In this issue, you’ll find chapters from three of the 17 or so books I’m trying to finish. Next time, I hope to be sending you another two or three.

Trying to write and/or revise five or six book chapters a month is a full-time job. I’ve been managing to do it in addition to my business work by staying up until the wee hours, my laptop on my lap, typing away with a cigar in my mouth.

I’m not complaining. Quite the contrary, I’m loving the hours I’m putting into my books and essays. I may be kidding myself, but I feel like I’m doing something useful. And as I’ve said many times, working on something that one values is one of the three lasting pleasures of life. (The other two are learning about something you value and sharing the value you have created.)

In fact, I’m enjoying both my daytime business work and my evening writing work so much that I find myself resenting any other calls on my time – including activities with friends and family members that, were I emotionally healthier, I should be favoring above everything else.

I’m loving my business work because the challenges have been significant and incessant. As I’ve mentioned in past issues, the information industry (my industry) has been tanking in recent years and that has raised the bar in terms of what must be done – i.e., building and rebuilding information products and selling them online.

One of the biggest challenges is AI. Five years ago, when we talked about the jobs AI would eliminate, we talked about truckers and mechanics and assembly line workers. What we never expected was that no jobs would be more threatened than the ones that used to be considered “creative.” I’ve seen the work that AI is doing in terms of writing and selling economic ideas and financial analysis. It’s scary how good it is. It’s not great, but AI is a self-learning system and I’m thinking that what it produces will be as good as the best creative work being done right now in no time flat.

I’ve been resisting using AI for several years, but virtually all the younger writers in our industry are doing it. So I’ve decided to get into it myself. My first attempt will be to use it to help me write a long essay I’ve been meaning to write for almost a year. The title of the essay in my mind is “COVID: I Told You So!” It will be a compilation of everything I’ve written about COVID since 2020 – all the claims I made from the beginning that were considered conspiracy theories by my liberal and leftist friends.

I was right on every count. And I have more than 6,000 pages of documentation to support my case that I’m going to feed into AI. It would take days for me to organize and digest all of that information. With AI, I’ll get the outline I need to write my piece in a matter of seconds. Literally, seconds!

I’ll let you know how it goes.