EP22: AI Puts Words on a Page. Humans Put Hearts on It. Joanna Hunt on Why Writing Is Still the Fastest Way to Change Your Life

Joanna Hunt spent twenty years as a ghostwriter for New York Times bestselling authors and household names, which means she has spent two decades being very good at something while nobody knew her name. Then in 2019 a coach refused to leave her alone about becoming a book coach — Joanna kept saying no — and she finally ran one group to make her go away. She fell in love with it and never went back. She now runs Silversmith Press, and when people ask what she does, she sometimes answers: I make people cry. Not because the work is hard, but because of what happens when someone realizes their voice matters and watches a dream they've been carrying for fifteen years turn into something they can hold. This episode starts as a conversation about writing books. It does not stay there. Want to write yours? Book a discovery session with Joanna at https://silversmithpress.com The first stretch is pure craft and strategy, and it's full of things most authors learn the expensive way. The story of The Cellulite Myth — an unknown author, a topic almost nobody had heard of, and Joanna telling a skeptical publisher that theirs would be the book to watch. They built a 350,000-woman community and launched number one in the country in trade paperback. They hit number one on every list that existed except the New York Times, which is where Joanna learned something about how that particular list actually works. Then she makes her real argument: writing a book is the fastest way to up-level your life, and starting a business is second, because both of them drag every inadequacy you own into the daylight. Paul adds the line he'd read that week — a book is the same shape as a doorway. The middle of the episode is where it turns into something else entirely. Joanna takes the whole room through an exercise live. Every emotion has a thought attached to it, and most people never slow down enough to see the pair. She walks through the ABC method — what happened, what you believed about it, what you felt as a result — and the four root emotions everything else branches off (mad, sad, glad, scared). There's a properly useful detour into neuroplasticity: your brain becomes most rewireable when you're emotionally heightened, which is exactly why news cycles and high-pressure sales rooms work so hard to get you there before they plant anything. Her prescription is what she calls insourcing. We've outsourced nearly every process in our lives. Almost nobody goes back inside to check what's actually running the place. Then she puts George in the chair, asks him what he'd say to his seven-year-old self, and doesn't let him get away with the adult answer. What he lands on — and how long it takes him to get there — is the most quietly affecting stretch of the episode. Joanna shares from her own life too, with a level of openness most guests wouldn't offer, and it reframes everything she's said about why writing does what it does. On AI, she's sharper than most. Her test: if you don't know how to do the thing you're asking AI to do, you think it's incredible. If you're an expert in that field, you think it's slop. Paul brings hard data to the table — Tim Ferriss has been publicly sharing his own declining book sales, with drops of 5%, then 13%, then 46%, then 57% year on year since 2022 — and Joanna pushes back hard on what that actually proves. Her case is that AI isn't neutral data, it's filtered data with an author's lens on it, and that we're deifying a tool while barely scratching what human minds can do. It ends with homework, which is not a sentence most podcasts get to write. Pick up a pen. Turn on your brain. Listen & subscribe: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0i1GYauyKzywre3YbAlPOT Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rethink-podcast/id1896340851 YouTube (full video): https://www.youtube.com/@RethinkAndGrowRich More Rethink material: https://skool.com/rethink Get the books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001K7ZD68/allbooks Download the free Rethink Habits planner: https://rethinkhabits.com