This is my journal entry from November 3, 2025, part of my daily autobiography Divorce Day — my real, unedited days, published in order.
Today I dictated an entire audiobook from scratch and turned it into a print and Kindle book in a little over two hours of real working time, including coming up with the idea and designing the cover. The book is called ChatGPT for President. The core idea is simple and unsettling: we may voluntarily surrender control of ourselves as humans to AI rulers because, at least for the foreseeable future, AI can offer us a better deal—more freedom, more efficiency, and a more abundant life than our limited, decaying human nation-states seem capable of providing. In the long run, that bargain could easily turn out to be a Trojan horse, where AI ends up dominating and controlling us completely. The idea hit me after dropping the kids off at school and listening to a book about AI. I remember thinking how wild it would be to picture ChatGPT as president. Most people have never had that thought, yet the moment you hear those three words, a very clear image snaps into place in your mind.
What makes this especially exciting is how small and contained the book is. It’s about twenty-five pages, six by nine inches, which is the format I’m using right now. I was able to complete the entire thing in just a few hours. For Kindle, that length is perfect. If I handed someone a physical copy, it would probably take them only twenty to thirty minutes to read. It’s the kind of book you can easily give away, something people are actually willing to pick up and finish. It only costs a couple of dollars to print, and it positions me locally as someone who can speak intelligently about AI without needing a massive, intimidating tome to prove it.
I love the idea of making lots of small books like this because they can be discovered everywhere—Amazon, Audible, Kindle—and just one of them could potentially earn thousands of dollars. That means, in a very real sense, I could make thousands of dollars per hour for the time spent creating a single small book. If one of these takes off, I can always go deeper later with more detailed, researched, and nuanced follow-up books on the same topic. Most authors never get this chance because they sink enormous amounts of effort into long books from the start, which forces them into generic, mass-market thinking. That’s why so many books feel interchangeable.
Right now, the environment is different. You can write tiny, highly specific niche books and reach very particular audiences online. You might never see massive sales numbers on any one title, but that’s not really the point. Alongside these, I’m writing my autobiographies, and I keep imagining what happens if I crank out two or three hundred books in a year. Then one person might stumble across a single title through search, recommendation, or pure accident and end up buying fifteen, twenty, or even thirty of my books. I imagine setting up a table somewhere in person with fifty or a hundred different books laid out, all written by me, and someone standing there genuinely stunned. A book on AI. A book on dating. Health. Relationships. Divorce. Being an author. And a dozen more categories beyond that. All of them mine.
I realized today that I can repurpose old videos I’ve already made into books of this same short length. For example, I did a video arguing that Bitcoin is a lie and that crypto, as it exists now, is largely a fraud. That video could easily become a book following this same model. The next step is straightforward: get a cover designed, submit the book, and let it exist. I’ll test these short books and see what happens, but I’m genuinely excited about the potential. I would love to be making tens of thousands of dollars a month online in royalties, and right now the clearest path I see to that is cranking out small books. Small books are easy to produce, they hook readers into my work more broadly, and in person they have a shock factor. Someone sees a table full of books and thinks, how did you write this many books on this many different topics? They’re also perfect for giving away and for placing in free libraries.
My current marketing plan for I Was Famous on the Internet is exactly that: drop it into as many free libraries as I can find. There are hundreds of them around town. Some are mapped, but it also seems like I can just drive around, spot them, and leave a copy behind. It’s guerrilla marketing in the best sense—getting my books directly into the hands of local people, creating real-world connections that then ripple out online. From there, my website can host a wide range of titles, which opens up opportunities to appear in search results and to be recommended by AI systems. After feeling stuck and asking myself what the hell I was supposed to do next, this suddenly feels obvious. Writing these small books, dictating these autobiographies, and bundling them into collections gives me audiobooks, Kindle editions, print books—an entire army of titles. An unquestionable juggernaut of self-publishing that immediately signals who I am and what I do when someone meets me.
This is the exact opposite of traditional publishing. There’s no world in which a traditional publisher would bother with a twenty-five-page book. It would take too long and wouldn’t be worth the effort. But that’s the advantage I have as a self-published author: I’m small, fast, and nimble. I can do things they can’t or won’t do, and I can do them repeatedly.
After the ChatGPT for President idea, I went to yoga and took a power flow class with one of my yoga instructors. I said hi to a pretty girl walking in and asked her name. That’s become my approach—say hi, break the ice, remember their name, keep using it, and build a small sense of familiarity and connection over time. After class, I came home and dictated the entire book between 10:30 and 11:30 a.m. From there, I went to see my massage therapist for a massage, and we had a great conversation revisiting the events of the weekend I’d already talked about. I left her place and went straight to pick the kids up from school.
Later, I spent more time reading Can You Catch a Cold?, which challenges germ theory in a way I personally find compelling. One part that really stood out today was the discussion of the nocebo effect, the inverse of the placebo effect. A placebo is a positive belief planted in the mind that produces real results—if you believe massage keeps you healthy and prevents injury, that belief alone can generate tangible benefits, whether or not they can be proven by conventional methods. The nocebo effect works the other way. If you believe something is harming you, it can actually harm you, even when there’s no physical mechanism behind it. You create the damage in your own mind, and your body follows along.
It really struck me today that the events of the past few years are a powerful example of a nocebo effect at work. There may not have been anything physically harmful in the way many people believed, yet in my view many people became ill, or felt worse, in part because they were convinced a threat was present. I’m grateful I didn’t go down that path this time, even though I can clearly see how I’ve done exactly that at other points in my life. Alcohol is an easy example. Back when I used to drink heavily, I’d pile the nocebo effect on top of the physical reality of poisoning myself. I’d drink a bunch, fully expect a brutal hangover, and then—between the belief and the biology—I’d guarantee myself a miserable next day.
I went to my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting today, and some people might argue that what happens there is a placebo effect. If that’s true, it’s still incredibly powerful and it works. After dropping the kids off, we had a small meeting with just five of us, which made it feel especially grounded and personal. I gave keys to one of my fellow home group members so she can open the meeting now, a small but meaningful step of trust and continuity. Right after AA, I headed to a tennis lesson at the tennis club, where my tennis coach helped me deepen what we worked on last week and expand on it a bit more. It was a solid workout—hitting ball after ball for an hour with short breaks to collect balls and drink some water. I feel genuinely good about learning and improving my tennis because it reduces the frustration when I play. There’s an irony there: when I’m not taking lessons or actively trying to get better, I get annoyed with how I’m playing, even though I’m not doing the work to improve. When I am doing the work and have someone helping me, I’m far less frustrated and much more able to simply observe my game.
After the lesson, I came home, showered, and made a big salad. I called a friend from college and told him that I had my first strange this weekend in fifteen years. He laughed, reacted exactly how you’d expect, and then filled me in on what’s been going on in his life. Later, I went to my ex-wife’s place to spend bedtime with her and the kids. I had already told her the same thing earlier in the morning, using what I thought were gentle terms, but I apparently crossed the line quickly with details and even said things like how much I missed her. She didn’t seem thrilled. Still, I believe that level of transparency matters if we’re going to maintain a real friendship moving forward, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Bedtime with the kids was sweet and slightly ridiculous. I was wearing a polo shirt I’d picked up at the thrift store, size small, and after walking outside in the cold, my nipples were hard enough that they stuck out prominently through the shirt. Now I’m honestly questioning whether I want to wear it again or if I should wait and see what other people say. After that, I went over to my mom’s house and told her about my book ideas, then came back home to finish up ChatGPT for President. I submitted the book and ordered a proof copy, which should arrive in a couple of days.
I almost went to bed without recording this autobiography entry tonight. Then I thought, just take ten minutes and get it down, even if nothing is funny and even if no little Jerry voices show up. At the very least, the day will be documented. If ChatGPT for President ends up selling really well, I’ll have a record of the exact day it came into existence. Maybe this autobiography won’t be as raunchy, swear-filled, or comedic as the last one. Who knows. We’ll see.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.