Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - The Truth Behind Andrew Huberman, AG1, & Black Market Organs | Scott Carney

Episode Date: August 3, 2024

The Truth Behind Andrew Huberman, AG1, & Black Market Organs | Scott Carney

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And then they tell you that they have the solution. And usually it comes with a discount code, a supplement. And all the grifts work a little bit different, but they also all work a little bit the same. Things that I'm most known for now is, again, I'm looking at wellness grifters. I've done a bunch of pretty big podcasts on like, you know, Andrew Huberman's sex life. That was with the New York Magazine. If you've ever seen that he was like sort of taken down recently, I was the primary, one of the primary sources in that. I've done a big video recently on AG1, which is like a supplement powder that every podcast advertises.

You take it once a day. Well, I looked into the founders' criminal past on that, that was ludicrous. He had this actually real estate crime in New Zealand where he did this rent-to-own scam on people. And so basically in the dot-com, not that com, in the 2007 real estate crisis, Chris Ashton din was a who was a former cop, a dropout of nutrition school, had failed to do a supplement company. He read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was like, hey, I can do this.

And he started this grifting real estate company, which sold people contracts and houses on a rent-to-own basis, but was basically designed to steal all their money. And it's more complex than that, but that's the gist. And he got indicted on 90 counts for violating fair trade practices, and he skipped out on his trial. fled New Zealand, backpacked around the world, landed in Phoenix, Arizona, and started the world's most profitable supplement company called AG1, which is like everywhere. It's worth like $1.2 billion

right now. And it was really interesting to go dig into his past and tell the story that no one else had come up with, even though the records are publicly available. It wasn't like too difficult to find. But I found it. And when I did that, this is crazy. A.G. Wan, when I was writing that piece, I reached out to them because, you know, part of being a journalist is you reach out to, but even the first people to talk. Give them a chance to. Yeah. So I reached out to them and they hired the most expensive law firm in the in the country. It was a, I actually, what's their name? Oh, the name's not coming to me. But it was like, it was the, it was the law, the defamation law firm that won the $787 million lawsuit against Fox News. Like if you remember that in where they would, the voting machine, Fox was like, St. Dominion voting was like a scam and they got sued for a shit ton of money and they settled for $7707 million. The lawyer who argued the case and got that plaintiff was the one writing me saying, Scott, you're, you know, we're going to sue you. And so I did. So I, but they were lying to me. They were telling me that Chris Ashton,

the founder of that company was never in jail, was never, had never been convicted of a crime. had never done, you know, all these things. And it just turns out they were lying that he was, that they were just sending me these false records, these records that were misleading. And, and it was fun. After the video came out, and it's done quite well.

It has like 300,000 views or something like that. After that video came out, and you have the exclusive here, because I haven't actually talked about this publicly. They fired the legal team. So I had a total victory. It was cool that went from being threatened to winning that one. Doesn't happen.

Did he ever get extradited back to Australia? No, no, no. By that time, he was a criminal, but he had, you know, it was on the various trading charges. But it was an old thing. And he had eventually paid all the fines and made all the restitutions that he needed. It's ancient history, but he didn't want the world to know that he was a criminal, right? Because he's selling a wellness brand. He's selling this thing that doesn't go well with a criminal history.

And yeah, I put that out in the world. What's the organ trafficking? You wrote a book on organ trafficking? I did. Yeah. So the red market. So I lived in, I was a, so I'm an investigative journalist. I'm at for Wired, for NPR, Mother Jones, have a YouTube channel, substack, all of that stuff.

But I got my careers of foreign correspondent in India looking at organ trafficking, sort of organized crime in India, in the tech centers, and, you know, war correspondent stuff in that region. So, yeah, that book is right here. Look at this book. A beautiful thing. It's called The Red Market on the world, on the trail, the world's organ brokers, both thieves, blood farmers, child traffickers, where I basically looked at the real

world of people buying and selling human body parts. And it's a thing that actually happens, like that that is a, you know, you can buy and sell human kidneys. They can buy skin and blood and corneas, hair, surrogate wounds, eggs, that sort of stuff. And I spent a chapter on each sort of Oregon market. It's about 10 years old now or maybe even older, maybe it's about 13 years old now. So it's a little bit out of date, but I can only say that the market has gotten to be worse than it ever was back then i want to say i read a oh i read a an article in wired magazine about this might have been wired where they actually had like how much they were going for uh the whole thing yeah you read my article oh did i yeah was there were stuff in china

so um traditionally so yeah i mean so the thing that was happening in china at the time i was writing. So we have these dissident movements inside China, the Falun Gong or Falun Daffa, however you want to talk about. If you've seen the Shen Yun posters all around America of like Chinese people waving scarves, you've maybe seen these billboards outside of like every major city, that group is connected to this political dissident group in China and they were being put in political prisons, like essentially Chinese gulags. At the same time, the Chinese government really didn't like these people because they had so many members. They were actually larger than the Chinese Communist Party.

And they would round them up, put them into these gulags, and then tissue type them. This is not crazy. They would actually do like blood tests on them, take out their genetic markers. And there was a program to do executions on demand for organ procurement. And that was a program that at least was running between about 2005 and 2011. My book came out. China now says that they don't do it anymore. And I really hope that is true.

But I certainly talked to prisoners, a former prisoners, who had been tissue-typed, who were part of this sort of Falun Daufa organization, who said that they were tissue-typed to the other people in the prisons were not. And, of course, people would then go leave the prison and they'd never come back, never find them again. Horrible stuff. And there were even, you know, there was this other book, right, and this isn't my book. This is someone else's book called Larry Kidney, Larry's Kidney by Daniel Asa Rosa.

The reason why this book is so fascinating. It's not actually pretty well written. Sorry, Daniel. But it's a comedy book about a guy who's like, deadbeat brother or cousin, deadbeat cousin doesn't, you know, it needs a new kidney and he flies with him to China and they execute a prisoner to give him the kidney. And ha, ha, ha, isn't that funny?

But it's a true story of what would actually happen. So you have multiple sources coming into this horrible market. how do you figure that out like if you're so is this kind of like if you're an american businessman and you need a new kidney is there a guy like i like i know a guy i can call type of thing like hey you can go on the on the um you can go on the dark web and say hey kidnies for sale and then they send your whatever they look for a match and they find one and then what you fly to china and you get one just like the book i mean is it is it that simple no it's not fortunately it's not that simple um there are uh there there are have been organ brokers who have

advertised online on the dark web and elsewhere but i could never tell by looking at them if they were really just scamming you because it's you're obviously involved in the dark web is full of scams and i could never tell with the people that i did make contact on the dark web who were doing this. They weren't just some sort of entrapment situation. What does happen much more frequently is that no person will be suffering from kidney failure. They'll be told that they're a lifetime of dialysis. And then they get creative. And there's a lot of programs affiliated with mainstream hospitals in countries like India and Pakistan, Brazil, Egypt, South Africa, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, obviously.

That's sort of the main, those are the big hitters of this trade. Who will have ways of getting your kidneys? And it happens in a variety of ways. It's not usually so easy as just calling them up, but sometimes it is. The market's always changing. You know, for instance, at the time I was writing the book,

there was this place called Adil Hospital in Islam. Lamabad, I believe, it could have been Karachi, where you would, they had something called an ethical organ harvesting network where I don't know what that is, but they said we had certified ethical organs and that we'll get you and it'll cost about $14,000. And you could just actually, in that case, you could have called up Adil Hospital, written them a check and they would have given you they would have installed a kidney and you and you shouldn't ask any questions about it. I was based in India where the situation was a little bit different. So I was on the southern coast of India.

Chennai, a city used to be called Madras. I lived there for three years. And, you know, there was this tsunami that hit that area in 2000. And I want to say six, it might have been earlier than that, maybe in 2005. When, you know, hundreds of thousands of people died around the world, you know, it was about 180,000 people who died. But many more people were displaced from their communities. they all learned enough in refugee camps. In those refugee camps,

you had these conditions of absolute destitution, people who had no access to really any income. They used to be a fisherman. Their boats were killed, you know, destroyed, and now they lived in these camps. And what occurred is that because Chennai is a huge hub for the medical industry, that organ brokers descended on them,

and they found contracts. They said, hey, I'll give you $2,000 for your kidney. And then isn't that great? And they said, yeah, I love money. And then they would sell their kidneys in agreeable transactions that were actually pretty unethical. They were pretty horrible to people. And then at one point I was there with National Geographic and we just lined up.

I think it was about 60 or 80 women in a line and we just ran the camera down the line of them and everyone had these nephrectomy scars. So these big surgical scars on their sides where they all had had. given their kidneys and the law of this this world is that you know if you have real horrible destitution next to world-class hospitals and and and and malleable laws you you find organ trapping so how did you get into this like i mean did you do you know like did you always know you wanted to be a um a journalist no i'm i'm the world's leading organ I'm a journalist man like I was I was you know I was getting my Ph.D. in anthropology. I lived in India for three years, learned Hindi. I worked in, you know, some dicey areas over the years. And I eventually realized I didn't want to be an academic because I didn't want to write a book that four people would read, you know, for your dissertation committee. And I could do anthropology in

the popular formats, right? I consider having five people read my work. I get up millions of people read by work. And apparently, you've read some of my work. You've read some of my work. You're in Wired. You know, I was contributing to out of there for five years. And I loved India, and I wanted to just keep on going back to India. And, you know, my first big story there was on the skeleton trade.

So, and, you know, you know, the skeletons that they're in your, your doctor's office. you know when a first year medical student studies anatomy it's better to study on a real skeleton than a plastic skeleton and so where do those skeletons come from is a it's a big question because you needed quite a few of them and so i uncovered i guess my first really big story and this was in two thousand i want to say seven it came out um was on the underground trade in human skeletons where i found basically india had been exporting up to like not only india calcutta just one city was exporting 60,000 skeletons a year, which they were getting from grave robbing. And it was eventually outlawed, and I still tracked down that's sort of like, no,

fingerprints that still exist in that world. You know, I broke this, I was tracking where, you know, from the grave robber all the way back to the American medical programs that would purchase these skeletons. That was like my first story where I was like, I'm an investigative journalist. And, you know, I'm hanging out of the, like I snuck into Bhutan for that story across in the border. I was interviewing cops with buckets of bones next to them. It was a freaking wild time in my life. And you know, you can read that article right now on Wired. I think it's still, I think Wired is free maybe. Then you get a free promo thing. But it was called Inside the Underground

Trade and Human Remains. And then I just kept on looking at organ markets. It's so funny that we're talking about this, because this is like literally 20 years ago that I was doing all this stuff. But I, you know, I look at kidneys, I look at human hair, eggs, surrogate wombs. I got human surrogacy sort of outlawed in India because there was a time when Americans would fly to India. They would impregnate somebody, you know, with IVF. And then they'd lock the woman in a room for nine months to gestate. And then they would, you know, have the baby. And the American would come back and take the baby home.

I got that made illegal in India, which is, I guess, sort of like the one thing I've done that's made the world a better place. I keep going back to the story about the harvesting the organs, because it makes me think of a, there was an episode of Law and Order where some rich guy's daughter or something, I think, needed an organ, and they, it, there's a, and there's like a, you know, poor black guy that happened to have, was a perfect match. And one day he gets mugged and wakes up in Central Park. and his kidney or his liver's gone, whatever it was, a part of it or the whole thing, however it works and was gone.

And they track it all the way back and they figure out she's the one who got it. Yeah, that's obviously a TV episode. That's not how the organ trade works. And, you know, that's one thing that I think is really important to separate fact from fiction because the waking up in the bathtub, full of vice, the tourist goes to Tijuana, you know, there's a honey trap and then they end up, you know, without a kidney. that's us all bullshit. And the reason why it's bullshit

and the reason you should know, everyone should know it's bullshit, is because, hey, real quick, just wanted to let you guys know that we're looking for guests for the podcast. If you think you'd be a good guest, you know somebody, do me a favor. You can fill out the form.

The link is in our description box or you can just email me directly. Email is in the description box. So back to the video. If you don't have to get the police involved, you don't get the police involved. Like, there's not a big kidnapping market when you can offer somebody

money to do it who's you find someone who's very desperate you don't want to go after americans where we have a legal system that you know it's not great but it does you know try to look for these things that's a pretty shocking crime and that's unusually the criminals try to choose the least risky method to do their activities although i will say the caveat is that sometimes they're pretty sneaky about it in bengalore so this is it's not called called Bangaluru, it was the South Bend City. In the 90s, 80s and 90s, more than a thousand kidneys were stolen at hospitals during surgery.

So you'd go in with like an appendectomy, you'd need your appendix and they'd go in and they'd also take your kidney. That was a real series of crimes that occurred. And estimates are about a thousand kidneys were stolen in that way. So sometimes you get some bizarre outcomes. But in general, it's very rare. to have a violent crime turn into organ trafficking. And I know that I'll probably find examples where it has happened,

but those would be the exception, not the rule, especially when you're trying to build an industry around it. Like, if you want to do one kidney by kidnapping, sure, there's no reason why that couldn't work in a one-off case. But if you want to do 4,000 of these operations over the course of a few years, you have to have a very different system in place for that. And that system does exist. It just operates differently.

Did you ever see the movie Repo Man? Yeah, it's been a spell, though. It's been a while. Do you know what I'm talking about where they were, they're giving kidney, they're replacing organs, but they finance them. And then if you can't pay,

they come and get them back. Oh, yeah, right, right. No, I, I, I mean, it's been a long time since I've seen the film, but yeah. Yeah, Jude Law is in it. And then, uh, Forrest Whitaker. We're hard. So.

Yeah, there's lots of, I mean, it's, it makes great. fiction fodder for sure you know you can do a lot of stuff with the with the stories around it as a non as a investigative journalist who wants to hang out with facts i do find that um by pushing those stories and pretending they're real and a lot of people do believe those stories are real in some way you're actually hiding the actual crimes that are going on because we actually do have you know china was doing executing prisoners for organs right there was testimony in front of Congress, from a Chinese surgeon who actually, I guess would you say defected or immigrated

to the United States, who said he was on the line of people who were having, you know, a line of doctors and they would do execution by organ donation. And he described people, I mean, he described it even without anesthesia, which I find sort of crazy that they would do that. But, you know, you'd start with the kidneys and then you'd take other things, other things. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply.

Visit BMO.com slash ViPorter to learn more. until you finally take the thing that kills them. And he said he performed multiple of those operations. And that's horrible, right? That's a legitimately horrible story. So, yeah, I don't know why we need fiction when you have like a true true. No, I was just to say that's pretty, that's pretty horrific. I just don't know how you end up, I'm not sure.

Other than an article, I don't see that going, that being super popular. It's an art. The Saw franchise is all about it. They're ready to go. it's horrific maybe a documentary but china's not letting you in they're not going to take you into the tour of the uh a tour of the prison where this was happening they're not going to let you visit the hospital seems unlikely seems unlikely the guys that are buying the kidneys aren't going to be like yeah you know i needed it i didn't want to wait two years i was sick of the dialysis

i heard for 40 grand i got a for sure thing within two weeks so Did you talk to anybody that actually had bought a kidney? I very intentionally looked only on the supply side of the chain. And the reason for that, actually, maybe in India I did speak to a few recipients. But I wrote mostly, I wrote primarily about the people giving it up because you enter into this very ethically complex situation when you, when you, the reason this organ market thrives is because of the idea that you're saving a life, not that you're taking a life, right? There's always this happy story in organ transplant news articles.

You read these all the time. The gift of life occurs in a number of ways this organ donor saved all these lives. And you get the positive story rammed down your throat all the time in the mainstream press. It's the most overriding narrative. What is not talked about is the procurement narrative. And I wanted the red market to look all on the supply side of this because it's too easy to get into moral ambiguity. And when you have people who are really being taken advantage of, who are really, really

suffering because of the organ markets, the happy story on the other side is a distraction because it's saying, oh, but there's a way that this is all okay. you know in the you know with the the surrogate story that I talked about you know I did meet a woman in San Francisco I met her also in India who had received who had bought I guess rented a surrogate room in India and then got the kid to come back to America and I told her side of the story and I feel like that was you know it was okay to tell to tell that but some people might think that it was still okay hey here's a way I can go do it like here's a way I can go do it like Here's the way I can go access this stuff.

I'd much rather tell you the bad side so you don't even want to access it. So you were afraid that you're, it could, the article could be used as like an instruct. Of course, yeah. Okay. All of my articles can be used as instruction guides to make crimes. It's terrible. And as somebody with a former criminal history, maybe I should worry about this here. Yeah, I'm good.

I got. Yeah. Yeah. That seems way, way beyond anything I could even imagine. It doesn't seem very lucrative. But it's funny, I did, you know, I've often mused that if I had had a different set of ethics, I could have been the world's most, the richest organ broker in the world. Because I actually do know how to set up these transactions. And it's funny when my, for a while from about 2007 to about 20, you know, seven to about 23. 13, that's how most people knew me, was around organ trafficking. And any time there would be a major disaster or, you know, some economic shift, I would get emails from people asking me to procure or broker deals, notably after the Haiti earthquake.

And when was that? 2012 was that when the Haiti happened? You know, lots of people died in Haiti. Horrible situation. there were a lot of dead people and a lot of skeletons and three different people contacted me asking me to help sell a large lot of human skeletons. So, I mean, this stuff is real.

Why are they contacting you? I thought you were against it. I am. They were idiots. I don't know why they contact me. I get all sorts of random emails from people. But yeah, they thought that I would broker the email. So I do have a policy that I do not help people buy and sell human body parts.

I don't know why I had to have that policy, but I'm not the policy that I didn't say that I, I keep you here in my tiny company. Yeah, it's funny. I get contacted. Well, I really don't anymore, but there was a time when I would get contacted constantly by fraudsters who would say, hey, I can give you a few thousand dollars. If you'll just have a conversation with me for like an hour, I'm like, I'm not doing that.

I'm not getting added to your future indictment. Like, no, thanks I've been to prison. Yeah. You were going to be the frank. epic nail of fraud is that right yeah so yeah or or i even had a guy one time be kind of befriend me for months and then flew down to tampa wanted to have coffee we had coffee and like three minutes into coffee said look you know i originally i contacted you and i came down here because i wanted you to know that i'm like a for real and i need you to help me do this

starting and I was like I'm not doing that what are you doing like this is what are you stupid so I was like I'm not going to do that then I of course I realized like so you contacted me three to six months ago or whatever it was because you were hoping that you were going to con me into helping you like come on man what are you doing get right so right people are idiots um yeah what are what are some of the uh what are what are the other books that you've written uh so I've written again six of them. And they are, like, I'm pretty ADD. If you've already been watching me, I look like a person who has ADD. They're all over the place. The first is on organ trafficking. The second one is called the Enlightenment trap. And it's about how the quest for spiritual perfection can end very, very poorly for people. So I tracked down, I was, I was looking at people who meditated until they died or committed suicide on meditation retreats. And the sort of the spiritual wellness grift that happens around the world. And I was looking out of Indic traditions, but it applies everywhere.

What is that? I don't understand what you're saying. Like, where people pay to be taught? Or are you just saying people to meditate to an extreme? So there's a lot of ways that happens. It's not just one thing. And, you know, I do have this YouTube channel called Scott Kearnney Investigates, and you can go sort of dig into a lot of those videos because they have quite a few.

on my channel but essentially when someone if you look at like a sort of a like buddhism right the idea that you know you might have an eye if you don't know anything about buddhism you might think that buddhism is all about levitating monks right if you don't know anything about it right or like that peaceful character is also a warrior or or someone who has superpowers who can levitate or watch your walls or things like that these are ideas that are not accurate but there are out there in the public consciousness. There are many, many Buddhist teachers who play on those ideas, who play, who will sell you an idea that you can meditate your way to superpowers of various sorts.

You can meditate your way to love or wealth or, you know, you can manifest reality through the power of intense meditation, essentially making you a Jedi, right? There's a lot of people and various levels come into that. And then when people have these ideas in their heads and then start meditating, you will notice that when you meditate reality changes a little bit, like light may change in your environment. Time may speed up or slow down or it may have insights that you never had before and you may think that you're special. And then when you push those logics and the ideologies that the teacher may tell you aren't varied, but one of them might be that you could meditate and become an angel or something called a Bodhisattva or you could become enlightened or something. like this. Some people take those physiological signs as an indication that they have achieved a spiritual endpoint and they will declare themselves enlightened. They may do things that

don't make any sense to outside viewers. I mean, for instance, let me give you an example. In 2006, this is right at my, I was leaving my PhD program. I was going into journalism. I was on that cusp between those two parts of my life. I was leading in a broad program for American college students in India and it was called um the name of the problem was like it was India from brahma to Buddha right so that brahma is a Hindu god and Buddha is obviously Buddha and we went to all like the holy sites in north India with the highlight being a meeting the Dalai lama and going to a seven day silent meditation retreat in a Tibetan tradition and on the seven day silent meditation retreat my best and my brightest student so I had I think 18 students

under me and my best and the brightest student you know we did the seven days she was meditating in front of me in full lotus pose she really was into it personally I hate silent meditation but at the end of it she climbed up to the roof of the retreat center

in the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment in both guys which is a rural area of India and she wrote in her journal she is a Bodhisattva and then she jumped off the roof to her death leaving that all she had to do is leave her body to become enlightened. And this opened up my eyes to this craziness in the spiritual movements where you can be meditating on this idea of bliss, on empathy, on love, on the impermanence

of life. And, you know, things that you would think are like good things to think about, but you could end up in this catastrophic outcome. And that was sort of the origin point for a lot of the stuff that I did, including that organ trafficking work, because I was tasked with bringing. her body and you know 110 degree heat basically bringing her body out from bolgayev to deli uh and things got very physical and i was you know people were trying to haggling over her body parts there was a whole madness that went along with that and the the the you know i wanted to know

like was she enlightened is there enlightenment like why did she kill herself what why was this happening and and that led me down this whole we erode to writing the enlightenment trap So that was like the second stage of my career. I'm watching the organ trafficking guy to the Enlightenment's a little dangerous, guys. Let's talk seriously about it. But, you know, the way most people know me isn't that stuff. That's sort of like my background. Most people know me because of a guy named Wim Hof.

Have you ever heard of Wim Hof, the famous ice man, he's Dutch, he jumps in ice water and can control his body temperature. He's super famous. So this was in 2013. he was a guy selling a meditation program where he could heat his body up with the power of his mind. You see photos of him on icebergs

in his underwear and he said, I can teach you to do all this stuff and I thought he was crazy he was going to get people killed like the other gurus I was looking at. So I went out to debunk him, but I tried his method and it worked and all of a sudden I was doing this icing meditation.

I was like, this is crazy. I climbed up Mount Kilbenjaro with him. It was negative 30 degrees out. I was in my underwear. There's, you know, the photos are relatively famous. And I wrote this New York Times Best Sine book about William and sort of the power of cold and breathwork. And I really launched his career into the stratosphere where now he's like mega, super famous, movies about him and all that stuff. And so that was part of my ride.

And I've since come to realize that once you get really popular, really powerful, have a lot of money. coming into you because I knew him when he was a nobody you end up into that you end up becoming that guru that I feared in the first place like you end up becoming the guy who who is corrupt and and dangerous and does get people killed so that's sort of where I am that's a that's a real that's going through a lot of my books that's not all of my books but that's a lot of my books well what about did I'm trying to think that makes me face actually the opposite um of the ice guy there was a guy who did like sweat lodges and he would and in james arthur ray yeah didn't someone die multiple people died uh in the sweat lodge in arizona this was in 20 i want to say 15 i might be wrong that

might be it early might be 2013 um but yeah james arthur ray you know he was one of these guys who teaches you can manifest reality if you just pray or think right in the right way it's that power positive thinking stuff which is a very popular ideology which is very problem because the world actually has physical laws. You can't just pray your way into a whole new reality. He basically locked people in a sweat lodge, telling them to overcome their internal struggles. And I think, I believe it was three people who died at that sweat lodge in Arizona.

And yeah, true tragedy. And then this sort of stuff happens a lot in a lot of different ways. Usually, you know, and here's the interesting thing about these spiritual gurus. All of them, all of the ones that I've raised, about over the years have a kernel of wisdom which is amazing right have they had these insights that the world is fucked up right there are um i don't want to say this is conspiracies but there are like like things in the world that are not right and they identify them and then they have practices that at least at the first really are beneficial like if you've never meditated before you've never

taken a cold shower never taken a sauna and then you you start doing that stuff your life is almost always to get better regardless of what the protocols are because it's something new and there's a physiological component to it and you know it doesn't really matter what the practice is it's sort of like you know i call it the law of speedy gains have you ever heard of the log diminishing returns you start something and then over you know and over time you have put more and more offered in before you know to get more and more returns but the the flip side of that is if you start something new you've never done before you have an incredibly fast learning rate like if i tried to teach you teach you ballroom dancing actually I'm a terrible dancer so I wouldn't do that but like let's say I took

a ballroom dancing class I would get so much better in a week like so much better I'd be like you know doing the chacha a little bit not great but I'd be a little bit that's the law of speedy gains you have a lot of increase at first and then it tapers off with all of these other methods you also have that same effect at first you have this huge uh improvement in your abilities you know whatever it is that your training. And then as you hit that assentote where things start leveling off, that's where they hit you with a sign up for my level two course. My level two course is going to cost you X number of dollars, you know, whatever, X number of commitments, whatever it is they're trying to get from you. And a level two course is never as good as a level one course.

I don't care what you're looking at. There's another like, you never get to like those, never become the Jedi that you hoped you would be, right? There's never that thing, but they have caught you. And usually they link it out. ideology to it. Like the ideology being, you are a good person or you are, you have achieved a special status being enlightened or connected to God or Jesus or, you know, whatever it is, they connect that ideology to those physical sensations and they've hooked you, right? I mean, it's just a classic rift. It's a classic fucking scam. And we've been, we've been doing that scam probably since the beginning of humanity in one way or another. And,

And so it's really complex because there are good things about it. It's not bad to learn things, right? It's not bad to, like, try a lot of things. But then they get cynical at some point once power and money get involved. You know, why is it that all of the gurus out there, all of the religious teachers end up fucking their 20-year-old students? Like, there's a reason. It doesn't matter what faith we're in, right?

Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, they're all fucking their 20-year-old students or their kids or things like that. like it is a trope around the world yeah i was going to say the uh the grant cardo it seems like the whole grant cardone you know you get the he initially he it sounds like a bunch of really good stuff and then when it does if it doesn't work out it's because you're not doing it right because you need special you need special classes for you to really focus in on this and so pay sign up for my $2,200 course and then if that doesn't work and you know it always is you're always on the cusp of winning.

And if it's not working out, it's because you're, it's you, not us, not me. Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

I mean, that's the classic faith healing grift, right? You know, the tent revivalists in Christianity all had that same grip. We're also seeing it now and like to, in a different form among wellness influencers, and even influential scientists who come on with the Peter Tia's of the Andrew

Hubermans, these mega huge podcasters who sell science. in the same way like they're doing these same things where they're they offer hope they they identify a problem you want to live longer you want to live healthier you don't want to linger in your old age in a hospital bed and then die like even the buddha was selling that one right he was like you don't want to be frail you want to like flatten the curve and just go right off the problem is real right we all want to be healthy happy and strong and then they tell you that they have they have the solution and usually it comes with a discount code and a supplement and you know something that's

like pretty wonky and bullshit and like not government regulated in a proper way and all the griffs work a little bit different but they also all work a little bit the same right so what what other books so you've written six books six six six books or the course of how long I mean, my shortest book, my shortest book is like 110 pages. No, no, I'm saying over what, the last 20 years? Oh, since 2011, my first book came out. So it's 20, what, 13, 20, 24 now. So, yeah, like over 12 years.

So it's like one book every two years. Your shortest book, what is that? It was about dreaming and why we dream, like, what dreams do to you physiologically. And it actually, it's funny, it started out of what, about napping. It was like, how to take the perfect nap. And I realized that there is totally science how to take the perfect nap.

There's a way to do it. And you can explain it in like five minutes and you don't actually need a whole book about it. Even 110 pages was too much for how and why to now. Until my 18th, get excited. This is big! For the summer's biggest adventure. I think I just smurf my pants.

That's a little too excited. Sorry. Smurfs. Only did it is July 18th. So then I got more interested in what happens during sleep stages. I did a book about dreams. I did include the five-minute description of why you should nap. And honestly, you should nap.

You work too much. You deserve a nap. Go do it. I always feel horrible when I wake up after a nap. Yeah, that means you napped too long. Yeah, that means so, yeah, let's talk about napping. Good, good one. Okay.

So you feel horrible after you nap. And the reason for that is because an average human sleep cycle is, it's like 60 to 120 minutes. So it's usually about being 90 minutes for the full stages of sleep, stage one, two, three, REM sleep. And if you take a nap that cuts you off in the middle of a sleep cycle, if you're in like deep sleep and then you wake up because you set an alarm or there's some reason that you got up, you know, you felt you had to go sometime. So you will feel like you're underwater. You feel like everything is not moving, right? Because your consciousness is still stuck in those deeper sleep stages. So if you take a nap, you should do it this way.

You should either take an under 20-minute nap or a 90-minute nap. But if you take an hour nap, you're fucked. Is that the book behind you that says Dream? Yeah, yeah, that's it. Where is it? Right here. Dream. Dream.

The art and science of slumber. It's actually my most recent book. It's funny. I did that as a Kickstarter. I was like experimenting with self-publishing. And, uh, and, yeah, self-publishing is fun. It was, it was fun to do like a one-off book really quickly, uh, on a topic that was very narrow.

And I can just convey all of the information to someone in like, you know, 100 pages of nothing. Like, you can get through that in a couple hours. Uh, and I think it's like 25,000 words at most. And, uh, and it was, it was a fun project to do that because I could answer the question. I'm like, here's what you do. Here's why dreams are important. Here's what they provide you in terms of emotions and whatnot.

And I cut all the bullshit that went on top of it. So that was a fun book to write. So why do you sell? I mean, are the other books traditional published, traditionally published with, with? Yeah, mostly, I think. So I have, you know, being a writer is really hard. I don't know if you've, you've ever learned anything about the, the finances of writing. But I think people have this idea.

that you get something called an advance and then you're rolling money and you buy houses and pools and stuff and that's awesome. That's not really what the writer's experience is. You know, I've gotten big advances. I've gotten, I think, $250,000 advances, which is a pretty sizable amount of money, right?

But I found that publishers these days are operating a lot like venture capital. So when you think about a venture capital firm, they come in they dump a lot of money on something but then they extract all of the value they can out the other side and and my experience with traditional publishing is usually hey it's cool to get a big check everyone's fucking loves a big check but over the over the longhold they don't support the books they don't they don't do the things they promise they don't market it the way they should and because the way advances work let's say they gave you a hundred

grand for a book um that's an advance on royalties that's It's not just money we gave you because we liked you. Like, you have to earn back that advance. And in general, like for every $30 hardcover book that's someone sells, the author's cut of that. It's about $4. It's like 15% minus a little cut for their agent as well. So if you got $100,000 advance and you're making $4,000,

if you actually have to pay off that advance before you get any beat amount of the dime. And so what is $4 into $100,000? You have to sell quite a few books, right? There was that 25,000 books at least before you earn another dime. And most books don't sell that many copies. I've had a couple books do very well. But like most authors will come out and they might sell 20,000 copies. And that still doesn't get them a dime.

So what happens is you get the situation where an author writes a book and they put it out into the world. And then they realize they won't earn another dime on it so they don't put it in the effort in marketing after the first week or two. You know, when everyone's stroking your ego because you have an article, you have a review of the York Times, yeah, you'll take the interviews. But you're not going to push it for years after that. Self-publishing offers a different model where instead of getting $4 a book, you get $7 a book, but you don't get the advance. But then you're incentivized to always, always push the book. So I have, you know, of the books I've done, I've had mainstream deals for five of them. I pulled one of those books out of the mainstream to do self-published on it.

And I half self-published one of my other books. This was a New York Times bestseller over here about Wimhoff. And that one, I self-published the audio book and I traditionally published the print book. And that created a nice mix of I can still do interviews and make money on the, you know, from when after someone hears the interview, they might buy an audio book. So I'd get like a thousand bucks. You know, if we were talking about that book and this was in my heyday, when that book was super popular, I might make $1,000 after this interview.

That was cool. I liked $1,000. And so I did a bunch of interviews. There's no reason to do that for like this book here because that book hasn't earned out at the bent. It'll be there forever. Right. Yeah, I got an advance for like $3,500 when I was in prison

for one of the books that I wrote. And it was probably two years before I ever saw anybody you know it's it's like I'm going to say is it every six months every six months or something I get a check for you know it's a check between me so the um the literer my literer agent takes a piece could say a little part and then it's split 50 50 between me and the author well I mean I'm the author but the subject the other guy yeah yeah and so I get a check every once every six months or so for 50 bucks or $65,000 or $6,000 or, you know, but I remember that $3,500 in prison was huge.

Yeah, right. What was way more money was the, I had gotten an article written about the book in Rolling Stone magazine and we optioned it. And so it's like every 18 months, I get a check for like seven grand. And that's still four, like that's happened four different times. I keep waiting for them to either make the movie unlikely or stop optioning it, but they keep optioning it. They even, I think Warner Brothers optioned it three times and then they sent it to like MGM or somebody and then they optioned it for even more money, which to me isn't much. It was an extra like $1,100 or something.

But yes, it's great to get suddenly you just get a check. They have my ex-wife's address. So every 18 months, I get a phone call saying, you've got a letter here from some lawyer who. And then she tells me the law, I'm like, oh, that's a check. Yeah, right on. So that's great. And you know what? I mean, I haven't had one of those recurring options in a while.

All my books have been option and they don't send me. Your situation is really cool. Oftentimes, they've never given me the recurring 7,000 every six months check. I've heard about it. So congratulations. on that. You won. You won that battle. And they'll never make the movie. They don't make movies anymore. That takes a hundred years to get out. I know. I know I've been I've been out of prison for in two days. It'll be five years. Five years. What is today? 60. Yeah, it'll be five years.

And I've been for five years, I have had, you know, I've written 22 synopsies and seven books. optioned seven of them. Nice. And most of the options do not continue to go, right? You get one option and then they, they're going, they plan on re-optioning. They want to talk about it. They're going to talk to the, their team. They're going to talk to Jennifer.

She's getting back from vacation. You know, it's always like, okay, I'll call you back in two weeks. Well, let's schedule something. And then they don't do it. So, and, you know, I've had all the meetings and all the, sizzle reels that have been made and all the pitches and yeah it's it's nearly and then i'll go it's nearly impossible and then i'll go to the movies and i'll watch a or go to watch netflix and watch some movie and halfway through the movie think how the fuck did this get made yeah it's trash right

it's a total trash show yeah well you know and as you're doing it you realize that the way they get made is that you know Todd's niece yes friends with so and so and so no you know and before you know it you're like like this is all like nepotism it's a combination of nepotism and um you know and and and you know back scratching and just who knows who and it's just and it really just doesn't the way these movies gets made is not the way you think that they get made they're not picking the best it's just what when the stars a line and suddenly this movie gets made and sometimes it's a great movie and sometimes it's just dog crap and you're like it's nothing to do with really whether it was a great

story or not a hundred percent man like yeah like yeah i've been in constant conversations for i think like 10 years on all of the books and it's like every hollywood person must have a meeting and uh and in general actually it's funny the reason why i went over to youtube recently and i've sort of built up this YouTube presence, uh, in the last like year, you know, going from nothing. Now I have like 50,000 or 60,000 followers, something like that. Um, on YouTube. Yeah, that great. Um, subscribers.

Yeah. That's a fucking, what's a lot of fucking, bro. It's great. The average person take, it takes the average person on YouTube that uploads, um, consistently. It takes three years to get a thousand subscribers. Oh shit. Well, so better than average.

I like that. Um, they, the, the, Anyway, the reason I went over there is because I'm sick of dealing with publishers. I'm sick of dealing with Hollywood executives. I'm sick of dealing with magazines and newspapers because there's all that time in pitching, right? There's all that time and being like, hey, other person give me permission to go do something, right? And usually the money even that great. Like, you might get some money, but it's not like life-changing money.

It's like maybe I'll make it to the next move. What I've learned recently is that if I can just go do my stuff, I can just do my stuff, I can just go out, I can put out a video, like I learned how to video edit slowly over the last year. I have total freedom to do whatever the hell I want to do. And since I'm super ADD, I have all these ideas going through my mind. At least I can put those ideas somewhere instead of sitting in endless development. So in the last like couple months, I found that people, people really like, at least of my, you know, I'm interested in everything. But what people really like is me talking about

the scientific frauds that are out there, the people that, you know, the personalities of like Andrew Huberman or Wem Hof or Peter Tia or, you know, people in the wellness industry. And then like looking up their criminal records and like looking up like the bullshit that they've been involved in.

And that has proven to be a pretty nice formula. I'll probably do that for a few more months and get forward and go on to something else. And that's the brilliance of YouTube, right? There's like, I'm in total. control you're until you know this is going on youtube jure people are watching this might or maybe they'll be on your podcast they'll be on your youtube you don't have to ask permission you just get to go fucking call someone up and have a nice conversation and for some reason some

people actually listen to this shit can you believe it well there's like you know to keep in mind too depending there's channels like um coffee zilla that you know are um you know they 10 million views on their on his most recent film video yay yeah that are amazing you know so you commented on one of my videos today. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, what was crazy. Then there's Spencer. Is it Cornelias or Spencer?

I forget the guy's name. I think I say his name long all the time. I've interviewed him. He's also got a channel. Like there's a bunch of these guys that have channels and they start to, look, once it starts to take off, you know, it takes off. Then it's paying when it, when it becomes your full-time thing, like you can get serious. Yeah, totally.

you know um i'm gonna i'm gonna make three thousand dollars on youtube this month baby that's that's fucking great i'm psyched i think that's like i think that's a win that's a win for youtube at may yeah that is one that's a mortgage payment yeah exactly well in florida it is i don't know about california where where are you i live in denver my mortgage is way cheaper than three thousand oh yeah yeah then you're probably good um i was gonna say uh yeah i was gonna say i i i So I've, you know, I had two book deals, right? Both of them were like horrific. Of course, I was in prison, so I wasn't in a position to negotiate, you know.

Right. And then the other books I just self-published when I got out. And, you know, and that was way, way more money on self-publishing than, you know, I did not. I kind of, I don't know how you put it. You know, I sold myself short, but I really didn't. Um, by not doing the audio books. Yeah. You know, but the truth is is that nobody, I read like a, like a fourth grader.

Like it's horrible. Like I'm not, it would have taken a lot of editing for it to come off well. Sure. But, you know, let's face, listen, but every month I get, I make between whatever. I make about 1,500 bucks, sometimes more. Right. I did Lex Friedman and probably had the Lex Friedman podcast and I had like two months where we were, I was making three, four thousand dollars a month.

I mean, amazing. Great. I was like and I usually when I do these podcasts people say oh well oh well you'll you'll sell more books and I never can see any real any real difference but when I did Lex yeah I did see a huge I did see a huge search for about two months I'm like wow this is great but yeah I wish I I wish I had more time to to write like I haven't really done much writing in the last probably three years and I have a a few stories that i my buddy and i are researching the problem with his researching is that he he doesn't seem to understand what is you know what is newsworthy and what's not just writes everything down and researches everything and finds everything right interesting and it's like that doesn't really help the story it doesn't you know i get it it is interesting and maybe that guy you could write a book about or that whole you know a multi-generational you know track through

you know the you know crime or whatever it was but honestly like that's you know the four pages you just gave me are a paragraph at best right right and so it's it's dragged this this this one book I'm working on, it's dragged it on for probably two years now. Yeah, I don't suggest working with other people. I've done co-written books. I think that it's usually more trouble than it's worth. I mean, the idea with working, so with somebody else is you're like, wow, I do half the work, but you don't really do have to work.

It's at best three quarters of the work for half the money at best. And if there's a personality conflict or any number of things go wrong, it can be you can put you in sort of development hell and those projects can totally fall apart yeah I did I did it I did it once and luckily the person was like one of my best friends in the world and I think it may have killed her friendship and the friendship definitely went down several notches several notches after after that book was written um yeah I was gonna say uh the thing is is several of my stories about like seven or eight of them are now being um

you know, they're, they're in, I'm not sure what you want to call it, research or in development to be documentaries. And so there's a company called law and law, is it law and crime? Yeah, it is it's law and crime films or production. And they've done like, I think they've had like six series on like Discovery Channel and a few other, you know, channels. And so I, you know, I have a law firm that represents, that represents me. And they got me a deal with them. And I flew out to L.A., met with them and went over the stories. And we ended up optioning, um, we did an option. I think there's a, there is an option.

It's an exclusivity. We haven't optioned them yet. But basically they're researching all the stories to try and turn them into documentaries. So some will be full length documentaries, like maybe a three-part series, standalone series, and then the ones where you can't get enough people to participate will be part of an anthology where most likely I'm kind of telling those stories, like, hey, I was in prison and hear five of the stories that I developed.

And then the other ones will be standalone, maybe a Netflix or some type of a series where it's like a three-part series. And it's super interesting going through that process where they're contacting people, people are screaming at them you know like the woman that contacts her name is uh anyway she i'm not i don't say her name but she'll contact people and you know so if you if you're you were a part of a crime 30 years ago and you were never indicted and now you've got three kids and a and a business and suddenly you get a phone call hey by the way you know that because drug conspiracy you were a

part of that you were never found guilty or you were never uh indicted for you thought had gone away well, there's going to be a documentary and we're going to be talking about your involvement. Would you like to be interviewed? If you mention my name, you know, you have no proof. We can, well, we have transcripts. We have, we have FBI 302s. We have, you know, homicide reports. We have police reports.

Like we have, suddenly it's, you know, I'm going to get a lawyer. It's just, sure. It's been super interesting. And what's really interesting is the people that are willing to talk, the people that you think, guy is probably not going to talk and they're like absolutely i'll talk it's 25 years ago they're like what do i care and then other people they're they're unwilling to talk so it's it's it's been interesting so i'm dying to see what happens and i'm enjoying the process of going through it mostly because i think i always joke that my fear is you go through the whole process and then

you watch the documentary or the film or the series and you go eh it was all right so i'm trying to enjoy the process of watching all of this happen yeah you know so we'll see what happens never know hollywood i don't put any faith in them to actually pull things off um no i don't i do hope that it does work out for you um they they do air um i've been in just too many rooms where documentaries at any stage they can fall apart at any state yeah i have listen i'm i'm not holding my breath right you know what i'm saying like i'm i'm i'm kick back kind of just like watching luckily i have at this point i'm kind of done right i right you've done your interviews you've yeah you know periodically i got a phone call with like hey

who is this person or hey these two people are not willing to participate who else could cover this portion of the story and you're like oh so-and-so talk to so-and-so's brother right right you know sometimes there's just nobody and you're like okay well then they're like well then you'll have to come in and fill in that piece. And, you know, I don't have a problem with that. Like, if we get to that stage, and that'd be great. Like, I don't, they don't, they don't, they don't. What's the legality of you making money on a prior crime?

Aren't there laws against that? So on, okay, so you're talking about the, the son of Sam law. Yeah, that's right. All right. So, um, there's about 13 or 14 states that have son of Sam laws. And they would say, and there is a federal son of Sam law. So let's say New York, for instance, Berkowitz, right? You know, he had sold his life rights for like a million dollars.

It's like, okay, so you're this psycho that kills, you know, whatever it was, seven people or nine people or whatever. And now you make a million dollars. So, of course, they came up with the son of Sam law. And then it's pretty strict in New York where in most, some of these states where they say, look, if you sell your life rights, you cannot, or you cannot profit on your, on your crime. So some states, like I want to say Indiana says, you have to give 80%, like you can profit, but 80% of it has to go to your victims.

Okay. So every state is a little bit different. I'm pretty sure New York is like, no, absolutely not. now that's if you were convicted of a state crime if you're convicted of a federal crime the federal statute says that if you have a violent crime or a crime of espionage you cannot profit but i have a white collar crime right so i wrote a book about my crime and i'm allowed to profit from that now as far as you or me as a journalist you know writing a story about a crime. Oh, yeah, that's fine. Perfectly legal. Like, so me writing stories about these other guys, because I've written stories about,

like I said, about 24, 25 different synopsies, combination of synopsies and and actual true crime books. And a couple were memoirs, but there's still true true crime memoir. So I'm allowed to make money off of their books. Now, in some of those cases, I've split the. the profits with those people. So I'm saying, hey, if I end up selling your, typically I don't split the book. Right.

But if I, if I option it and I sell you. Oh, you're actually an option. Okay. And I think, imagine, almost everybody has signed a life rights agreement with me. So they've talked their life rights to the book that I wrote. If I'm able to sell your life rights, you get whatever that agreement is. Maybe it's four, you get 40%. You get 50%.

Maybe you get 60%. Right. Right. So, but I, like I said, I've, you know, I've done that a few times and I've only had really one that has been super successful at it thus far. Uh, you know, a few of them. And they pay different, right? Like almost nobody wants to pay for options anymore.

Right. They always, they're always, but they do pay. That's what always bothers me when I talk to somebody. You talk to somebody, some big production company and you're like, okay, so you want to option? Yeah, we'll send you it. I'm like, okay, we'll send you the option. and you can look it over and sign it and it's like well wait a minute what what how much is the

right right right no that nobody pays for options anymore it's like really because two months ago I just sold one for 3,500 bucks right right right but now you're a liar now you're a lot you're you're lying to me because I know they do pay and by the way my other option the one that gets renewed I got one that gets renewed every 18 months six months ago I just got a check for that one right so why are they still optioning it right and then it's like oh well um let me talk to Brad. Yeah. Oh, now it's possible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's all negotiating. I mean, you're negotiating it. I mean, they want to take as much money for creators as they can. Like, that's Hollywood. It's been Hollywood story since the studio system and the 20s, right? It's like the people creating content journalists, actors, you know, the people really create the material.

They want to make that material totally worthless. and they want to put money into production services because they control the production services. But the stories they try to get per zero. And yeah, that's my life. We were talking with Hollywood. It's like dealing with that sort of bullshit. I see it all the time where you're saying is totally accurate.

I'd rather deal with criminals. I'd rather deal with criminals. Yeah, at least they have a business model usually. I mean, depends on the criminal. At least you know there's a good chance this guy's lying. Yeah, yeah, he talks a guy in a nice suit who's sitting in a studio somewhere. He's driving a nice car. He's like, you know, you're like, oh, he's got to be a legit, right?

Like he works, he works for, you know, works for Warner Brothers. He must be a good guy, right? You're like, yeah, no way, man. That guy in the studio is not a good guy. I mean, you know, they might be fun at a dinner party, but they're out there to screw you. Yeah, it's funny. My wife had a deal recently, I mean, it was a few years ago. She had a podcast.

It was like a, like, number three in the world. world or something like that for a little while and you know that all the all of these companies are talking to you being like hey can we get on board with your thing and uh one of them it was a really big company and i actually don't even remember the name of it because it wasn't like warner brothers it was like someone who works with warner all there sort of thing anyway hundreds of millions of dollar company and after negotiating with for the three months you know going back and forced with like details they finally sent their option to us and it was for one dollar and we were like go fuck yourselves like why did you waste our time for like so much so

much um and yeah anyway i don't trust hollywood whenever they call i i once an r emanuel call me i've ammanuel is the guy who runs wm and i wrote this book you know uh what doesn't kill us about ice bathing and he heard me on npr and he was like oh scott i i you know uh i want you to train me to become like an ice man or something and he's like i'm going to make you a star and as soon as i heard someone say they're going to make me a star i was like oh this is bullshit yeah as soon somebody guarantees anything you have to know right then you can't guarantee anything right right it was it was funny it's funny it's funny to turn down billionaires i got to say um what was the book that was the ice one yeah it was what doesn't kill us after that came out

I mean, it was a huge. Like, I'm not famous now, but I was famous for like a brief moment in like 2017 from like, I don't know, like March to July of 2017. Scott was everywhere. I was on like Dr. Oz. I was like all the radio programs, all the big podcasters had me on. And, and I was an idiot. I didn't. I should have created my YouTube channel at that point and like, you know, come to my YouTube now, right?

But I was an idiot. I was like, this will last forever. It didn't last forever. Um, and, uh, and that was that, you know, made, it made some, some good publishing money. And now I'm realizing that the, the relying on, on other people's channels and other people's fame to support you. Because that's what you do when you write for a magazine or you get a documentary or you go on someone else's show. You're relying on their capacity to, to reach people to, to bolster your fame. but they don't, I mean, they're not going to carry you more than a couple months.

I'll collect Streetman, you know, I'll carry you for a couple months and then, and then you're on your own. And that's not their fault. It's your fault for not having captured interest and have a place for people to land. So that's, so the first podcast I did was a podcast called Concrete, the guy named Danny Jones. I was maybe a month or two out of the halfway house. and he's he's since then renamed it danny jones and it's funny because he had about the same well he had about 200 and i think he had about 280 000 subscribers and so and he'd been doing it about seven years yeah so i went there you know he you said you got to come okay so i go i go to the

podcast and after the podcast i remember i had to drive across the bridge from tampa to st pete which is like a it's like an hour long drive to his place anyway and you got to go across the bridge like I was like listen man you got to buy me dinner or something he's like okay well it was like 11 o'clock he's like I think this is like waffle house is open let's go yeah right we're at waffle house and he said listen he said I can't guarantee this he is but I think this podcast is going to be pretty big and I thought his podcast have 6,000 views 7000 views like this is not going to be big and I don't really, but then again, I don't really know anything either. And what I didn't realize, I didn't really know how YouTube worked. So I had looked at the most recent videos and they're like two

weeks old and they have 12,000 and 7,000 views. Not realizing he had videos on there that had 800,000 views. Right. 1.1 million views. So I was like, okay, he said, you, you're super interesting and you're a great storyteller. He said, you really, you said you want to start a true crime podcast. I was like, right? He said, you really need to post something on your YouTube channel now. He said, start a YouTube channel and post something now, just talking about how you're going to start a podcast. Yeah. This does well, you'll get a bunch of subscribers. He says, and if you can, maybe even put up a start telling your story on your channel. Yeah. And I'm like, no, I want to do it where I have a production company do it. Yeah, right. And I want to, you know, and I don't

have the cameras and he goes well you've got an iPhone I said I don't want to do that with my iPhone like oh like I don't even know no way and I don't have the software he's like well you've got you have a laptop right like it's got I movie like you can do it with I movie it's not oh it'll look horrible like first of all I don't know anything right been out of halfway house for two three months right so I don't do anything the video gets one point well I know it ended up getting sorry It ended up getting like 2.2, 2.3 million views. Wow. Then I go on Patrick Bet David.

It gets 2 million. I go on soft white underbelly. It gets a few million. I go on. So by the time I go and I'm having all this fun going on these podcasts, I then a year later start my podcast. So a year out of that way. But by that point, you've dropped.

Yeah. I've dropped. So it's funny to think. all of those, all of those things, like all of the two million, uh, uh, you ones. AdSense alone, that's about $6,500,7,000 on each one of those videos, depending on, you know, circumstances. I've had one video pop to, to 2.5. And, um, two point five million. Yeah. Wow. How long is a video? I don't know, 12 minutes, 13 minutes. And, uh, and it, uh, it was amazing, right? It was amazing that, and it was nowhere for six months.

It was getting like, you know, 50 views a day or something like that. And then one day it just exploded. YouTube is weird. It's both magical and horrible at the same time. Because this video, you, listener, watching right now, how many views is that down there? Right? And like, you know, one person's view is worth what? About 4,000th of a cent is one view, something, something like that?

it's basically nothing um but sometimes the algorithm shines its light down on you for reasons that are completely inexplicable like it can like it can be the most random video on your channel and like suddenly everyone loves it for some reason uh but it doesn't happen too often usually it's just a painful thing where you got 6,000 views yeah every week for a bunch of time yeah i've had them we've had them where we did a video and it got 50 000 views in a month or so and then it trailed off and then six months later my editor will call me his name's colby and or producer whatever you want to call he'll he'll text me and he'll say have you looked at the brett johnson video and i'm like what bret johnson he's like the one we did six months ago i'm like

no he's like it's gotten a hundred thousand views in the last two weeks it's like what and then the next two weeks it gets another hundred they ended up being 250 000 and you don't have you have no idea why it's suddenly got 200 000 within uh within a month right right i don't know why it got 50 000 for the first six months what happened yeah if only all videos did that that's always a nice surprise because keep mine too i don't my videos aren't 12 minutes they're like two or three hours some of yeah i know i know so um but like i said the the thing with my video is on my youtube channel i waited a year so by the time i the algorithms chewed me up and spit me out i then started it so then it just turned into a grind right so

So now I go on other people's podcast to try and stay in the algorithm. But I'll, I missed that first eight million views that I got within a year. I missed that. And that, that could that honestly, in my opinion, was probably a few hundred thousand subscribers I missed out on. Yeah, that makes sense. But I didn't, I didn't know any better. I didn't know what I was doing.

And I didn't listen to Danny. And Danny tried to tell me. I always say it's the best advice I never listened to. Yeah. Yeah, the advice is do stuff. Get your shit out there now. You are the creator. Don't depend on other people.

The cavalry ain't coming. You got to do it yourself. Yeah, that's true. Anyone who's listening to this who wants to start their own channel, you should have done it 10 years ago, but you can always start now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think 50,000 in how long? A few years?

Yeah, I mean, you know, when I started really doing this for real was two years ago. But my channel itself, I posted a video like, you know, 15, 20 years ago on YouTube. I was like, cool. That video has 35,000 views. It's really funny because it was just like me showing myself around around an apartment. I lived in India. But I really put effort into it about two years ago. And it was really hard at first, really just painfully hard.

I went from like, I don't know, I think of probably 200 subscribers to get that first 5,000 was probably a year and then going from then the next year going from 5 to 50 or 5 to 60 or wherever I am right now I think I'm at 55 actually that you know was has been much better maybe next year it'll be even better yeah we'll see yeah I mean I yeah we've we've had those it's funny too because every once well I'll say something like you know man you know like you know we only made this much today and my colby will say i remember when we were thrilled to make that and i was just i'm like yeah you're right you're right like you know he keeps reminding me like you know you're pretty doing pretty well like this is my

full-time job this is all i do but not all i do i i do speaking engagements and um other podcasts and i you know i like to say i write books but really we haven't well you should come up you should come on my show sometime. My 50,000 subscribers would be enjoyed, would enjoy hearing about some crimes and capers. Get a kick out of me. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I don't have a problem with that. Have you written a true crime book? I mean, all my books are true crime books. I need to some degree. Like, you know, I mean with where there's a, you know, I don't want to say protagonist, like where there's a subject where you find a subject and follow that subject, not you're kind of doing The genre of true crime, I do have a true crime crime podcast that I'm putting out in a few weeks that I produced.

It's called Blood Vines about wine fraud in California. I'm not the host on the behind the scenes, but I work with this great journals named Chris Walker, who was local. I did a podcast with him three years ago as well called The Syndicate about the largest marijuana bust in American history. And that's, those are very true crimey things. And, but I look at more, I, I do more investigative journalism because I, I, uh, it's not just true crime has this sort of voyeuristic element to it, right? It's like, oh, the girl got kidnapped. The, the dentist was evil. Like, it's very salacious.

I try to, um, look at larger macroeconomic things that go on. I try to look at, I sort of, I'm trying to do anthropology as I do my stuff. and I often intersect with crime when I do my work. It's hard to get Netflix or HBO to make a series out of that. Yeah, I don't really care too much about getting Netflix anymore. I do. I do. I want one.

I want an eight-season series based on. I want to be the next Orange is the New Black. I want one of my people to. That would be. I'm loving that for you. And I'm, you know, hopefully that happens. Put no faith in Hollywood. Scott, this is about me.

But no faith in Hollywood is all I have to say. Just keep your expectations low. Yeah. It's rough. Hey, I appreciate you guys watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button in the bell so get notified of videos like this. Please consider joining my Patreon.

Leave me a comment. Share the video. Also, we're going to be leaving the all of the links to Scott's books, where you can get them on Amazon in the description box check those out thank you very much see you