What happens when a shy farm kid from rural Wisconsin who never dreamed of being a writer becomes one of America’s most beloved storytellers?
Michael Perry joins Infinite Loops to share his remarkable journey from cleaning calf pens to pitching scripts at Universal Studios, all while maintaining his day job as a volunteer firefighter and EMT in his hometown.
This conversation is a masterclass in authentic storytelling, practical wisdom, and the power of staying true to your roots while navigating an industry that often values credentials over character. Perry shares unforgettable stories about turning down Oprah (yes, really), why he sells hundreds of books to “people who don’t read” at firefighter conventions, and how his nursing background taught him the most important skill for any writer: human assessment. We explore his philosophy of “kindness is not weakness,” the difference between cash and cachet, and why sometimes the best career move is knowing when not to move at all.
Whether you’re a writer, entrepreneur, or simply someone who believes in the power of authentic storytelling, this episode will remind you that sometimes the best way forward is to embrace your own improbable path and never stand behind a sneezing cow.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
2024 O’Shaughnessy Grantee Arjun Khemani has launched Lords of the Cosmos, his new book with Conjecture Institute President & Co-Founder Logan Chipkin:
“Welcome to the Anthropocene.
Most of human history has been unremarkable and static. But Western civilization is different, sustaining rapid progress for generations. And we’re just getting started.
Lords of the Cosmos views the story of humanity through the lens of our most profound theories of progress, addressing such questions as:
What sparks progress? What does progress entail? What is the role of human progress in the cosmic scheme of things?
Lords of the Cosmos illustrates how humanity is the most powerful force in the universe, capable of creating any object the laws of physics allow. Authors Arjun Khemani and Logan Chipkin argue that suffering is intimately related to staticity, while creativity provides the only means to end suffering.”
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Highlights
How Mike Learned to be a Storyteller
Michael Perry: “I get asked all the time: ‘How did you learn to write and tell stories?’ It was being down at the implement store listening to the farmers sitting around rolling dice and drinking coffee. They all had stories and they were storytellers and their stories had shape and form and flow and they often had a payoff. They didn’t think of it that way, they just did it. I talk about sitting under the hay wagon that we filled and we’re waiting for the empty one. And so, you’re taking five minutes to drink some water out of an alfalfa-chaff-filled cup and you’re telling stories. And again, they all had shape and form.”
Do You Want Cash, or do You Want Cachet?
Michael Perry: “I get approached at my events and people say, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a novel.’ And I say, ‘Well, you should write it.’ And they don’t want to hear that. What they want is to say, ‘Well, here’s the number of my agent and here’s the publisher. And by the way, as long as we’re at it let’s just get your direct deposit information.’ And that circles back to, I call myself a self-employed writer because that’s what I am. And I’m willing to talk about promotion. I have a 2002 Toyota that I load up with a bunch of book boxes and some T-shirt tubs. And I got a guy named Tony who’s my merch dude and he comes with me and we do gigs in places like Gilman, Wisconsin. And you know what? I make a good living at it because again, back to do you want cash or do you want cachet? And I’m ready to play Carnegie Hall at this point. I really could, but it’s probably not going to happen. And so in the meantime, Duluth is good, too.”
Nurse Mode
Michael Perry: “I’m very shy. I’ve learned to function in public. I love performing, but that’s different. But one of the things that’s really hard for me is cold calling. And you have to do it all the time, especially back when I was doing magazine work. And I always say that I’ll pick up the phone and put it down 12 times before I call somebody. But what nursing did for me is it taught me to go into a tiny little room with a complete stranger, ask them to take all their clothes off, and within 30 seconds, ask them when’s the last time they pooped. And so whenever I would find myself going to have to interview whether it was a country music star or a CEO or even just the guy down the road, and I didn’t want to, I would just go into nurse mode. I’m like, ‘no, you’re just here as a pro. Ask your questions and get on with it.’”
Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow
Michael Perry: “If I could impart one bit of wisdom, hard-earned, hard-won, from this farm kid from rural Wisconsin, it is this: Never stand behind a sneezing cow.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: “I can attest that you are correct.”
Michael Perry: “If you’re not familiar with this situation. Cows are big animals and they’re tall, and if you’re standing behind them and they sneeze, they projectile something out of their backside. It’s not milk. The way that I explain it to my city friends is basically, it’s a situation involving several of the properties of physics, including contents under pressure, ballistics, and the path of least resistance, and of course, inertia. Although in this case you might refer to it as inertia. I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, Jim, but it has happened to me and I can tell you it is a jaw dropping experience.”
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I’ve been watching some of your other interviews. I just finished the big biography of Mark Twain, and I couldn’t help thinking of you and him because I just love—you know, as I was getting ready for the podcast, I’m like, you know what I ought to do? Is just let Mike talk the entire time. And it might be absolutely the best podcast I’ve ever recorded.
Michael Perry: Yeah, I’ve not read the new one. I’ve got two others, actually. I can see them from here that are bricks. And one of the things that he was really helpful to me for was his speaking, because I’ve never—I can’t even say I’ve done better than I expected, because I’ve never set a goal. I never dreamed of being a writer. I just wandered into it and discovered the thing I love. And I’ve never sold a million, but I’ve done well enough that I’m making a decent living and I’m taking care of my family. But I realized pretty early on that it wasn’t my brilliance, it was hard work. We can talk again—we’ll probably talk about all this.
But there was some luck involved. And Twain, of course, he would have these grand successes, and then he’d blow it all on bad investments, and then to recoup, he’d go on speaking tours. And I’m extremely shy. I don’t ever want to come out of my little room here where I write. But I learned early on, no, you better learn.
Michael Perry: I just got done listening, by the way, to your episode you did on Permissionless Action. And I love that phrase because I look back and I go, yeah, that’s pretty much what I was doing. I mean, I was writing letters to people I had no business writing letters to. And speaking is another one where I really didn’t want to. But I just realized that Twain would make up for lost ground by doing these speaking tours. And honestly, that has become one of our steadiest revenue streams. I keep writing books, and they keep doing fine, but the speaking—and then the other way it helped me is that I remember the first essay. Back in the nineties, I sold a piece. I think I write about it in the new book, the “Improbable Mentors” book.
I sold a piece to Newsweek kind of by accident, and I got $1,000, and I had never gotten more than $75 for anything I’d written. And I had a buddy who had retired from the NFL, and he was on the cusp. He was one of those guys where he actually made more money selling used cars after he was out of the NFL than when he was in.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: He must have been a lineman.
Michael Perry: Actually, there’s a great—again, just shut me—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, no, no. Go for it, go for it.
Michael Perry: You’re a Minnesota guy, so you’ll get this. He was a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers for ten years and I believe was an All-Pro at least one year. I mean, very obviously very good. You don’t start for the Packers for ten years. The problem was, and he tells this story on himself—he’s no longer with us, but he would tell the story on himself. He said the very first time he replaced Ray Nitschke. And he said the very first time he was quoted in the Green Bay sports section, he said, “I will make the people of Wisconsin forget the name Ray Nitschke.” And he said, “Now, upon reflection—” But anyway, he was one of those guys that by the time I met him, he had a very successful car dealership and he had saved some of his NFL money, even though it wasn’t huge money back then. And so whenever he took me to lunch, I was the broke freelance writer. It was one of those where you didn’t even have to pretend who was getting lunch. And so I sell this piece for a thousand dollars. And I jokingly say to him, the next time I see him, I said, “I got a thousand dollars for this essay I wrote. I’m probably going to invest it all in a mutual fund.” And he said, “You should.” And he sent me to, I think it was a Merrill Lynch guy. And he bought me some middle-of-the-road something. But it truly was a remarkable moment because it was another five to eight years before I had any more money to put in there. But I do talk about that with a lot of my artist friends who just—they don’t want to talk business, so they don’t want to do self-promotion. I’m like, “Man, I just want to make more art.” And being able to take care of my family, being able to have some investments—and over and again, we are not wealthy, but we’re fine. And so much of that is because I joked with that guy and just—
And so anyway, a difference between me and Mark Twain—there may be others—is I took my money to Merrill Lynch. I didn’t invest it in a new typewriter.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So Twain, you know, the one I just read. I always—and I’m mad at the author because I kept reading it, but I kept getting madder because he kept clutching his pearls about Twain had this thing with young girls that in today’s world would be incredibly inappropriate. But there was never any suggestion of any wrongdoing. Basically, the way I read it is his daughters had left. They meant everything to him. And he just wanted to be surrounded by youth and beauty and all that kind of stuff. And so he would do these clubs where he would invite bright young women and literally it was all very innocent. There’s always a chaperone there and they would play billiards and he would read from his books and he just—I think he kind of loved to be adored.
Michael Perry: Right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Especially because his daughters adored him and his eldest would really give him great ideas for editing his manuscripts and so he relied on them anyway. He just goes—every other chapter he’s clutching his pearls, kind of saying, “This is bad,” even though—and then he would follow it with “Even though we didn’t find any evidence of any wrongdoing.” But he was a really interesting guy. I’ve always been a big fan of Mark Twain, but I did learn a lot about him from this. You know, in the end, he was—the bad investments, et cetera. He was really interesting because he would always blame the other guy, especially in business, never in writing, which I thought was really interesting.
Michael Perry: That’s a great—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But in business, it was always the other guy who, by the way, parentheses, he had hand-picked. And when he picked them, he would go around telling his friends, “I have just found the most brilliant manager for a business ever. This guy is going to make me a fortune.” You know, six months later he’s suing him. He loved to sue people, but what a talent. And the other thing that I knew, but I didn’t know how profound it was, he put America on the map for authors. And I didn’t know how popular he was in Europe, in the UK, Germany—literally, crowds would gather. He got invited by the king and queen, whoever was reigning at that particular moment. And he was weird because he was the ultimate American.
You know how our diplomats are—we’re the only country, I have to check this, but from the last time I read we’re the only country that does not bow. In other words, when other diplomats meet kings and queens and emperors and all that, they do the deep bow. And in the American diplomatic corps, you may not bow.
Michael Perry: Interesting.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And Obama caused, when he was president, caused quite a stir because he bowed to a king or a queen out of courtesy, I’m sure. But I was really struck by the vehemence of some of the “Americans don’t bow.”
Michael Perry: Exactly. Yeah, well, you’re right about Twain because we were not viewed as capable of art. Capital A.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That’s right.
Michael Perry: And that’s been a whole struggle. I don’t mean that in a dramatic way, but with me, I come from very blue collar people. I’ve written about this a lot. I wrote a book about Montaigne and I said in there, “Where I come from, if you can’t stack it or stack with it, it don’t count.” And so to make a living as a writer or a humorist or whatever it is I am, I’ve struggled with that over the years because my two brothers, they can—they got bulldozers and log skidders and big equipment. And I loved hard work. I grew up working on the farm and on the sawmill and I worked on a ranch in Wyoming. And to this day, I stacked a bunch of firewood yesterday, I’m utterly at home stacking hay bales or straw bales.
But I knew I wasn’t going to be a farmer because when the tractor breaks, I can’t fix it. And I don’t understand electricity. It’s magic. And so there is that balance. And to this day, I struggle. In one of my prefaces, I wrote a book called “Million Billion.” In the preface, I said I think of myself as a writer with a small w because I’ve just never been able to get into that whole capital A artist. And yet I try to invest my heart and soul into everything I do. So, yeah, there’s an interesting—and I don’t know how much of that is just because we’re Americans or how much it has to do with being blue collar. You come from the Midwest. I’ve listened.
One of the things I got a kick out of listening to you is you telling about the reaction when people find out—I don’t remember which degree it is, but they’ll find out that you don’t have a PhD or—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah.
Michael Perry: Well, I’ve been in some—and I say this without rancor. This is just—I’ve never been one of the literary cool kids. I’ve had just enough success that occasionally I pass through those circles and there’s this fascinating thing that happens that—and I know it happened to you because I’ve heard you tell the story where I’ll be kind of in the corner with my cheese, and someone will finally say, “Oh, you know, who are you? Say your name.” And then they’re like, “Oh, that’s—do you write?” I go, “Yeah, I write.” “And do you—have you done some books?” “Yeah, I’ve done some books.” “Oh, do you have a publisher?” “Yeah.” They go, “Oh, who’s your publisher?” “HarperCollins.” “Oh.” And then the conversation just—all of a sudden, you have value.
And a minute ago, I was just this doofus with a nursing degree from rural Wisconsin who’s never got his teeth fixed. And it’s kind of sweet because you’re flying under the radar. And by the way, many of those people have gone on to become very valuable friends, mentors and everything. But there’s just—it’s just so interesting what’s valued.
They wanted—one time, some ladies at the bank in my hometown wanted to put me on a float for the parade with the sign that said “writer.” I said, “I will get beat up by the time we’re halfway down Main Street. And by the way, by my brothers.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right?
Michael Perry: I only got—yeah, because I went on fire calls, you know, I mean, I was an EMT, so that, you know, there’s like, “He’s okay. He’s a writer. He goes to modern dance recitals and poetry readings, but he goes into the barn fire.” So, anyway.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I discovered you through “Montaigne in Barn Boots.” I love philosophy. Never took it in a university course, but just got really—I tend to be excessive when I go dive down rabbit holes. And then my wife would just—she can see me coming, and she’s like, “I really love you, but I do not want to hear all about Montaigne. I don’t want to hear about Kierkegaard. I especially don’t want to hear about Spinoza.”
Michael Perry: I remember I had a dinner with my wife one time. This is back when we had just moved to this little farm. And I do remember with all clarity her just saying, just very gently but firmly, “I’m sure you’re familiar with—no more talk about chickens.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No more talk about chickens. Yeah. But, you know, I think that’s one of the things that—why I find you—what you write and say so intriguing that there are so many incredibly wise, just regular folks. That’s another part of America that I really think that we don’t—modern Americans don’t really understand that America for—as it was becoming kind of the world’s leader. Everything was about practical wisdom. Everything was, “Let’s roll up our sleeves and figure it out.” I’m reading about the early tycoons of the Gilded Age, a term Mark Twain coined with his book. And literally, Andrew Carnegie, no education, none. Just very practical, very hustle oriented. But kind of like you with the various diversions and ways that you created your career. He did the same thing.
He was just like, “Huh, I need to learn to be good at something really fast.” And so he got really good at telegraph. And the guy who he was doing it for noticed, because Carnegie is getting him messages faster than all the other people. And so what does the guy do? He’s like, “You’ll do.” And he hires him. And then six months later, Carnegie is running the whole show. And then he’s like, “Thank you. I want to go over here and do this now.” But it was like, we’ve lost that. We do a lot of work with artificial intelligence and everything. And the fact that we have not trained AIs on that can-do American spirit, which really dominated this country for most of our history. And our history was people like us.
I used to joke when I looked up our—the O’Shaughnessy family history over there in Ireland. You know, we were very powerful warlords in Galway. And I was fascinated because I didn’t know much about how that worked and everything. And I’d lived there when I was a kid in the summer. So I got really interested. And so I’m looking at it, you know, we’re seeing the ruins of these castles that were O’Shaughnessy castles and everything. And then I’m talking to my dad and I’m like, “What happened?” And then I learned that the British, who always had bones to pick with the Irish, because the Irish were like, “No, you really can’t run our country. We’re doing it fine. Not your job anyway.” So they came up with this very clever idea, what they called “surrender and regrant.”
So what it was the Brits would come and they’d go to an Irish noble and they’d say, “We’ve got a lovely deal for you. Surrender your Irish nobility. We will regrant you British nobility far better.” And so the whoever was the head of the clan was always called “the O’Shaughnessy.” And so all of the O’Shaughnessys told the British where to get off until one guy, the guy who was the O’Shaughnessy during the reign of Charles the First did it. He accepted it and he gave them his Irish nobility and briefly as it turned out, became a British noble. Then this fellow named Cromwell came along, chopped Charles the First’s head off and went and seized all of his—the O’S’s lands because he was a British noble. By the time of the restoration of Charles II, that guy had died. His son was now the O’Shaughnessy, an ardent nationalist. And when the Brits came back under Charles II and offered him British nobility again, he told them where to get off. So went from warlords to dirt farming to on a boat to America.
Michael Perry: Yeah, those paths are fascinating. I mean, I don’t know a lot about my family. We’re kind of one of those mix of so many different places. But I know that my grandfather grew up all over the Midwest, poverty. Lived in a railroad car for a long time. His dad was one of those itinerant “start a shop here and then go farm there.” And then my grandpa wound up in World War II. He was on Iwo Jima. And well, he was a yeoman in the Navy. And he always joked with us. He said, “I took Iwo Jima with a typewriter.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Way to take it.
Michael Perry: Yeah. But of course, later we would learn that he saw hell on earth. But he then came back and got a secretarial degree or something and worked in an office supply company, but eventually worked his way up. He was vice president of national sales for National Presto Industries. So the Fry Daddy. And he brought you the pressure cooker. But anyway, he just was one of those—when he died, he left me his reading list. And it was Plato, it was everything. It was Twain, it was the Bible. It was—but the thing that—and this may or may not come up.
I wish—so he died just as I was starting to strike out on my own as a writer. And he was very encouraging and he was one of the people because I wrote about this in the book because so many were like, “You have a nursing degree, you have a very good income. What are you thinking?” And I, by the way, had no plan. I jumped out of the airplane and started knitting my parachute. And so he just was very encouraging. But I remember the thing that I wish—we had wonderful conversations before he died. And I was at his deathbed, but the one thing I wasn’t quite worldly or well-read enough to comment on was, I remembered later, he had been promoted to vice president of national sales. He was a terrific salesman. He had throat cancer.
So he spoke in a whisper, and he would do sales conferences in very noisy sales halls. And he would always say, “Now I’m recovering from cancer. No, no”—you know, because people go, “Oh.” And he’d go, “No, no, I’m fine. I’m in great health. I’m great. I have nothing to be—but because I speak like this, I am going to have to ask you to gather in very closely.” And of course, he would just sell, sell. He also one time, and this came into play to me as a writer, especially doing nonfiction, he said, “I’m aware of the reputation that salespeople have,” but he said, “You can be a very successful—” And he was a man of extreme character. I witnessed it. But he said, “You can be a good person, an honest person, and still be a very effective salesperson.”
He said, “You don’t have to lie to sell something. You don’t have to deceive someone to sell them something.” And then he got a little twinkle in his eye, and he looked at me, he said, “Now, telling the truth creatively—” But anyway, the point that I was going to make is that I remembered in retrospect, he had been—he had made it to vice president. And then they wanted to put him up, number two or three. He’s very high in that national company. And he declined. And I just remember him saying, “I’ve come farther than ever. I like what I’m doing. You know, we’re—” They weren’t wealthy, but they were fine. Grandma was in good shape. Everything. Years later, I remembered that on his bedside was a copy of “The Peter Principle.”
And I remember the day that I twigged that I went, “I bet he said, ‘You know what? I’m where I need to be.’” And that’s so interesting because, of course, again, to get back to America, we’re all about “get to the top, top, top.” And it’s like, “No, sometimes, you know, that—” That might come up in our discussion today. I mean, there are turns that I didn’t make out of a choice that financially may have been a mistake, but here we are. So anyway.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Indeed. You know, it’s funny, another thing that you and I share is I, on all my books am James P. O’Shaughnessy, like you. You’re Michael Perry. I know, Mike, that if you’re like me, if somebody was standing right behind you and said, “Michael,” you wouldn’t turn around.
Michael Perry: I would be equally disturbed because it would be my mother, and she would be upset with me. And I just—we just lost my mom here a couple of months ago, and I’m sorry. She would truly be not only angry with me, but back from the dead to say so. Yeah, I always said I’m Mike every day. It just is a matter of distinguishing things and continuity to be Michael on my books and my billings and things like that. But I always said, yeah, it was only Michael when Mom was mad at me. And if this is probably true for you, and if she threw in the middle name—oh, yeah, you were talking to dad later that day.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, man. I one time got my mother so angry that I got the full—I got a confirmation name. I was raised Catholic, even though I’m agnostic now. Note agnostic, not atheist, because who the hell am I to decide?
Michael Perry: For the exact same reason.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But anyway, the one time I can’t remember what I was doing, but obviously my mother was very upset with me, and I was outside, and I might have been hitting somebody with a stick because we were doing sword fighting, and she saw me, and she saw me going in. She didn’t know that I had welts, too. And I heard very clearly “James Patrick Ignatius O’Shaughnessy in the house right now.” I went, “Oh, man, I’m dead.”
Michael Perry: Probably had a conversation like I did with my dad one night. Then I had hit the “Michael Lewis Perry” level with my mom, and I knew trouble was coming. My dad’s a very gentle man. Never struck us in anger or anything, but very firm and very strict and followed through. And so I was up in my room when he got in from chores or whatever, and I heard his footfalls coming up the wooden stairs. And I just remember him opening the door, leaning his head in and saying, “I don’t think you need to ask for the van keys for two weeks.” And then he just shut the door and left. And I thought, “That’s fine. No need for a scene. Copy that.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: “Yes, sir.” Yeah, I, too. My parents weren’t physical at all, but, man, it was even sometimes I kind of felt like, “Why don’t you just spank me or hit me or—” Because you’re killing me here.
Michael Perry: We did lead relatively parallel lives. My—so my parents, we did get spanked, and I’ve written about that. It was a, again, different time, but also never. I never, ever received a spanking without having gotten several warnings and very clearly laid out. “If you do A, B will occur.” And then, even then, there was always a separate trip, literally, to the woodshed. And then you would sit and he would explain to you what you had done wrong and why you were going to be punished. And then you would be punished. And my brothers and I all agree on this. We—you know how when you grow older, all of a sudden you have these conversations, like, “Were you thinking this too?”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Michael Perry: And all three of us said, we all eventually hit a point where we said, “Could we just—could we just skip the sermon and go straight to the spanking? Because that’s way easier to deal with.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally. Totally. And of course, our parents knew better and knew the sermon was the real punishment.
Michael Perry: Of course.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. What do you think—what do you think about that? I’ve been on the east coast for so long that when I tell people that I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, out here in New York, they’re kind of like, “You did not.” “Yes, I honestly did.” What is it about the Midwest that—and obviously I’m very biased here because I grew up there, but what is it about the Midwest that produces these kind of practical yet very firm and often very funny personalities?
Michael Perry: That’s interesting, because I’m thinking of my dad right now, who’s a very quiet, devout man, but devout in—my parents tried to teach us two things and two things above all, charity and humility. And by charity, I don’t mean a buck in the jar. I mean charity towards your fellow humans. And then humility. And my mom just died at 84. Dedicated her entire life to serving others. I was raised, by definition, in an obscure fundamentalist Christian sect. And I always say, I like to say that because it makes people nervous. And in fact, that particular sect has run into trouble and withered and like so many do, and I left it long ago, and I no longer believe what I was raised to believe, but I am grateful every day I was raised in it. It was gentle.
My parents were kind and thoughtful and quiet. Our door was open to all of the people that were being turned away elsewhere, including the ones who were being turned away for doing things that my parents didn’t approve of. But as long as you were welcome, as long as you follow the house rules. But so I just grew up watching that. And so my dad was this very serious, read his Bible every day. Thoughtful guy, very intelligent. He would tell you he’s just an old farmer, but he’s got a chemistry degree. And he’s brilliant. But he was my first teacher about telling stories and humor. Because my dad is that guy who will say something and about two minutes later you go, “That was funny.” And he also has—he’s so great with the wry comment and one of my books.
So my mom taught me to read when I was four so I could read before I was in kindergarten. Part of being in this church was no TV, no movies, no radio, no dancing, you know, no fun. I always say, “No fun.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It’s not true.
Michael Perry: I had—I couldn’t get it all done in my childhood. That’s another thing. Grew up on a rural Wisconsin farm with no TV, no radio, no movies. We couldn’t get it all done in a day. We were just out chopping down trees and riding bikes without helmets, doing stuff that we just were constantly occupied. And I’m now off on another one of those tangents where I can’t remember where I started. But the point is, my mom taught me to read when I was four. And the one thing, despite no movies and TV, she filled the house with books. So I grew up reading voraciously and I was very proud of the fact that I could read when I was a little four-year-old. And dad tells a great story and I tell it. I wrote a book called “Truck: A Love Story.” And I said, we were walking across the yard toward the barn to milk cows and I was a little tyke in my little green rubber boots and dad was holding my hand and we walked behind the neighbor’s pickup truck and I pointed at the tailgate and I said, “Look, Dad, F-O-R-D. Ford truck.”
And so I was telling this story one night at a family get-together and my father is down at the end of the table, very quiet, as he often is. And he was just observing and he said, “Yeah, I—” I said I was very proud of myself for being able to read at the age of four. And he then told that Ford story. And then I said, “Yeah, I was very proud of being able to read at the age of four.”
And he said, “As you still are.” So he’s that guy. So I think part of it, and in my case, the storytelling. I get asked all the time, “How did you learn to write and tell stories?” It was being down at the implement store listening to the farmers sitting around rolling dice and drinking coffee. They all had stories and they were storytellers and their stories had shape and form and flow and they often had a payoff. They didn’t think of it that way, they just did it. I talk about sitting under the hay wagon that we filled and we’re waiting for the empty one. And so you’re taking five minutes to drink some water out of an alfalfa chaff-filled cup and you’re telling stories. And again, they all had shape and form.
And the other thing I remember with my dad is he would tell stories about when he worked on a ranch in Wyoming or nutty things he did in high school and they became favorites and you would ask for them like the greatest hits. I remember as kids going, “Dad, tell us about the one when you were driving the tractor and you grabbed the pitchfork handle instead of the clutch.” You know, and it’s—and so I think part of that humor and storytelling is just we didn’t have a lot more. And I’m like you, I’m that age. I was born in December of ‘64. So I’m on that cusp of—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Michael Perry: And it’s, you know, even to this day, I’m the guy. I’m not a Luddite. I’m interested in AI, I’m talking to you on a MacBook, all that kind of stuff. And yet I don’t have the innate sense of those things that my daughters 18 and 25 do. So I was old and I am old enough to remember when there just was more, especially in the country visiting. You dropped in and you visited and you talked and how many conversations I had through pickup truck windows. It’s still my—one of my favorite places to talk to somebody is through a pickup truck window. So I think there was that. Just that general. And then we also—and there’s a negative side, all of this, as you well know too. But we’re big into not letting you get too big for your boots.
There’s, you know, humility cuts two ways and sometimes it’s overdone. One thing that I admit I’ve grown weary of is just the whole “I don’t need to know nothing about nothing.” And you know what? I am not the brightest bulb and I have terrible retention. One of my favorite things about Montaigne, the reason I wanted to write about him is because he said, “I’ve read omnivorously and yet I can’t remember anything.” And I’m that guy. When you start telling Twain things, I’m the guy that goes, “Oh, yeah, that’s right.” Or if we’re talking about Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I can’t quote it. I can just go “the one with the rabbit, the teeth, you know, that’s a rabbit.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: “Well, we’ll be having rabbit meat soon.” And then he cuts his head off. I love that scene. “Run away, run away.”
Michael Perry: But I think so part of it too is just that I mentioned that where I come from, if you can’t stack it or stack with it, it don’t count. And that includes a stack of books. And so on the one hand, we’re always overcoming that. On the other hand, it is what allows us just to burrow down and get to work. And, you know, I tell a story in one of my books about one of my earliest memories, if not the earliest, is me getting—I was—we had come from church, I had my little Mr. Sunday clothes on, and we had gone to lunch at another family’s farm, and I was in their barn and a dog kept approaching me and I kept backing up and I fell backwards into the gutter and became drenched in what is in a dairy barn gutter.
And I always say that I’m so grateful for that memory because I can still see with utter clarity the whitewashed rafters as I’m laying in a puddle of cow excrement in a gutter. And I just say, “I’m so grateful for that memory because it’s all up from there, man.” And even that Midwestern, especially rural ethic. My brother’s a logger. And I remember one day I was on book tour and my book had started to do well, and so they were extending the book tour and I was in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was a spring day or a winter’s day, and I don’t remember the temperature in Kentucky, but it was above 40 and it was kind of nice. And I was looking at the big weather map in the hotel lobby and I saw in Wisconsin it was 10 below.
And I knew that my brother was logging that day. And my publicist from New York called and said, “We’d like to—” He said, “How are you holding up?” And I looked at the weather map and I said—and I thought about having to do a reading in a bookstore that night. And I said, “You know what? I’m doing all right in the 10 below snowstorm,” you know, so, yeah, so I’m trying to build now. And the one other thing—and again I mentioned this cuts both ways. And everything’s always changing too. Things are sort of leveling for better or worse culturally, everywhere. But I can’t tell you—and it just happened to me in LA at Universal Studios, but I can’t tell you how many times in New York City publishing, I run into someone and you start talking, they’re from the Midwest. These kids go to—they go to New York City and they’re just used to showing up and doing the chores. And I told my daughter, I have a daughter who’s 25 now and struggled mightily with dysgraphia and dyslexia was one of those kids that was super smart, tremendous—I know it’s a cliche, but just off the charts people skills and, you know, her ACT scores and stuff were—I remember her weeping, you know, as we opened them. And I would always tell her, I said, “You’re gonna find your way.” And I said, “If in this day and age, if you show up when you say you’re going to show up, and if when you’re done with your task, you find the person in charge of you and say, ‘What can I do next?’ you’re going to be fine.” And she just—she’s 25 now. She just took a job with a startup, you know, so it’s that kind of Midwestern thing. And as I said, I don’t like to overdo it either because it does get overdone. You know, we also—not everybody around here has got the same work ethic.
And the other thing is, I always think at least maybe I’m just speaking for myself. It’s that positive aspect of imposter syndrome. I can’t—I was on Universal Studio lots recently pitching a script that’ll probably never see the light of day. But the fact that I was invited there because of what I do, I literally, even after all these years, I’m sitting there going, “Holy crap. I used to clean calf pens, man. I was just stacking straw bales with my dad two days ago in Chippewa County, Wisconsin, and now there’s that universal globe.” And yet obviously, you know, I’m bringing it. They wouldn’t have me there if I didn’t earn the appointment, so—well, I’m sorry.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, no, don’t be sorry at all. As I said at the top, I thought my best strategy for this would be just to shut up and let you talk because you are so entertaining and you do something that I think is a relatively rare thing, and that is you teach, but you make it really enjoyable. I’ve always believed that if you want to get through to somebody, you’ve got to entertain them. Because I don’t know about you, but I remember the teachers that really did engage me were always the ones that they were storytellers. That was it. I still remember a high school advanced placement English history teacher, Cy Turvey. And literally I had him right after lunch and on the—I guess I had him three days a week.
And on those days I would eat really fast so that I could get into one of the first row seats because he just—all from memory. But it was not “In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded the UK and blah.” It was always like a Will Durant or Ariel Durant story. And it wasn’t just me. It was all of the kids were just like this. And guess what? We knew the most about English history because he made it interesting.
Michael Perry: I’m beaming because one of my top two high school teachers ever, I have this new book out called “Improbable Mentors and Happy Tangents.” And I quote him in there anonymously. He was my history teacher and he taught me a lot about history. But he was also a Vietnam vet. He’d done two tours, two Purple Hearts. He flew choppers into the worst of the worst and in and out. But he used to tell me a story about—on weekends he would take gigs. I guess they probably didn’t call them gigs, but flying fighter jets. And there were two things that I always remembered and he’s—he was not a cynical man and he was very patriotic. And he was a Marine and became a state trooper.
And after becoming a marine and a state trooper, he taught history in a small town rural high school. So I think he did the proper preparation for us knuckleheads, I can tell you that. But I remember he would, on weekends he took extra assignments to fly fighter jets. And two things I never forgot. One is he said that he spent most of his time circling the Shell oil refineries or outposts or whatever they were called. And he didn’t elaborate or editorialize, but in just sharing that story, he told you something about the way the world works. And the other thing that I never forgot and it made it into—in this, in the book, I talk about, you know, when do you decide to make a move and that sometimes actually it’s okay to not make the move.
And the story I tell about him is that someone said when they found out he took these extra sorties, I suppose you call them, flying fighter jets, they said, “Oh, you must—you’re so patriotic. You must be extra brave that you would take on this assignment.” And he said, “No. After flying helicopters into firefights all week long, I just like being in a vehicle that can retreat at 600 miles an hour.” And so in my new book, there’s times when honestly, it’s better just to go, “Yeah, no, I’m gonna get out of this as quickly as possible.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, let’s talk more about the happy tangents, because I had a couple of weeks ago—I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work, but Ken Stanley, who is an academic, and he wrote a book that really resonated with me called “Greatness Cannot Be Planned.” And his thesis is basically your life. It’s—he says that the people who have these very detailed blueprints for “then I will do this, then I will,” you know, they want to climb the ladder, do all of that. He’s like, “If you want to have a really interesting life, don’t do that.” And what do you think it is about so many of us that that’s the norm. And people like us who, you know, just sometimes, “Hey, you can just try things. You can just do things.”
Well, it’s kind of like, you know, I’m sure you’re aware that we have a publishing company.
Michael Perry: Yes.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I had a good friend, college friend, call me, and he goes, “Yeah, so, Jim.” He goes, “Look, I know that you’ve written four books and that two of them were really successful. I heard you on another podcast joke about, you know, when they introduce you as a New York Times bestselling author.” I had the same reaction because literally mine was on the how-to part of the New York Times. So kind of a cheat. But he’s like, “But so—” He starts really nice about the whole thing, it’s like, “Yeah, so you had these really successful books and that’s really cool. But Jim, what do you know about the publishing industry directly?” And I went, “Well, I know as an author all the things that I hate about the publishing industry.”
And then I had a great conversation with Jimmy Soni, who’s also an author and also hated exactly the same things. And then as I was researching you, I love the fact that you were, let’s say, not terribly happy with the first round of publicity that your publisher had you do, but you did something that I absolutely love. You were like, “Okay, let’s be useful.” You sat down, you wrote out a very detailed in-depth explanation for how they should run it. The reason we started a publishing company is because we just saw all these really easy to do things that the authors would absolutely love. And what’s funny about it is Jimmy is—I’m the executive chairman of Infinite Books and he’s the CEO and editor-in-chief. But the response he’s been getting, and you know what his pitch is?
His pitch is “Tell me what you hate about the current traditional publishers.” And he goes, “And let me—let’s make a game of this.” And then he’ll fill in the blank. “The fact that they give you a two week window to market and then move on and never look at your book again. The fact that they don’t get your finished manuscript back to you in four months, do those—are those on your list?” And they’re like, “Yes,” and we got another author.
Michael Perry: Yeah. I think again, everything’s got two sides and one is that I am forever grateful to my publishers and I’m still under contract with one with Harper for a book that’s very overdue and I’m under contract with another publisher. But I also am back to doing that hybrid thing. I self-publish a lot of things. I’m just very, you know, pragmatism. There’s another Midwestern thing. It’s lovely to have cachet. It’s even lovelier to have cash. So I love that I can say I’m with HarperCollins and it’s true. And I’ve had one of—you know, my life was changed by an editor at HarperCollins and I’ve had tremendous support and I have a publicist there that have worked so hard on my behalf. Putting together a book tour is a nightmare. So none of this is sour grapes.
What it is I identify areas where they’re just not doing it right. And at some point it becomes clear it’s not going to change. And it’s not personal and it’s not animus. It’s just the machine. And so then the answer—the timbre of my voice is going up. I always have to be careful because that tells me I’m getting self-righteous. Then once—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It’s a good tell though.
Michael Perry: It’s also, I just realized too, I did that thing that so many of us autodidacts do. I said “timbre,” I think it’s actually “tamber,” but I know you are correct. I know what it means and I know how to spell it. You’re gonna—well, it’s like when I wrote a book about Montaigne. I told all the public radio interviews I do, they all go “Montana.” And I said, “I’m from rural Wisconsin. If I say Montana, it’s gonna sound really—I’m saying Montaigne.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, you know, that is so funny. We really are brothers from different mothers because same thing. Montaigne. Yeah, all of the—and just it makes me feel such—I’m just a fake and I grew up in the Midwest. I’m gonna say Montaigne. Okay.
Michael Perry: I can be respectful of it. I’m again this—get back. So I don’t want to be that person going, “I don’t need to change my way of thinking about it.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right? Right.
Michael Perry: No, absolutely not. But there are just some situations where you go, “No, I really need to just say Montaigne.” So what was I talking about? We were talking—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, we were talking about publishing and you were on NPR.
Michael Perry: My timbre went up because I was getting self-righteous. And what I was getting self-righteous about is that once I identify something that my publisher isn’t doing well for me. And I realize that it’s not personal and that it’s not personnel related, it’s just the biggest entity. Well then it’s incumbent upon me to do what I can rather than sit there and whine about it. And so that’s when I again, in this new book, “Improbable Mentors,” I talk about one of the things when I did a book called “Population 485” about being a volunteer firefighter and EMT in my hometown. By the way, let’s get this out of the way. People from LA or New York find out that I’m still on the volunteer fire department and they say, “You must be very brave and noble.” And I was going, “Eh, I’ve kind of got what they’re looking for where I’m from, which is a pulse and a valid driver’s license.” Anyways. And plus, when I moved back to my hometown, my two brothers and my mom were already on the fire department. So it was more a peer pressure situation than a hero situation. But anyways, “Population 485” is a very, if I may, artful, heartfelt memoir about sense of place and life and death and mortality and spirituality. It’s also a goofy book about a bunch of knuckleheads making fire calls and ambulance calls. And so one of the frustrations that I had with my publisher back then is the book was doing great. But I kept telling them, you know, “It’s great to do a reading in a lovely independent bookseller’s bookstore.” And those folks hand-sold me into existence. But I said, “I got 20 to 30 people there on a good night and there’s just also 10,000 other books for them to choose from.” And also I said, “Well, if you really want to move this book, there are these hundreds of conventions across the US where tens of thousands of volunteer firefighters and EMTs and full-time attend.” And I said, “If you send me there, we’ll sell so many of these books.” And time after time the response I got was a variation on “Those people just aren’t readers.” And my response to that is “I have made—I’ve been in the back of an ambulance with those people. I have gone into burning buildings with those people. I have attended the dirt track stock car races with those people.” And statistically speaking, the publisher’s not wrong.
Those are my people. But having said the point that I made to them. So then I just started booking myself into these conventions. And to this day I still speak at firefighting—and not because I’m an expert firefighter, but I get up and I tell the stories. And they’re not my stories. It’s their stories. And the stories are told in their vernacular and they recognize themselves, they recognize their patients, they recognize their neighbors. Even if I’m in Mississippi and everybody’s accent is different, they still know they too have a Bob the One-Eyed Beagle in their town. And then so I—and of course. And then when I’m done, what happens in the back of the room by the exit? That’s a whole other discussion. It’s in my—is that a book? There’s a table with a stack of whose books?
My books. And I sell them by the hundreds to those people who aren’t really readers. And what I tell the publishers, I said, “It’s not about literature, it’s about iteration. If I stand at the door of a conference room in Duluth, Minnesota on a Saturday morning when everybody’s bleary-eyed because they all were partying the night before and they got a cup of bad coffee and a donut, and I stand at the door and I say, ‘Would you be interested in buying a personal memoir examining—’”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: “Yeah. No, I wouldn’t.”
Michael Perry: “If you give me 45 minutes to tell the story in their vernacular and in a way that’s not condescending. I mean, I don’t change the text, the big words, the poetry. It’s also, I don’t change that, but they see it coming through someone who’s actually served beside them.” So that’s an example of where the publisher just never would do that for me. They—it finally came to a head with the Montaigne book. And when I say came to a head, there was no scene or anything, but I actually took the time to go to New York, lay out the whole plan. “Here’s the things that have worked, here’s the places that haven’t worked. Here are the places you haven’t sent me that we might have a shot.” And they couldn’t have been nicer. This whole group of people at this conference room table. “Oh, this is such amazing information. Thank you for sharing it. So helpful.” A month later, they sent me my book tour and it was the same 12 stops I’d made for the last one. And so I just remember I wasn’t angry. And I understand also publishing has changed, so I don’t have a platform. And again, rather than get angry about that, I just go, “Okay, things are changing. Let’s—how are we going to—” Navigation is so important. I think you got AI. You know, I’m sure we’ll get to some of that. But I talk to writers right now and then especially in Hollywood and people are angry about AI and they’re fighting AI and listen, I ain’t relaxed about AI as a writer and as a creative, but I also just—I’m the pragmatism again. It’s like, “Here it is.”
What are we going to do with it and about it and it seems to me doing your own thing still remains the key.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. And before we get to AI because I completely agree, you know, so we had quill pens, we wrote with the quill, then all of a sudden we got typewriters. And guess what? We wrote on those. Then we got computers and we wrote on those. They’re all tools, right?
Michael Perry: Yeah. And it’s not the all or nothing. You just reminded me too. I’m back to now—like I said, I have a couple of books under contract with some legacy publishers and I love working with those folks. But I also currently self-publish some things because there are certain things, books where I just realize this isn’t the book for a big publisher and both of us are going to be frustrated if we feed it into their machine. Now when I self-publish, I self-published a novella about a farmer, it’s called “40 Acres Deep.” And it’s the darkest thing I’ve ever written, but it also is 100% me allowing myself just to be artful and try to be that guy that used to have nice long hair and would go to the coffee shop and write really bad poetry.
And I immersed myself in that book and I put my heart and soul in that book. And you know, we took it to some publishers in New York and they just—it isn’t even that they don’t want it, they don’t know what to do with it. First of all, it’s a novella and it’s a grim book about a farmer in Wisconsin. So I just, again, I don’t get upset, I just go, “It seems like I’m better off publishing this myself,” you know, and the thing now has sold thousands of copies. It’s still, you know, it’s kind of hit trickle stage now, but it has sold thousands of copies. And I would just be frustrated if I left it with the big guys now.
The big guys, I usually sell far bigger numbers with the big guys because of distribution, but we can talk about royalty scales and we can talk about self-publishing and how when that nice lady bought my book yesterday on my website, the money was waiting for me this morning. It’s fascinating to me. And again, so it’s not all or nothing. I’m eager to finish my book for HarperCollins and get it out there, but I’m also just as eager—you know, I’ve got this new book out that we self-published and there are just so many ways to do things if you’re willing to just barge ahead, take a shot.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: We again, are ridiculously simpatico. My biggest experience with the traditional—first off, like you, I owe much of my career, and I mean this quite sincerely, to the fact that McGraw Hill chose to publish my book, “What Works on Wall Street.” It literally made my career. And it was back in the nineties where you had to have the imprimatur of a well-known publisher. And I wrote, my first book was called “Invest Like the Best.” And as I always joke, being the laziest human on the planet, I won’t do anything until I know that I’ll get a contract out and publish. So I went to the bookstore and I bought one of those big, you remember those big thick books on publishers and all they really contained were their addresses.
Michael Perry: The Writer’s Market. Yes, yes, finish your story because I got one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay, great. So I’m there with my wife and I grab it and she’s like, “What are you doing?” And I went, “I’m going to write a book.” And she’s like, “You’re going to write a book?” And I went, “Yeah, about this new way of looking at the stock market.” “And you’re buying that because you’re going to find a publisher through that.” I went, “Yeah.” And she’s like, “Honey, I love you, but that isn’t the way the world works. Books—you need an agent, you’ve got—” And I’m like, “Well, let me just see. I don’t know. I don’t know.” So what I did was still using, actually, no, I had a computer. It made it easier.
I just grabbed the 100 biggest publishers, being an idiot, and sent off a query letter to them saying what the book was going to be about. “And I’d love it if you would publish it.” And I still regret this. I kept all of the rejections. It was the funniest file ever because some of the people, the highfalutin publishers, I got a letter from one woman saying, “Obviously you do not know who we are. We are for serious literature.” And then she goes, “Please never contact me again.” But out of the hundred letters I got, 98 were rejections and 2 were “let’s talk.” And one of those two, the other one was Wiley, which was a big financial press at that time, but the other one was McGraw Hill, which was a really big name.
And so I flew, or actually I was living here. I went down to New York, had the meeting, they gave me a contract, I got a $5,000 advance and I felt like, “Wow. Wow. I just—” looking at the check, “How cool. And now I got to actually write it.” But so I owe so much to the traditional publishers, but that does not stop me from being able to say, “Listen, best practices from 1925 are—maybe you might want to update those a little bit.” And so that’s what drove me into starting the publishing company just because there are so many new tools. And you mentioned royalties. You can—we will make deals with authors where they get 70% of the royalties. Why?
Because technology allows us to do so many things that we don’t have this huge staff that we have to pay. And the economics. Why are we still letting the author whose work this is—why are we saying you should be thrilled with 15%? That’s absurd. That’s absurd to me. Now I want to hear your story.
Michael Perry: Well, first of all, two things. I love your letter about “don’t ever talk to us again.” I never got one quite that profound. But I didn’t keep my rejections. I had so many, I didn’t see any point. But one of my favorites was I had—I was writing a series of humorous stories about life in a small town and I made up the town. It was called Foggy Crossing. It wasn’t real. You could definitely recognize my neighbors, but it wasn’t real. But these light little humorous tales. And I—well, I’m not going to go off on that tangent that little endeavor has, is still paying off 30 years later.
But at the time I was pitching them to publishers as a collection of stories and I pitched to one small publisher and they sent me back a letter that said “Until you are the stature of someone like a Garrison Keillor, we won’t be interested.” And I remember even back then I was dead broke. And I remember even back then still going, “Listen, if I’m the stature of Garrison Keillor, I’m not going to be talking to you people.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The ships will never ever meet.
Michael Perry: “That would clarify the situation considerably.” But the reason I reacted so positively to the Writer’s Market reference is I quit my—I quit my job, my nursing job. I took a job for $6.25 an hour proofreading brochures. I had to take a proofreading test. I aced it. They said “We’ve never—we haven’t had anyone who’s done this.” I said, “I have a nursing degree.” I also remember when I—I told them they kept—I had to interview three times for the proofreading job. And on the third interview they brought in the vice president of the company and she said “We’re just baffled. You have a nursing degree. We know what they’re paying you over there at the hospital. What are you doing?” And I said, “I want to be a writer.” And I just—
I said, “I’m a young nurse, and I was working on neuro rehabilitation with traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, strokes, amputations, that sort of thing. I said, ‘I take that very seriously. And I’m not far enough into my nursing career where I can just go home and show up the next day and serve my patients well. I actually need to prep and spend time getting ready. So in order for me to write, I just need a job where I’ll do the best, I’ll do a good job, but I need to—when I punch out, I’ve then got until midnight to be a writer.’” And so finally, the last question the vice president asked is, she said, “Well, where do you see yourself in this company in five years?”
And I looked her in the eye and I said, “Well, I know what I’m supposed to say. I’m supposed to say, ‘I’m going to work really hard. I’m going to move up, and you’ll hopefully get a management position.’ And then—but I said, ‘But here’s the truth. I said, every day you see me walk in that door, you know I’m going to be here at least two more weeks. That’s how much notice I’ll give you.’” And that was my—I quit. I worked that job for, I think, a little over a year or maybe two years. And that 1992, that’s when I got my last paycheck. And so—but then where it kicks in is I didn’t—I had no idea how to be a writer. And I went—there’s a library 15 minutes from here. I went in there.
There was a giant, thick brick of a book called the Writer’s Market. It was filled with—where, in my case, magazine articles I was—and filled with submission guidelines, but in the front of the book. And this is the part that drives some of my MFA friends right into a bridge abutment. In the front of the book, there was a slim little section on how to be a writer. And I just said, “All right, then.” And I apologize if you got an MFA. But that’s how I—that’s how I did it. Yeah. Again, this I always feel like I’m covering, but some of my greatest mentors and dearest friends are MFA folks and teach and everything. So again, it’s—this is not a—we’re not casting aspersions on everybody, but there’s just many paths and—and that idea of not knowing any better.
It’s like, I think I may be referred to earlier. I think of it as kind of the reverse imposter syndrome. I don’t know enough to be—I’ve also said people say, “What’s your greatest attribute?” I go “Being too dumb to know when to quit.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: What did Babe Ruth say? That you just can never beat the guy who won’t give up.
Michael Perry: And then there’s also—there’s some of your audience, and maybe you will be familiar, there’s an evangelical finance guru, Dave Ramsey.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Dave Ramsey. Yep.
Michael Perry: And there was a time when I was out on book tours, I would listen to him a lot because, you know, eventually you come to understand Dave is in the Dave business. But from a very fundamental point of view, there are some things, if you listen to him for the first few months, that are helpful and basic. And I—and I had a brother who was helped very much by paying some attention to Dave. But that brother, who’s a farmer and a logger, he and I were standing together one day talking about how we both wound up working for ourselves, and we just, you know, we’re too stubborn to just take a regular path. And we said—we agreed that Dave Ramsey has many sayings, and one of them is, “Don’t try to outwork stupid.”
My brother and I look at each other and say, “That’s really all I got going for me. I do it every day so here—”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But—but—but, you know, there’s just so much truth. And I’m fascinated by the story about Oprah, because when—when I had the—I got paid a big advance for my only book that I wrote for the general public. All my other books were really written for fairly serious investors who already knew the basics and stuff. And this is in the late nineties when the stock market frenzy was just at full bore. I got a call from a guy who worked for me at my first asset management company, and he goes, “Jim, I thought of you. He was in Arkansas and on a sales call, and he goes, “I’m now officially panicking.” This is in 1999. I went, “Chris, what? Why?”
And he goes, “Jim, I’m in a McDonald’s in rural Arkansas, and the TV has CNBC on.” And I was like, “Oh, no.” It’s like the shoeshine boy with Kennedy. But anyway, so I get this huge advance, and I was kind of awful of myself, because I showed up in Page Six of the New York Post, and for those people who don’t know what Page Six is. It’s where they do all the little gossip and they tell stories about famous people in New York without naming them, but everyone knows who they are. And anyway, so I show up in the New York Post as getting the highest advance ever for a personal finance book. And so they made a big deal at the conference. You’ve been here, so you know exactly what I’m talking about.
I got front of catalog, I got the whole deal, I got the whole sales team behind me. They put me on a satellite tour where I literally spent the day in an office in New York doing morning radio. And you start on the east coast and then you go all the way out to California. And I don’t know about you, but answering the same damn question 29, 30 times in a couple hours gets a little boring. Anyway, so I got an opportunity to be on Oprah four months after the book had published. And mind you, the book had met their expectations. It was on the bestseller list, it was doing well. It was called “How to Retire Rich.” And anyway, they—Oprah people called and said, “You know, you want to come on?” And I’m like, “Yeah, now?”
I said, “Yeah,” without ever having seen an Oprah show. So this becomes important later in the story. But anyway, I say, “Yeah,” and my agent calls and he goes, “Well, they’re not gonna do it.” And I’m like, “Wes, slow down. What do you mean? They’re not gonna do what?” And he goes, “The minute you got confirmed for Oprah, I called the publisher, who shall remain nameless in this tale. It was not McGraw Hill, it was another publisher anyway, and said, ‘He’s gonna be on Oprah. You gotta print extra books. How many do you have left in the warehouse?’” And I think at the time they had something like, I don’t know, 15,000 copies left in the warehouse. They’re like, “You know, it’s done well, we don’t really want to do a reprint.”
And he’s like, “You know, he’s only got a five minute segment” and I’m like, “Wait, so they’re not gonna—” And he goes, “Nope.” And you know what happened? I spent my five minutes on Oprah and literally I was an Amazon junkie because it was so new back then. And I would just refresh. And it literally went to number one on Amazon and they sold out of the book. And I’m just like, “Oh, my God.” So I had a good experience with Oprah, but I’m really intrigued and I really think—by the way, it makes me think much more well, I thought highly of you before. It raises you in my esteem by the fact that you turned her down and you turned her down for, I think, very good reasons. But tell our listeners that story because I think it’s fascinating.
Michael Perry: Yeah, I was—I’ve been an EMT since 1988 and always have my kit with me. I’m a first responder now. It’s a slightly different certification. And I was driving up to northern Wisconsin to do some late night recording with some musician friends and very remote. And I came over a rise and there was a body in the roadway. And so I pulled over and blocked the roadway so that no one would hit the body. And then I went out and my headlights were on the body and I went out and it was someone who had been ejected from their car terribly, horribly injured, probably dying. But I had my stuff with me. So I gloved up and I did what I could. Very bloody scene. And eventually an ambulance came. Took a long time, but they took him away.
And then I just went on my way. I stopped at a gas station a mile or two up the road and washed my hands and noticed that a glove had broken and I had a little bit of blood on my finger. But I washed up and went on about my business. The next day a sheriff’s deputy contacted me and asked if I had been on the scene. And I said yes, and keep in mind, by the way, this is back in the mid-nineties. And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, did you have a blood exposure?” And I said, “Well, I actually did.” And it turned out the gentleman had indeed died, but also was HIV positive. Now, back in those days, there was just so much information, misinformation, disinformation, aspersions, negative connotation, you know, all this stuff.
And I just thought I was in my early days of writing essays and trying to place things in magazines and I thought, “You know, I should write about—” All of a sudden I wanted to learn a lot about HIV. And I also knew that I was going to be getting tested for the next couple of years. And even though I was very—I was actually quite comfortable with the idea that I would—I was fine. I had checked, I didn’t have any skin breaks or anything like that. But I will tell you, when you go to the desk at—back in those days, you had to go into the lab to get your results. When that woman approaches you know she’s going to say one of two things. And it’s pretty exciting.
And so I just thought, “Well, I should write a piece about—” Because right away, you know, I heard some jokes from some of my roughneck buddies and stuff and I thought, “You know, I can try to write a piece that conveys the idea that this is not just a big city problem. It’s just—it’s not just a cultural issue. It’s literally here. We need to know how to deal with it. It’s just with common sense and thoughtfulness.” So I wrote this essay about the accident and what I did and then about, you know, my little hope that we would all do the right thing. And it got published in Newsweek. And so at some point after that I got a call from Oprah. Not Oprah personally, but yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And they said, one of her many minions, what they do say is, “Oprah—”
Michael Perry: “Read your piece in Newsweek. And she loves it.” I don’t know if she did or not, but anyway—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I want to hear the rest, but I can confirm she doesn’t. I’ll tell you that part of the story afterwards.
Michael Perry: So, but they said, “We would love to have you on.” And I just remember I had self-published two books at that time. They were pretty bad, but they were necessary. That’s a whole other discussion, I learned in public. And I always say, “If you find one of those two books, please bring the book to me so I can be the one to burn it.” But yet it was a very essential step in the process. So at that time I had these two little self-published books. I’d written a few regional pieces. That was the only national piece I’d ever written. But I knew enough to know that this is huge. If you’re a writer and you can get on Oprah, that’s massive. And so I wanted desperately to be on.
But then the next thing the person said is, she said, “Oh great.” She said, “We’re doing a show about heroes.” And I just remember getting a sinking feeling in my gut because I had seen the Oprah show and I just said, “Well, this isn’t really about heroes. And I’m not comfortable saying—I just did what I’m trained to do.” And I—when you tell it, I know it sounds like some dumb self-deprecation, but it’s true. And they said, “Oh well, we want you to talk about heroism. And we think you’re—that’s the thing, we think you’re a hero.” And I just, I remember this turmoil, but I just said no I said, “If you want me to come on and talk about HIV and AIDS and trying to educate ourselves out here in the hinterlands, I’ll do that.”
And the short version of the story is that they just—well, they hung up. And I’m sure that three minutes later they had booked their hero.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
Michael Perry: And in the book “Improbable Mentors and Happy Tangents,” I talk about—I’m not here to say I made the right call. I think I did. But the point was, it was every writer’s dream is to get on Oprah, and I wanted to be a writer and be on Oprah. But I also knew that A, they weren’t going to talk about the things that we needed to talk about, and B, I wasn’t ready. It would have been like a first year dance student trying to go out on the Bolshoi or whatever. I just didn’t have the chops. And so in retrospect, it’s a fun story to tell. And I really, truly am the only writer I’ve ever met who said no to Oprah. But it’s just one of those cases.
Again, we always talk about first mover status, you know, and sometimes first mover status is absolutely critical. It’s the only thing that gets you there. And sometimes, and I write about this in the book too, as trained as an EMT and a firefighter, you have scene safety. You look at the scene before you go in because you don’t want to become a victim. So your buddies now got to take care of you too. And I tell a story about me going into a scene and finding myself in a very dangerous situation because I didn’t assess. So sometimes being the first mover is just the way to become the first dead one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The scene you referred to is there was actually somebody armed at the scene. And you didn’t know that?
Michael Perry: Yeah, a guy with a terrible head injury, unconscious. And I was dispatched to the call—the dispatch information, and this was not the dispatcher’s fault. The wife of the man said that he had fallen off a ladder in his garage. And so when I got there, I see him lying there unconscious. I went directly to him, started to administer care, and it was a very clean, neat garage. And I just remember all of a sudden she’s beside me, and all of a sudden I realized there’s no ladder. I said, “I thought he fell off a ladder.” And she said, “No, my son did this.” And I said, “Where is he?” “He’s in the house.” I said, “Is he armed?” And she said, “There’s guns in there.” Where I’m from, that’s really, you know, redundant.
I don’t know if I should tell this story, but—now, this has nothing to do with selling books or being smart or anything, but I have a brother who’s very much brilliant, can do anything. Jack of all trades, a sawyer, a pilot. He builds his own—built his own cabin. He loads his own ammunition. He can run every kind of heavy equipment, tear it apart, put it back together. But he is a believer in the Second Amendment. We were—he lives in a very remote area in a tiny little log cabin, and he and I are on the fire department together.
And one time we were working together on his place out there, and our pagers went off and they said they were dispatching us to stand by while what we call an ERT team or a SWAT team, basically was going to deal with a man holed up in his house with a gun. And my brother, who has this big beard and overalls, turns to me and goes, “I don’t see what the big deal is. That’s me every night.” People ask me where I get my material from. I’m like, “Mostly my brothers.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Now that you got that picture.
Michael Perry: When I talk about just being so happy to do what I do, that’s my life. I mean, I’m hanging out with my brothers, you know, going deer hunting and talking, you know, and having him say things like that. And then a week later, I’m at Soho House in West Hollywood, and, boy, everybody there. I said, I went to Soho House for a meeting one time with some film people. And I wish I could quote myself directly, but I’m not that egotistical. But I said something along the lines of how it felt to be there. And it’s always that balance of, as we’ve been talking about, being grateful for what these folks are doing, but also being able to just go, you know, “The emperor has no hors d’oeuvres.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Hors d’oeuvres.
Michael Perry: I was in Soho House, West Hollywood, and I said, “The food, you know, the hors d’oeuvres were good, the chairs were soft, the view was incredible. But the general vibe was like a nervous breakdown in a razor factory.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Everybody was just—oh, you’ve been there, too?
Michael Perry: Yeah. And I was—and I’m there going, “I don’t know, I’m gonna go back and bail hay with my dad, but I will have one of those gherkins.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, you know, that’s the other thing. I believe that people who—first responders like you, special forces, emergency room docs or nurses, EMTs, you are as a group of people fascinate me. Because the wisdom that I have found by talking to those people—I was out in California and there was a whole group of firefighters there who were, this is years ago, but they were fighting those big forest fires and they were really close to us. And I’m also unlike you, I score 100 on the extroversion. It drives my wife crazy because she doesn’t and I’ll walk up to anybody. And we were in Miami once and there was this very rough looking guy as a bouncer. He was a biker, he had the cut on and he had the chain and he was vaping.
And this was just as vaping had come into popularity. And so I start, and my wife is like, “Don’t go over there, don’t go over there.” And of course one of the salt of the earth guy had a great conversation with him. “Why are you vaping?” “Because my old lady threw me out with the cigarettes.” And I needed to do it. But I ended up having this great conversation with him and I went over to the firefighters and I’m like, “I heard you. Can I listen in and ask you questions?” And they’re like, “Yeah, sure.” And I gotta tell you, I learned more in that 30 minute period about the real problems facing California from those guys. Then I could have been talking to governor after governor who would have just BS’d me.
And these guys were just so authentic, so real because they’re the ones on the scene. And one of the things that I find is the reason I have such great admiration for people like you who do that is you can’t be around with all of the nervous energy and razor because you are literally facing life and death. And so reality comes at you real fast and you learn to be very pragmatic.
Michael Perry: It plays a big role in both keeping you grounded and gratitude and also sparing you that desperation. The nervous breakdown in the razor factory where everybody’s maneuvering and “I got to get this gig and I got to get this deal.” And I would, don’t get me wrong, I’d like the deal, you know, sure. But I just finished an essay that I don’t know if it’ll find a home. It’s shopping around a little bit. But it’s called “Bailing in America.” And I do write about—I wrote about I was bailing hay with or bailing straw with my dad, who’s 84, just lost his wife of over 60 years, and I’m on the wagon, just kind of watching him up there in the tractor. But I’m also fresh out of LA and had a wonderful—again, I keep saying this, I love it.
I’m so happy to be out there and I love Ubering off to Universal Studios and tilting at windmills. But one of the things that EMS and fire has done for me and the reason I—and by the way, I want to make it clear, I make maybe 10 to 15 calls a year at this point. I’m gone so much and—but I live in an area where they just need anyone they can get. But it just never lets you lose your sense of mortality. And I don’t walk around filled with darkness or impending doom all the time. I am a Midwestern Scandinavian. I’m a depressive optimist. Things really just keep going. But in all seriousness, just knowing that literally, I don’t know if I’m going to make—I’m in a little room above my garage out here.
And the house is across the yard and the back 40’s out there. I don’t know that I’m going to make it back to the house today. And that’s not drama, that’s just a fact. And when I was in LA this last time, in the 24 hours, the 48 hours, let’s say, before I went to LA, where everyone was desperate and I was involved in a deal that went south and just watching people filet each other. And in the 48 hours preceding that meeting, I made three calls. One to a suicide attempt, one to a car accident, and one to a farmer who was short of breath and all within two miles of where I live here. And I know that one day it’ll be me.
And so when I’m in that meeting room and everybody’s maneuvering, or if I’m in Soho House and everybody’s checking out, “Who just walked in and what do I got to do?” I just go, “I don’t know, folks.” And again, I say in—oh, it was in the essay. I’ve written so much stuff, I forget where it all is. But in the essay, I said, you know, “I’ve—there’s no question, I also have lost ground in certain places or not gotten things because I don’t have what I call that gimlet-eyed drive where you’re just like, ‘I’m gonna do whatever it takes.’ Sometimes I go, ‘I’m not gonna do that.’”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I definitely think though that the special nature of not only the work that’s being done, but the people who are drawn to doing that work.
Michael Perry: Yeah. And the other thing that—oh, I’m sorry.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, no, please.
Michael Perry: The other thing I thought of just now too. It isn’t just the mortality either. The thing with me is, and as a guy who works as a cowboy and grew up on a farm and everything, I have watched the toughest, baddest dude in town weep in pain. I have watched the guy who was mean to everybody tremble like a little baby. And that’s not to make fun of him, that’s just to say I never forget that could be me at any minute. I don’t care how tough you are. And so again, that’s kind of that almost sort of a psychological pragmatism, if you will, that you’re just saying, you know, “I’m gonna put my stuff out there and I’m going to charge ahead fully aware that could all end in tears.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I mean, I think that’s the thing, right? Because I was that gimlet-eyed guy and I was the—I’m going to use this book, I’m going to use media, I’m going to do all of this stuff and yet back to Oprah. So to close that loop. So I’m literally there. Colin Powell is in the green room with me. I’m feeling like, “Man, I am—I’ve made it.” And so then it was still being shot live then. And so they take you between the green room and the studio. They have blackout hallways and I mean blackout. So most of Oprah’s at the time producers were women. And so it’s me surrounded by all these women. I can’t see anything and I feel all of these pulling on my suit jacket and everything.
And it’s the producers and one of them is saying, “I’m sure you’re going to do really great, but don’t—don’t say anything too technical.” And I’m like, “Oh, can you give me an example?” And she’s like, “Don’t say things like PE ratio or Dow Jones Industrial Average.” And I’m like, “Oh damn.” And she’s saying this to me seconds before pushing me out there. And so I have under a minute between the women taking me by both arms to—and there’s Oprah sitting there holding my book. And Mike, I can tell you by looking at her face, it’s the first time she’s ever seen that book. And I’m like, “Okay.” And then she goes, “You gotta think, you gotta come up with a phrase that—” Because Oprah loves certain types of phrases, but you got to come up with something.
And I’m like, “Well, I’m screwed. I’m screwed. I’m a wonky Wall Street guy. And now I’m on the big show and I’m gonna totally blow it.” And then suddenly it hits me: “If you can change your focus, you can change your future.” And I sat down next to her, Oprah, and she’s looking at the book, and she’s like, “Nice to meet John—” And I’m like, “I know. I’m like, Jim.” And so she—I wish I had the book here. I’ll just use this one as a prop. She’s looking at it like this, kind of dismissively, frankly. And she’s like, “So what’s this book all about?” And I dropped the phrase on her, Mike. Her entire face changes and the cameras come on, and she’s like, “My next guest—” And she would—she’d read the book eight times. “That’s brilliant.” And that’s—
Michael Perry: Oh, go ahead.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Just the follow-up is again, not naming names, kind of like you. I got approached by a bunch of people who were professional packagers. And I spent a day with this guy about how I could be the next—whoever the big guy was back then, Dave Ramsey or whatever, Suze Orman. And literally my wife was sitting in with me and he’s throwing around big numbers. And “You know, we heard from Oprah’s producers that you really—she liked you, she’d be willing to have you on the show as the financial expert.” And all this. And at the end of it, I just looked at him and said, “Well, you know, we’ll think about it.” And as we’re walking out, I turn to my wife and I said, “Do you know what I’m going to say to you?”
And she goes, “Yes, you are going to say to me that would be your personal hell, that you would never, ever do that.” And I went, “Yes, we do know each other very well.” So I admire the fact that you were that one writer that said no and you said no for the right reasons.
Michael Perry: Yeah, I think I said no for the right ethical reason. And I also said no for the right pragmatic reason. I just wasn’t ready. Quick anecdote about people not reading your books. I’ve only ever missed, as far as I know, one interview on book tour ever. And it was in Omaha, Nebraska, because I can see the hotel room and what it looked like when I awoke at 7:55 AM and realized I was supposed to be in a TV studio at 8 AM out of Omaha. And I turned on the TV and found the channel. I called immediately and just said, “I’m just horrified. I don’t know what happened. I’m not going to make it.”
And it was one of those shows where the very happy, chirpy morning host lady talks to the librarian about the book of the week and they have the author on—it would have been perfect. And as you know, you learn early on, you just take over. And so unfortunately, it was just them. And they had “Population 485,” which is, you know, a lovely book, but there’s a whole chapter in there called “Death.” There’s scenes of accidents and fires and infernos and everything. And neither of them, of course, had read the book. And they said, “Well, this is our book for today. The author is unable to make it. It’s called ‘Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time.’” And then the librarian said something over there.
And then the chirpy morning lady leaned over and said, “Well, I see it’s about firefighters. So I bet it’s a book that kids would really enjoy.” And I remember sitting still in bed because I haven’t even gotten up. “Why bother?” thinking, “You know, dude, this is your own fault. You got no one to blame but yourself.” So somewhere out there, a couple of—
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Kids, there’s a couple of kids who are just traumatized beyond all belief. You know the—again, what is fun for me? I read a lot of your stuff, I did a lot of research, but that led me to think, “You know what, let’s just go down a bunch of different tangents.” But now I’m going to actually ask you a question that I actually prepared before our chat. And it’s, have you ever—I love your idea about mentors. And they’re not always—the best mentor is often not the person you think is the best mentor. It’s often you know, the guy who’s got real or woman who’s got real domain knowledge and what you’re seeking. But just to share a couple of stories, because some of them—and I think I know which ones you’re going to share, but I’m not quite sure about the best mentor that was completely accidental and yet taught you an amazing thing for your life.
Michael Perry: Yeah, I mean, several come to mind right away. The first one, quickly, is my neighbor Tom. I wrote a book called “Visiting Tom” which was about—he’s just a jack of all trades, can make anything. He’s a genius. He’s an autodidact, makes his own cannons and shoots them. And we’re not talking—we’re not talking lawn ornament cannons, okay? The one, the barrel weighs 300 pounds. He ran out of cannonballs. So he fills 20 more beef stew cans with concrete and shoots those. But anyway, in the process of writing that book, I spent an entire better part of two years with him on a very close basis. And he talked about his disappointments, his triumphs. His childhood farm was cut in half by an interstate that goes literally past his window or his living room.
And so I just had spent two years really getting to know this guy. And he’s a crotchety old fellow. And the final day, we’re going through all the—the final draft, last chance to correct errors, let me know if I made a mistake. And last page is flipped over. And I look at him and it strikes me that we’re neighbors, we’re going to see each other, but this may be the last time that we’re truly going to be working together in this particular realm. And so I just looked at him and I said, “Tom, all this—” I gestured at the manuscript, I said, “All this living all this life, all these lessons, all these victories, all these failures. Do you have any regrets?” And he looked me right in the eye and he said, “Yep.” And that was it. And then I realized, “Yeah, he does. And he’s not about to tell you about them.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So the—
Michael Perry: The point I made with that little chapter is that, you know, you can’t necessarily seek wisdom. You can’t seek a mentor. It’s like pushing a rope. It’s just gonna knot up and trip you. You just got to put yourself in their presence. And of course, he had taught me plenty already. One of the—I think of my nursing instructors. But when I was in nursing school, I had, you know, I said I was a voracious reader. I grew up, I read piles and piles of books. I was reading—well, mostly, my dad would tell you, mostly Louis L’Amour cowboy books. He said he lost—at one point, my dad said “I lost more man hours to Louis L’Amour cowboy books than to pickup trucks, girls and football combined.”
But I also read, you know, I was reading the Bible because of our church, and I was reading—I read “All Quiet on the Western Front” in third grade and “Gone with the Wind” in fourth grade and I remember getting in trouble for reading—sneak reading “Serpico” in fifth grade when I was supposed to be doing math or something.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh my God, I read that too when I was around that—oh my God, we really are almost related.
Michael Perry: So as much as I read all these books, to me growing up a poor farm kid in rural Wisconsin, and when I say poor, I have to rush to point out by technically below the poverty line. But went to—every night when I went to bed. I never went to bed hungry. And I always knew I was loved so the two greatest privileges in the world. But it just never occurred to me that I could be a writer. To me, authors were capital A people and they were from distant places and mysterious places. So I was well into nursing school. I had by that time figured out that I enjoyed writing, but I hadn’t—I hadn’t even begun to conceive of it as a career. I was studying nursing, and nursing was—they taught us human assessment, holistic human assessment.
In other words, you, yes, you check out the abdominal pain, but you don’t get tunnel vision. Yes, you get the vital signs, the blood pressure, but you don’t just look at that. You look at the whole person. You ask questions. You know, socioeconomic situation, emotional situation, family situation. All of these things come into play before you make a nursing assessment. And the line that I finally have come up with is that when I went to start writing, I found out that all these skills were directly applicable because nursing is human assessment and it’s predicated on human assessment. And what is writing but human assessment? And then on a much more practical level, the little anecdote I share is that I’ve mentioned I’m very shy. I don’t—I’ve learned to function in public. I love performing, but that’s different.
But one of the things that’s really hard for me is cold calling or—and you have to do it all the time, especially back when I was doing magazine work. And I always say that I’ll pick up the phone and put it down 12 times before I call somebody. But what nursing did for me is it taught me to go into a tiny little room with a complete stranger, ask them to take all their clothes off, and within 30 seconds, ask them when’s the last time they pooped. And so whenever I would find myself going to have to interview whether it was a country music star or a CEO or even just the guy down the road, and I didn’t want to, and I would just go into nurse mode, I’m like, “No, you’re just here as a pro. Ask your questions and get on with it.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love that. And also you—you ask great questions, too. Because I love the story about how when you were traveling with the country music folks, everyone asked them the same question. Always the boilerplate. You and I both, as authors, we know we could recite ahead of time what we’re going to get asked. And so you develop your kind of stock answer. But then you started getting great stories when you said, “Hey, tell me about the bus driver.”
Michael Perry: I love that I was the freelance guy. So I was last in line to interview all these country music stars. And the only reason I was even there, I also tell in the book that I got a call out of the blue one day from an editor in Nashville who said, “Are you the guy who writes about country music?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” I wasn’t, but I was now. And that led to this assignment where I would go to these country music festivals, and my job was just to get the little 300-word summary thing. And I, because I was the freelancer, I was last in line behind the radio people, the TV people, the big glossy magazine people.
And so I quickly learned they all asked the same four questions, they got the same four answers, and they printed the same stuff. And I, too had to ask those questions because that’s what my publication wanted. But thinking back to my grandpa who said, you know, “There’s ways to do this stuff,” I was honored. I honored what I was supposed to do. I asked the four questions I already knew the answer to. But then I also knew I’m never going to have this person again. So then, yeah, at the end, I just started saying, “Tell me about your bus driver.” Well, in country music, bus drivers are—they have their legends in their own right?
And of course, I would get people who couldn’t wait to get out of the press tent who then were talking to me an hour later. Vince Gill is the one I always remember that an hour later, 10:30 at night, he just wants to go get on the bus. And he’s still telling me bus driver stories. So, yes, it’s often the question no one is asking. And I have to give a little shout out to a guy named Andy Andrews who helped me come up with that idea too. He’s written about that himself. We were trapped on a boat once and talking about the people who had influenced us before we realized they were influencing us, and that led to this book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. So what’s a question you never get asked that you should be asked?
Michael Perry: Oh, man, you stumped me right up. This is only my second question and I’m already—what—what is writing really about? I think I would say, and what is—what writing is really about is not what you thought it was. One of the most heartbreaking things for me is I meet people every day who want to be writers. I mean, one of the sweet ironies of nobody reading and AI is that more people than ever are writing books. And I meet people every day that say “I’m a published author.” And I just smile and say yes, because they are. But then they’ll start asking me questions, and I realize that they are asking me questions about an industry that ceased to exist 40 years ago. And even I have had to navigate that.
You know, my first book with HarperCollins came out in 2002. And I remember that right around then there was this little company, Amazon, and we were also—everyone was very angry at Borders and Barnes & Noble because they were going to kill publishing. It’s like, “Well, let’s check out over here. That one came out of nowhere.” But people—and don’t get me wrong, in that same—that essay that I keep referring to, I wrote about wishing that I had been—that I had my own moveable feast. I too wish that I could just go hang out in Paris and write. I too, wish I could be down in Key West in the early seventies. And—but it changed. And so, yeah, I think if people would ask, “What’s it really about?”
Because the one thing I see over and over, I get approached at my events and people say, “I’ve got this great idea for a novel.” And I say, “Well, you should write it.” “No, no.” So—so the deal is you should write it. And they don’t want to hear that. They want—what they want is to say, “Well, here’s the number of my agent and here’s the publisher. And by the way, as long as we’re at it let’s just get your direct deposit information.”
I think the thing, it’s probably not my best answer, but it’s one I came up with is just the reality of what you’re doing. And that circles back to—I talk a lot about being—I call myself a self-employed writer because that’s what I am. And I’m willing to talk about promotion. I’m willing to talk about—I have a 2002 Toyota that I load up with a bunch of book boxes and some T-shirt tubs. And I got a guy named Tony who’s my merch dude and he comes with me and we do gigs in places like Gilman, Wisconsin. And you know what? I make a good living at it because again, back to “Do you want cash or do you want cachet?” And I’m ready to play Carnegie Hall at this point. I really could, but it’s probably not going to happen.
And so in the meantime, Duluth is good too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, up by that Lake Superior up there. Yeah.
Michael Perry: Duluth is actually an under-the-radar, pretty hip place.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I’ve been several times. No fun in the winter though. Oh my God. I remember I used to joke when people would ask me about Minnesota. I used to say, “You remember the old USSR?” And they’d go “Yeah.” And I’d say “Well if we were the USSR, that’s where they would send you.”
Michael Perry: Yeah.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Because literally I remember waiting for the school bus in a full Arctic Cat snowmobile suit with the full face mask and the goggles so the liquid in my eyes would not freeze.
Michael Perry: Yes, we had snowmobile suits. We didn’t even have a snowmobile but we had snowmobile suits. That tells you how prominent—when I had the Ski-Doo patch myself.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes, I had Arctic Cat. I had Arctic Cat.
Michael Perry: The thing about the just being pragmatic and businesslike is that the thing I tell—I just had this conversation with a younger person this week who wants to be an artist but is very troubled by capitalism and very troubled by self-promotion. And I just explained that in my case if I take care of the business, I just am buying myself more time to make art. And furthermore I’m not having to spend my time asking someone to help me do art. And again, one has to acknowledge all kinds of levels of privilege here and time and timing. I was able to break in, you know, even though things have changed. When I broke in, I got lucky and—but honestly I, you know, when I get up in the morning, I think people—oh yeah, you said “What is writing really like here?”
It is for me. I get up in the morning, I come to this little room above the garage which is filled with lots of tchotchkes and things on the wall that are inspiring to me or evoke memories and I have my writing desk and I make—I grind some beans and I make a wonderful cup of coffee and I sit down at my keyboard and I do QuickBooks and I hate QuickBooks, but I gotta do QuickBooks so that then the rest of the day I can do—I can be a writer and I could be an artist and I could—and—but my sales tax got paid so that I don’t have to talk to the dadgum government.
So yeah, it’s that I think if I could just tell them it’s that so much has changed and that even bold-faced authors are having to reckon. And it isn’t just folks like me, you know, an unknown Midwestern mid-lister, it’s—it’s changed so much and so we’re back again to pragmatism. You can—you can be up—I’ve watched so many of—and I didn’t write about this in the book because this is the downside, but so many of my—I did write about it in the Montaigne book, I think, but so many of my trusted, precious mentors in general life, just my elders and the people that raised me, I watched so many of them become bitter and brittle and it’s not—and when I say brittle, it’s not about giving away your morals or your ethics, but it’s just navigation.
We’re back to that. Just that idea that you know things are going to change and so don’t be bitter and don’t be brittle. You can be disappointed for 20 minutes but then you just get back to it and find the new path. I think is kind of the key. I don’t know.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I know. I think that’s maybe the best advice ever. I’m a huge fan of the Tao Te Ching written by Laozi. And that’s one of the chapters. That which is brittle breaks when—when an old tree, the snow piles up on that limb, what happens? It breaks and it dies. What happens when the snow piles up on a young reed, it bends, it doesn’t break. And you’ve got to learn, especially as you’re getting older, you’ve got to bend. You know, life—life is a verb, it’s not a noun. And if you are like, “No. Did you know that in my—you know, in my day.” You never want to be that guy. “In my day, I had to go and actually get a book and type on a typewriter 100 letters, and you’re whining about not—you know, you—they didn’t pick you up immediately.” But see, it is, it’s just kind of the way of things, isn’t it? If you don’t constantly understand and remember, “No, no, I gotta bend. I’ve gotta bend because I’ll break otherwise.”
Michael Perry: I think also, I already said I don’t have—I have terrible retention, so I can’t cite names and dates and things like that. But one of the things that really helped me during the pandemic, and by the way, that’s what really triggered my new self-publishing, everything shut down. And half, you know, half of our income came from my live performances. And so I just—I had a bunch of newspaper columns that I’d been writing for ten and a half years, and I said to my manager, I said, “Well, time to break out the print and press.” And it really got us through. But during the pandemic and all the other things that are going on in our country, in our world, I read two giant biographies of Voltaire.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: One of my heroes. Oh.
Michael Perry: And what was so helpful, apart from just him speaking of navigating—he navigated, lent money to people on both sides. Brilliant. But one of the other big picture things, and this is a completely unoriginal observation, but I need this reminder. I just remember reading those biographies, and as they’re talking about France in the 1700s, you’re just going, “Check, check.” Even AI I was—someone was very upset about AI the other day. And I said, “If you read about what was going on in France, Voltaire would write a book and then seven different people would steal it.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Absolutely.
Michael Perry: He never said—and they would sell it. So not only were they defaming him or setting him up to be defamed, they were selling his work and there was no control over it. And so am I happy about the digital equivalent of that? Of course not. Is it new and can I please—what? Is it special pleading or whatever?
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No. Yeah, special pleading. Yeah. No, it’s not new at all. It’s—
Michael Perry: It’s here again. Yeah. Yes. He was something else, that guy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, I love that guy so much. You know, “Candide,” I always say, I always call myself a rational optimist because I’m always seeing Pangloss. Dr. Pangloss from “Candide” and you know, his—Panglossian. “No, no, no.” As everything is burning around him.
Michael Perry: “This is fine.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: “This is fine. This is fine. In fact, it’s better than fine. This is the best of all possible worlds.” Yes. But, you know, when you—I’ve read that book so many times, and I had an insight the last time I read it, and I’m like, “You know, there is something to Pangloss’s attitude.” As when you read it when you’re a kid, you’re like, “God, this guy is an idiot. This guy is just such a—” And then as you get older, you’re kind of like, “There’s probably a little bit of wisdom in that outlook.”
Michael Perry: Yeah, you just have—there has to be titration, I think, in all things. Yes. My brothers and I—our father, we love and respect him dearly, but we’ve, you know, he is our father, and we’ve lived long enough that we’ve noticed certain tics and traits. And I mentioned earlier, he is a man of great humility and charity. But one of the things that my brothers and I joke about is whoever you mention, my dad will say, “Oh, he’s a pretty good guy.” And my brothers and I, when we finally got to the age where we go, “No, he’s not. That’s a bad man, dad.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, isn’t it—wasn’t it—wasn’t it Montaigne? I might be getting my citation wrong, but wasn’t it Montaigne who said, “Wisdom is knowing what to overlook”?
Michael Perry: Let’s just say it was him.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. For—I have a guest, Alex Danco, who’s been on the podcast ten times, and we always have—he’s really a bright young guy. And so we never plan at all. At all. And I really mean that. So it’s just raw. And so the current joke is we’re just here training the AI models of 2125. So we did the last show we did. We—that’s what we did. It was just like, “So AI in 2125. This is true. We saw it with our own eyes,” and then we just burst out laughing.
Michael Perry: Yeah, you’re telling AI, “Check out this. What are you going to do with this?”
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, well, Mike, this has been even more fun than I was expecting it to be. We end every show making you the emperor of the world just for a day. You can’t kill anyone, you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that it’s going to incept the entire eight plus billion people on Earth.
They’re going to wake up whenever their next morning is and they’re going to say, “You know what? I’ve just had two of the best ideas in the world. But unlike all the other times, I’m actually going to act on these two.” What two things are you going to incept in the world’s population?
Michael Perry: I’m going to do two. I’m going to do a serious one and I’m going to do a ridiculous one. The serious one is if there was one thing that I could convey to the world, it is that kindness is not weakness. That’s it. Empathy. I just wish there was more and I wish that it wasn’t seen as weakness. And I see it all the time, just bravado is a poor substitute for kindness and empathy. Now for something completely different, and only because you’re from the Midwest. I grew up on a farm, and this phrase, I think, based on album sales, has paid for half my house and half my daughter’s braces. If I could impart one bit of wisdom, hard earned, hard won, from this farm kid from rural Wisconsin, it is this: Never stand behind a sneezing cow.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I can attest that you are correct.
Michael Perry: If you’re not familiar with this situation. Cows are big animals and they’re tall, and if you’re standing behind them and they sneeze, they projectile something out of their backside. It’s not milk. The way that I explain it to my city friends is basically, it’s a situation involving several of the properties of physics, including contents under pressure, ballistics, and the path of least resistance, and of course, inertia. Although in this case you might refer to it as “inertia.” I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, Jim, but it has happened to me and I can tell you it is a jaw-dropping experience.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Personally, it has never happened to me, but I’ve heard about friends it did happen to.
Michael Perry: It is a jaw-dropping experience. Although that would not be your best move.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: No, Mike, this has been absolutely a pleasure. But really, this was so much fun, I can’t tell you.
Michael Perry: I know you were trying to wrap. I just have to quickly say two things. Number one, I mentioned at one point that someone had helped me by the first time I ever got a thousand dollars. They helped me invest it. Over the years. One of my amateur hobbies is to listen to finance people and finance podcasts and I’ve learned by osmosis. And I’m not a genius in that regard, but it has been a fundamental help to me and my family. And you and your son are two of the people that I have listened to over the years, long before there was any idea of any podcast. And then secondly, I work out a couple of times a week in my unheated granary out back here with some rusty old weights. It’s a killer health club.
But many is the time that I’ve been sweating out there or seeing my breath out there and listening to your podcast. So it’s just been a thrill to be on with you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, I’m really honored to hear that. Thank you so much, Mike. And I’ll have you on again because we didn’t get to any of my questions.
Michael Perry: Excellent.
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I can’t wait. Thanks, Mike. Cheers. Bye-bye.
