Steve Susi joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Brand Currency — the 2019 book that grew out of his years as an executive creative director at Amazon — and where its four currencies stand now that AI has rewritten the rules.

Steve traces the thesis back to a standing ovation in Tokyo, where he realized "there's something universal here... What matters most to all people? Money, information, loyalty, and time," and thought, "So let me write a book."

He talks about the book's unexpected second life: it launched just before COVID, "actually sold pretty well," drew fan mail he never anticipated, and got picked up for Korean translation — proof that "we're not so different around the world."

Then the conversation turns to the question every author is now asking. Steve uses AI every day as a thought partner, but is adamant it "is simply not going to write my book," because "without... enterprise-level instruction, it does not come with encoded discernment, judgment, or taste."

He explains why "Taste is the New Oil," how AI "didn't add a fifth currency — it just compressed the original four into a moment," and why, even in a world of instant answers, "you're going to see flesh tone and fingerprints on things more than you ever have."

He closes on why the physical book endures: when someone "sees a bookcase full of books, it says, I've invested in this piece of physical matter because it really matters... it's going to be hard to kill. We love touching things."

For more information on Steve Susi, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/steve-susi

For more information on Brand Currency: A Former Amazon Exec on Money, Information, Loyalty, and Time, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/brand-currency

Five years after his first Author Hour appearance, Chris Belchamber returns to talk with Travis Stoliker about what has and hasn't changed since he wrote Invest Like the Best — and what he's learned watching the market since.

Chris walks through the case for compounding over chasing returns, tells the story of turning down a seat at Long-Term Capital Management in the 1990s, and lays out why he believes gold, not passive equity indexing, has quietly outperformed the S&P 500 since 2000.

He also gets candid about Bitcoin, the state of the fiat currency system, and why he believes the average investor is dramatically underserved by the financial industry.

Along the way, Chris reflects on what writing Invest Like the Best gave him that he didn't expect: a "lighthouse" that draws in exactly the right clients, and a level of clarity about his own thinking that's only grown more valuable with time.

For more information on Chris Belchamber, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/chris-belchamber

For more information on Invest Like the Best: The Low-Risk Road to High Returns, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/invest-like-the-best

David Burkus joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams — his fifth book, and the first he published professionally after four traditional deals.

David lays out the math he gives every author weighing the two paths: still write the proposal, and if the traditional offer comes in between $75,000 and $100,000, take the money — but if it’s “20, 25 grand,” that’s not enough to deal with the hassles of signing away your IP.

He explains why a traditional proposal is written “for an audience of one,” how his publisher’s push to make his networking book a career book earned him exactly two speaking gigs in the book’s entire history, and why the timeline sealed it: guided author in June 2022, on Amazon everywhere by May 2023.

Then he opens up the speaking machine itself — lanes and problems, the caveman test that named Best Team Ever, micro videos that get found, the bureau secret of bringing agents in on deals you already have — and the production system behind five books: six months of research in piles on the floor, 500 to 750 words a day, and “when you write nonfiction, there’s no such thing as writer’s block. There’s just you haven’t researched it enough.”

Plus the LinkedIn message from a Lithuanian event planner that turned a book into a homecoming.

For more information on David Burkus, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/david-burkus

For more information on Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/best-team-ever

Matt Moyers joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Venture Capital Alternative: A Blueprint for a Better Patent System — a book idea he sat on for the better part of a decade before deciding, in 2023, that "now is the time."

Matt explains how a career spent valuing intellectual property — including the Nortel bankruptcy, where a patent portfolio first bid in the hundreds of millions sold for $4.5 billion — showed him the same story on repeat: an inventor commercializes an idea, big tech enters with a competing product built on that invention, and the inventor gets crushed.

He walks through the Sonos case, why the IP system in America is "a mess," and his blueprint for IP debt and IP equity as an alternative to venture capital.

Then the conversation turns to craft: the Instagram course that got his first draft done in 60 days, the 18 months of editing that followed, the Kaizen 30-minute writing sessions, a dog that got "walked like crazy," and why he shopped a finished draft to publishers everywhere before deciding Scribe's hybrid model — and Scribe's editor — were what he wanted. He's already realized he has three or four more books inside of him.

For more information on Matt Moyers, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/matt-moyers

For more information on The Venture Capital Alternative: A Blueprint for a Better Patent System, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-venture-capital-alternative

Nick Capman joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement, the book he wrote from a four-page Word doc called "book notes" that he'd been keeping in Calibri 11.

Nick explains the theory behind the book: we all sit on a spectrum from resentment to passion, the same person behaves completely differently at each end, and if you hire the right person, "it's not the employee's responsibility to bring passion. It's the employer's. It's not 50 50." He shares the 15 pillars, the NPS-style assessment his company runs every year — and the news that this past year The FDA Group scored above 9 on every pillar for the first time.

Then he gets practical about what a book actually does for a business: the credibility "spoke in the wheel" that turns sales conversations from "I need to see if you're the real deal" into "how can you help me," the copy every employee receives at their 90-day mark, the confetti-filled client box with an engraved bottle of wine and the book ("I wanted to send out my book, but I didn't want to be pretentious"), and the Barnes & Noble signing that drew 60 people because "I said I have a book" — it was as simple as that.

Plus: the LinkedIn ad that said everything he'd been thinking, why the finished book had "no fluff," and his marathon advice for anyone still sitting on a book-notes doc of their own.

To listen alongside an in depth episode summary, highlights, and full transcript, visit [link for Author Hour episode on Scribe website]

For more information on Nick Capman, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/nicholas-capman

For more information on The Passionate Workforce: How to Create and Maintain Maximum Employee Engagement, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/the-passionate-workforce

Neil Thanedar joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about Positive Politics: A Proven Playbook to Get into Politics, Change Your Life, and Change the World—the book he decided to write in late 2024 and published in 2025, on a thousand words a week.

Neil explains why “books are a way to own an idea,” how the story of a 19-year-old who got a C on a paper and turned it into the 27th Amendment proves you don’t need to win an election to change the Constitution, and why he tells founders to pick one bill and run with it.

He gets specific about the Scribe process: the book coach who told him chapters one, two, three, four should run four, three, one, two (“And she was right”), why doing it alone might have meant never finishing, and his hiring-a-specialist analogy—publishing a book yourself is like building your own house.

Then the payoff: three of the five founders in his first accelerator class found him through his writing, a skeptical VC who said “we don’t need another pundit” got the answer “well, guess what? I’m doing that, too,” and his stretch goal of getting ten new people into politics this year is halfway done after one week in a seven-bedroom Airbnb in D.C.

For more information on Neil Thanedar, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/neil-thanedar

For more information on Positive Politics: A Proven Playbook to Get into Politics, Change Your Life, and Change the World, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/positive-politics

Stephen Butler joins Travis Stoliker to talk about Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose into Productivity—the book he wrote with coauthor Karissa Price after recognizing what McKinsey calls the purpose gap: 85% of senior leaders say they’re living their purpose at work, versus 15% of everyone else.

Stephen explains why purpose is a verb, not a whiteboard exercise, a constant cycle of discovery, learning, and impact, and tells the story of the young woman who felt “like a musician who had a great instrument and knew that she knew the music, but couldn’t hear herself play.”

Then the conversation goes wide: what a 250-year-old political philosopher can teach us about AI and institutions, why the 2007 financial crisis was a bigger world-historical event than 9/11, what a Blackberry-era law-firm admin can tell us about disruption, and why AI is “much less a cost-cutting story… It’s going to be a growth story.”

Along the way, Stephen shares what Scribe’s editors taught him (“the real title of the book is not the title, it’s the subtitle”), how a Marriott CHRO came to write his foreword, and how the book unlocked a door he never knew existed — a funded Bay Area platform company where he’s now head of AI. He closes with the line every publisher wants to hear: “I think the world needs more scribes.”

For more information on Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose into Productivity, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/why-is-a-verb

For more information on Stephen Butler, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/stephen-butler

Paul Hobby joins Eric Jorgenson to talk about Glorious Tension: Rediscovering Our Sacred Middle Ground in an Age of Extremism — a book that began as "cathartic COVID era scribblings" and grew into what Eric calls an act of public service. Paul tells the story of finding his grandmother's 1938 speech "in the bowels of the internet" — a speech that gave him chills because you could swap the names and places for today's — and how sophisticated friends convinced him the scribblings were a book. He explains why your brain is built for rabbit holes, the difference between a tribe and a cult, why he keeps a list on his iPhone of things he's been dead wrong about, and his grandmother's rule to always phrase a criticism as a question.

Along the way: the speaking invitations the book has opened up, the reader email that arrived out of nowhere the morning of the recording, and why Scribe's fact-checking was rigorous "almost to the point of irritation" — with the result that nobody has ever caught a wrong quote or fact in the book.

For more information on Paul Hobby, visit https://scribemedia.com/authors/paul-hobby

For more information on Glorious Tension: Rediscovering Our Sacred Middle Ground in an Age of Extremism, visit https://scribemedia.com/published-books/glorious-tension