alright we're live sean i've got a little bit a few actually stories but it starts with a person i hung out without the other day you know ryan holiday right the author ryan holiday of course he came on the pod he's awesome i was hanging out with the end of the day and he said something actually to me in person but he previously said this on the podcast that we had i think he's been on twice he said something about how he actually made a funny comment he's like most most authors say they make more money through speaking than they do actually selling their books those people they just didn't sell a lot of books however yeah i feel like i could rule where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a goal less traveling have a look ryan has sold a ton of books we know that for sure but he also mentioned to me that his other things like the daily stoic which is his daily newsletter so ryan hall wrote a book on stoic he's written six or seven now at this point have but he has his other properties the daily news that are called daily stoic where they sell coins and merch and advertisements he has told me that that has made more money for him than selling books like which is crazy because that's what he's known as as an author and so what i wanted to talk to you about today was i went down to this huge rabbit hole where i found ways that authors are making money other than just like writing a book well you you got you gotta tell the coin thing because the coin thing is the perfect simple example of this don't know what he confirmed exactly but explain the coin thing because i think it's a perfect simple example of an author making money not off their book but a a lot of money in some other way ryan hall whole s is stoic it's a philosophy that is fairly useful and it's just like how to deal with hardship in your daily life and for some reason he decided to come up with a coin and it's a coin that in latin it says like you're gonna die or like today is one of your last day is alive or or something like that like something like inspirational thing but it's in latin so i'm not exactly sure what it says and a coin is a great product to sell because it costs twenty five bucks to sell it costs like a dollar to make it ships for whatever a stamp two stamps so however much that is eighty cents there's no returns there's no sizes it's just like the easiest thing ever to sell and on the podcast i don't remember if he said the exact number but i believe he said tens of thousands of coins which is millions of millions of dollars is that what he said he did he did say that and he also said that he works with some mint some mint in the united states and i guess it's it's one of the old famous coin mint and he i think he was like their biggest customer also like he's like they're mint more of his momentum mo coin than they are or anything else so what i wanna do and that was surprising to me i had an inkling and then he kinda revealed that that is true where he made more money not from selling books but i had i went down to rabbit hole and what i wanna do is i wanna show you three people who are making significantly more money than you would think and they are doing it in ways other than just writing one book making whatever ten percent of the revenue that they of which they sell alright so we're gonna start with the first one sean do you know who james patterson is i do not know who james patterson is who is james patterson i did not think you sandwiches is maybe your former baseball player who are we talking about you you are very smart you're a very high iq smart person oh god here it comes the fact that you don't know some of the most basic things like of pop culture like it's it's beyond pop culture at this point this is these are things that you see all over our bookstores whatever it shocks me that you don't know the vampire and twilight yeah i mean that who is this no okay your second guess was a lot further away from the first guest so listen to this so have you ever heard of this strat myers syndicate you probably haven't right of course if you haven't heard james patterson you also probably haven't heard of nancy drew or the hardy boys be heard of those i who those that they write murder mystery they write mystery novels right for kids or something yeah yeah yeah so they are the main characters in murder mystery novels so the way it starts is in the nineteen thirties there was this thing called the trap myers syndicate it was this one guy he came up with to this company in the thirties where he was like hey and not a lot of people are writing children's books i'm gonna go ahead and start publishing children's books and then he was like you know what i need to write more books but i don't feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these this artists authors who like are just a panda the butt to deal with all i care about is making like kind of cookie cutter novels that children like so what he did was he goes i'm gonna actually just come up with these characters so nancy drew the hardy boys and he had a variety of other series and i'm gonna have these authors write these books i'm just gonna say it's written by the same author every single time i'm not gonna give a person like they're a little bit of fame i'm gonna pay them a fair rate but it's in and and they're gonna follow my rules and maybe eventually they'll become a famous author but for now they're just gonna follow my rules and that's what he did and there was at one point where like every kid in america could name nancy drew the hardy boys things like that strat myers syndicate what a name so wait sorry the syndicate is i think i missed something here the syndicate is the set of novels the syndicate was the name of his company he called it a syndicate which sounds like a drug like a drug syndicate it sounds like something illegal because usually said that was just the name of his company and was a legitimate company wasn't like anything shady although he did a bad job of naming it'd be like naming like your kids children's book like warm candy and vans or something like that like he did a very bad job of like naming his publishing company called the syndicate kinda weird gotcha but basically he came up with these rules where he was like all books need to be part of a series every chapter needs to end with a preview of what the next chapter is going to be the beginning of each book needs to give us summary of only one page what happened in the previous books and he just had this like outline of how to like make hits well fast forward seventy years there's a guy named james patterson at this point now he's seventy five years old he started in advertising in new york for the jay thomson advertising firm just some huge firm but on the side in his late twenties and early thirties he starts running novels and they do okay like they're not like that big a hits but he keeps at it and he's a work and he keeps going and eventually at the age of forty seven he retire from advertising and goes all in on publishing these novels so he's been doing it now at this point for about twenty years and he's finally starting to see success and the whole point of his novels is they're thriller some people might say they're kinda like trash formulaic thriller but the thing is is people love them and at this point he sold something like five hundred million copies of his books and at one point he accounted for sixteen percent or sorry six percent of all hard covered novels sold in america so the guy's a hit maker he sold he sells a ton of them but here's the craziest part since he started writing about forty eight years ago he's published on average seven books a year and at this point even though he's seventy five or seventy four he's doing something like thirty books a year now how on earth does the guy do that that's like ridiculous right at this point to be doing that it's ridiculous to be doing that at a young age it's more ridiculous to be doing seventies well more than a book every two weeks it's ridiculous well here's how he does it he has coa authors and a little secret with james patterson and even he know he's well loved in america he actually has only written about twenty percent like solely written twenty percent of the books that his name is is credited with as writing the way that he does it he has a team of of c and so what he does is he pays these guys out of his own pocket he kinda comes up with a framework they flesh it out he reviews it almost like a movie script and he's like right notes in the in the in the margins and he gives it back to him and they kinda flush it out and at this point he's done it so much that you'll see that there's james patterson with dolly par i think there's a james patterson and then the c author is bill clinton and then the other c author who's like person of doing the actual work is listed below it but this has been so successful successful that at this point he's made something like eight hundred million dollars what yes that's how richest guy is he owns like three or four homes each of them were worth forty million bucks he's donated something like fifty million according to his website just small bookstores but this has been a smashing success i'm shocked you've not heard of james patterson i think i have seen the name it looks like his most famous book i don't even know the name of his books but he's almost like do you know tom clan yes okay he's like tom clan does clint tom clan do the same thing or does he write all his own books no tom clan would write them but jim patterson does not write as much but you know like jim patterson at this point it's sort like tom clan where you're like oh it's tom clan novel i don't even know what tom clan i can't have a name is novel but i know it's it means like it's like a spy novel right okay so let me ask your question did this guy start out writing all his books and then over the years was like how do i scale and he's like what if i got another author or from the beginning was he like did he have this plan from the beginning or did this come about organically trying to scale up so over the last twenty years that he's been killing it i don't i don't think one of his books i'm not sure exactly but most of his books have not themselves been best sellers however he has been a best bestselling author if you add up all of his titles for many decades and he learned early on he was like well like i don't know if any individually are gonna be a hit but i'll just make a shit ton of them and so we discovered early on it on his career he goes we're gonna be about quan and at this point he says that for the last forty years he's worked something like seventy hours a week and he writes all day and when we talk about writing it means working with a team and things like that but he discovered early on he's like we're just gonna do quantity we're gonna pump these babies out and so at this point jim patterson he's a face he's a guy he's a real person but it's almost like a brand and he's like get these authors to kinda come under his brand and he makes jokes but he'll say things like they should pay these like these referring to his c they should pay me to be a c author i'm teaching them so much and they're giving their name out there and he actually gives them press so they're able to like list but it's almost it's almost like them boy way the music industry works of like have nicki mina nicki mina coming on your song you have to pay nicki mina you know what i mean like that that's the first one you went to nicki mina eyes alright so this is interesting what what do you like about this guy you liked that he basically and to me what i one thing i like is i feel like he broke the like precious rules of like like writing and book like being an author is this like high prestige usually it's a prestige low volume labor of love you know that may you know almost never makes money and if it happens to make money you you kinda got lucky with this one smash hit and you know the honor is in sla away at this novel for four years and he's that sounds like he broke all those rules he's not precious about it he's like cool let's try books people wanna read let's make it formulaic let's make it so that i can hire people that are gonna write these books let's scale this baby up no individual we're we're hitting singles and doubles maybe we're not going for home runs necessarily because these will all add up and it sounds like the cool things that this guy almost like product this type of book and exactly like a business person then he did an artist well in reality what he is is he's an he was he was a ceo of the thompson agency group it no it that's like a that's part of a huge corporation and he's basically an advertising executive turned author and he brings some of that pi to being an author and it has worked really so he's both a business person and and an advertising person let me give you two more that i think are even more interesting have you seen these books lately written by this guy named jack carr it's kind of all the rage right now i've i've heard the name but i i haven't read anything now alright so jack carr is a former navy seal he served in the navy seals from nineteen ninety six i think to two thousand sixteen and he started writing these books called the first one was called the terminal list it came out in two thousand and eighteen and if if you go to the terminal list on amazon you'll see it's it's one of the highest reviewed books i've ever seen given the quantity of reviews it has tens of about or hundreds of thousands of reviews and it's like a four point five i read one of them two weeks ago i think i even suggested that you read it but it's really great it's basically like the equivalent of a romance novel for a woman it's like james bond for the man it's like basically the story of a guy who goes through all these hardships where he's a he's an x navy seal his family gets hurt he's gotta save them he's gotta get revenge whatever all that like epic man however i started reading his book and i noticed something really interesting he names products and brands like crazy in his books and i'll give you an example so this is a a a a few excerpts or one excerpt from from one of the books where he talks about he reached inside and removed the nine millimeter smith and weston m thirty nine from his chest better known in the seal says the m k twenty two hush puppy and then he goes on and saying he grabbed a box of his nine millimeter super v subs sonic ammunition that was sitting next to his yeti cooler he is i swear to god we'll talk about things like for example he'll talk about tip his athletic greens he names brands like crazy like there was one point where he was talking about like they're like he needed the best most durable equipment so we started using a hill person fanny pack or something like that i'm like out i'd like dude can we carry like my he's like he he put on his headphones and turned on my first million his go to on of thursday all types of entrepreneurial inspiration and then dude he went more he named stuff like crazy and the the main character james james reese he's like a james bond type a guy where he does a lot of bad stuff but like you really like him and you kinda wanna be like him and he just names all of the products that he uses and it's crazy and so i was interested i'm like why is this guy named name and all these products so i go to his website i googled jack car brands i just google that he's got this whole website i think it's just jack car dot com but if you google jack car brands what you'll see is he has jack card dot com and he creates do you do you know like that website on crate or gear patrol he basically has created his own version of that where he has all these gift guides or he'll be like here's all the gear that james reese used in this book and he has these beautiful guides on his website and lo and behold if you highlight over a lot of them they're all affiliate links and in fact and in fact oftentimes on jack card dot com he sells his own stuff and so one of the main parts in this first book that i read is he's got the fancy tomahawk which is basically like an axe and he uses this tomahawk to kill people and it's like a really high quality tomahawk well jeff carter dot com sells that exact same tomahawk and i thought that this was brilliant because when reading these stories he's talks about the cars that he's in like the type car that he's in is like a main part i'm like i want all this stuff because this character james reese is so cool all i have to do is go to jack card dot com and i could buy all this stuff and it's amazing i love this strategy yeah this is brilliant i've never i'd never would've have thought that product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does but that makes perfect sense this is his this is his feast this is his prime tomahawk dude it's awesome and by the way i was just giving them a little shit not all of them are affiliate links but a lot of them are and if you go to like his amazon page he even has those school feature on his amazon page where it lists all of the products in the books not those are is just like you know for example a lot of people ask us a bunch of questions like oh what are you use for this whatever and it's like sometimes writing the shit down is actually just it's valuable to them it's useful to me it saves me time and i know that a bunch of podcast to do this but it's it's like small income it's signed but it's not their main anything do you think this guy is like he's gotta be making more off of his books than he is off of this this amazon affiliate thing right i think he's making more off his books but my third example is i'm gonna show someone who's making way more off this thing and i think there's a world where jack carr will make way more off that side thing than the original thing meaning when you think of a navy seal you think of like many things including like the cool types of gear they have and you're like see what they're wearing you're like that's neat i would love to have that thing or you know you it's like cosplay playing to be a tough guy there's a here's right i mean like you guys in on word again yeah yeah as he walked around his home wearing in b sucks yeah it's jc penn like sell like really good boxer or something you're could talk about the third one steve have you heard a steve three for three no who was steve okay this one is i would i would not think you even know who this guy is so he originally starts as a magazine article guy for outdoor magazine so he basically he's from michigan which school montana he loves the outdoors he also loves writing and so he starts as a freelance journalist he works for outdoor magazine he works for like men's healthy things where he he's able to like talk about the outdoors and they pay him a small amount of money whatever his first book that he writes is about for so which is basically just he wanted to create he the the book sounds silly but they're actually awesome he wanted to write about how he went and hunted and forage his own thanksgiving dinner but like in doing that you find like the meaning of life and you see like the history of food whatever and outdoors it's awesome the second book that he did is called the american buffalo and it's this amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to american history whatever if you're not into that you're not into it which i don't think you are but for the people who are what gave it away yeah this like yeah you my body language right now is the body language of a girl who's about to get grind on by a guy at the club on unwanted leave no no thanks forward for my food no thanks i'm out of here would you like to free copy of my book it's signed no yeah you're you're not in this guy but you're gonna be into what what i'm about to explain so he writes this book american buffalo it gets pretty popular so then he creates us website called meat eater dot com have you ever heard of meat eater have heard of meat eater yes so meat eater starts as a series of podcasts they have a show on this thing called the the outdoor the sports channels something like that and it starts working out well eventually churn i think you know churning they invest into it and at this point in two thousand twenty three meat eater is a website where steve or vanilla blogs about outdoors he published his books his books under the meat eater name he has recipe books he has more podcast podcasts whatever newsletters however they went and bought a bunch of brands they bought a duck called business they went and bought a clothing line now in two thousand twenty three they announced that they did a hundred million in revenue from selling all of the products on unique eater dot com of which his kinda claimed to fame or at least where he gets a lot of the traffic from is his books and then his podcast and things like that and so this is an example of a guy who i think has made significantly more or will make significantly more in terms of enterprise value from selling the product that he talks about in the books or selling the lifestyle those guys super fascinating dude going from american buffalo a book about buffalo in america or whatever to having a hundred million dollars in revenue on your business is like that that's not the american dream but it's it's something it's someone's dream somewhere it's it's an american is dream yeah that is i can't believe that that happened that's insane turning is so smart by the way they took this one thesis of content to commerce so they were like hey anybody who's world classic content it's not valued properly in the market because media is such a shit business that they're valued as a media business but if you can flip their business model from content to commerce then this thing is gonna this thing is gonna take off and it's gonna take off in the same way that our youtube subs are gonna take off when you go to youtube and you say to yourself goddamn i'm learning a lot from sam today about mediator and about authors and about all these people they're gonna go to youtube you're gonna go to my first million and you're gonna click subscribe because you love us so much thank you very much that's a plug that was good so good job i think if i had to make a prediction i think that meat eater will be worth many many many hundreds of millions maybe even a billion dollars in the next ten years i i believe it these these lifestyle brands once you get like there is no no niche too small with these lifestyle brands mediator is actually pretty big compared to some of these lifestyle brands like they'll h the watch brand luxury watches only right or there's things for like you know how people when they get into biking they become like you know lame they start dressing like sponge bob stand out to like clip bonds and the they walk into a coffee shop after like a ninety thousand mile ride that morning like those people are super valuable as an audience and they need content that's like so lame like that that it's the thing that they care about and so there's like an endless niche of these like really really hyper specific lifestyle content brands that i think can be built you just have to come from that space it sounds like this guy steve you know came from that space which is pretty pretty cool you wanna know the here's a curve ball of the situation he lives in brooklyn it's real he lives he lives in four green brooklyn brooklyn yeah well he lives in brooklyn i was doing research jonathan and he's like from montana and he's like i know montana better than anywhere on anywhere anyone else in the country i knew enough to get the hell out of there yeah and now he lives in brooklyn which is what i thought was kind of weird but anyway those are by three examples of strange ways or shocking ways that a bunch of these authors are making money i know that you are thinking about becoming an author does this change but i think you've paused it i'm not sure if you paused it or i think becoming an author to make money just that's like saying you know i was hungry so i went to church it's like yeah just because they have some food there it doesn't mean that's why you go and so like i don't think making money is the reason i to write a book if you're gonna want if you wanna make money and you're smart about marketing and all that there's a hundred times easier way to make money did you just make up that analogy that was a really good that was a really good analogy i did my morning routine today so you know the brain is on the brain is awake the thing that i've looked into is how much these authors make so there's like tiers to this so if it was ten tiers the first five tiers you know of tier ten through five is just all of them made no money actually maybe tiers you know like ten all the way to number three all made no money but a couple of interesting data points that are in our world so i think the top tier is like the jk rowling of the world jk k rowling jay patterson which is like you actually are mainstream canon right you are you're a part of the meta like you you you became the equivalent you know you're gonna get a netflix show type of so have you ever thought about by the way have you thought about jk k rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to like a game or a language that people refer to now like the word mug i actually just out the thought of that word at least twice a week you know people do the roman empire i don't give a shit about the roman empire but dude i do think of like dia and alley i think about hogwarts i think about all these places right like i think about that twice a week how cool that is someone just made it up yeah it's weird to me that that when i think about i'm just like that's that's so odd no bullshit what percent of you is like might be real is there any part of all like well i i i am i am just a mo how would i know the way that i think about it is it she is so good at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it and she just telling a true story like you know what i mean like it's just impossible to think that one brain like our brains are each six pounds but that came out of hers i don't understand how that happened dude i've been at an airport where it's like you have the smart cart thing telling and i'm walking between you know nine and ten i don't run at it but like you know i'll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little little give in that in that wall you know i'll i'll play i'll see so there's that that tier right that's like god here then there's the james clear you know atomic habits david go mark manson i think these guys have cleared like thirty dollars to fifty million dollars off of a single book that's a lot i would say more like twenty so james clear i think i don't know how many he sold out it's his thing is escalating by the way which is really interesting he tweeted this out recently and it was it was something like i'll try to find it but it was basically like he first year was like you know maybe like a hundred thousand and then the next year was like two hundred thousand the third year was a million and then the fourth year was like four million and the fifth year was like fifteen million and he's just gone up and up and up i think now he sold basically i don't know twenty million copies or something like that worldwide and so you know way really that twenty million yeah yeah he's like think it's like a it's like a runaway train basically so i i think i'm pretty sure is his book has grossed like a hundred fifty to two hundred million dollars probably hundred probably a hundred fifty million dollars worldwide i mean you know i might be off by thirty million in either direction but but i'm not off by by half you know and he's just a guy in ohio i think like she's just he's just a guy like i i knew him before here i i talked to him before the book and he was just like a blogger in ohio like it didn't seem particularly fancy and he does not a million years what i yeah i knew him before you stop talking to me yeah so so i think the that's like the next year david go book i think has done like thirty five forty million dollars in sales and he did it through scribes so he kind of like owns more own lot of it tim ferris surprisingly didn't sell that many copies of four hour workweek week i thought four hour workweek week was like a to me it was like that was a huge book it's obviously it did super super well but i think it's sold two million copies you know so two million versus twenty million ten x more for for atomic habits which is pretty crazy a fun one is eric jorge so you know eric jorge he he was like a startup up growth guy he lived in some i don't know where he it was like kansas city or something like that and eric jorge wrote the naval vol act which is basically he's like yeah neville tweets are the shit what if i printed him out basically like what if i printed it out and staple it together right obviously he did more than that but the core idea was he didn't write the book he didn't do a he didn't study individual's paul's life and write a biography he didn't create a bunch of original wisdom he just took neville existing wisdom that was super fragmented packaged up into a really easy to use book and then and he actually gives away like the ebook for free i think online i'm pretty sure eric hey he's ever told me this is my my guess work based on some some back the envelope stuff pretty sure eric has made like three to five million dollars off of the development act himself no way i don't believe that that is so my real eighty two percent confident that that's a real number dude if you're even half right i would be it's definitely made more than a million dollars i think it's like three million to five million dollars off the development act okay well that's insane does naval nevada get anything naval got distribution i i don't think he gives some all money from it i don't i'm gonna make you famous baby you're gonna be super superstar that's what i'm gonna tell you i'm gonna create the sean sean mac did you said that way too naturally that was not the first time you said that is that what you told trunk that's insane i that that and basically the concept is ridiculous right i mean it's good the concept is genius is what it is he he took somebody else's genius that was fragmented and was like why would i write nobody must read their eric jorge book but a lot of people wanna write the naval book and neville is kinda open source with it he has he said this many times was like the the best thing you could do is let other people res share your ideas they're you know stealing your ideas but really the prop your ideas it's one of the highest compliments one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution and so you know i think he was happy that eric and i need it took him like a year he put a lot of effort into it not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up the content in the vault way five hundred doing in his life so i think he's done fine too right that's that's the whole idea no and eric by the way i eric's now the ceo of scribe david the the company that did david go book so yes and the company that i think you might be using yeah not yet but okay so another crazy story so i've never heard of this book and i doubt you have either because are you a sci f reader not exactly only like the most famous ones so have you ever heard of this book called wool no talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison you know what i mean it's going very far the conversation got a lot of data yeah that's a hard yes i am well basically here's here's idea i was looking at the at the charts and i saw all of the game of thrones books so it's like you know a song of ice and fire and it's basically george r martin george r martin george r martin there's five of his books and there was one book on top of it called wool and i it's like i i've never heard of this book what is this book so i went in research it so the author this guy hugh howie which sounds like a fake name might be i don't know his the his origin story is he's living in north carolina he's broke he was doing some odd jobs he was like oh there's a roofing gig yeah i'll gotta help you out you know i'm technician sure i'll help you out and basically i know at someone point he's unemployed and he's like you know what i'm gonna write a book his wife is kinda supporting the household he's like gonna write a book and she's like okay honey great sure you don't wanna get out there with the old resume and she's he's like don't know i'm gonna write a sci f book like it was like ideal like something's he's like what if aliens of this flying car whatever i don't know what it was some crazy idea hey this conversation could go way different it'd be like hey by the way like i know that you love having these action figures in the plastics still but we make a little bit of room for the baby oh you're gonna write a book i'm gonna find another husband so yeah so he puts the book out he sells less than a thousand dollars of the book okay so first first try failed most people would obviously clint strike one he's like oh i'm just getting warmed up he's like i that was that was good but i can do better and he still has no job he needs to kind of start you know paying for the bills a little bit so i i love this part about the story he gets a job but he's like he's trying to find not the highest paying job he's trying to find a job that will make a minimum amount of amount of money that he needs to live with the maximum amount of free hours so he ends up finding this job that he could do for about twenty five thirty hours a week it pays only ten bucks an hour but he's like i'll take it because there's a lot of downtime where i'm just sitting there not doing anything i could be writing during that time and it's only thirty hours a week so i can spend all of my free time doing this and i also don't even want a good job they'll make it hard to quit later because i wanna be an author and i'm not gonna trap myself in a job that's like hard to leave then he changes his schedule he's like i'm gonna wake up two am every day i'm gonna right before my job i'm gonna ride during my lunch break i'm right after dinner it became a comp for him and in three weeks he writes this book wall three weeks so again just like james patterson wasn't precious about the whole idea of writing books this guy was like three weeks not three years and so he bangs he bangs out this book he puts it on amazon for ninety nine cents and he sells like a thousand copies he's like boom thousand bucks alright love it and he's like and the but like you have a small reader base it's kinda like yc they say you want like a small number of people you rather have a thousand people that love you than a hundred thousand people that just kinda like you so he had a thousand people that really love the book and they were like dude you gotta write a sequel so very next month before they get cold he writes a sequel by the way wool it w five hundred and thirty pages he did that in three weeks yeah so then he he writes the sequel a month later he or like you know two months or whatever it is and he sells three thousand copies of that one he's like alright i gotta keep going so he writes two more and he sells ten thousand copies and finally he puts out the collection all five of the books that he's written in a very short period of time and the first month he sells twenty three thousand copies of the set and now he's selling it for six dollars and instead of nine nine cents it makes basically a hundred and forty grand that in in gross revenue that month and he's self publishing this whole thing so he's keeping seventy percent of it whereas a normal author is gonna keep ten percent maybe fifteen percent of it and all of a sudden you know the months by he's now sold five hundred thousand books you before you know before anybody knows it which is a shit ton of books to sell that's like you know you're in the top top you know percent of a percent that are or of of authors at that stage and he's getting approached by publishers and they're he he's like okay what's the deal they're like we'll give you you know two hundred and fifty thousand dollars like i'm already making two hundred fifty thousand dollars they're like okay well give you more he's like well i'm what why would i give you why would i take some money today for like now i give up all my upside and they're like well we can help you get distribution he's like i've sold five hundred thousand copies myself and they're like how the hell you do that and he's like and so his strategy he's like gorilla tactics to get his book out there where he's like alright i need to influence the influencers so he sent basically like copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at good reads so not like influencers but book influencers so people who review books and good reads like high ranking good good reed people so then he's like alright that's good next step he goes on reddit and he's got he does an am on reddit for twelve hours and so he's just like i'm just gonna like soak up all the reddit love for this day on on reddit alright does that then he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art whereas most authors are pretty again precious about like it's my ip they try to like you know take down anybody who writes like variations of their book he's like no go crazy i built the universe but you guys can fill up at all the stories and he would basically incentivize people to design other alternative book covers for it so now their little audience would he you know there are that artist audience would see them designing a book cover for this book called wool that was pretty cool he picks thirty of the die hard readers and he's like okay how do i get my die to help me and become like you know super evangelist and so he made them beta readers again everybody's so precious they keep everything under lock and key he took his super fans and was like you're gonna be readers of the of the early distance of new books before they come out so he did a bunch of community building essentially like stuff that doesn't really scale that each one individually wasn't a game changer but if you add up that end the twenty other things they did you could see how he like that's not what made it successful but he did start turning to crank at the beginning the crank is pretty hard to turn but eventually you know you you you if you power through that first part of the crank it'll start to move on its own and that's basically what happened for this guy and so then someone comes up to them to they're like look i don't think you should sell your book rights but i do think you should sell your film rights you haven't actually you're not gonna make a film yourself so he sold his film rights and and he kept his his book rights you know as an independent person for a while i i think maybe he sold it now i'm not sure but he he also met george r martin once he went to a book signing for for george r martin and he's like hey george like it's me you know hugh howie if the guy's like never heard of you he's like i'm the number six guy on the sci list like you know it's your five books and i'm number six said george r martin and he posted this thing george r signed his book and said to number six keep trying and then a couple whole months later a couple months later he actually hit number one and so just a pretty cool story of like a self published author that that really made it happen like entrepreneurial hustle story that's a great story do you use good reed you know anything about good read i've used good yeah i bet the founders of good eats and i was like otis chandler yeah they're they're really cool people really nice people it's a cool product but but it's old now it's been around for a long time but it's got a great moe i i i can tell a little bit about good reed but this guy hugh holly he has so i'm i use good reed religiously i'm i'm i'm i'm that's kinda like my it's worth my library i keep everything this guy has seven hundred and fifty thousand ratings which is huge and if you're in a hundreds of thousands of ratings and you have over a four star review you're like the best of the best he has a four point one five review out of five or almost a million reviews it's amazing yeah and it all started with a standalone short story basically it wasn't even like a full book it was like a short story that he published at the at the beginning of that first three weeks but again that's kinda what she wants a prototype right he treated it like a entrepreneur had not like a author he's like the blue collar version of sci f five this guy's like the larry bird of sci five you know what i mean like french lick indiana yeah dude how insane is it that larry bird was so amazing and would just literally drink beers like on the bus to the game and like people used to smoke cigarettes at halftime time of those games like he said that absolutely insane now like now lebron james sleeps in like a hyper chamber but like the guy who was basically the lebron james of his time was literally just like downing bud lights after games and he was like so skinny and so pale had the worse haircut the shortest shorts the best the best mustache but like kinda looked like a like a human version of like big bird and he just killed it and he's considered on the top five yeah that guy's amazing he he gives he gives the weirdo hope the story is amazing you hugh holly that's a good story you wanna do one or two more thing yeah you shepherd it's great you need to hire somebody go check it out it's how i hire a bunch people if you wanna hire people like i do use shepherd how was that alright there that's thrill in that chill but i kept it short do you have one more thing oh well i guess we didn't talk about this this is kinda cool james clear just launched an app yesterday which i think was the stimulus for this whole thing that we didn't we didn't talk about andrew wilkinson partnered he he andrew wilkinson our andrew will and he put out this tweet where he said we partnered with james clear tiny owns forty percent james owns sixty percent we made this app i actually didn't look at the app a productivity app or tracking app yeah it's what about just something completely it's the social media apps never quota sharing out dude just some like stupid game it's like you'd like they recreated like snake from nokia that's so i by the way okay so let's talk about a couple things here great idea to release a habit app you want an app to be habit forming literally that's like only successful apps are ones that you use habit obituary so creating a habits app is a good idea there's lots of there's habits apps but they're not made by james clear so i think this is like nope no brainer idea he could just created anything that was a habit like just like some supplement or drug like i'm gonna get you addicted we're gonna make this habit watch this we're gonna call track so i think genius idea by him maybe doubly genius idea by andrew to pull this off i think it's amazing what he's doing he's done this now with hub so he launched the y mate drink with human which i think is also a genius idea i think what andrew andrew's doing now is the new playbook of what churn did remember i saying like churn in playbook with the content to commerce they did it with bar stool they did it with eater they did it with like a bunch of these media media publications that was a really good model and it's played out over the last ten years i think what andrew doing now is gonna play out over the next ten years which is he's partnering with these experts and authorities and he's like look i already have meta lab that can do the design the engineering i have i i own a portfolio of businesses i've you know made a billion dollars doing this whole thing so let me find a ceo we'll build the whole thing do you just have to promote it and it's a perfect fit with what you do think it's just like such a good model it's also really fun for him right because he's gonna get to hang out rubbed shoulders of people who he likes and respects he's got like a cool cocktail story of being like oh yeah i we built the james clear app we did the hub and drink we did the whatever right they've done a bunch of these these apps now so i just think it's an awesome win all around like i'm i'm really happy for it we should have andrew on to talk about it but my prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that know one would ever talk about but it's cooler than all of the other ones like it's significantly cooler it won't make as much money but it's way cooler like to be able to like i think this thing's gonna make a lot of money why do you think this not gonna make money well i just think that it's his other stuff just to so much better if i had to guess i think the app like can do like hundreds of millions on meditation i'm pretty sure that you can get like thirty forty million of arr on a habit app i think maybe you can but andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like the thousand most popular agency and they also make many many tens of millions a year in profit no no if you add them all up they do but each individually does not right like if you add them all up they do his but this agency if you add up what he's gonna do with humor with james clear in the next five that he's gonna do like this those are gonna add up to be much bigger the humor drink is a brilliant idea that is a absolutely brilliant idea the james clear app like he's getting the right type of things like you don't want necessarily the a list celebrity because the a list celebrity for every you know george clooney or ryan reynolds that you get that that have a hit there's tons of others that they don't really care about promoting at the too busy but it's not a fit they don't have like a direct relationship with their audience because they're actually on in hollywood they're not like have a direct channel through social media and so the people that he's finding are like this is meaningful for them it's a perfect fit with them they have a direct with their audience and they haven't like they have like love from their audience it's not just like people who are fans of them as people have deep trust in them and i think that that is a i think he's picking the right influencers to these users i i would bet that he's gonna make hundreds of millions off of these place if you if you add the you know three to five that he's gonna do in this category i would bet that that's a three to three like three hundred million dollar prize i guess we'll have to have him on and ask him about it i'm he he's like a spider man he's or like an octopus he says his technical like all over the place i see this i'm like how the fuck did you we your way into that thing like he just like he knows everything like you're not knows everything he knows everyone i don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things i'd be like check be like hey where's our email we're influencers andrew we're yeah well where's our offer he also plays dumb with me all the time i go like you're i i'm i'd probably be like hey have you heard of this guy named a i i'd love at his podcast and wilkinson will be like yeah i think it's a nice podcast i also enjoy it and then like weeks later like yeah we partnered with them him and launch this company work just for eighteen months yeah i'm like okay like he does that he does like kind of on a regular basis with me where i'll be like you're at this thing it's kinda neat and it'll be like yeah i agree that is neat he he is a super network he is a absolutely pot like incredible network i am i i i am i admire his networking skills like he's like cool i like bill ac now i'm friends with bill ac and he's an investor in my company oh charlie mu is my hero years later i'm having dinner with charlie mu and he's offering me you know x y z it's like he is really able to when he puts his mind to it with who he wants to meet he able to make that shit happen and and i think he does it in a way that's mutually it's not like you most people when they're like oh i wanna meet this person it's like just begging for a you know time or attention in a way that's not additive to the other person i think he does it in good way that's additive to the other person yeah he's he's fascinating in the way that he's able to but also he also turns a weird networking opportunity into like real businesses like usually all more often than not when i meet people i'm like that was nice to meet you i'll see you never again yeah awesome right yeah and that's like where my brain stops yeah what a guy yeah he yeah that's like i'm literally how you know dom and dumb when he's walking out of the seven eleven he's like big gu alright catch later like that's like that's me at every networking event the same that's exactly how i am where it it's starts and ends right there it's just like a passing memory and yes andrew somehow like makes it into money and turns it into dollars i don't know how he does it he's very good he he told one story on the pod where he was like i wanted to meet dan gilbert and matt dan gilbert and then they had this challenge with this like are he had a product i have a design agency so we just made him a website for free that was really nice because i he like use that as his currency to like you know hey i think you're awesome and we did this thing this is awesome right oh it's because my agency awesome because i'm awesome i mean he just uses it to sort of like open the door he'll put in the work basically and he's he'd be like oh whenever you're free i'll fly there and let's you know i'll i'll be you you know i will make the effort to come come make this happen and take to have an agency do you that have like a the an agency or like a sick house it's like oh you're in town come stay in my home and then right you know what i mean you have to have like some like awesome i do like every anytime someone's traffic like you wanna stay in my house and i just rent an airbnb b i think stuck they're just absolutely indebted to me well it's kind of a good tactic chris sa said that he had this house in truck and you know he would like lure sounds weird more weird than it actually is right he would lure these like at a white house and truck yeah come to my bed i got aws credits come over and he would like get these guys come up and to become friends with them and they was like they're they're like i would love to hang out truck and just happens have to have a house and that's how we become friends with them but maybe having a great line about it than having when i lived in san francisco i was just constantly getting like meeting requests or event invitations and it was like a good problem to have but at it's still a problem he's like i playing defense i was just was reacting to whatever was going on he's was like when i moved to truck then i played offense i would figure out who who is that i wanna actually spend time with and then i would proactively plan and like set it up so that travis ka came for the weekend and stayed with him and he's like we're not gonna just get coffee we're gonna hang out for a weekend and like for every fifty coffee meetings i do like one weekend it's just so much more powerful than fifty coffee meetings and so he's like we hang out we spent time together they meet my family we chilling hot tub we brainstorm in the morning that later that evening we a new idea comes and i'm just very helpful for these people that's how he did a uber investment he did the same thing with the founder of instagram that's how he did his instagram investment too was he invited kevin system to come stay at his place in truck any stayed there for whatever a few days a week or whatever it was and by the end of that like they were kinda bonded and i i think that was chris did a lot of cool things and that's definitely one of them i don't know if a a three bedroom place and the be is gonna do the trick i think both of us are gonna have to just step it up can i interest you in walnut creek yeah we'll go to safe way come back like the only appeal you like marble countertops i got i got marble countertops like alright is that it the pod that's the bot i feel like i could rude the world i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a road less travel never looking back