Ryan Holiday Reveals How Much Best Selling Authors Make, Crazy Peter Thiel Stories & More

and then i googled like mark manson house because that's always like the tell on like is someone like crushing it because it's you can't really like it's hard to get a mortgage for fifteen million dollar unless you're actually raking it in and it said like you know mark manson sells tribe becca condo for fourteen million dollar and i'm like damn he like i thought book the book business was a bad business he must have crushed it he must be making millions my man ryan holiday oh nice said nice to talk to you it's good to talk to you too so you you you asked to come here and i'll just because i wanna get out of the way i wanna give you the love you asked to come on here because a we're homie and i love you yeah and also because b you have a book coming out what's discipline is destiny this is the new one for the series yeah it came out yesterday oh and how's it going so far really good really good should be significantly higher it's already significantly higher than the last one and then you're so i i i know where the numbers are but i'm waiting well the one thing you don't know until the end of the second week is audio numbers and where it may or may not land on the best seller list what do you think this the outcome of this one's gonna be we'll probably come in a bit above forty thousand copies the first week i would i would venture to guess could be higher if they keep trending this way so because i have my own bookstore and i did the sales through my own bookstore i probably won't hit the wall street journal they they they sku me last time and then the new york times list is let's say fifty fifty all all of which my publisher is very concerned about and i have decided that i don't care about at all anymore because if you own your own bookstore that means that and you sell twenty thousand copies do they not count all twenty thousands in in the rankings yeah so i mean just generally if you sold twenty thousand copies of a book through one bookstore they would find that to be suspicious or or un and there's a chance it could get tossed if you ever look at the at the best seller list and you see like a little they call it a dagger or it's like a little cross next to certain books that means that there was a lot of bulk purchases or like suspicious activity so there could be that but the the the wall journal or book scan which is owned by nielsen just flat out told me they just don't include sales from stores owned by the author anymore which doesn't strike me is that being a big enough category to have a rule about but i guess it it there's the potential for fraud like i guess theoretically i could have just you know inflated the numbers or something so so there's a chance if could get toss but as i have gone on as an author i've cared once you get once i feel like you have it and then you also realize like kind of how meaningless things are so i care a lot less about sort of the status or the recognition of sales and i care a lot more about you know did i sell as many copies as possible to as many people as possible right because the whole puts for people to read it does being on that list and when you say the best seller list are you meaning just in new york time that considered like a the list and does being on that there's help sales there's there's sort three lists there's new york times which you you probably rank as number one wall street journal which you'd probably rank as number two and then usa today those are the three what you have to hit one of those three lists to be called the national best seller those are the three national lists there i think people tell themselves a story about how being on the list helps them sell more copies but as someone who buys a lot of books and talks to a lot of people who buy a lot of books i have never once heard of someone buying a book because they saw it on a list most people don't even know where they would find such a list dude i was reading is it news corp or i forget the company the the it's rupert murdoch company but he has two of i forget which one is that owns i think penguin and they did this whole i was reading their annual report and they were doing this entire section on mark manson and basically saying like this has been like a breakthrough hit and like this is a you know the company like a twenty or forty billion dollar company and they're referencing mark manson and i'm like oh wow that's that must be a huge book in order for them to like discuss this in a sure six pages of a hundred page document and then i googled like mark manson house because that's always like the tell on like is someone like crushing it because it's you can't really like it's hard to get a mortgage for fifteen million dollars house unless you're actually breaking it in and it said like you know mark manson sells tribe becca condo for fourteen million dollars and like damn he like i thought book the book business was a bad business he must have crushed it he must be making millions it's actually a a great business so the the publishing industry i think is about a forty billion dollar industry news corp owns harper collins harper collins publishes mark penguin random house which is my publisher is the biggest publisher in the world and they are themselves those look penguin random house i think they're owned by a a parent company i forget the parent company there they're owned by be or something like that yeah that's right but you know let's revenues their revenues are i bet i four billion euro for for penguin random so it's a it's a very big business and and always has been and there are multi multiple multi billion dollar you know businesses inside that business even even ingram which is the distributor that sells books to most independent retail is like a seven or eight billion dollar business but mark's probably sold i think i think subtle art of not giving a fuck sold like ten or fifteen million copies and what are the cost bucks yeah so so if you think about like my books i i've sold five million copies if you said twenty that's that's a hundred million dollars in gross revenues right there right see now now obviously there's a lot of middle men even before it gets to the publisher right the publisher is selling the book at wholesale so right there that's you know cuts it in half and then you know blah blah blah it goes down but but there are if you think about how much a book sells for and the quantities of which successful authors sell a lot of books that that number gets very very high this is why jk k rowling is is a billionaire right she's probably sold a hundred two hundred million harry potter books not including licensing and all the other things you know different the the the different formats whether it's audio or ebook physical hard even hard cover and paper back is a big thing like one of the i bet mark for instance that i i know mark and he's amazing the distinction the the decision to put your book in paper back is actually a multi million dollar decision for authors and and most authors have never even thought about this so for instance on a hard cover book the the standard publishing contract and pretty much everyone including the authors that are household names are on this same contract it's just this is what it is is fifteen percent on hard cover price so and and author makes you know fifteen percent of twenty seven dollars whether you as the customer get that book for seventeen dollars on amazon or for twenty seven dollars at an independent bookstore you're making the same amount right your your royalty is on msrp but fifteen percent of hard cover right a paper back sells for about ten to fifteen dollars less than a hard cover right but and your royalty is twelve and a half percent so my my agent very early who was in publishing he was like he was like i will never let your books go into paper back he's like you have to sell about as third you have to sell a third more books to make the same amount of money that you sold in hard cover and this is why tim ferris books are not widely available in paper back good to great by jim collins which is sold tens of you know by ten million copies still in hard cover even though it's a twenty year old book so there's lots of little decisions audible and eb so audible you make i think it's the same as odd i think audible and ebook are twenty five percent of list price so you make it it it's a higher royalty but on a lower price point audio books are like fifteen bucks or nine bucks for for ebooks books a lot of times so so somewhere between two and three bucks a book you make across formats so you're in cover ebook book and so you think mark's book has sold two hundred is i think did you say two hundred million in sales so no no twenty he's probably sold twenty million bucks oh sorry in gross revenue oh was twenty million bucks times hard cover pry or you know it it it there's gonna be a a blend there of the price the only the only thing that's worth pointing out and this isn't a criticism it's a it's just a a quirk of the business mark has sold mark's books are very big internationally right his books are big in brazil his books are big in india i i've experienced the same thing but as soon as you start like so as soon as you start selling lots of copies internationally let's just say you start seeing a lot less money for those titles right like for instance somebody sent me a copy of one of my books in from iran recently and i emailed my agent and i said oh i didn't know we did it like a persian translation and he said we didn't he said iran doesn't recognize copyright they just do whatever they want he's like you'll never see a penny from these books so the point is like if if you sell a million books in russia right you're not getting your standard royalty rate you may never see a penny of that you might get an initial advance but you do you know is you start to get into let's say less transparency in the accounting as you sell so you can't you can't simply go well what's the total number of copies sold by a person and then times that by a number you're probably gonna be overs stating the cash they have on hand so you've sold a hundred million in books so then like the estimate based off of the numbers you said it would be like around thirteen fourteen fifteen percent take home i mean how many authors are doing that selling five million books so very very few i mean definitely there are lot there are lots of people who have done it and there are people who have done much much higher than that but like as far as people who write about philosophy i mean i'm not sure it's been done ever certainly not in in in like the modern world so you know when i went to my publisher and i you know offered them a an obscure book about ancient philosophy in two thousand eleven two thousand twelve for for the s book for first stop book now they offered me my my advance on the obstacles is the way was seventy five thousand dollars they were not they were not thinking you know that series would sell three or four million copies do you think that your life has or will become so we were talking about tim ferris and we're like you know however much he's made on books it probably pale in comparison he's i arguably like just guessing maybe he's worth a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty million dollars based off of his shopify and uber and seed investments and who she probably has done so many more things that i don't even know about do you think that your business is gonna be a similar thing where it's almost like the books are awesome but there gonna be tiny compared to the other revenue streams i don't know i don't i don't do that many investments but it is weird like i i i i was an advisor early on to like butcher box and they've done a few sort of private transactions that i took part in and it is both humbling and surreal to be like to get a check and be like shit i would have had to sell a lot of books to get the same amount of money and this amount of money was you know a lot less work so i i think for someone like tim you know when when you can when you can invest in something that scales at that level it i i do think it makes you a little dis interested in the economics of publishing even though they are quite they are quite good yeah i mean i was like and everyone talks about in writing a book and they say i think he's the one who told me this he's like it sucks he's like it just it stinks he he says he goes i love it kind of but i also really hate it it's very uncomfortable and it's a lot of hard work and i was like yeah i don't know why you'd write a book then when you if you don't have if you don't if you don't truly truly love it i have no idea if he does or just not but it's very hard it seems it almost impossible it is super weird though because like a lot wealthy people read books right the the the the interesting thing about books is that they sort of punch above their weight culturally it's like the opera or something right and so like you could be very famous on youtube and your average billionaire might not know who you are but if you write like a business book or a political book that sells reasonably well you're gonna you're gonna have some name recognition in an elite group and so i've gotten to meet like a number of very successful business people over the years and like as a rule they all wanna write books or all wanna talk about whether they should write a book or not and it was actually very helpful for me to learn that early on because like every author i knew was trying to start a business or follow tim ferris footsteps and invest in these companies to get really really rich and then i would meet really really rich people and they wanted to write books and it was a reminder to me that like doing stuff that's cool that you like that means something to you is what people do with their money when they have it and so they're like like i met this guy you actually probably know but i won't put them on the spot but anyways he he'd written a couple books and then he started a vc company he raised a fund he raised like a hundred million dollars and he had to put writing on the side to raise this fund and i asked him you know like why why are you doing this like what are you gonna i was like let's say you really succeed like let's say your fund crashes and you walk away with like twenty million dollars what would you do with it right and he was like he's like do you know who baton is he's an author who started this company called school of life he was like i think i would do something like that and i was just i just burst into laughter because like doing it that was it yeah he was it's like that that story about the you know the fishermen who meets that western businessman who tells him like you know if you really scale up your company blah blah blah blah you know one day you can sit on a beach somewhere and it's like that's what i do now and so there is kind of this weirdness where people think financial freedom is this kind of abstract good and then you meet people who have it and they still have to wake up and figure out what they're gonna do all day dude i listen to your i wanna talk about the youtube thing in a second but i listen to your youtube videos every single morning when i take a walk wow and like it makes me feel so good about myself not maybe not good about myself but i feel like i'm getting so much from it whether it's education whether it's just like you're helping me think differently i don't know what it is but you're i get so much from it when you you're the one creating all this stuff or at least you're para like interesting people do you think that you are absorbing these lessons better than most others like you know like are you you you just told this very simple story of like well why would you go and do this this and this when you're already doing that now are you motivated by like are you motivated by money are you motivated by all these things that you talk about like look this in this and this may not make you happy i think i i certainly struggle with it like every you know single person does because it's not like just knowing it doesn't magically make it easy but i would say like like a big lesson like that like why are you trying to make all this money to get somewhere you're already you already could be i feel like i do a a better job learning those those big philosophical lessons like sort of where do you rein ambition in you know sort of how do you define meaning or happiness or contentment in your life i probably am better at that than i am at some of the more basic stuff like you don't have to be anxious about this or like why are you letting this person get under your skin or why are you losing your temper about x y z so like i feel like the bigger stuff the this stoic or the philosophy sort of connects with me and and by the way that story that about the fishermen actually traces back to like the fourteenth century about this story about a prince advising a king or an adviser advising the prince so the story goes way back i feel like i get that better than i do stuff that might be seem really easy for most people which is just like you know sort of day to day emotional management how you said something been really cool on the i was listening to this the other day there's two things that suck out but the first one is with matthew mc mckenna hey you're talking about content and you're asking him about how what he chooses like which projects he chooses and apparently he there was the whole part of the episode was talking about how he had like ten or twenty million dollar offer and he was like nah i don't wanna do this this doesn't this doesn't speak to me this is not how i would have spent my time and he was like he felt guilt over that and you guys were talking about bob dylan and think it was you who said i wanna make content like bob dylan which is quality and quantity don't necessarily have to be at odds with each other like i can output lots of really cool great stuff and you do do that and the daily stoic is an email then you have the daily dad another email and then you have the books which is you have dozens of them or a dozen of them plus and then you have the podcast podcasts and then you have the youtube channel and i'm like how on earth are you how are you outputting all of this stuff it's always awesome i love all your shit well thank you i mean i i i think i actually like i actually like doing it right so there's there's some people who they don't like doing it and so to do it because you think it'll make money or it's what you have to do that would be not a reason to do it but like i like this morning i i got up and i wrote and yesterday when the book came out i was excited not to come into the office to see how you know the the disciplined did but like i had saved like a really good chapter for what is the sequel because i'm doing this four book series like i was just fucking pumped to do that like that that's really what gets me excited is doing the stuff so i've always i i think i tend to have more energy to make stuff than there actually is like pipes to put stuff out that's just like how it shook out and i i agree like i i i i agree with the sentiment re dylan and that that like quantity and quality don't have to be opposed to each other and in fact the more you do chances are you'll you'll sort of get something magical or important i mean like i i i really admire people who are wired differently and they sort of painstakingly put you know put lots of years into something although like if you you know i bet if you asked mark he would and i actually i have asked him but like following up a massive massive hit is really hard and i've been lucky in that my books have done well but they haven't done so well that like my whole world changed like when the obstacles was the way it came out so obstacles the way it came out they did offer me very much money it sold well at first but it it took when did like a slow yeah it and and not even slow but just steady like it probably didn't cross the one million copies sold mark i know it crossed the hundred thousand copies mark within the first year because there was a bonus attached to it so it took you know twelve months to sell a hundred thousand copies but it probably took an additional four to five years before it crossed the one million copy mark so like for someone like mark or james clear or other other people like it would they they hit the one million mark in like a number of months and when you start to do that everything changes expectations change you know inbound inquiries change and i think i think it becomes hard to just like do the thing so i i feel like kind of lucky to be like to have a niche but to to to have a big niche but for it it's still to very much be a niche right like there's just more people haven't heard of me than have heard of me and that is a nice place to operate in dude so many people so the hustle we were a daily email and then me and sean did this thing three days a week and people are like hey how are you doing quantity i wanna get started but like you know i'm like banking twenty one episodes before i start or yeah i'm like perfect like this blog post and you know i'm i'm going more for quality versus quantity and in my head or sometimes i'll tell them i'm like no that's a false dichotomy that that's not true like the quality is the quantity like you know you like the the output here or like the if this were like quality plus quantity equals it would be like you know like the total reach in how impactful they are and the types of people you're impacting and to do that you have to have like something in there for quantity and it's really just kind of an excuse to procrastinate further that you're making up for yourself but a it gets easier as you get into it so you need quantity you need the swings to get better and b if you treat it like a job you could have way more output than you think yeah i i have couple thoughts there so one it's like try to apply that logic to like any other thing like imagine if you met a comedian and they were like i'm really focused on quality instead of quantity so i don't do a lot of stage time like i just don't go up very often you'd be like you're a shitty stand of comic like the way you get good at it is by doing it a lot right and it's very hard to get to quality without years of back and forth with an audience right like it's just really hard and so especially online where you're giving the thing away for free like you should be focused on quantity because quantity is how you get to a place where what you do is worth paying for at a premium level like with a a book or something so like i i've done a free email every day for six years right that that's built a business but are you writing that i write it every day i mean every once in a while like like let's say ten percent of them are you know hey i'll i'll work with someone on my team be like hey i already wrote about this can you work this into a draft for me to approve or rewrite but like the vast majority of those daily emails were like a hundred percent original ideas that i put out a hundred percent of i just the data or does it make it easier both both you you oh i didn't know you're writing both of those every day yeah well i don't write it i mean i write every day but i don't write the email every day right so like i am currently let's say like i could pull this up let me i have a document where i i have someone track them like i am i'm scheduled out on daily stoic through and daily dad through october fourteenth and then i have ten written that are ready to record sixteen that are recorded but not un scheduled and then nine on daily dad that are ready to record and eight that are recorded but not scheduled so like that's your system yeah so i just do like i might sit down today like i have i don't know where my to do list is but i might to do is i have three sort of one sentence ideas for daily to add emails and i might bust that out in thirty minutes and then that's you know almost a week worth of content right there are you writing the scripts to your youtube videos i think you're only doing one or two a week right yes so youtube have a i have a i i've a actually wait let me i'll i'll come back to that in sec the other thing i would say about the people who are like oh i really wanna get to quality that's why i take so long when i look at what those people make i very rarely see the quality right like but they're like oh you know what this book it took me five years and i'm like where show show me five years of work in this thing right i'm i'm not arguing with you that it it transpired over five years but i don't think you showed up and worked on this as you said like a job every day for five years i think it either because if that were true i think it would either be a lot better or i think it would have come out a lot faster right so i think a lot of people are baking in a lot of inefficiencies and a lot of procrastination inside that and then patti themselves on the back and saying that they're doing a that they're really focused on quality so that's just like a dispute i have i think a lot of people take way too long to do things when when i see like a robert greene or a robert carr or you know one of these greats i'm like i see the i see the five years like it's obvious like you weren't like robert greene it was telling me the other day he's like seven months into a chapter on this book that he's writing right now and when i read that chapter i'll see every fucking day right because like that he's not lying dude when i read robert greene and the what's his what's carol's both moses yeah the rob moses book robert moses and then i just got done reading the rise of the third reich which is like which is like a fifteen hundred or thirteen hundred word like epic and then at pretty much like titan is like this too anything ron turnout does yeah every sentence hat like to me it's like a life's work and if they're lucky they can maybe get three of them yeah and i read those things and they make me depressed because i just think like i i can never do anything this detailed oriented this beautiful like it it those it's i think it's mostly history books every single sentence is amazing and i don't understand how you could do that for so long yeah this is the william manchester series on churchill show which i would highly recommend this is the taylor branch series on martin luther king also incredible in the acknowledgment of the last book in the the king series taylor branch talks about how his youngest son was born like the day he started the series and then took a break from college to help him finish the last book that's crazy man so nuts those are really like life work they are and it's not just that every sentence is perfect but like we don't see that if you think about the iceberg we don't see the research the interviews right the on like location observing that went into forming one of those state the those sentences so yeah like there's definitely people who there's a reason they only do two or three things in their lifetime and then there's everybody else and chances are like you're everybody else and so there's that and then as far as the youtube videos go i do a couple different ones like one the i think the easiest youtube videos we do are like compilation of like reels or instagram clips that i do so there's not a lot of script there it's just the intro it's like piecing together sort of meditations on a larger idea but if it is a like you know how to read marcus aurelius how to read seneca or you know let me tell you the biography of this stoic or i have one coming out next week that's about the relationship between marcus aurelius and anton ny pi his step father that's a combination between like having somebody give me an outline and then me usually drawing on something that i wrote somewhere else so for me the writing particularly of the books is what generates the vast majority of the content and then i have people who help me just just in the way that i don't do the spanish edition of my books i have people who help translate what i've done into different mediums are you using google docs yeah for them for the most part yeah and how big the team like ten people now probably includes includes the bookstore and also does it include daily stoic and a daily dad yeah yeah i'm saying that i probably have ten employees maybe maybe eleven or well but but less than fifteenth dude that is crazy man the output is this awesome i i i think that's amazing our software is the worst have you heard a pub hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better i was messaging you the other day because someone was like hey you should start a book club me and i'm like well i read a lot but like you ryan should really start it like someone like that and i looked a while ago i looked the book of the month is the book of it's called book of the month and it's like a company that's been around for like fifty sixty maybe even a hundred years it's been around for a long time and it's traded hands a ton i think right now last i heard they're in the seventy million range of revenue which is a a big business but i don't know if it's growing and don't know if that makes a profit i know what this situation is but have you looked into these book of the month businesses i think re reese witherspoon had one too that i think was profitable yeah there's a there's a couple different ones there's another company called liter book of the month the book of the month concept definitely goes back quite a bit and that used to be like a way that you would guarantee a book success would be if you were selected to one of those clubs because they might buy a hundred thousand copies or something there's and then there's a what is it called the next big idea book club which i think malcolm glad is an investor and there's there's a there's a handful of them the problem with the business is first off not that many people read right unfortunately second the logistics of it are what is tough right so like at the very best you're gonna be able to get those books from like let's say you're doing physical right at the very very best you're gonna be able to get those books at fifty percent off from the publisher so if you start to get into you know like it it it drives the subscription like already your subscription is more than netflix which gets you unlimited of the best most entertaining content in the world right so the the really tough part is getting to a place where you can move a lot of books and the revenue is high so i started this newsletter like fifteen years ago where i just recommend books what do you have like two hundred and fifty thousand people now on it something like that yeah and and i just prefer to like look if you wanna buy the book from my bookstore i make a little bit of money doing that if you buy it from amazon i get the commission but i'd much rather just have that list in that audience than try to monetize a book club itself because the bundle of including the book plus fulfilling the book plus customer service and all that other stuff it i think i think it's just hard to make the business itself work how much revenues can you make at one send from from the reading list newsletter i don't know i don't know i completely ten or twenty grand maybe or yeah that that would be that would be a a lot because the the other thing that i found is that the people who read the most who like real like like the kind or at least the kind of readers that i attract are like i don't wanna say they're loan wolves but they're more like like i don't know about you but like the way i read is i just have at all times a long list of like books i'm going to get around to reading i'm not like oh you're reading this book right now i have space for you in my life so like like if i think about the impact that the list has had as far as moving copies for books it's not like oh we sold this many copies of this book this month it's more over a time although i did invest in this company do you know the company vinyl me i think i introduced you to them matt field the founder is my that was my high school yeah who is my i or mike my very very very close college friend and for those listening vinyl me please is awesome i don't know how many i don't remember how many people they have twenty thirty thousand subscribers and they send out a record of vinyl of a piece of vinyl and i remember he was like complaining to me he was like man the the like we whenever someone gets selected for our vinyl like when we pick an album it becomes the best selling vinyl in the country because we're the biggest but but now they're not counting it anymore saying right it's the same thing we're talking about with the best seller list they they would be the number one vinyl album in the country each month but but they just get sku from the billboard charts yeah and i i i haven't asked matt about the business lately but it's been around for ten years now and it seems to be doing good i and but i think that's that's a different experience right and so i i'm one i was i guess i'm an adviser so i i got some early shares in inviting me when it came out so and that's been a surprisingly big business like i i i when i see the numbers i'm always like whoa that's bigger than i would have guessed right you wouldn't you think like oh maybe a thousand people a month not twenty thousand people a month yeah that's a lot of people but but i think and music is people consume more music than they do books right and do over and over again with a bunch of people it's a passive experience and the the art of discovery is different right like you want to be suggested random things on a regular basis and i i think with a book like people have so little room to read in their lives that i don't know i just i i i like the idea of the business and it would be amazing to make it work i have struggled to actually see it work and i think there's probably just ultimately better ways to monetize that attention than than than a list of subscribers you have to service each month for a specific kind of book you said something earlier about like you get access to all these amazing people and i follow you on instagram and i've talked you a bit and i follow your content and you are hanging out with like all these athletes you're hanging out with billionaires and business people and celebrities and all these interesting people who are some of the people who you've met where you said i wanna emulate this particular attribute or the way that they've done this this and this i admire so much or this person is just wildly impressive who do you admire or of all the people you've met oh that's a good question you know i actually talked about this in the in the end of of discipline as i was sort of struggling with the book kind of early in the process like one i was just fucking tired because i've done a lot of books in a very short amount of time and like the idea it just i don't know it just wasn't gel and i had lunch with with von no who just got ind in the hall of fame this month and we were we were having lunch at the at the bookstore he he'd come out and we were hanging out and it just sort of struck me like this dude has four rings like his four championship rings and he has two gold medals and is a hall of fame and he was like i i don't wanna say he's a regular person because that sounds like that almost minimizes it but the point is when you think about someone who has four rings i think you think more of like a jordan character who is fundamentally out of balance right like so there's no disputing jordan is jordan is like one of the greats if not the greatest like basketball player maybe athlete as a as a whole right but but we tend to think that that to be that good requires like fundamentally some fundamental trade offs about what kind of person you are and what your day to day life looks like like tom brady right comes back to football can't walk away and it may well cost is marriage right and and people see that nigga that's what it takes right i'm not sure that that is what it takes that might be you know what it took in that specific scenario but like i the more i meet really successful people i become less impressed by like how much money they made or like you know whether they have the most rings or the second most rings or whatever it is and i go like is this person like a good parent do they seem like they live in reality you know or are or are they like are they actually able to wake up and in joy like what they have today or is it like they're traveling here and there and they're just always doing stuff right i i think like to me what the the the journey that i've tried to go on inspired by people like that is i wanna be world class at what i do and and like be a somewhat of a normal person like who else it's almost easier to be great than it is to be good if that makes sense yeah that's awesome who who who else have you who have you met so you know hey him and chris ba are interesting you i've i listened to a bunch of content that you made it with those guys i felt the same way about chris ba and i was send you him i'm like oh man this dude like kinda yeah maybe normal insulting but like that's what i was like you're i'm never gonna be something feet tall but like yeah you know like your mentality is achievable you know what i mean it's it's kind of funny as craig i do feel the same way about chris and and his wife and and my wife friends but like every once in a while i'll mention one one of them to the other and then i forget that they it chris said something to me actually when i had him on the daily stoke podcast he's like you know he's elbow me in the face like a lot like like it was like realizing like like their best and worst moments came like the the moment in both of their careers came at each other's expense right like like man goes up for a rebound that that chris gets that chris tips back to ray allen who makes a three pointer to win to basically win the series right like it it is also weird to things like hear are these like kind of two people that i admire and then they're on like a their careers were like on a collision course with each other are they buddies now i don't think so no i don't think so even though they like they live not far from each other right one's in san antonio one's in austin and i i do not think that they see each other other's social data that it might take some time like maybe maybe in twenty years the that rivalry rep fades away is there anyone else you've met and you're like man the way that you're pulling this off or the way that you're playing life i just admire so much well you know what it was i had a weird one a couple weeks ago i i i don't wanna say who it is i it not because i it i feel weird dropping the name but anyways let's just say i met this musician and he'd read the books and he reached out to me to through someone we know and he was like hey you know next time you're in new york you should come see me let me know i'd love to have dinner with you so i was like hey i'm actually gonna be in new york like next week and he's like oh alright my assistant will like send you the details and the details were like go to this pad and then the helicopter took me and his son and our mutual friend to their house in the hampton where we had dinner and then it flew us back to manhattan after dinner what yeah it was fucking nuts it was super nuts but like talking to this person he was like was like so what's going on with you he's was like well you know my youngest just went away to college so we're empty nest like we're gonna spend an extra couple weeks here in the hampton and it was like again i think at the end of your life and you when you reflect on whether you were successful or not you're gonna think like what is do my kids want to spend time with me or not like am i what it am i on my fourth marriage or am i my first marriage and he's he's bit he's still with his high school sweetheart right despite selling a hundred million albums in between meeting and like the day that i was there he's he has a business that he founded with his son like i i like to me when i see stuff like that i'm like okay this is fundamentally not normal and that like we just flew on a helicopter to have dinner and that was like you know like a wave of the hand for you but that fundamentally you still worked very hard to remain rooted in some sem of normalcy where your kids are not monsters and you're you like spending time together you one of my favorite books is conspiracy which is nick dent i believe is his named nick dent yeah yeah i make that in the founder of ga and peter t and there's just so many moments in that book where i've been like oh my god i cannot believe that that's true and basically like the fact that like peter t plotted and had people and staff for like some amount of years five or ten years like a long time in order to like hey when you see ga screw up you tell me and we're gonna pounce and we're gonna sue them because they out me out as being gay or you also told another of the story about how peter t had mercedes a black mercedes everywhere he went that was just ready to roll in case anything bad happened and i don't know if this was in the book or if i'm making this up but i'm almost positive there was like a plane to new zealand that like you he knew about or something like that is that true or i making that the mercedes thing is in the book the new zealand plan thing that sounds true but it it that i think his new zealand citizenship came after i finished the book yeah just like all this crazy stuff what sure what was it like getting to know that i mean he he's one of those guys where like i i actually don't think they're is i don't know him but where there actually is no balance and he is just really quirky well i think it's it's both it's both very understandable and then very inexplicable right like if you had made billions of dollars and you were very powerful i don't think you would like to be picked on right like i think people were like why would he do this and it's like what you this this bully came along and humiliated him in his eyes like i i don't like not being a gay man i i can't really fully understand what what the reaction would be to being out and and do and the a a number of people that i that i interviewed for the book who were gay like they didn't even understand so like let's just let's just s that his explanation of his experience was that this was humiliating and he found it to be very frustrating i think when you're at that level one of the feelings that you don't sit that doesn't sit well with you is imp right like so when people were like peter there's just nothing you can do about it he was like then what the fuck is the point of everything i've done right and so so in that sense i think it's very understandable i think that the problem is if you're the kind of person who like i'm gonna spend ten years chasing down this media outlet when everyone is telling me not to do that you're also the kind of person who can get sucked into other things that i think are gonna pay off less well whether it's backing jd vance or blake masters or some of the other political bets that he's made you know i do i i find the sort of anger and the resentment of what it seems to be driving that i i i have trouble of trouble understanding it dude i don't have trouble understanding that i get i i i don't it just it comes from a at least for me like i would have done the same thing if i if like you're if you have a money power and someone wrong you i wanna i i have that same mentality where like i wanna crush them typically i've got my wife saying like dude chill you're this isn't worth it and so like i listen to her but if i didn't have i'd be like no no no we're gonna let's destroy them and it comes that i get that that i understand that's the count monte cri that's the oldest revenge story of of of history i'm saying more the other thing like the problem is what when you sort of start to feel like you can bend the world your will that you can do anything and everything i think you get sucked down other avenues and i think some of the political bets he's made you know even even trump himself like the fact that it worked doesn't mean that it made rational sense but how do you not feel like that i mean with my very very small amount of internet fame and my mediocre to small financial success i'm like oh like i just i bent the you know in in in a i'm a big fish sometimes i'm a small pond and i'm a small fish and a big pond but i'll be like oh sick i just i bent the that's i say it all the time i bent the world to my reality like i just made my my true the thing i want to be true i made it true and that is incredibly into i think that there's a ways to do that there's a lot if you wrote a book and millions of people read there's a way to do that if you become powerful and politics there's a way to do that if you the easiest and most practical way for most people is if you learn how to make money on your own you're like oh like whatever i want i turn into reality have a joke i call myself a manifest cowboy like i just make i make the things that i want to i the things i think of i am not a business person i am a an expert at making things that i think of be real and even at a small scale i get intoxicated like that and but i get intoxicated by it do not i i have seen up close i i i feel like very lucky that up close in personal multiple times particularly early on my career i saw people who who had the ability to do that also destroy themselves right so like i i direct doug charlie was my direct boss right like he would call me five times a day and i watched a guy who built a multi billion dollar company that made fifty million t shirts a year you know start something i mean i didn't didn't to start it but i let let let's put it this way the the the arc of the entrepreneurial journey the the beauty and the danger of it is that you have an idea for something that is insane right like people are like that will never work here's all the reasons you will fail do not do that you'll will regret right and then you do it and it works right that's that's the definition of what entrepreneurship does if everyone knew how to do it or if it was easy it would have already been done you were able to create something from nothing a you know that violates everyone else's conception of what's possible the dangerous thing that you take from that is you now as you said see yourself as a person who does that and you see people who tell you that you can't do it or shouldn't do it or criticize you for doing it you see them as the enemy right so when doug charlie is like i'm gonna start a maiden usa sweats up free fashion company that doesn't print its brand on things doesn't use professional models and owns all of its own stores and i'm a sell all those products for an enormous premium like that's that's fucking nuts right like no part of that should work so then he does it and then people are like okay you did it but you should really have seasoned operators around you you know you really shouldn't over expand too quickly you know by the way it's not proper to have sexual relations with your employees right all these things that they told them he was like fuck you who are you to tell me look at what i've done right and so he crashes and burns as a result of this exactly what you said like i'm a manifest cowboy the rules don't apply to me i can bend reality to my will like do you do you ever you you ever heard that expression the political expression about the reality based community you know that no what's that so so as as george as george bush was contemplating the invasion of iraq i think it was carl ro but i i one of one of the officials in the bush administration you know is responding to all the people who are like it's gonna be an enormous q you're not gonna get the like right now you have no international support bob it's gonna cost this you you know and they go look he's like there's two kinds of people he's like there's the people who live in the reality based community and then the people who believe in america it basically says who believe in american exceptional who believes that america creates his own creates its own reality bends the rules the order of the world to its will and so they believed as they went into iraq that yeah it was a bad idea for all these reasons but that could be changed through force of will and confidence and firepower etcetera but they're not always wrong true big but but it's it's not true maybe in that case but like the that that feeling is cousins to yeah cousins to the other what to it working do you know what i mean to what where where's chin from argentina like this argentinian dude is gonna come and like be the boss and like kill it and like you know what i mean like that the their their cousins yes but but here's the thing like when you look at man story he did not wake up one day in argentina go i will be a hall of fame nba player right he makes his way like almost all those journeys are much smaller and humble than that right he makes the argentinian team that he's pretty good he gets you know he gets an opportunity to play in europe where he plays he gets drafted like very late a total he not actually even entered the draft he was just drafted by the spur who let him play in europe for like three years before he comes over almost nobody believed in him i mean he knew what he he knew he was good and he was confident in his abilities but there was not these delusions of grit he was not kanye a west going around saying i'm steve jobs right like that this was he he was like in the churchill book they talk about this churchill did not at the at when when britain is standing alone he does not in he does not know for certain that he will be able to bring america into the war and that you're like what what what what churchill does is he buys some time right like all of these things start small and they build there when when the person has this vision that they can clearly articulate that they know to be like that to me that leads to disaster more often than the prophecy comes true dude that's crazy fascinating to me i gotta keep thinking about that but another thing that you're associated with that i find like equally impressive even though it's much smaller now to all the other things that you've done is the ghost town sarah go which yeah i'm a very very very small investor in but the reason why it is no you're not a small investor you're the guy the reason why is well you're you're you're i i view you brent and nathan now nathan barry has like you know the the guys but so basically like in two thousand and fifteen or fourteen you guys like you know got some money together and you bought this town that went viral because it was like you can buy a whole town for one point three million dollars a ghost town and you guys bought it and it was like doing okay whatever and then the pandemic hit and brent spin up this youtube channel and it felt like in a matter of six months it got a million subscribers and i remember being in my apartment in san francisco miserable that i'm trapped in this place and i see these videos of him and it's like the it felt like it got me through the first like twelve months of the pandemic watching those videos like felt yeah so much better watching these like twenty or thirty minute videos of this charming cute dude named brent like saying like hey so here's this old mine that i just found in my town let's just like you know walk a hundred feet into this mine and let's just see what we find and it's when you think of about mind you think of like a cave and this was like like a crawl space and he just like it's going deep in these places and that was amazing what what a what what's your feeling and how everything's going with that and like what's the plan well i mean a hundred feet into mind one of the mines is nine hundred feet straight down that he regularly goes in it's fucking insane it's crazy his videos are so good did you advise him or you guys were partners on something does see did he get the content bug from you are you advising him how is this so good it's an amazing story it actually goes to what we're just talking about like the idea in it as an outsider or or in retrospect it feels like guy makes brilliant investment buys town turns it into a youtube channel makes these amazing videos in the now blows up yeah but that's not how it went at all right like first by the way was the channel ghost town living okay when when he first told me about it i was like dude that's a horrible idea i'm not interested at all right like i came in at a very small level at first because i didn't think it was a good idea but brent idea was by this place find build a hotel on the site and make it some sort of like luxury resort thing that that that they failed to do for like two years maybe even three years he had no intention of living up there it was losing money hand over fist right like he how many it it's three hundred acres but it backs up to like thousands of acres of government land so it's and it's like in the mountains on the like four hours outside la it's yeah it's about three and a half hours from la it it looks down on death valley at at about eighty five hundred feet it was once the largest silver mine in the united states but there's like no water and electricity right there i was just up there he he like i took a a nice warm shower there's water now oh but there wasn't it i guess if i mean there was not i mean historically there were some springs and then those right up and i mean it has always been a battle of the elements but it's funny that you you you bring up how you liked the videos during the pandemic my four year old fell in love with the videos during the pandemic and that's part of the i up investing more money in it was that my son is obsessed like he knows it he had trouble so brent started as my intern like twelve or thirteen years ago i think and my son is met i mean is known brent his whole life and it he's got so ent with the videos that he had trouble because it was the pandemic we can see him she had trouble like con perceiving of the fact that this was a real person that he knew that this was different than the youtube channels of other people that he watches that he doesn't know and brandon like he's so charming in these videos and he's so ad deer and like i don't know i've i'm not really hung out with them i'm only chatted with him a couple of times it seems like he just kinda turned on this charm in charisma and it was like into he's always been like a behind the scenes person and and i think that's what's so interesting it's like yeah he didn't just randomly started a youtube channel one day like he started the daily still youtube channel and he started the daily episode podcast like he he was the one who who built out the systems or created the universes for me and then that i am obviously the face of but he was the one who was like here i think we should do this and he's the one that figured like you know we probably had a hundred thousand youtube subscribers when he went to sarah go so he had experience that he'd learned on the job so to speak working with me and then the the funny thing is we had shot some videos for daily stoic like the first week of march twenty twenty or maybe the last week of february and he had taken the camera home to like upload some stuff and so when he went to sarah go he just took my camera or our camera like that sarah go was started with equipment that he had got for daily stoic and then used skills that he had developed with daily stoic that ultimately blew up into this thing that i don't think he definitely not i would have predicted but like people often underestimate how long you have to spend developing like a baseline of skills before you know sort of the man meets the moment so to speak dude i read that in in mastery mastery changed my life i remember like exactly where i was where i read it and i was like oh this this is called the print apprenticeship like and that it totally mastery you know i got turned on to you because i was or maybe i don't remember if you got me on a green or him to you but i remember reading mastery and that was like a life changing book because it talk talked talked about that but sarah go think about that like do you ever think about the fact that the hustle and this podcast could actually be the apprenticeship for like a company you start in your fifties that's telling it's going to be it's going to be and people like you know alright so the hustle we sold for let's say tens of millions of dollars which is like i think by most people if you do i think i i was thirty one thirty when we sold it which so like that's six that i would say it's objectively successful but compared to others like it's nothing right like sure compared to the company that bought us it's nothing yeah you know they bought us but and so a lot of people were like well you know like you guys only did that in four years i'm like yeah we did it in four years i also spent four years before that though studying writing and like blogging and reading and like being a student and i learned a skill which my skill was copywriting and that skill led me to this other thing which led me to this other thing which led me to this other thing and i often tell people i'm like everyone says overnight successes aren't true and i'm like well in a sense actually they can be like you could be a mark manson or something and like write a book and like it get really big really fast but it more likely than not that could happen like hitting a lottery is real like look at instagram but learning the scale for five or ten years in advance is often necessary yeah to give mark credit though mark doesn't hit the lottery i mean mark was an online copywriter and marketer and had a platform for a decade before he writes a book right right but what i mean is like the set functions and growth are real yeah you know like it could be like it's doing okay it's going okay it's going okay and then a matter of like a month or three months is like boom something just changed like that is real and i think people actually don't like acknowledging that because the story of like slow and steady is preferred because that like there's more character to that but like a step functions exist but you have to work a certain amount of time typically in order to get that step function that's what i mean no i think about michael lewis in that regard like michael lewis is is a fantastic writer he's been a great writer for forty years he wrote liars poker which is about finance he wrote the blind side you know he wrote a number of these books that were that were big and he was he was a leading non fiction author and then two thousand eight happens and it's the most inexplicable but widespread financial event of you know since the great depression and he is uniquely suited to write the big short which was his big transformative you know huge book like money ball the blinds side the other movies that come out i believe they come out after the big shore like michael lewis today looks like he's always been huge but you don't realize his career was sort of like this and then like this right like what like i i i think about that i i i'm very proud of all of the books that i've written and i i continue to write them and and work on it every day but i i'll i wanna say i hold that hope but i i feel like there's some part of me that thinks all of this is training for like the book at the moment maybe it happens maybe it doesn't maybe it it's the moment but the book only these sells ten copies but like i do feel like it's building towards whatever i'm meant to do are you not satisfied with your career no i'm very i'm very satisfied like more i was just writing about this in my journal this morning like when i'm look at the sales number of this book this isn't just like what i dreamed of this is like ten x what i even conceived of as being possible i'm just saying like i i i want what i'm working on to set me up for like something truly challenging so challenging that i or or perfect for my skills and what i my world that i can't even think of it yet dude consistently i've said once i hit this wealth number i likely won't want anymore and then i always do once i lift this much weight or do this type of athletic feet that i've been really working hard towards like i'll be happy and then i get there i'm but we could go a little we could do a little more so like it's all i think that's just unilaterally true with at least people who are driven enough to achieve anything interesting like it's just like it i've just settled with it's just never enough i okay i've never heard of someone getting to the number like like like actually getting the number because the goal post always move so when always hear people say it there's a number like when i when i talked to an author there they're like my goal is to sell a million copies or whatever i'm i go like i don't have goals like why would you why would you even put a ceiling on it right like what you should just try to sell as many copies as it's capable of selling do you have the other than like be a good dad and be a good person and all this stuff do you have any professional goals for the next five ten or twenty years where you say like this is what i want or any people who you say i i wanna be i want my career to be similar to this type of person yeah i mean so like i sold this four book series so to do four like four inter locking inter related books in ostensibly four years that that that's the that's what it it could change but like that is like the mountain that i'm climbing right now because it was unlike the mountains that i've done i've done before i don't have like a certain number of books that i'm trying to write or certain number of copies that i'm trying to write but i i i do there's a like i i've never written one of those biographies that we were talking about and there's some part of me that thinks about maybe doing that at some point and doing anyone place anyone in particular i do have a person but i don't wanna say because someone might steal it but but i but i but i but i have thought about doing a a big a big book like that and i there's a part of me that thinks being able to do it and not not care like financially like if it takes five years or takes ten years like there's a part of me that things about that and i i so i have a couple ideas like that where i'm like that would be a cool thing to do but like i i have the weird sensation i'm sure you have this too of like of like very much feeling like i'm i'm playing with house money and that's both really fun and then it it's also a little it's like a little un un moo because you're like shit i thought i was running with everyone else and then now i'm just like by myself am i going fast enough am i going too fast you know did i don't loser it's like it that's a weird feeling where are like well i have what i wanted i thought that i'd be willing to like spend this much to invest on my idea and then it's like but i don't wanna lose this and that yeah that also exists well you you think that being successful will make you more courageous because you are more secure but it actually the the the rational response to having a lot is to become more risk ave reverse because you know how hard it was to get it and so there's tension there you know how do you how do you continue to push yourself without being reckless and how do you protect what you've built without being complacent wait but you you just said something that reminded me the the fisherman story you started off with what which was you said like i wanna write this biography and i hope i'll be at a place where like financially doesn't matter do you you don't feel it you're there already no no i i feel like i'm there i just have to get through these two books i've are like i i'm already creatively committed to an idea it's like like a director it's like hey i've already attached to these two movies or movies then like once once that i plate is clear i and i'm not trying to i'm not trying to put it off into the future i i don't feel rushed to do it i'm just saying like when when i have a clear plate or open road in front of me i think that's probably something i might fuck around with any topics that we didn't cover that you think need to be covered you know what actually yeah i i mentioned to the you in text you were like well can we talk about like how much money your books have made i i i that's what i said was i go how much money have you made how big your dick where what's your social yeah no it it's it's funny like on my first books like obviously books as a market are less interesting to people than like the movie business but like whenever i would sell a book like the your agent or publisher they're like should we announce this deal like there's trades right and sometimes like my first book got a ton of publicity because that was like a k who came out of nowhere and sold a book for bunch of money i was always i was like i wanna press release like i wanna put this out and then probably starting i think it was was stillness i might have been after definitely with this series that i realized that there was no advantage to doing that that when you start talking about what something is sold for or how like i have two things i thought okay like so i saw this four book deal and it was a it was a very large deal at least for me and i had two thoughts i said one telling people how much money i made from it it makes you a target makes you weird you know it it it could it could somehow be seen as selling out or something but then the other part i i thought i don't want people this is an idea that's gonna take me four plus years to get to the end of why would i want to give people who might be writing in the same niche like a heads up about what i'm doing and so i don't think i've announced when i did a podcast deal when i've sold other projects like i i see no benefit to putting out specific figures i only see downsides to that i don't know you do a podcast deal with no i i i do agree with that at first you know it's like that song if damon feels gonna be at gangster they they they said real real gangster don't flex nuts because they know they got them and yeah and and that's how you you make the police come after you right like but i used to feel that way where i'm like yeah like when i i mean i'm still insecure but that when i was even more insecure i would be like yeah i need to i'm gonna brought this into my high school friend's face yeah i then now i'm like i don't wanna get sued i don't want to be a target i don't want people to pretend because we i can always these fake people on twitter or instagram pretending to be me or like people like threaten to sue you when and when you're not wrong at all like now i'm like i don't want any of that nonsense yeah i did a i did a podcast deal with with amazon wondering like maybe three months ago how big of pod now or do you measure it in podcast downloads or youtube views youtube is it isn't wasn't included in the deal so it's separate but podcast is is fantastic like i think we we crossed a hundred million downloads that's crazy and yeah do should do we're we're getting close to being able to do that annually like not quite but like to me that's that's where the number big we're at our monthly downloads on the podcast are range between one point five and two or one point three and two million and then the pod the and then the youtube episode views are another one or two million so we're in the range of two to five on any given month and our next target i'm like how do we get to that five to ten sounds like you're there do i think youtube is the i it's weird to say like youtube's is the big thing because it's been around for fifteen years and it's already huge but like the growth i'm seeing on youtube stuff especially with shorts it's crazy dude people are age and older they're like what youtube i'm like no dog youtube youtube's tv like yeah like you know youtube is where it's at and it still has so much room you because i only watch youtube as my tv yeah it it's the best well dude you're awesome man i i asked you like who you admire and who you wanna steal from and i have like a short list of maybe three or five people and you are on that list where i just think like we're like you know i'm a family guy like i don't have kids yet but like i see you raise your family i see you with your wife i see like you know i also bought a kind of like a farm inspired by you i live in austin in most of the year like there's so many things that you've done where i think this guy's nailing it and i wanna steal a little bits and pieces of how he's doing and how he's living life and i'd admire your confidence your drive i mean i'm on i'm on the the ryan holiday train i've been on it since since the the first book so media media confessions well we gotta we gotta hang out when you're back man you you and i are almost a little bit similar where we have our toes in like the new york world and in the la world but you know i lived in tennessee for a long time i live in texas just like you i like doing i like the boo shit and i like the redneck shit man i like it all oh so i i'll how'd you wanna get back and i appreciate you coming on this is awesome i wanna see the farm and say the book name again oh discipline is destiny the power self control as part of the stoic virtue series the first one is courage calling where do you make the most money where people buy it if you buy it from from daily s dot com or my bookstore or the painted porch awesome i appreciate you man is awesome thank you okay thanks