuable advice in telling people to specialise in something rather than telling them that they should forget college and go assemble their best writings and send emails to the right people?

Am I way off the mark here?
What's the difference between you telling people they should blog and J.K Rowling telling people to write about witchcraft?

If you weren't Ryan Holiday but you thought the exact same way and were one year younger, could you follow Ryan Holiday? If you sent the same opening emails to Tucker a year later than you did, wouldn't he have responded with "No thanks man, I have a guy, his name is Ryan, check out his website"?

Have you heard the expression "If you're one in a million in china, there's 1300 people just like you"?

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_engineering#Salaries_and_workforce_statistics

What are you taking about? Did you see my post like two weeks ago asking for interns? I have FOUR different full-time jobs. What do you think that says about the amount of opportunity there is out there? They each deserve their own separate person. But there is no one to fill them and schools haven't even gotten around to acknowledging they exist, let alone begin develop curriculum.

Not to mention, I have NEVER - NOT ONCE - ever told anyone that they should blog. I have always said that it is your job to educate yourself. That's Ben's point as well. Only an idiot or a loser would have a problem with that message.

That Clay Shirky video/speech really has gone viral. I've seen it mentioned on almost all the sites I visit lately.

And with good reason. It is great!

Lately I've been reading:

Godel, Escher, Bach
The God Delusion
Molecular Biology of the Cell (5th ed)
Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius (thanks to you, Ryan)
Guns, Germs, And Steel
Ghost Soldiers

Shirky's book is extremely good.

"Shirky's book is extremely good."

It's on my list.

Have you read "Founders at Work"? I think it would interest you greatly.