Ryan Holiday on Opening a Bookstore During a Pandemic

it's not obvious that they're getting better. You know, we talk a lot about shipping and logistics, and at least by some measures, for example, that's actually still like as worse as it's ever been today than at any point in the crisis. Yeah, so we're still working through various forms of gridlock in the supply chains, as we've been talking about quite a lot on thoughts. But I feel like there's also these sort of deep scars on the business environment from the past year. Like it goes back

to that question. I guess we've discussed it on the supply chain episodes, but what do businesses do about investment? Are they confident enough to start reopening to really put a bunch of money in expansion or is everyone going to be nervous for a long time that you could get a third wave or some sort of delta variants something like that that could come in and um, I

guess surprise everyone again. Exactly right, you know, I think like a lot of businesses were clearly designed for a sort of like predictable, pre pandemic like patterns, right, and some things like going back to normal, and it's like okay, like people are going out to eat again, and it looks like people are starting to go to movie theaters again. Though I don't know if it's enough to justify mc stock price, but people are going back to movie theaters

again and so forth. But obviously, like things are just different, and so certain types of businesses are certain types of behaviors are going to be different, and certain types of businesses are going to be affected positively and some negatively. Yeah, So on that that note of things being different. One thing I wanted to do was talk to a specific business, like a single small business, to try to get a feel of what the past year was like and how

they're now looking at the future. And I thought, what could be really interesting is to look at a business that already has its challenges even without the pandemic. So today we're going to be talking to a very very famous author and someone who recently started their own brick and mortar book store in Austin, Texas. And they actually

opened that store during the pandemic. And Joe, I know you follow the Texas news very closely, but there were also all sorts of weather related events that would have made the past year even more painful for a new business. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean I didn't think in the last few months, Texas has had both a historic freeze and historic heat all in a short period of time, stretching pretty you know that added to grid strain. I mean we saw

like the crazy like freeze. I think we're back in March, so just one thing on top of another, Yeah, exactly. So today we're gonna be digging into all those various challenges from the perspective of an actual small business owner. And I am very pleased to be introducing our guest on this episode. It is the author, Ryan Holiday and now the proprietor of The Painted Porch. So Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me.

You're you're right, but it's difficult to have a business during a pandemic. I think opening during the pandemic was so much harder because you were completely flying blind, like you had no you had no idea whether it would work under ordinary circumstances. And then it was like, are people ever going to be in the same room with each other ever? Again? That that was like the level of of like questioning your bedrock assumptions about reality that we had to think about a lot over the last

fifteen months. So walk up through the timeline here then, like when did you start thinking about opening a bookstore and why? And at what point did you actually start doing it and how did that clash with the pandemic. It seems like an eternity ago, but I was in the fall of twenty nineteen. I was We lived near a small town called Basstrop, which is right outside Austin.

I was sitting in a restaurant with my wife in this small main street and we looked out across the street and there was an empty building that had been closed forever and my wife said, you know, it would be great there a bookstore. And I said, that sounds crazy, But for some reason we ended up like getting excited about the idea, and so I think we It officially became our space in January, and we hired like our first employee started the process in mid February of so,

right right before the wave crashed. So what is the vision I mean? I'm actually I used to live in Austin for a while. I've been to bass Drop and I'm just sort of like imagining this sort of like idyllic little bookstore and it sounds very cool and I

hope to visit it one day. But besides, like sort of like looking at a spot and saying a bookstore would be here, like what was sort of in your mind like the business opportunity for So I have a couple of advantages that your average sort of bookstore owner would not have, which is, for the last ten years, actually more than that, I've had an email list where every month I just recommend some of my favorite books.

And this started with like fifty friends and it's now, you know, a couple of hundred thousand people all over the world that get this one email that I do twelve times a year. So I've been recommending books for a really long time, and I know books that people like I've loved. I've loved supporting and recommending other authors even before I ever wrote any of my own books.

So I've kind of had a digital bookstore for a long time, except almost everyone that recommends stuff online sends those people to Amazon, and you take affiliate revenue, right, And so I've I've sold hundreds of thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of dollars with the books over this time, but just you know, taking a minuscule commission. And so part of it was thinking like, Okay, I've already done this before. What would it be like if I actually

owned the books and sold the books? And what if I sold my own books directly to consumers? What would that be like? Then the other wrinkle, and this was a great piece of advice I actually got from Alison Hill, who is the owner of Romans and Book Soup in Los Angeles and now she's the head of the a b A, the American Book Association or the American Booksellers Association. But she was saying that if you use this space, multi purpose use of the space in bookstores is basically

the only way to survive. And so I actually needed my My wife was tired of all my books, being in the house, uh me being in writer mode around the house, sort of dipping in and out of reality. And and so the idea was, I needed some office space. I needed a place that I could do what I do, even recording this episode right now. So I needed space I wanted to do. The bookstore that came together in this specific location in this town, you know, down the

street from from my house. So first of all, let me just give a plug to Ryan's reading recommendations email, because it is really good and probably responsible for like a good chunk of my personal reading every year. But just going back to this idea of like a physical bookstore and a multi use space, so I get that in your case, it's a little bit different. You're an author. You're looking for office space that you can use, um for your own projects. But to what extent are most

bookstores nowadays multi use space? Like I certainly know in New York, if you go into a bookstore, chances are it's probably going to have like a coffee shop, um, maybe like a little area where they're selling stationary and greening cards and things like that. Everything seems to have diversified and expanded to try to offset the giant that is Amazon. Yeah, that's that's a huge part of the business. H wine bars or coffee shops, stationary gifts, successories, that

that's all a part of the business. But that, to me is still makes you very vulnerable to like in person retail traffic. So I would say the real way that most indie bookstores are diversified is that they also sell online. Right, so having e commerce and in person that's a big part of it. But still you're dependent on,

you know, customers to sell books. So what I really wanted was some some way that like we could have a bad day, like nobody came in the store, which does occasionally happen, and and I wouldn't have necessarily lost any money, Like it didn't cost me anything because I still needed the space to write. When I was thinking about sort of risk mitigation of this crazy, very expensive let's call it uh vanity project, that's the wrong way

to put it. I think this rather self indulgent business, Like you're you're not opening a bookstore because you think it's going to make you very wealthy. I was doing because I genuinely love books. But I wanted a way that like, hey, the mortgage or the rent or whatever it is, is covered at least partly by things that are not dependent on people coming in and buying hardcovers or paperbacks today. So why do you walk us through

the timeline a little more? You mentioned that you had the idea late obviously no one knew what was coming a few months later. How quickly did you put it into motion? What did they entail and what were the first like steps to turn like raw space into a bookstore. Yeah, in March of that's when we had just started the building of the demo, the building of the shelves. All that work started like right as the world was shutting down.

I remember talking with some of the workers and going like, hey, guys, like this is gonna get real. I don't know where this is going. And so you know, then it it did escalate really quickly. We took I think we took our our youngest out of daycare on like March eighth, March nine, and sort of stayed at home, which is a few days before things really started in Texas. But I remember a few days later, you know, because no one was in the space, I could safely drive there

and not be around anyone. But I remember just walking through this net, this space that had previously been set up to be a restaurant. That's what the space had been. Uh, it's been open for a hundred and forty years, but the last thing that was here was a Mexican restaurant. I remember I walked through the space. It's now completely empty. All the expensive kitchen stuff has been torn out, the bar has been removed. It's like worse than when we

bought it. And I remember thinking, like that line from Arrested Development, you know, I may have made a huge mistake. Like I was just like, oh my god, did I bet everything on like a thing that's not going to exist anymore. So in March of when you're surveying the space and it's a mess, are you what are you thinking in terms of next steps? Do you just press on with the plan or did you maybe scale back some of the ambitions or have to delay some of

the work and refurbishing it. Yeah. The first thing we did was basically cut the plan in half, so our spaces is technically two addresses, although they're joined interior in the interior through a through a door. The original idea was like a bookstore on one side, coffee shop, meeting space, events space for the bookstore. On the other side that would be the bookstore would be like five thousand square feet.

The second this happened, it was like, well, we're definitely not doing meetings anytime soon, definitely not having events, definitely not having people sit for coffee, Like is that even

gonna be possible? So we cut it in half just then, which was both terrifying and somewhat of relief because it made the scope of the project so much smaller, Like, of all the things we're thinking about doing that I'm the least qualified and have the least experience about more of the hospitality side of things was the furthest outside

my experience. So scaling it down to just like business store that sells books and it may be that we're primarily online for the foreseeable future was like that was the first radical shrinking that we had to go through. Okay, so pandemic hits total chaos. When did things start to feel for you like, Okay, things are easing a little bit that like the chaos of the first couple of months, you know, you start to get your bearings a little bit, get more, you know, some sense of normalcy, when did

things start to jel a little bit for you. We did end up pressing ahead with the work, so it was it was surreal to see like shells go up and then the order of books came, but there was no sense for us that it was remotely safe or appropriate to open. So Texas, like in June late May June was basically decided kind of like Florida, that the pandemic didn't exist, that we had no obligations to our fellow citizens, and then it was sort of every man,

woman and business for themselves. So you know, that was supposedly a pro business decision, but it's actually really kind of terrifying and overwhelming for especially for a first time business, Like we don't have customers that we're serving right because we've never opened our doors. But it's just like, are we going to take what is literally a sealed off bubble that is our lives and open it to hundreds

of people? And it is that the right thing to do in a small town in the middle of a pandemic. So it became this thing, well, now we can proceed with opening, but sort of ethically morally, and then also just as far as keeping our own families safe. We've got two young kids, can we should we and and we just decided no, like so we didn't even start thinking seriously that that we might open until like so we had to eat a year of like expenses going

out but nothing coming in. So, just to be clear, Texas didn't provide guidance on whether businesses should stay open or closed or what sort of things they should do to try to protect their customers. Yeah, almost none, whatsoever. I mean, you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, there was like a mask mandate and some business closures

and like some some crazy lady. It turns out it was like sort of not a stunt, but it was sort of a political sort of operation some some lady and I think Dallas kept her hair salon open in violation of the policy, and then she was like arrested or find and then the governor like pardoned her almost like immediately. So it basically made it It basically reduced masks and public safety and all the COVID regulations to like meaningless theater, which made it so much harder to open.

Like it made it essentially impossible for us to open a business for the safety of our own kids. But then also just like in good conscience, right, like I'm not indicting or or criticizing the other businesses. It's it's totally different story if you have people who have worked for you, who are you know, sort of dependent on their jobs to whether your restaurant or whatever is open. We didn't have that because the government had punted on

the problem. It now made it our problem, and and we had to decide like can we look ourselves in the mirror and be part of the problem. Yeah, I remember like hearing this from other business owners that like, Okay, obviously there's some impulse like you want to people want to open up, you want to sell, you want to

make money. On the other hand, you sort of like create this Like I guess it's like game theory where it's like if you let some if you let everyone open, then you're put in this position where you're sort of screwing yourself if you don't open, even if you don't feel like you could do it safely or something like that. Like it was a pretty like it was a pretty weird time. It was. It was super weird. And and you know now that we have the vaccines and we

sort of have. I don't even want to say we're coming out of it, but now it's it's really difficult to go back and remember what it was like in June or like is it coming just around the corner? You know? And I think, what what I do remember of that time? In every step, like Texas sort of made the wrong decision and it got worse. Right, So it'd be like, hey, you know we're at ten thousand cases a day, Well, you know, is that the peak? And then it's like then twenty, then thirty, then four.

You know, it kept going higher and higher and higher, and so every time we thought like, okay, we're going to turn a corner soon, it was just sort of self inflicted, you know, like let's make it worse by pretending this thing doesn't exist. M Did you get any help or support from either the state or the federal government that you know? I'm thinking about the paycheck Protection

Program for instance. I don't know if that applied to you because you're relatively new, and maybe there were restrictions on how long employees had to happen working for you, but anything like that. Yeah, I remember I applied for all that stuff at the beginning. You know, having just spent all this money all this time and then not knowing what it was gonna do. And I remember we got I think like all businesses got like a thousand You got like a thousand dollars for every employee, like

at the very beginning. So I think we got like a thousand dollars or something. And then and then I got approved for like a loan in the low six figures that the p P people on the first go around, and I remember just thinking like I don't actually need this, and I don't feel good about taking it when other businesses are really struggling and do need it. So we

ended up deciding not to take it. Was actually funny, like several times they replied like, hey, you know you're approved except your loan here, And there was a large amount of money, and it was tempting. I just felt like I felt like, one it wasn't the right thing to do too. I felt like because I have been successful, I mean, it still wasn't something I could afford, but I have been successful. I felt like the optics of it weren't right to accept it. And I also just

didn't know where things were going. One thing I did end up doing that. I think a lot of business owners or people in Texas where property values have gone way up. What I did do was I refinanced my house at an extremely low interest rate that just sort of relieved the pressure of like floating a business for a year, if that makes sense. So so I felt like I was benefiting from the government policy without having to take a direct amount of money from the government.

And I felt better knowing that, you know, hey, that that's going to someone who had actually needed And then of course you find out like all sorts of huge corporations and businesses did take it that really didn't need it. But you know, what are you gonna do? So, you know, Tracy and I were talking about in the beginning, obviously, I think like in the last few months, Texas has had at least like two very extreme weather seeing both extremes of the weather that really stressed the power grid.

There was the big freeze, and then of course there's all these issues is that companies that small businesses are facing both with logistics getting stuff and with hiring. So let's take some of these things. Like, first of all, you know what happened to you and uh, your I guess your home but also your business during I get

the freeze. I think that was in March, right, Yeah, it was out of the fire and into the furnace for us, Like, what what happened was we ended up opening the business right after the surge crests at the you know, the beginning of the year, sort of partial open mass, only only a few people at a time

and mostly selling on e commerce. And then this massive, unexpected freeze happens that again the Texas government was totally ill prepared for, had neglected maintenance and basic responsibility of competent governance, and the result is the power grid collapses in the midst of a you know, a terrible freeze. It's a huge disaster. Because we don't end up we don't all live in the same reality. We don't see it on par with like a Hurricane Katrina. But it

really was a disaster on that scale. I mean, hundreds of people have died. State with with like thirty million people is completely without power in many parts for for days at a time. I remember going into my son's room and sleeping in his bed with him because we knew we would lose power during the night, and I had heard of people freezing to death in their homes

like that. Just the level, like that's a thing you're doing in the first world is insane, right, And long story, Sure, what ended up happening is pipes at our at the building froze because we couldn't keep the heat on. Also, snow accumulated on the roof and the weight of it cracked parts of the roof and water came rushing in

and ruined a bunch of inventory. So again to go back to this idea that like, oh, the Republican response or the Texas responses, pro business, we're not going to let these lockdowns, you know, keep our businesses shut like pro business is a philosophy which means supporting business and

making business possible. The incredible incompetence and negligence right down to Ted Cruz fleeing the country for a resort in Mexico like that cost businesses like mine tens of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of having to be closed and all that. And you know, let's not even get into the sort of perpetual denial of climate change which

puts us in the mess to begin with. Right, So it was extremely frustrating and just again, I could afford it, but I can only imagine a business that was struggling to hang on that being the blow that finishes you off. Did you ever stop and think maybe it's not worth it? I mean, the beauty of the sun cost fallacy is that it blinds us and we keep going because of

all of what we've already done. Supplies so like, okay, you're like the snow like it cracks the roof of your building, the pipes freeze, so obviously that creates things you have to buy or thinks someone has to buy. Anyway, you mentioned inventory damage and so forth. We also know that coming into this people are already talking about difficulty finding labor after imagine, it's not trivial funding construction labor or repair labor in Texas in the middle of a boom.

On top of that, how did these things intersect to the extent that they did, where like sort of like getting back on your feet, intersecting with some of the broad shortages and tensions that were building up even prior to this. I mean, I'll give you something even more practical than that. Publishers have had trouble keeping books and stock.

My own books have gone out of stock, like three or four different times, different titles have You know, publishers tried to over the years get closer and closer to sort of real time inventory management to keep as little in stock as possible. Amazon the same thing. You want to have as little inventory sitting in warehouses, but you want to speed up your ability to get books to

people who need them. And so when the pandemic happens, that's bad because publishers are you know, printers are struggling. It's hard to get supplies. Everyone's dealing with you know, sort of new COVID safety protocols, and that makes it harder to do what you normally do. But then also this bumps into a good thing, which is suddenly people are home and reading more and they're buying them, you know,

mostly online, but they're they're reading more. So book sales have gone up during the pandemic, but the ability to stay in stock has been a perpetual struggle. So, like even even right now, I sent out my reading list email yesterday and I had to decide what books I could recommend based on what books I could actually get my hands on in high enough quantities to sell them to people. And these are you know, publishers are publishers and booksellers primarily make their money off what we call

the backlist. Yes, new titles, celebrity books, memoirs, et cetera sell, but it's you know, it's books that are five years old, or ten years older or a hundred years old that sell. But though those are the most dependent on that sort of inventory management. So it's been a real struggle just getting books in people's hands because stuff that people want isn't in stock. What do you think is needed to

rectify that situation? Is it just things sort of going back to normal maybe people this sounds weird to say, but people reading less as they go back to work and start going out to bars and restaurants. Or is it publishers and printing presses responding to the new demand and actually ramping up production. Well, I hope the solution is not people reading less as as just a member of society. I think part of why we're in this

message people not reading enough. Like one book we've sold a ton of copies of is is John M. Berry's The Great Influenza, which was published in I think oh four oh five. Actually George Bush reads it and puts in place a pandemic response team that, as we know, is later disbanded, and that gets us where we are. But books are timeless, and good ideas are timeless, and and it's by studying the past that we can prepare for the future avoid unnecessary repetitions of the past. Um

So I think we need to read more. But I do think publishers are having to figure out how do you minimize costs but also not make yourself dependent on this sort of byzantine supply line that really struggles. Like, so one of the things I've made, I made these sort of brass coins, these challenge coins that are emblazing

with some of the ideas in my books. Right, we could have made them cheaper in China over the years, and that would have helped us be profitable up until but the fact that we use this small uh you know, mint that's based in Minneapolis allowed us to never go out of stock during the pandemic. So some publishers print overseas, but most printing is done in the US, which I think is why although there's been trouble, it hasn't been

a complete disaster. Businesses are having to figure you're out, Hey, you get stuff cheaper in China or Bangladesh or wherever you make it, but that makes you vulnerable to very long supply lines, and the closer that stuff is to home, the faster can be done. It's more expensive, but it's also more resilient. Let's talk about that a little bit more.

The actual physical publishing, because every once in a while, like me and Tracy, like we'll talk to someone about writing a book, like maybe an Oblots book or something like that, and they're like, oh, if you start it now, you know it'll come out seven or something. It's like, that's all right, I'd rather just like write write a tweet and have it be up two seconds from now.

But you know, but in all seriousness, like it does seem as though my understanding, like actual physical capacity of production is an issue and there's only like so much production, so how much publishing capacity is there just in a normal state, and then like what really like happened to it and how strained is that is that? Now, like walk us through a sort of like publishing supply chain a little bit more. Yeah, I'm not an expert on it by any means, but I'll give you an example.

This was happening before the pandemic. The success of the Obama books, particularly Michelle Obama's books, were so pronounced and so enormous that like printers in the US, we're running out of paper right, so so um it can be you know, a massive hit book, you know, can suddenly suck up all the printing supply and publishers have to

make decisions. And this there is our arguments I was having with my publisher of course, is like you know, well who gets you know, if there's however many pages available, how are you allocating them right? And who gets those pages? And so that can be a real battle, and that you know, the customers don't understand is is influencing what

they can see and what they can order. But what you're really dreading is like somebody decides they want to read a book and then they go on your website or they go on Amazon, where they go to a store and it's not available, and you can't tell them when they're going to be able to get it. And so that's the perpetual difficulty. What's been interesting about my books is my I think my oldest book is ten years old, but all of my books remain in print

and sell sort of consistently. It's what they call a

perennial seller and publishing. That's a good problem to have, but it's also you know, I've i think twelve titles, so that's a lot of books to keep in print, right, and that can be a hard target, and hard choices get made, and suddenly you know your book is the one that they pushed the printing back, you know, six weeks, but at yourself through rate, that means they're going to run out two weeks from now and for a month, people that want to buy your book can't buy it.

And you know what happens if that's the week that you know, you get interviewed on NPR and suddenly I'm only saying that because we're not actually talking about my books here, but I just mean, like, you know, maybe that's the week that some celebrity mentions your book on Instagram and all that demand disappears in the wind because

they can't purchase it when they want it. A lot of this reminds me of in some of our shipping episodes, we've been talking about how you actually get space on a container ship, and it usually goes to the big customers, like a Walmart or an Ikea. If you know, if you're the shipping company and you have to make a choice about who gets limited space on your ship, you're going to give it to people that you know are going to come back again and again and be worthwhile customers.

So I guess I'm curious when it comes to authors, like, how are publishers making that judgment call? Is it just based on on who they think can sell the most books? Yeah, I think it's it's primarily based on demand and need and velocity. The good news is most books from the big publishers are printed in the US. But actually, during the pandemic, I had bought back the rights and was working on a leather bound edition of one of my books, The Daily Stoic, and the only place we could get

it printed was in Belarus. So it got printed in Belarus in I think late May, but we weren't able to sell it to August. That's how long it took to get from Belarus to the United States. I remember how just watched it was a crash course in global logistics to watch, you know, a book leave on a boat from Belarus, make it to New Orleans, travel up the Mississippi and a container ship until it got to our warehouse in Chicago, and watching that happen, watching it unfold,

and then exactly what you said. I mean, as you pick your shipping rates, it's like, you know, here's what it costs to be in the container, but here's what it costs to be the first unloaded from the container, right, And oh, I didn't realize that was a thing that that was like part of the plot. And and you know, here's what it costs to put it on a on a on a plane. You know, maybe that's three or four dollars a copy, which is you know, obviously destroys

the margin. So there's there's all these things that you doing my own books, having self published a few sort of premium editions of my task, it did give me so empathy for the struggles that my publisher was going through. Although you know, I remember having one conversation that was sort of like, look, uh, the reason I sold my book to you was so this would be your problem and I would get I would get the benefit of being a protected by the big guy, you know, the

multi billion dollar corporation. But I think one of the things I learned about the pandemic was like it really put everybody in the same boat, didn't matter how big you were. How did you end up if you had this vision for like a really premium leather bound version of the book, how does that process work? Like finding the one printing pressent Belarus that can like deliver deliver

the version you need. Yeah, it was pretty funny. Um My my agent had been a long time publisher before he was an agent, and he he recommended me to someone that they had used before. It was like a Bible printer in the United States. They're actually based in Dallas, but they print at a factory that they own in Belarus. So you know, we went through a bunch of different people.

They gave a samples. But one of the reasons my publisher didn't want to do the premium edition and why they sold the rights to me is that it felt like to them to be more trouble than it's worth. It actually ended up being a great idea and and readers have really loved it because because the day was still because the book you read a page a day every year, and you start over it, you know, after you make it through all three five days, so it kind of needs to be a sturdier book than your

average hardcover. So it was it was a cool project, but yeah, you just realized, like, oh man, now I'm having to you know, different qualities of leather. What do I want? And how do I get in a box? And you know, how do I ship it some to the arehouse in the UK and some to the warehouse in Chicago? And what am I willing to pay? And yeah, how fast do I want it loaded off the containership? And you know how what is the capacity of the port?

You know, during the pandemic and then god forbid people whose stuff was going through the Suez Canal and there's a boat stuck sideways. Like all of a sudden, these things that you read about in the news become like your problem when you're you're when you're the publisher, or when you're when you own the bookstore. One thing we haven't spoken very much about is uh, I guess employment and whether or not it was difficult to find enough

people or the right people over the past year. I imagine some people you know, much like you, were perhaps reluctant to open in the midst of the worst of the pandemic. Employees were probably reluctant to come into work. And then of course this year as the economy reopens, we've heard all this talk about a labor shortage, and I'm just curious if this is something that you've experienced yourself. Yeah, we we hired someone really great at the beginning of

the pandemic to be the manager. And then I think that was you know, as soon as we did that and then we couldn't open, it became sort of unconscionable to us that we would like if we wouldn't show up at the bookstore every day, to send someone else to do it for us, you know. So so we just decided to sort of first have this person set up everything and oversee the roll out of the of the bookstore, knowing we weren't going to open, and then sort of repurpose them for other projects until they felt

comfortable and we felt comfortable. And then you know, obviously the decision for for all of us to get vaccinated and made some of this stuff less stressful. But you know, Texas again shoots itself in the foot, decides to sort of aggressively politicize the vaccine, you know, to lift the mass mandate early again, the pro business state passes this sort of nonsense legislation about, you know, not being able

to discriminate in the form of vaccine passports. It's like, okay, great, Um, now you have to deal in a universe where you're asking someone, an hourly employee, to demand some complete strangers much bigger than them to put on a mask. And you know, this is a state where people can openly carry handguns like that. That is a totally unfair birden to throw on businesses. But it's the reality of where we are. So we we said, what can we do about that? My wife and I have volunteered in the

vaccine clinic in town. We've tried to go like, we want to live and work in a town where people are vaccinated and safe. We can't affect government policy, but we can sort of try to be part of the solution. So what about like just sort of I mean when we talked about the power outages and the power stress and the buying things like buying shells or like buying furniture or buying lighting, I imagine this was like totally new to you. And again we keep hearing about like

shortages and delays with all that stuff. What was that process? Like, yeah, you you definitely hear that from contractors and stuff. They're like, hey, you know, I had to go to six different home depots, you know, to get this thing. And you're and and I'm sort of going like, but I don't want you to have to go to any home depots, Like can we buy this stuff online? Because again I've I've I've been very conscious of not wanting to ask people to

do things I wasn't comfortable dealing with myself. But we're in the middle of this, you know, we talked about

the freeze. Well now it's this crazy heat storm and lo and behold the A c uh you know, goes out in the building and we're gonna have to spend you know, a large amount of money on these two A c s. But like we're in a line, in a long line from the company, so like they have to wait to get it, and then we have to get slotted in with all the other businesses and people that need air conditioners, most of which you know, probably weren't super well maintained during the pandemic, and then to

go through this freeze. So that that's what like right now today we were trying to figure out how to get this, to say, cee situation fixed and you know, sweating our asses off in the meantime. I guess that's a good segue into what things are like right now. Um, have things improved our customers coming in? Does the business feel established to you? Yeah, it feels. It's been just long enough that it's sort of part of a new normal. But business has been better than we expected. People have,

for the most part, been wonderful. So many people have comeing up. I love bookstores. I you know, I always wanted there to be a bookstore here. I'm so happy you're here. And it's been cool to see other businesses pop up, you know, and some of the empty storefronts since we opened. So we're feeling good about where it's going.

But then, like a lot of business owners, you sort of also out of the corner of your eye or your track in this delta variant, and you're wondering, you know, could could this all go back in the other direction again? And how can we be prepared for that too. The other thing we haven't really talked about is independent bookselling

in the time of Amazon. Obviously, it's been pretty you know, I fear the sort of like chain physical bookstores like they got sort of obliterated, but there does seem to be the space for more independent um bookstores are things like sort of at an equilibrium, were like sort of like true book levers are supporting independent books, maybe more than they did in the past, and they're sort of like this balance or is there still like persistent Amazon

anxiety in your community, in your world. I'm a little unique among authors in that, like I don't get any of this Amazon hate, Like I love Amazon. Amazon has been amazing for me, not just because they've sold a lot of my books, but they've surfaced my books to so many people that would have never heard about them, and that quite frankly, you know a lot of indie bookstores have never got behind them the way that Amazon has. So you know, when I go on Amazon, I know

my books are in front of people. When I walk into a random indie bookstore and you know, Cleveland or something, it's not a guarantee they're going to carry my book. So the the majority of my sales come on Amazon. That not only am I not going to bite the hand that feeds me, I'm grateful for for what Amazon

has done but I would say that our strategy is. Look, if you know, if you're looking for a very specific book, like you want to read the newest whatever, um, You're probably just going to buy it on Amazon because you're that title is in your mind and you want it right now, You're going to buy it there. The need we're trying to fill is, hey, exactly the need we felt when we were sitting at that breakfast restaurant, you know, eighteen months ago, which is we're having brunch. What are

we gonna do after? I love browsing bookstore. So the premise of our bookstore is not that we carry every book, but that we carry books that we know you will like, that we have gotten behind, that we want you to check out. And you know, that was something that surprised me when I was researching about the indie bookstore business. The average indie bookstore carries about ten thousand titles, which is an insane amount of books. We carry about six

hundred titles. We have multiple copies of those books. But my premises I want to have a small amount of books that of them I've not only personally read, but like I can tell you about and I can tell you why they're amazing. You absolutely have to read them, and I want to be able to display them in the store in a way that they stand out. So we carry a smaller number of books that we we we know people will love. That's the premise of this store.

So we're not competing with Amazon, We're not competing with Barnes and Noble. It's right right back to this email list I've done this whole time, which is like, here are some books that I'm personally vouching for that I think you'll love. Um. So I realized that we haven't actually plugged many of your books on the podcast, So I'm just going to say that two of my favorites of yours are Conspiracy, which probably for our listeners is a little bit media naval gayzy, but that's why I

am very interested in it. And Ego Is the Enemy was also amazing and helped me a lot when I moved into a managerial role at Bloomberg. So thank you for that. And I have to ask, are you working on anything at the moment. Yeah. I mean that was the other part of the pandemic, which is as as expensive and costly and crazy as all this has been.

It was also wonderful to have a quiet, safe space just to myself that I could write and and to know that hey, if I show up every day and write this book, do my job, We're not going to starve to death. It will cover all this, right, And so that was that that was the ultimate sort of variable use of the space was that I could use the upstairs to write. And so I worked on a kid's book during the pandemic. I wrote a kid's book

about Marcus. Reallys uh that that that came out in March, and then I I'm just now finishing and it's going to the printers. I'm writing a book about Courage that will come out in the fall and hopefully we'll be the first event that we have in the store, depending on sort of where the pandemic goes. My wife is reading the book by Conspiracy. Oh, thank you, it's great. Um. And the new one on Courage it's called Courage is Calling. Is that right? I'm looking on Amazon right now, Yeah,

we'll see there you go. Yes, Courage is Calling. The subtitle is Fortune Favors the Brave, and it's it's the first in a four book series and the first one comes out and I believe September. Okay, well, we'll definitely look out for it. Um. Ryan, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts and talking to us about the challenges of starting not just a new business, but you know, an actual brick and mortar bookstore during a

massive pandemic. Appreciate it. It feels good to uh to vent a little bit UH and and share, to share, to share the journey. So I appreciate the opportunity. Well, thanks so much, Ryan. That was great. Ryan. Thanks so Joe. You can probably tell I enjoyed that conversation, but I think it really helped to crystallize a lot of the different ideas that we've been talking about. I know we've spoken individually on a number of these supply chain issues now and a number of these sort of like high

level economic themes. But I feel like this one store in you know, a small town close to Austin probably crystallizes a lot of what's going on. Yeah, totally right, And I feel like, you know, it's interesting, like it did would not have occurred to me that, like, even though it makes sense that like publishing got curtailed at the same time there was like a spike in demand

for physical books, like how many? Like I just feel like that is such a repeated theme that we saw over and over again this last year, the simultaneous spike in demand and the color and the you know, the diminishment of supply all hitting at once. I just hadn't thought about it at all with the physical books, And then everything you said about shipping was like super interesting, Like I didn't even realize that, you know, track your own ship and getting to decide like when it gets unloaded,

just all super interesting stuff. Yeah. And also publishers prioritizing prints from certain authors. I guess like intuitively it makes sense, but it's also something I hadn't thought about before. But the other thing I'm thinking is getting back to that

question of whether or not these pressures are transitory. You know, this idea of does the publishing or you know, the physical book shortage resolve itself because publishers ramp up capacity in one way or another, or because demand starts to normalize and unfortunately people start reading less, or maybe it's a permanent shift in behavior and having spent a year at home, people decide that they actually really like reading books, um, and it becomes the new normal. I guess it's too

early to tell. It's too really, but again it's interesting because like how many times have we seen like an industry was trying to get like super lean or like just in time inventory or and again like books, it must be suit Like I get that impulse like of course that you want to not of inventory, but also like books are super unpredictable in terms of what's gonna have a huge run. So once again you see like the sort of cost of like trying to get to

to lean to fancy with your inventory. Yeah, absolutely, Okay, shall we leave it there? Yes, leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe wi Isn't All. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow our guest on Twitter, Ryan Holiday, He's at Ryan Holiday. Follow our producer Laura Carlson,

She's at Laura M. Carlson. Followed the Bloomberg head of podcast Francesco Levi at Francesca Today and check out all of our podcast at Bloomberg onto the handle at podcasts. Thanks for listening to the Year to