Doomer Optimism, The Economics of Book Publishing, and More

my brain hurt for twenty four hours but then i feel great for that okay well you're all right now well we'll see we'll see actually at the end of this episode i'll give you a grade on your your ct status thank you i feel like i could rule to world i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's on on a goal travel never looking back but let's just remember to say something about you can review on spotify now we're here you can leave reviews on spotify now go do that i have i have done what was asked me alright let's start alright we're supposed to tell people to give us review on spotify but you could only leave stars you can't leave comments i read all of our comments to understand like what we're stars so between the two of us we got it covered okay well then we're good dude we have a lot to go over today i i because you're like a pain the ass to get a ahold of i wanted to ask for your advice today but you've got interest yeah you've got some interesting stuff wait you wanna ask if i got knocked out well first of all yeah are you gonna be able to do pod or are you like post concussion syndrome right now well what happened and how did it how did it feel yeah it was like a flash of i was like i was were spa it looked like you were practice you're you're practicing boxing so you were spa with somebody is that a amateur a coach is that just like a dude he was a the the kid was probably twenty years old he's a young guy i'm going against tell all these young guys and like for the most part they kick my ass and i was doing great i was doing really good and then he just caught me on the chin and did you saw the video i got i saw the video you just look like he had wobbly lasers for a second you didn't look me and i was over all over like you you didn't fall down there so so no i i was out it went black and i started tipping over and then i caught myself and i woke yeah i was just for about two seconds i was out and what does that make you feel do you are you questioning your chin do you feel like a new man like what's going on it didn't like it okay so here's how i feel right now about boxing i love it it's awesome i think we should all do it i am scared about the long term pain like i think that is not good to do long term i'll probably do it for six more months right and then i'll probably chill i think that jake paul has said that like he has like memory loss already and like people like mock them they're like oh yeah okay sure i totally believe that dude like the like i when i got hit i was i was in pain for twenty four hours oh you were in pain okay what what was the pain just like the concussion type i just had a headache yeah i had to go home and go to sleep my head hurt for had concussion before or is that the first concussion i've had concussion before from falling in plain ice hockey yeah it hurt i was in pain for twenty four hours my brain hurt for twenty four hours but then i feel great for that okay well you're all right now and then we'll see we'll see then about the end of the episode i'll you a grade on your your ct status thank you that night i was at a bar or a a restaurant sitting outside and three or at first three and then like twelve police pull up with their lights on like a screeching stop just like a movie they go they pop out of their car they grabbed their ar they cock it they go everyone run inside and it was i was shocked and we like ran inside and they it got word to us that there was like they said an active shooter and i guess the story of what really happened was that i think they think someone shot a gun in ar like a because they said there's someone walking around with a rifle and so we got locked in this restaurant for like an hour just waiting and then they just left i i've have no idea how it ended i've got no idea i don't know what happened i have no idea if it was a real person i've got no idea but they lost end the podcast we just leave yeah that's what this happened they just left and they go we're looking for they go we're looking for the guy you gotta stay in there but there's a man that's shooting a gun around here and we don't know where they are and wow so that's what happened to me this week we're okay two questions i i i find this fascinating because i lately whenever i play with my daughter like kids they just fall all the time they get hurt super easily they don't know anything about anything so there's always git in harm way and you don't wanna i just constantly be tell them to stop but that means you gotta kinda be reactive if you know if the fun play actually turns somewhat dangerous and i a few times three times in a row something was happening and my reaction was so slow and she would get hurt and then i was like why didn't i just like i saw it coming out and i'd be like hey watch out but like that's not gonna do anything for a kid they don't know what what that means i was like i need to dive and grab her and like you know barrel roll away from the situation like there's rattle snake in my backyard and my daughter was like six inches away from it a four foot rattle snake and i like pulled her away but i wasn't that quick you know we were at the playground and someone was swinging on the swings like crazy and she just like walked in front of the swings that got like basically hitting the head by this girl swinging and i saw it and i was hey hey like as if i could as if anybody cared and so i'm like okay i've been working on my emergency reactions i'm like new i'm my dad muscle exactly i'm gonna be quick with that dad muscle now and my wife is the opposite like i think moms have this where if she senses like from her peripheral vision something's with the other book cases falling she turns into like a literal bat and flies across the room and like swoop in and saves it before anything even happened so it's like she's amazing with it my question to you is when it was hey everybody to get inside now were you like quick on the draw were you like this one in the room or were you like hey what what's going on to actual about it i'm very alert so like i've been places where like we've been i've been walking i was walking in san francisco and i was with sarah and i go that guy's getting mug right in front of us the guy holding a gun at that other guy and it was like a block away i'm like we got turn around we gotta walk away and she was like how did you see so i've always been very aware i have a a strong protective instinct i think so right when it happened i was like alright let's be aware of our surroundings but yeah so i'm i'm good at that stuff i think it's i think it's just a personality trait i think because you are so calm and relax you don't get you don't get rattled very easily remember you were telling ben ben levy that when he meet meets me don't be angry if sam yells at you because sam is known for like get losing his temper i like i've i i lose my temper sometimes i think i get rattled easily you don't get rattled easily at all yeah but it has this downside which is you know chill like my trainer says this thing he's like look most people live in fight flight but there's no there's no threat around them it's just anxiety about the future he goes but if there's a lion in front of you don't start meditating like go run when there's a lion and like that's the part that i actually don't do very well is yeah you you i barely react very much and that's what they do you don't have a sense of urgency about anything yeah i'm pretty chill but i would argue that you're happier than most people and that's the major personality you can put up my die in a certain situation alright so so that's her that's where that's that said okay i wanted to ask but the knockout and the shooter that's crazy that's kind of actually related so you you set this tucker max thing explain what he's talking about and your reaction to took because i thought it was pretty interesting okay so there's a guy named tucker max for the people who are at least thirty years old you'll remember tucker max as the author of a book called i hope they serve beer hell which it's basically a f book about having sex and kinda being an asshole and all things that like the dream nineteen year old boy would act like yes story much of drunken hook ups and stuff like that and like kinda of being a douche bag but in a funny way tucker is now in his mid forties i would think he's grown in he's way different and he recently posted an article saying that the pandemic changed his opinion a little bit and he is what's called a doom optimus which he meet which means he thinks that there's a small chance although no with his i think he thinks there's a large chance that the world is gonna go to shit in the next two to four years but he hopes that it doesn't but he's gonna plan for it to go to shit and he wrote this huge article that was in incredibly well written and my problem with tucker is that he's just like malcolm glad well which is like i have no idea if what he's saying is true but he's such a good writer that i tend to believe it and so he wrote this amazing article saying why he thinks the world is gonna go to shit and and what will happen in two to four years and how he's preparing by buying a ranch and and basically prepping for like ten plus years of like living without power with his fit people trying to come and attack him it's pretty wild and he talks about physical fitness learning how to fight building a ranch with community members on there so you can each take like a watch during the night it was pretty crazy my after reading it i felt afraid right is that what you felt like well i got as i i've i've only had two thirds of it but the from what i i i i i'm with you that he's such a good writer he's sets a almost like a likable writer he's i got charisma through writing yeah it's very hard to do but he's very good at it and that it makes it really fucking hard to assess like am i convinced by the argument or am i just charmed by this dude as he writes and i don't i and i didn't even agree with i don't think i agree with much of anything that he said about the vaccine about like political stuff but he was such a good writer that i was like well okay maybe you're right right you know like i what i would say is this last two years if if it's done anything it really kinda makes you question so i think a bunch of people question like shit i thought i needed to go to the office every day it turns out i can work for home or you know what like i don't need this job or if the world's gonna end you know how should i be spending my time in my life or can i trust the news can i trust science i trust this doctor fauci can you know who do i trust for information about things because you know one minute they say the masks don't work and then the next minute they say that masks do work and like you know what which one is it like you know they people called you know when people said it was a lab leak early on it was like you're a racist and we need to shut down the wet markets and you know because that's where this case came from somebody eating bat soup and then now it's like you know pretty much confirmed that it's a it's like a eighty eighty percent plus probability that this was from a lab and oh yeah sorry about sorry about locking up for racism i'm bad here you you're out now i just filled this paperwork up before you go it's like should we open up the wet markets again like can can my brother's go eat some bat soup because that was totally wrong you know like you basically had to question a lot of things so when i first read this and he's talking about du optimism i was intrigued because i never heard of this this is the type of guy that i think is early on to trends i think he's early into start certain movements so i'm i'm i'm curious about it from that way i didn't fully buyer or believe everything that he was saying about like he was basically saying like my buddy's told me this is a si ops mission you know this is looking si which is basically like i don't even it's basically like you go into a country and you create you you shift the like the mind state of people in that country by running these like sort of like mind control campaigns but that's true things that's true we had a guy in the podcast and he said my job was to get dropped off into a country and and convince people to commit espionage and get them to buy into the american cause versus let's say the iranian cause and get them like to change their opinion and like i know i believe that that exists i guess i'm saying is he was saying that that's what covid is or something like that i oh yeah yeah yeah and that's what like riots and shit yeah what the you know the riots for black matter you he was like trying to tie all these things together and and he was like you know this is the same playbook that my my buddies were talking about but he didn't say the playbook and that was became very un convincing to me but i will say i found this interesting and i found it worth worth you know we talked about steel manning the other day which is that when you feel really strong point of view one of the best ways to actually understand if you're correct and convince somebody else is to look at the opposite side and say here's what the opposite side would say and they're not crazy people they're not dumb they're smart and they believe these things but i think their conclusion is wrong because here's what i believe and then you laid out both arguments as strong as you could side by side and you pick the better argument and so i actually when i saw this and i was an immediate like whatever you know paranoid you know paranoid crazy guy now i've learned to not write off paranoid crazy guy totally i actually steal man the argument and so that's what i think is worth doing with some i think if you read this it's worth reading for both the writing style is good and then the second thing is to practice steel manning and that's kind of what what i'm gonna do from this i agree and i'd did the same thing and you know what i pulled myself so like i'm like well tucker is crazy no one acts like this and he talked about like being persecuted whatever and i started realizing like do you remember the the rwanda first of all i was like well like you know world war two wasn't that long ago we're like right you know a group of people were collectively murdered and then i was like well you know rwanda was like in nineteen ninety seven and the same thing happened where a group of people were like systematically hunted down and you know do you know about the rwanda no i'm not in my head i no idea what you're talking about rwanda is a country in africa it's in that part yeah and there is who twos in toot i think it's how you say it's too different i don't know the right terminology but i i believe they're just different ethnicities of some type of like african ethnicities two different ethnicities i believe it was the people are gonna shit on me one of them i forget the toot c's i think were the ones that got killed and it was like three or or two million of them were killed in like three months or something like crazy like that it was a tragic and that was in in bill clinton was president so that was in the nineties and like well that wasn't that long ago that like crazy bad stuff happened and then i was like fuck september eleventh i mean i remember that like like and i've got friends of you know i now live in new york like of course something back can happened and then right the pandemic i felt scared it wasn't the same but i felt scared i remember being in san francisco when writing was happened was happening and i was like man like something bad could happen i so anyway i it was close enough that all these things have happened that i do since like man maybe i should question like not i'm not safe all the time and so my prediction actually is that the thing that's gonna happen that we should but that i should be looking out for is a a a hacking attempt i think it's like i think that like in five years we're gonna look back in ten years we're when look back and be like i cannot believe that we used passwords in the way that we did like one person would use the same password into everything and you pretty much could guess it because most everyone uses the password one two three four five six seven or like something like that and or like you just had a post it note at home that had a password and basically if you just got that post it note you had access to someone's entire financial and personal information yeah it's wow there's two things on that one one password or no last pass one of the two came out there the other i was like hey master passwords have been breached it's was like it's like basically this is the thing you're supposed to do to stay secure and and the main thing is that your mat but they it was wrong they they they came back and said no actually it hasn't sorry that was incorrect bad on their part for for that but it just kinda shows you you know just in general even even the even the the attempts at security are are difficult challenging second thing is elon musk went on hardcore history podcast recently and it was like i didn't listen to it because i don't listen to that but i figured you or ben would would like that sort of thing but i know one summary of like one thing that he took away from it which is they were talking about like the history of like rockets like rocket war for you know like of different types of weaponry back in the day and how that led to like successor failure and the war and like how the germans had amazing technology but they had horrible materials their oil was like not refined or whatever like their oil was not a consistent mix and so it was like ruining their their their weaponry and like one of the major reasons they that the germans lost war was that their weaponry did not function very well because they didn't have access to these like core commodities underneath that the americans had much better weaponry and he's just talking about like you know in great wars escalate into engineering ring wars and that just sort of makes you think like yeah okay so before if it was like you know what guns do my soldiers carry then it was like what tanks do my soldiers sit in and what planes do they have what boats do we have though it's gonna be like drones and robots literally just like boston dynamics robots going into places and crazy and stuff like that and then it's just like gonna go into just like cyber warfare which is like you know what people think you know the russians did to americans you know like basically brainwashing through social media as well as hacking and getting access to government secrets and intelligence and like dude this is just gonna be an insane frontier of cyber warfare that's already happening and it's gonna just like escalate over time because if all wars come turn into engineering wars then the engineering wars that matter are artificial intelligence and cybersecurity now med drones maybe drones and robotics so that's pretty yeah pretty crazy thing to think about so i wanna tell you something about elon and and le friedman and i think you have it on here but basically neville is a good friend of mine and he tweeted out this wonderful video where le friedman interviewed elon musk and le friedman he did it a couple times but this one particular example he asked elon when will we go to mars and he basically asked a asked in such a way that i think everyone should learn from and i'm gonna explain to you why you should learn from this but he said when do you think we're gonna go to mars he didn't say a word and elon sat there for i think twenty three seconds and just sat there and thought and le didn't say a word in silence he just let elon think and then elon replied with a very direct answer he said as soon as five as late as tenure like he he gave an answer and the reason why that's brilliant is i have got a friend who actually works with a bunch of cia folks and my friend is like a nervous guy he's kinda like me a little bit and he goes dude whenever i'm i'm my cia friends but my coworkers i find myself talking all the time because they talk very little and they talk very little so like when when i've sat down when i've just got to meet meet them and we're were trying to get to know each other over a business relationship i would sit down with them and they would talk so little because they knew that i was gonna fill space because i was uncomfortable with the silence and i ended up just spilling the being on all type of stuff and i appeared weak and told them everything and i asked him about that and they said yeah we purposely don't talk a lot because we know that if we don't talk a lot you're gonna talk yourself into like telling us what we want to know and le friedman did the opposite he shut up and he got the perfect answer out of elon and i think that's a wonderful way to interview people for a job for a negotiation for i watched this funny show about this it's called like dating on the spectrum or love on the spectrum and it's about kids or grown ups who have autism and are dating and i've noticed they do this too and they'll say something like so what do you think about how this date is going do you like me and they'll just silently and i'm like that is such a brilliant question like i wish i had the courage to ask that when i was dating and the other like they had the courage to ask that because they're are just you know maybe not a att always with social cues i wish i had the courage to ask that that's a beautiful question to ask and and giving that silence in that space and that for that question to breathe you foresee other person to come to a really cool answer for it and so anyway that was a really neat clint dude i love that point so many so many things to say about that first have you noticed that the people you get along with best are the only people that you can comfortably be quiet with when you are just living life yeah absolutely and that the fact that you could be quiet with each other almost builds a silent trust between people because it's like oh we don't have to yeah you don't have to okay wow i'm at ease i can just be myself i can just do whatever i just be pure i don't have to be constantly measuring how this is going so that's one observation second observation great interview great interviewers do this and like you said this cia folks great negotiators do this i worked with my dad for about nine months to a year in his company when i was young it i like twenty two or something like that and i had always you know you you don't really know how your dad is at work because this is like a different scenario was like it's a different context you know they come home and their dad mode they're not in like work mode so i gotta see my dad at work for the first time and i always knew my dad was smart but my dad was not great with like politics in the office so you know he never really got ahead seem like you know the sort of the the good look at tall white guy would always get ahead and my dad would sort of be there you know giving the right ideas and the right analysis but you know great thanks you know pat on the head and and you know move on you know he he would be at the he'd be in the meeting when the decisions happened and then whenever it he goes for a beer afterwards he wouldn't really be the guy who who connects with every afterwards was i think that held him back but the one thing he was great at was negotiating and i got to see him negotiate and i used to be like telling them i'm dude you got like i would be like kind of like trying to give my opinion a like you need to say something that's is awkward and he's like hey and afterwards he would teach me but during the i'm like you gotta say something so awkward just to do it like that you know you wanna make them feel you wanna build rapport he's like no in negotiation you don't wanna build rapport necessarily he goes in negotiation there's there's two types of person who can win there's the person with the leverage but we don't have the leverage and the second type that i can win is the mad man the mad man has leverage and he would do this intentionally he would go into situations and he would be the most stubborn guy in the room he would not be realistic he would not be cooperative he would not be practical or pragmatic with them he would just say you know like i like i won't do it or he'll would just be basically he would get to this state where he would just say look you know before i would have agreed to this but now saying how this is gone like i will die before we do a deal like this is just saying stuff like he would just get to a point that it wasn't all verbal it was just he would keep repeating the same thing so they would say you know seems like it's really important to you that this happens and when most say yeah you got it you you have heard me fantastic you know correct and my dad would say it is really important that we you know we have distribution rights they'd they be like right you so you guys want rights but you know we have to consider all these other factors you go we need distribution rights i look i know that you want distribution rights but we have to take into account these factors we need distribution rights and i would be like dude why do you keep saying the same thing and he's like i am just gonna get my way because i'm gonna be more stubborn than they're willing to be they want everybody to be happy and get along and they wanna be well liked and i such immigrant this is such an immigrant mentality and it's he would do the same thing at the market or here say i don't have any i only have six dollars they're like sir you just drove up in a bmw i only have six dollars it's like you know i remember once literally these are made up examples this is a real example we got to an airport and we had been telling my dad by my dad classic like an immigrant is just packing so much shit into the suitcase and i just kept telling them like dude these are not like this is like more than the quota allows right so and he's like no no don't worry we're gonna check this one we're gonna carry this one on i was carry this on this is a huge bag like this is not even close to a carry and he went to the counter and the lady was like he puts one of the bags on the counter and especially fifty pound limit it's like sixty five or whatever and she's like oh sir this is too heavy he goes no this is too light i was like what and she's like no no sir the limits fifty hey he goes he goes no this is this is wrong this is this bag is light this i have checked his light enough because her dad have an accent or nobody just like like this mode where he just like shakes have like an immigrant he's just like this this bag is too light actually this bag is light enough and she was like and she was she what to do and this little asian woman model i'll never forget and she was just like okay we'll just put it through and she just picked up and put it on the back thing like whip sent it through and i was like he just outfit his way he just older her the the bag as it was being weighed was too heavy he just told her it was not even it's okay it's fine make exception he told her it's too light which makes zero sense in any in any conditions and he's just on this so many time was like oh we trying to go to the four seasons they they check your id at the front to make sure a hotel guest and he would get to the front he would just be like he would just be like so you need to see some idea or something and the guy was like he's like you need some some id or we're fine he's like you're fine we just get through right you just had this immigrant confidence of like i can be more certain even though i'm wrong than they can they i will make them question there being right and i just saw him do this in so many negotiations so it reminded me of this like ability to be comfortable in the discomfort in this case not with silence but with something else these a great story the good this is a good story episode i'm digging this by the way did you watch the actual le elon interview the clips likes freedom clips on youtube dude there's one amazing clip i don't know you saw it was probably the most viral has to be when i was watching i took notes as i wrote this i sent it to my team because i was like hey hear some cool stuff that elon was saying because i was like you're probably not i watch this three hour podcast there's one section where i don't watch the three hour ones they're too long they're too long exactly let's asked this question he goes like you're doing these things in engineering that are considered hard or impossible self driving cars electric cars reusable rockets these engineering problems that literally nobody has solved in the history of humanity and experts even some of your heroes will say that it won't work or your method won't work you know how do you overcome those that that and if these engineering problems we and he goes where do you take where do you get your strength from in your inspiration you know what gives you strength to continue on amongst that and elon it quiet but he's quiet and this is quiet like when you're learning a new language he was like in my head in his head it just looked me like he's saying like what's the motherfucker talking about get strength like i i like i don't even do that but let me just entertain this thought like what do he what is he trying to ask me yeah it's like it's like asking elon like or a normal person it's like where do you get the urge to be hungry for dinner yeah exactly exactly like how do you scam yeah and so he goes so he goes he said something and he goes like i think that you just decide if it's worth doing and then try your hardest to do it or die trying and he's like he's like and and alexa alexa like so you don't you don't consider quit you know you see so you don't give up when things are hard is that what you know he goes quitting is not in my nature so tight there's this great sixty minutes where he said the same thing and someone was like you know like no car company has ever launched in the last like seventy fifty year whatever long it's been you are teeter on bankruptcy i think it's time to give up what do you think and he just looks it was scott pe he looks at him and he goes oh i don't i don't give up and right that's that's all he said period pants it looked like he's got to cry actually in that yeah in that interview you remember that yeah and and but he just looked at he goes i don't give up yeah exactly i thought that was really good exactly what he didn't let's go see you know so you don't quitting quitting is not you know quitting is not an option he goes it is not in my nature oh took that's tight and then and then he goes you know we just we just carry on and he paused and he's just goes fuck it like we'll get it done and like he he when he's talking about like the hard engineering challenges like you know and i was his attitude i thought you know elon kinda had noise me sometimes it's just stuff he does like yeah he's just like whatever on twitter he's he it's like trying really hard to be like a dude like win guy when he made the joke about like the guy looking like he just came or like condom him a penis head or stuff i forget what he said i thought that was whack i was like that just that's wack i don't find it that just like interesting well four twenty o yeah sixty nine bro it's like yeah i did not it's not like that it's just not funny to me not like i'm offended but just like literally it's just not funny so yes again you a joke that doesn't land which makes you less cool in my books you know but well when he session shit like this and he actually you know his story actually lined up with i think it's actually really fucking bad ass there was a bunch of things in this that i thought were really cool one one so so he he talks about a couple of things can i just rattle off a couple of the bits that that were good yeah he's like i think you should learn physics because he goes there's only what the only real rules are physics everything else is a recommendation brilliant all public policy social sciences psychology biology chemistry these a recommendations physics is the only rule so he's like you know when we go to do one of these hard things i just first look at are we trying are we redefined the laws of physics if we are then we need to change our plan if we're not then we can get it done he said a couple things he knows what a baller mentality he goes you know physics teaches you not just about physics it teaches you how to think so he goes you know he he gave but again the example people have heard about first principles thinking which is like you don't you don't come to your conclusions by analogy like this worked so something similar might work in another vertical it's like first principles being like okay you know for for example to to get to lot to you know can a rocket it be cheaper well i i can give you some opinions but like let's start with what is the physical cost of the materials that go into the base minimal rocket that can get to mars based on everything we know today or i can get get into orbit and then you know they come up with our cost assumption from that not well it cost nasa this and we could do probably twenty five percent better you know starts at the bottom not that not top down the other one he talks about is like thinking about things in the limit you know he's talking about bitcoin and he goes people argue you that money has value money has power in and of itself it does not and the way to know this is to think about it in a limit if you are stranded on an island and you have no food no water no shelter but your bitcoin will not save you money itself has no value you know it only he's like money is a way that groups of people can allocate resources but if there are no people then it has no value to you even if there was one person there and you said i'll give you all of my bitcoin trillion dollars of bitcoin for that apple they would never give it to you if you're stranded on that island another thing he's like so here's how we use that that idea of thinking about things in the limit in our business he's like so he's like cars everybody thought the cars would be too expensive and they were at first the roadster was you know a hundred thousand dollars plus and then the model s was a bit cheaper and then so on and so forth he goes manufacturing things if you think about in the limit it's like as you increase your volume your cost goes down and it will approach basically basically means the line will converge just to the cost of the raw materials plus the licensing cost of the intellectual property you're using so at enough scale it might be billion cars or whatever you know at enough scale that is what the costs are is like and you think about that then you say okay so so then will this work you know then you can work backwards into reality he goes because most people the way they do things which i think is wrong is they you know they look at okay given my circumstances so given the tools and the methods that we know what can we do he goes that will never really yield like breakthroughs he goes instead do you think what is the actual ideal scenario what is the perfect arrangement of atoms that will yield the best product now let's try to get the atoms into that shape because you actually want both you wanna think of both directions you wanna first think of the perfect product what is the perfect arrangement of atoms or pixels in a in a computer per product that would be the act absolute perfect ideal product and then you say what tools methods and materials do we have today and you wanna think of both directions and then you'll arrive at like you know a fantastic you know best in class product and that's you know what we do for test on things like that that's great so you know he's was thinking about about things like that and he was just describing things like that which thought was great you had a couple other funny ones he goes yeah when a when a website asks you if you'll accept the cookies he's he's like he's giving an example of like when government regulation doesn't work he's like the government tried to regulate tracking so then every website just asks you for cookies it just pops up every time you visit every single website and every single person to click accept on every single website now nobody reads it nobody actually knows what they're doing but yay the government regulated that that the website has to pop that up and he said like he's like you know every time that pops up it feels weird it feels like perhaps there's a a very small chance that clicking this will open up a tiny portal to hell because dude he's so funny weird i love that it's god he's so interesting i i i feel inspired just listening to do you tell us tell story we wanna do one more yeah i have two interesting ones so i can like one scroll on to the bottom do you wanna talk about my buddy's portfolio or the book thing let's do the book thing i think that's faster let's alright alright so i got curious about something i saw this so there's guy named mark manson mark manson has this book called the subtle art of not giving a fuck then he created a couple spin offs from it so i'll tell you quick a funny story so this book was the best selling book of two thousand and twenty i believe or nineteen either nineteen or twenty i forget the exact year and it or maybe even prior before that actually but it's just sold like many many millions copies of books i actually had dinner at a conference with tucker who we're just talking about and mark manson sat next to me and i was talking to him them and i was like what do your parents think about your job and he goes well they kinda make fun of me and ask me what i'm gonna get a real job they don't really know what i do they just think i play in the computer all day and i play video games all day they don't truly understand like what i'm doing but they kind of understood it this year when they released a report for new york time saying i sold more books than hillary clinton so that's when they that's when they kind of understood what i do and so that's a funny story about mark but i looked up i was i was curious about something about him when my and the first article came out that he had a condo in new york city that he recently sold for fourteen million dollars and i got curious about that because i think that book i was like books can't make that much money can they and atomic habits this year sold or so far has sold around five million books in total and this year atomic habits was the best selling book on amazon in two thousand twenty or twenty one and i was curious about how much authors make so i i have a friend i can't talk about his name but he sold thirty thousand copies of a book that was published on a major publisher and i wanna explain to you how much money he made by the way the and that thirty thousand that's a ton that's like in the top one percentile you know yes the book this book is in bookstores and it's probably in the airport and things like that so they were given they didn't have a book before they were given a two hundred fifty thousand dollar advance which is basically just like here's two fifty go in a year yeah and and go write the book off that thirty thousand in books they have not made a cent in royalty or licensing fees and he told me that when he was looking at the contract he doesn't even entirely understand when he's gonna get paid past that amount and he only gets paid like pennies on the dollar for every like fourteen dollar books sold right and he said he's like i he goes basically i get paid they spent a certain amount of money to help me make this book and they get paid once it's surpass i get paid once it surpasses that amount but i can't even understand in the paperwork how much they spent it like including everyone's salaries on doing this and publishing and things like that but i have made he said an additional four hundred thousand dollars this year on selling other stuff like courses and coaching and consulting right which wouldn't have happened because of the book but basically on thirty thousand copies sold he has not made a cent other than the two fifty and he told me that his editor wasn't that good that he had to spend a little bit of money getting their his own editor and that their marketing people weren't that great and i found to be very interesting and so i looked up dan aria dan aria you know who he is the instagram guy he self published his book and so dan aria book it costs thirty five dollars and he has a shopify store that sells it you can't buy it on amazon and it works for dan airing because he just posts a link on instagram and he goes viral but david go did it as well and so anyway this whole publishing kinda of thing got me interested because these people do not i guess mark manson he must have crushed it somehow but for somebody who sells thirty thousand books they don't make shit off their off their books and i found it to be incredibly fascinating i guess if you're like ryan holiday i heard that he makes he does good but a lot of people they just don't get paid well i think it's two things it's if you take in advance the economics and it's your first book the economics is gonna be super skewed against you if you have multiple hits like a ryan holiday then you know by the time you negotiate your third book deal you're gonna have much better economics in the you know tim ferris probably made more off his last book than he did off the first book which is the best seller and then the last thing is self publishing you know changing the game in a way so you know let's say a book sells for thirteen ninety nine or whatever fourteen bucks you know i think it's gonna be like probably you know seven eight bucks of just the cost of a book plus shipping to get it to a customer and you know so you're left with four or five bucks at the end to play with now whether that goes all in your pocket or your publishers pocket i think that depends on how you negotiate but even if you just take four bucks per copy you know five million copies sold for atomic habits you know i would believe that he's grossed you know twenty million thirty million in sales i'm sorry like gross profit off that now i don't know what his deal was if he's i don't know if he fell publish him what well five million books tom's fourteen dollars is seventy thousand seventy million so the the revenue on that i would have bet is in the fifty to a hundred million range yeah that huge ballpark but i don't know what a guy like him would make but i bet you he could get paid like many thousands an hour to come and talk i mean i bet you you've cost some fifty thousand dollars to show up at a at a boardroom in new york to give a discussion to give talk i just got paid eight thousand dollars to do a zoom call for one hour to give a talk and so that means that somebody who's you know the author of atomic habits is definitely commanding you know twenty five fifty k per per talk crazy and now maybe a digital that's crazy so anyway i thought i thought this was interesting and it's it's shocked me writing a book you because you're going through this i know you're i know you're or you're thinking about going through i don't know how far how far are i basically paid to write the book and now i gotta write the book this year so that'll happen and so i would predict that you don't make money directly off of it but i imagine there will be money made in some ways yeah i think a book is a pretty horrible way make money so i'm just doing it for fun that's it alright well that's that this wasn't an interesting episode i think this is actually gonna be a favorite really i i feel like ben you tell us but i feel like because we were all over the place at just like random stories i don't know if people i don't know what people think what you would you grade it first of all i should say i'm i'm changing my grading system in two thousand twenty two because like the reason that you know i came and did this because i love my first million so i giving out a's left and right because like every episode is an a to me but i need to adjust it so that c is the normal episode from now on instead of back okay so c is just like an average my first million which is an a really but we're see just just say just say average normal like that yeah see that's me okay okay so then we will call this an average plus is it a new phone like it's it's it's like a c plus b minus it was it was a better than normal episode i actually like the topics were super different and random but they were all super interesting to me what was the most interesting well you know i'm into the du optimism stuff so like i loved that discussion that was probably my favorite dude that shift freaked me out i was upset for like two days i'm still a little rattled by it it may be nervous that's i when you're talking about building these airbnb i was like no no sam you need to go out and start building like compounds you know it's a good i feel like that's gonna be a thing in the future do you know that mormons prep what like mormons prep oh that's like a thing it's like part of it yeah but what do you do bet like you believe like part of part of the actual religion or it's just like it's like we thou shall do this or it's happened to be more like prep yeah so it's been deem emphasized a little bit just because the you know more than fifty percent of the members of of the church now are outside the united states so a lot of them don't have the financial means to do like emergency preparedness but every member of the church is supposed to have a month of like food and water i thought it was even higher i thought it was like six it used it used to be more like a month is kind of the bottom line is the is sort of the yeah yeah yeah the minimum and then a lot of people do three or six we we have somewhere between three and six to me doing that is like the same thing of freezing your sperm so like there's a small chance that something's gonna happen to you where you get a car accident and your sperm goes away and you can't reproduce and for many people myself included that would be like the worst thing ever like can't oh man i can't have a kid so it's like it's cost a hundred dollars a year in order to do it i'm gonna do that prepping is the same exact thing there's a small chance but i'll be thankful if there's one in a million that i ever had no so i what i would say though is like having food storage or stuff like that is not just good for like the end of the world but also like if you're in hurricane katrina and you can't get out for whatever reason and you just need to be to like eat for a week it's good for like emergencies that do happen all the time to people like every day you know all the mormon mommy bloggers that i follow which i do follow a lot they all do a really good one they don't remember a lot of their names i found on instagram and i and i go to their blog sometimes but they basically have these like you know how i at the grocery store there's like coffee beans and you just pour coffee on top and at the very bottom you can like like they have like granola coffee sugar and you can just like you know open the spigot at the very bottom and it just empty out it seems like what they have those in their homes and so whenever it's not it's always topped off though so the oldest this stuff gets you eat that but then like you are always you're constantly topping it off so you always have a constant supply of that stuff you like those containers sometime anyway alright that's the episode yeah i feel like i could rule to where i know i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a travel never looking back