My First Million - Ryan Holiday on The Economics of Book Writing, Why You’re Monetizing Your Media Business All Wrong, His Split with Tucker Max, and More

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday) to discuss how Ryan makes and spends his money, why he opened a book shop, what fuels him, why he decided to sell coins instead of tee shirts, and much more. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (00:28) - Background on Ryan and MFM (05:42) - Stories and learnings from Peter Thiel (07:20) - Why to sell coins instead of shirts (31:45) - Why to publish through a traditional publisher (42:00) - Buying a ghost town (52:00) - What fuels Ryan? (56:15) - Ryan's daily routine (58:30) - Ryan's thoughts on Tucker Max ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

What do you do with your money? I know you got a ranch. I think you lived. He's had that forever. I mean, that was like my house. So it's not like it wasn't like a hot, like a luxury property or whatever. It's not like Kanye having a ranch in Wyoming. You actually live there because you wanted to live there.

Sam, Sam, I think, has some similar aspirations. But what do you do? Are you like, I'm an investor. You just do something boring with your money. What do you do with your money? Yeah. Well, I spent a lot of it on this bookstore. I bought two buildings in this small town of Bastrop.

Originally it was going to be a bookstore and a coffee shop. Now it's a bookstore and I rent out half of it to a record store. But I needed like a space to do all my stuff. So up top is like my office. My wife also wanted me to take all my books out of our house. So that was part of it. It was like getting all the shit out. But no, I don't really do anything.

I don't really do anything with it. I invest it. I like investing in things. that are very different than internet things. So most of it's like an income producing real estate. How do you describe yourself? You know, I don't do it very well. You nailed, I would sort of,

if I had to say, what do I identify as? I would say I identify as a writer. And then I sort of have these other things that I do in, that are somewhat related and somewhat unrelated. But like if I had to sort of only pick one thing or like, what do I feel like, I was like meant to do it's it's writing so I identify first as that Sean do you remember this did I ever show you this coin I used to carry around I

would have it with me a lot particularly in the old San Francisco office I had a coin remember face of you no I've never never seen your coin what do you do there's two face of me no it was it said what is say momentous meant oh what does it say Ryan yeah which means like you're you're gonna die you only live once right by the way don't you love that Sam carried it around for years doesn't know what it says on it Momentous. I knew that it meant like you have to live today. Like you're going to die.

Yes. Right. And I was thinking about it. I bought one for $26. And I was thinking about it. I was like, this is the greatest business of all time. I just bought a like a fake coin from Ryan for $26.

It was just probably a post like a stamp just to mail it to me. So only 50 cents. There's not going to be any returns. There's no, it's one size. it's all and it made me happy and I carried it around and I was like this is that the greatest business of all time selling coins it's uh it's been in it's been in a nice business better than the publishing business right like what's interesting about books is like like the new book so you spend two years of your life writing something it's like 60,000 words uh you have to you know

the publishers taking managing all of it so you know they're they're the middleman and all of it but like that book is $26 and people if if that book was $32 people people people would be upset because there's like a sense of what a book should be, right? Like this is what people are willing to pay. And regardless of how good the book is or not. Exactly. Something of this shape, I pay either $9, $13 or $26. Yeah, right.

And so one of the things as Daily Stoic, which I started as this email list, became sort of big. The idea was like, okay, are we going to advertise? Are we going to monetize this via advertising? or are we going to, like, is there stuff we can sell that, you know, makes it a business to pay for itself? And as we were thinking about stuff you could do, because I came from the apparel business before I was a writer, I was like, we are not doing T-shirts. Under no circumstances, are we doing T-shirts? First off, because T-shirts are, like, are, you know, it's kind of cheap, you know,

but T-shirts are the worst business you can do. So like bands become popular, people build a brand. The first thing they always think is t-shirts. But what I remember is just how fucking complicated t-shirts are. First off, because you have to get someone to make them. But if you sell one t-shirt, that's already, at a minimum, three skews, right? Small, medium, large. If you want to do extra large and extra small, okay, now five skews.

And then you're like, okay, we're going to do white. Then we're going to do black. So now you have 10 skews, right? And then they don't fit. there's quality control issues. So I was like, we're not doing shirts and also like shirts, even though all of that, people will only pay certain amount for shirt because we don't value it as a thing. So I was like, I want to make something that's better margins that's less work, all of that.

So I was just really thinking about it. And then one day I was at the airport. I was at the Austin airport. And I was thinking about this idea of Momentumori, which is like if you look in a lot of old Renaissance paintings, the philosopher always has a skull. on his desk. And so there was a philosophical genre of like reminders of mortality. And I was like, it would be really cool to have a reminder of that.

What would that be? I was like, well, I could get a tattoo. And then I was like, I don't really want to get a tattoo. And so I was like, what could I have? And the idea of the coin popped into my head. And it turned out to be really cool. We actually used this mint in Minnesota that invented the Alcoholics Anonymous chip, like that you get it like 10 years or 20 years.

So they've been in business since 1888. Wow, that's crazy. I think we're their biggest customer now. And that also is a really cool business that I've been fascinated with. But yeah, that was a cool. I'm going to ask you about a mint in a second because I have another mitt that I think you're going to get a kick out of. But can you reveal how many of those coins you sell a year or do not talk about that? I don't want to say exactly how many, but like tens of thousands.

it's a lot of them and people like I'm giving a talk in Marble Falls next week and like they bought one for each of the attendees so it also became it's a really cool way to like what I'm interested in is not like Chotchkes or like just random ass merchandise but like what are what are physical manifestations of the ideas that I talk about that could actually provide value in some way. So like I have I have this one on my desk, but then the other one that I have this for my others, this is this one since Tempest Fuget, which means time flies. This is like a parenting one. It's just a reminder that like to be present as a parent. So I kind of start with stuff that would be helpful to me and then if it works for other people, it's good. I do think entrepreneurs

tend to think about digital products first and not physical products that have good. margins and this so that's been really cool well how much does the coin cost you a dollar uh more than that because more than that and then there's also packaging and all that all that kind of stuff but um but yeah it's honestly it's it's a good it's a good margin uh but um but uh yeah it's a good mark not as good as a digital product but good enough that business i feel like um you know i have this phrase, you know, you are what you admire, which is like, if you admire things enough, you, you end up moving in that direction. And that's a type of business that I've really, like, the thing, the little thing you just said gets like the highest amount of respect for me.

Like, okay, Elon can send a rocket to Mars. You know, Steve Jobs can fucking, you know, where is turtle knight can do his thing? But an entrepreneur who says, well, I wanted to create, I realized interest in stoicism, so I created this free thing to give it away. And I didn't know what the business would be. The traditional model doesn't really work, ads. Like, you know, how kind of shitty would a Stoicism newsletter be if it was just plastered with ads? But I did it anyways, betting on myself that I'll figure it out. And then I figured it out first by having my little framework of like, what's a thing that represents this belief that has high margins, that has low headache? Like, I have a DDC business with over like 3,000 skews. So when you're saying

that, my body's just like, you know, inside, just shriveling up and dying. And I'm like, oh, wow, how amazing would it be if I had one skew that was just high margin and like I could just make that skew amazing. So hearing you pull that off and, you know, the way it kind of like Sam has it and people at the conference buy it, to me, that's like, you know, top level respect because the creativity that that requires and the thoughtfulness that requires is kind of amazing. I think most people would just kind of declare creative bankruptcy and say, I don't know, I don't know how to figure it out and just Never, never. This is why I think Shopify is going to be like the biggest company in the world because they like let people do that. Do you know what I mean? Like you just come up with an idea and then, you know, it plugs into a third party warehouse. Although I have a fulfillment center here in Austin where I do some of the stuff out of the bookstore. But just like that you can just come up with stuff and make it and sell it to people. It to me is going to unlock like so much potential. And part of the reason I'm able to have the book still like a physical space is that. because most of what I sell online can subsidize like in-person retail also.

Sean, have you heard of this story is going to come full circle, but not till the end. Have you heard of Stuart Resnick? Stuart Resnick? No. All right. I bet you've heard of. Oh, I think I know this guy. They own the pistachio company, right?

Yes. So when you go to the store and juice or whatever. Yeah. So they own this company. It's a privately owned company. It's probably one of the large. Linda and Stuart Resnick is probably one of the largest privately owned companies at America. They do multi-billions in revenue. He started like a security business that he sold and he got

some money. And then now he owns palm, like the drink, palm drink. He owns pistachios and a bunch of stuff. Anyway, he, one of his first businesses after he sold his security company, made a little bit of money. He bought this thing called the Franklin Mint. And the Franklin Mint, I knew, I knew, Ryan, I knew you're going to know what this was. And the Franklin Mint basically started out by selling coins. Eventually they expanded to a bunch of other collectibles, but they started selling coins. And up until somewhat recently, they are one of the largest, I think, advertisers of digital and not digital, print media. And so, like, if you would open up a magazine, like a TV and news guide, like the got things, they were always selling coins. And it was Franklin Mitt.

And he sold it for like two or three hundred million dollars when he was done with it. And you know who bought it recently was Ty Lopez. Oh, wow. Didn't he buy Radio Shack also? and a bunch of shit. He's bought so much stuff. Hold on. I'm kind of stupid.

What these mint? Okay, is the mint literally a coin factory? So they take metal and they shape it into a coin of your choosing and then they, they sell it or they, you know, they provide it to you who sells it. Is that the idea? Is a coin factory? Is that what a mint is? Yeah.

Although the Franklin Mint is like commemorative quarters and dollars and stuff, right? But they don't, but they do like a prince. No, but yes, they do. but they got actually sued because they used like a Princess Diana coin. Or they've done like a, like a, I don't know, like some like famousist person that like middle American moms like care about. You can buy like a coin with their face on. Oh, interesting.

I've met this guy who has a very interesting path that like intertwines with the Silk Road and other things. And he had said something like he's like, yeah, what I'm doing now is I'm buying these email lists of like hundreds of millions of people. the, you know, like the leaked Madison Reed or whatever, what it was? Not Madison Reed. What's the Ashley Madison? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Email lists for like, oh, LinkedIn got hacked. Cool.

I'll take all those emails. And like, you can't, you can't really even send to that big of a list. It's like too dirty and you'll get like banned or whatever. But he like had some like expertise and how to send mass emails. And I was like, what are you going to do with this? Like you start a new thing? And he's like, oh, no, I'm just going to find people who like Trump and I'm going to sell them coins. I'm going to sell coins and hats to Trump fans.

And I was like, I was like, wow. And he's like, yeah, like, if 0.2% of my list, 0.02% of my list or whatever ever converts, like, you know, I'll just make millions of dollars passively sending these emails. I was like, wow. This is one of the craziest business plans I've ever heard. There's an argument that Fox News basically exists for the sake of like reverse mortgages, gold coins, and other forms of grift. Like, if you watch Fox News just the commercials, you get a sense. of like just how dumb the audience is, to be perfectly honest. And then you realize why the content, it's almost as if, like, I heard this great thing about

spam. They were saying like, like, you know, you get an email from like a Nigerian scam and you're like, oh, this is obviously spam. That's because it's not for you, right? It's for someone who's dumb enough to not be bothered by how all the red flags that are there. And so, well, even further, it's, they want people who after they get scammed won't really know how to like have any recourse?

Yes. So they won't be able to get back at you. And so they filter out all the people who have like lawyers. Yeah. And so when you watch Fox News and you get the sense, oh, this exists to create the kind of customer that would fall for these like obscenely high margin almost criminal enterprises. I know this is an exaggeration. But but like right on this side of what's legal or not businesses that tend to exploit not very smart or savvy people.

That's why the content is what it is, is to set up the commercial break where people won't buy real things. When you turn on pretty much any other form of entertainment, you're not seeing those advertisers because that's not who it's appealing. It reminds me of in India, I don't want to do a deep dive on this at some point, but there's like, India has this culture of gurus, right? So like, first, in terms of gods, we have like, whatever, 50 gods. So then the gods all have like, there.

gurus and the kind of like the saints type of people who give, you know, genuinely good advice, but then they also kind of like do magic tricks and you're like to show that they're like, you know, the man of God. It's like he can produce something in his hand, but it's like literally an illusion. Yeah. Like a magic trick. But the way they work is they have this like virtuous brand of being this person who only wears their white robe and they like don't have any material possessions, whatever.

But when you go to visit them and people, I mean, there's like miles long. lines like going, like crawling up mountains. Literally, they crawl to show their devotion to get to this person's like thing. And then you donate your gold chains. You donate like gold. And so these guys inevitably get raided by the government because they pay no taxes and they like, you know, are involved in crimes. And they go, they find like tons of gold, literally like the physical, the measurement,

tons of gold in their house. And they have like, and then they'll like license these like chip brands and like popcorn brands. and stuff like that. And it's like the face of this guru, but he's selling like, you know, potato chips. Dude, Vikram Yoga. Vikram yoga had ketchup, I think. Yeah, it's crazy.

Wow. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's very strange, uh, once you get into sort of the back end of how some of this stuff works. Do you know anyone, Ryan, who's outselling you in terms of coins? It's selling more coins. No, I mean, I do sometimes wonder like when, when, um, when we order like, we'll order like, you know, a bunch of the coins from the, from the Mint, which is in Minneapolis.

And they'll be like, oh, no, we're really backed up. Like, sorry, your order will be like in a couple weeks or whatever. And I'm always like, who is ahead of me? But there is, I mean, so I was thinking about it. Like, I was thinking like, okay, I wanted a reminder of Momentumori. And then I thought coin. And it didn't occur to me because I had a bunch of them already. So I was probably, but there is a genre of,

there's a thing called a challenge coin that, like, like the military gives out or police officers give out or firefighters give out. Sometimes it's like a commemoration like you visited this place. But like if you did like, you know, this tour of duty in operation enduring freedom or whatever, like they'll often give you challenge. So I think a lot of them are like government clients or like, you know, nonprofits or there's like that. But like I could get them done.

I were talking about margins. They would be much cheaper for me to make them in large books like from China, but we haven't done that. We've always used this original place. I wanted to do Made in USA. And then as it happened during the pandemic, it was great because it was like we never ran out of stock of any of our products because everything we sell is made in the U.S. That's awesome. Now, Brian, I wanted to ask you because you've done a bunch of different things. Okay, so you're a college dropout, correct?

you worked for Tucker Max you consulted with Tucker Max Robert Green who's the kind of 48 laws of power or whatever you've written a bunch of books you've you own a independent bookshop you got your coin business you sell courses all that you've done a bunch of different things okay so I wanted to play a little game just to get to know you game and and it's called first worst best best last weird and basically it's on job so what was the first job and doesn't have to be like a job

It could be like a side hustle you had. So what's the first kind of dollar you earned? I worked at a, I worked at a deli at a grocery store called Obexers in, in Homewood, California, right on Lake Tahoe. And what were you doing at the del? Like making sandwiches and I worked in the stuff. Like just like a, like a just a kid. I was 15. 15, 16.

Yeah, 15. You know, just like $6 an hour, whatever minimum wage was in California then. Just a, you know, a kid who worked at a little small town grocery. And what was it like? Because you make $6 an hour. I don't know how many hours you're working. But you end up with like, you know, a couple hundred bucks after, you know, a couple weeks. That's a lot of money to a kid.

Do you remember like what you did with the money or how you felt about that amount of money at that time? You know what? I don't remember what I. I was super into snowboarding. So I probably bought a snowboard or something. But, yeah, it occurred to me the idea I was just thinking about this. I basically worked nonstop since I was 15 years old. Like that I worked at Wendy's after that.

I remember correctly, that was a lifeguard. So I've had like a bazillion jobs, but that was, that was the first one. And like, I feel like at age like 18 or 19 or something stupid, you're like the boss of American Apparel or something like, just like something ridiculous. Or like at 18, you like worked for Robert Green writing 48 laws of power. Well, 48 laws of power came out when I was like 11 years old. But so not, not exactly. But I did. I started working for Robert when I was 20.

And then I was the director of marketing in America. American Apparel like in my early 20s. So you, when you dropped out, you dropped out because what? You just hated school or you had something you wanted to go to do? No, I liked school, but I wanted to be a writer. And so I had this, I was going to UC Riverside. So I was working for Tucker, who was at that point one of the first bloggers to have a book deal. So I was like, I was working for him doing like marketing and online stuff.

And then he got me a job at a talent agency where I did like, I could not see you fitting in there. I was like answering phones and stuff, but I worked on like new media. So this is right. Like YouTube had just sold. So everyone's sort of interested in internet talent. So that's what I was working on. And then the summer I was at the end of that summer that I was working there, I was supposed to go back at to college.

And within one week, I got an offer to stay on at the talent agency. I was working for this movie producer there to be his assistant. and then I'd met Robert Green and Robert Green needed a research assistant on a book he was writing called The 50th Law. And so... Why did all these people like you? Why did Tucker hire you when you're 18?

What did you do to get hired by him? Because at the time, he's writing basically like funny dating stories and sex stories, right? Like that was like his blog at the time, if I remember correctly. I think I was very young, very ambitious, very hardworking, and I was just obsessed with the internet. like what what this sort of internet culture would become.

And I loved books. Like I just, I've always loved books. And so I think they sensed that I wanted to be a writer. And they sort, I sort of went under their wing as like an apprentice in, you know, how to do how to do what they did. Did you just cold email them? So when I met Tucker because I was writing for the college newspaper and I wrote an article about him, which is what I was doing. I would write articles about people. And the way that now you'd be like, oh, I want to meet this person. Will you come on my podcast? Right? But this before podcast.

So I would just interview people and write articles about them. So that's how I met Tucker. I was a huge Robert Green fan. So I met Robert through Tucker. And then the talent agency, the guy who I worked for was producing a movie about Tucker's book, first book. So they were all sort of connected. And then it was through Robert Green that I met Dov Charnie, who was the director, or who was the founder of American Apparel. So it all kind of was all swirling about each other. And what was the first kind of like personal hustle you did, right? You're helping Tucker achieve his goals. You're helping Robert Green achieve his goals. You're helping the talent agency find talent. When did Ryan go into business for Ryan? That's a good question. I don't know what like the first

thing I would have. I mean, I started my marketing company in 2000. when I was writing my first book. But I think the first big bet I made on myself was, I mean, I'd done other, like, little stuff before. But the first big, in 2011, I basically quit at American Apparel to go write what was my first book. Trust me, I'm lying. So that was, like, the first big bet on myself. And that was a hit.

I mean, that was pretty, it seemed like it took off right away. It got a ton. I sold it for a good chunk of money. for at least to me then. It got a ton of attention. Ironically, it will, it sold well, but it will probably earn out its advance by this summer,

which will be the 10th anniversary of it. It's looking like the royalty statement I will get in July of 2022, which will be the 10-year anniversary of the book. It will finally go from negative to positive, on the advance statement. What was your advance? I was 250. I think it was 200 with some incentives.

Although when I announced it had been sold for $500,000 because I knew people, nobody actually fact checks press releases. So the whole point of the book was to prove that like the problems I was talking about in the media system in the book were real. So I promptly doubled the advance when I announced it and nobody checked. That's funny. Did you, so you got a big advance. You didn't have that big of a following at that time.

How did you finangle any advance, let alone like a quarter million dollar advance? So the bet on myself was that I left and I wrote the book first. Almost all nonfiction is sold with a proposal. and then you go write the book. But I didn't necessarily need to do that. So I wrote the book. So I had what was like I had a, it's like I had a good piece of property. Like I wrote something that was like unlike all the other books at that time that I don't think really there's been that many books like it or that I would.

Maybe Chaos Monkeys would be another like similar book that I'd sort of, which I thought was good. But so I sold it that way. So I wrote it so then I had it. But it was mostly just all the authors that I knew I sort of got in because I'd work for Tucker. I'd worked for Robert. I'd worked for Tim Ferriss at that point. So I had a pretty good sort of rolodex of people who got me in the door when I sold that book. Are you still doing the deals now, those type of deals now with all your latest books?

Or are you self-publishing? I'm still at the same publisher, actually. I've done all my books with the same publisher. I've self-published a children's book, and then I've self-published two high-end editions of traditionally published books that I have. Like I have a leather edition of The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle is the Way.

But other than that, everything's been traditionally published. I guess I own the audio rights to one of my books. Because, like, from the outside, you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this way, it's like, oh, publishing, you know, record labels and book publishers. It's all just middlemen and they take advantage

and the authors cease so little, you know, blah, blah, blah. And someone like you, you have a lot of business sense. B, yeah, now have a track record. C, you have an independent audience you can sell to.

So there must be some reason that you say, no, actually, people don't get it, that you do want a publisher for these reasons. I look at it on a case-by-case basis. You're really doing the math. Will the,

what they're paying for it plus the royalty, what are you thinking you will earn, you know, in a short amount of time or, you know, in a certain amount of time. So I just do the math on each project. So every time I think about a book, just because I have a publisher, obviously if no one was interested in publishing it,

there would be a different story. But I, you know, I conceive of what the book is and then I take it out. My publisher has a first look deal at my books. And I see, what they think, what they're willing to pay. And then, you know, I have an agent. And so we obviously try to get that number up as high as possible. And then once I have that number, then I think, okay, what would this look like if I did it myself? So what would it cost me to do it myself?

What am I likely to sell myself? How much work is that going to be? How much of a distraction is that going to be? And 90% of the time, you know, the math, the math tends to go towards traditional publishing in my experience. The kids' book that I did, the publisher just wasn't in their wheelhouse. They didn't totally get the project. So I did it myself. It's been great and really fun and artistically fulfilling.

but also just an incredible amount of work. I mean, like, the coins I sell directly from my store, right? The manufacturer makes them, they drop it off at the warehouse, they get shipped. Fulfilling books through Amazon is like in like, and then also the thousand independent retailers in the United States, plus every international edition, you know, is extraordinarily logistically difficult. And I remember you gave this talk one time that was awesome where you showed a chart of the sales of your book versus the normal book. So a normal book, you get a peak and then it pretty much just kind of goes away.

But then for some of the classics, you get a peak and then it goes down a little bit. But then it kind of quickly comes up to the point that word even like it's pretty steady throughout like a catcher in the rye or something like that. Or even sometimes it'll suck early on and just slowly get better. Your books, if I remember correctly, they popped just like everyone else. They went down a little bit just like everyone else. But then they like raise and were pretty steady with daily sales. And you're like, that's because I make shit that can last a long time. And this was actually for when you're running perennial seller.

I think you're like proving this point. Is that still the case? And considering all of your other businesses is book, is making books still where you make the majority of your income? Or are you just using that because you love it and it happens to make money? but you make the bulk of your money from other shit. Yeah, it's, most nonfiction authors make more money from speaking than from books. That's because speaking can be more lucrative, but it's also because most authors don't sell very many books, right? So I'm in an unusual space where my books do sell consistently and I have a lot of them.

So I make a good living from that, but probably make more money from stuff other than books than books. all in. Dude, that's crazy. That you're like the man and yet still it's like the other. That's another reason to traditionally publish, right? So like you're a publisher does not take any percentage of speaking, does not take any film or TV adaptations, does not take any ancillary products, any merchandising, anything like that. So really this, the book is, it's not a loss leader because people pay for books.

books and books have value to people. But like the ideas in the book, everything else is downstream from whether that takes hold or not. Does that make sense? So if the book doesn't land, all the other stuff, you know, doesn't really matter. But if the book works, all the other stuff happens. And then the success of the book is slightly less significant. I think what my, so in publishing, there's the front list and the back list. Frontlist is anything within one year, like the year of release, that's considered a front list title. And then it becomes a backlist title after a year. So most titles stop selling when they leave the backlist, when they leave the front list and become on the backlist.

But almost all of the income in publishing is from the backlist. So for me, it's about like I've tried to create that in my own. my own catalog of like titles that sell every year, um, as opposed to like a big book that comes out, gets a lot of attention. Then then three, four years later,

I have to write another new book because the other one is like not relevant anymore. It's like, it's like Michael Boubley or Mariah Carey writing a Christmas song. You know, you, you want that Christmas hit. You want that annuity. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so, so like, uh, my book, The Daily Stoic, when, when my agent was like, we should do a page you should do a page a day about Stosism. And I was like, I don't know. And he was like, it will be your bestselling book.

And I was like, there's no way. That doesn't make any sense. He's like, yes, it will. Every New Year's like, it will. And he's right. The book sold more copies this already this January than last January. Amazing. What do you do with your money?

Yeah, I know you got a ranch. I think you live here. He's had that forever. I mean, that was like my house. So it's not like, it wasn't like a hot, like a luxury. property or whatever. It's not like Kanye having a ranch in Wyoming. You actually live there because you wanted to live there. Sam, Sam, I think, has some similar aspirations. But what do you do? Are you like, I'm an investor, you just do something boring with your money? What do you do with

your money? Well, I spent a lot of it on this bookstore. I bought two buildings in this, in this small town of Bastrop. Originally, it was going to be a bookstore and a coffee shop. Now it's a bookstore and I rent out half of it to a record store. But I wanted, I needed like a space to do all my stuff. So up top is like my office. My wife also wanted me to take all my books out of our house. So that was part of it. It was like getting all the shit out. But no, I don't really do anything. I don't really do anything with it. I invest it. I'm I like investing in things that are very different than internet things. So most of it's like in income producing real estate. In which state? Texas is in Florida. And you're just buying like what, like multifamily?

some multifamily. I have some mostly single, single family, and then some like vacation rentals. And you have a manager who, do you, are your hands on with that? Is it a headache for you? Yeah, I try, I mean, I try to have it be as little a headache as possible. Most of them are managed by, yeah, property managers. But, but I like, it's not that I think the stuff that I do will go away, but I like the idea of like, like my decision to write trust ma'am lying and not having to think about needing to. to sell it up front. There was a similar one when after I wrote, Trust Me, I'm lying. I was like, hey, for my next book,

I want to do this book about ancient philosophy. And they were like, are you sure? You know, so they gave me less than half. I got $75,000 for The Obstacle is the Way, which is sold many, many times more copies than Trust Me, I'm Lying. And obviously set up all these other things. But when they came back with that offer, I was like, okay, sure, whatever.

You know, it wasn't, I didn't have to think about whether I could live on $75,000 for however long it took me to write the book because my life wasn't set up around needing. That's, that's really, like when people hear a book advance, it can sound like a lot of money. Like even, you know, $200,000 to write, trust me in mind. So. But it's just like a salary, right, for two years. But even worse than that, right? So I let's say I left my job and then 18 months later the book came out from like when I left. So $200,000 over 18 months, that's pretty good.

But like I said, it hasn't earned another dollar for 10 years. So over 11 and a half years, $200,000 is not great. But I really wanted that's the book I wanted to write. And obviously it opened up other business opportunities. But I like to be able to do my creative work and not. have to think about, does it make sense in the dollar and sense? And this is how the entertainment business works as well. Like, almost all the money is in the catalog in owning the intellectual property over the long term. But you can't do that if you are dependent. Like, you get paid as an

author every six months. So, and you're getting paid for the previous six months of earnings. Not like, okay, ended yesterday. Here's your thing. You're getting. essentially a paid from a year ago. And so that's like, you know, that's a, you can be living hand to mouth that way, even if you're a very well-known person who's in, you know, the media all the time. And so I want to be in a position where that's not the case. Sean, do you remember like seven, maybe 2014, I think? Basically, when you and I were just getting to know each other, there was this article that went viral

and it said you can buy a ghost town in California for like, like $1.2 million. Do you remember that? It was like you can buy like an old mining ghost town. Yeah, and people did a group did it right? And I think yeah, I saw your note today. Ryan was involved in that. I think Ryan in his right. So Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong, I've never met Brent's in the other room.

My best buddy. Oh, really? Okay, so listen to this shot. Okay, so Neville is good friends with Brent, so I've heard all about them. So if you go on YouTube, Sean, and you type in like ghost town Brent, you'll see this channel where this guy named Brent. He's this really cool dude who's got like 1.5 million subscribers. on YouTube, he started living in this ghost town that he bought a while ago. But just when the

COVID, when pandemic hit, he just moved there. And it went to the moon. And it's the best YouTube channel I've watched. Well, anyway, Ryan, weren't you like the, you and Brent were like the mind, the brains behind it. You were just kind of the quiet. I was one of the investors. There's a, there's a bunch of investors. I think we know, uh, you probably know like half of them at this point, or more, more than half. Uh, but I, to be perfectly honest, I thought it was a terrible idea. I was like, you're going to lose all your money. This is not going to work. But I mean, I've known Brent for so long.

I just sort of was like one of the small token investors. And I didn't see it becoming what it was becoming. I should have. Like I was thinking about it in terms of real estate because Brett and I have invested in real estate in Austin before. And so I was thinking about it in real estate. And, you know, being from California, I was like, that area is like a like a, like a, hit, you know. Anyways, I didn't think about it as a content play, and that's obviously what it ultimately

probably will become. I mean, you could make more money off the YouTube channel than the actual, any money you can make off just turning it into a hotel. That's one of the things I found with the bookstore, and that's kind of where it clicked for me was realizing that, so opening the bookstore that like, that making money from selling books might be the third or fourth, like least important revenue stream or use of the property, like the office being number one, the space to film and make stuff, like content being number two, and then like real estate being number three, and then, you know, like the actual

brick and mortar retail business being like four or five. That's amazing. So you basically are like, you bought a set. The set actually just kind of functions. It's like if, you know, it's like, dude, it's like three. It's like 300 acres in the middle of the mountains. Yeah. Have you seen it, Sean?

No, no, I'm not, no. I'm talking about the book shot. But it's the same thing. I mean, the, the ghost town is an enormous set. It's a set piece to film and create content and have a life and a brand that people care about, you know? And, uh, so, so hold on. So it's been many years now. So what's actually, what is that today?

Is there? watch the YouTube channel. Is there like a functioning town? Do people come visit? The pandemic obviously made a hospitality business, you know, not very viable. So right now it's mostly just in the sort of rebuilding phase. They're like rehabbing all these different cabins. And then he films, you know, he films videos there.

And they do like merchandise and stuff like that. It's really, but like my son, like my son is five. He watches one of those videos every night before bed. He's like obsessed with it. It's beautiful. It's like a beautiful YouTube channel. And Brent is very. Deering. He's awesome. And it's crazy that the quality of stuff you can make, one person can make

with like a drone, a GoPro, and like, you know, one decent like Sony camera. Like you can, I mean, he was at one point putting out like a 45 minute video a week. Like he was putting like a television quality show out for millions of people, you know, for like a couple thousand dollars a month. It's crazy what you can do. And it went, it went from like zero to like 1.5 or one point, I forget exactly, over a million subscribers in like 18 months. Yeah, I mean, you got tons of media attention. It's done like hundreds of millions of views.

I'm very bullish on YouTube as a social network. I'm like late to YouTube, ironically, considering that's like what I left school to focus on. Like I saw at this talent agency, I signed their first YouTube client. And I remember this agent coming up to me and he's like, what are you going to do? You're going to commission their advertising revenue? And I was like, I guess. Yeah. And like, that's like, that's like.

Of course, that's way better than commissioning checks from, you know, a television series because you, this way you actually own the stuff. But I've seen it even with Daily Stoic. Like, like, as an author, you get recognized like every once in a while. It's actually been weird for me in the pandemic because, like, I haven't done that much stuff. And so every time I, if I go out or I do something, like, I saw someone in Austin a couple weeks ago. And then I was just in New Orleans. And like, because of YouTube and. and like Instagram reels, like the amount of like fans I see in person,

it's like exponentially different than what I was getting from like who I was before. I see you on TikTok like every day. You're in my TikTok feed every day. Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Telling me to like, you know. Thanks Marcus Aurelia said. Yeah, yeah, tell me something some ancient dude, you know, said about, you know, remembering I'm going to die or like, you know,

not being anxious about the future. And I'm like, yeah, actually, this guy's talking some sense. I like it. And the video quality is actually really good. Like, I don't know if you're, I don't know what you're doing for that. But like, it's like a GoPro.

That's a GoPro nine hero. It costs $600. And you can shoot in 4K video with a, it doesn't even have an external mic. It's like, it's crazy what you can do. But you could do a 4K video on your iPhone. But when I upload on 4K, my shit never looks like that.

I think the GoPro corrects, I don't know. The GoPro does incredible. The lighting in the building, I have to say, not something I control is quite good. Well, it looks like you're on like a farm and you're leaning on the post. Like you're in the middle of that. You're like in the middle of the walk. I mean, the gopros are better for outside stuff. But yeah, you just, I mean, just put it there and it shoots like, you know, super high quality stuff. And then somebody cuts it up.

Do you edit or you just hand that off to somebody you say, please turn this into a week. And then I try to shoot, I try to think about what I want them to make when I'm shooting it. And sometimes I'll give notes. I'll be like, okay, you know, cut this here or whatever. But I'm mostly, yeah, I mostly just shoot in like small blocks. And then the idea is like, okay, so if I'm shooting in, you know, between 30 and one minute, 30 second and one minute chunks, okay, so that goes, a content of that size can go on Twitter, Instagram as a real, can be a Facebook video, and it can be on TikTok.

So you've got like four. got four bites at the apple there. Then that content can be packaged together to make videos on YouTube. So I'll take like eight of those and that can become an eight minute YouTube video. And so by shooting like these little things, I get like lots of different like platforms that they can go out on. So basically, well, so Ryan, I had I made a living with a daily email. Sean just released this new business. that he's working on, which is amazing.

Sean, I got to reply to your email. It's called The Milk Road. It's pretty hilarious. And it's like a crypto daily email that he's working on with his partner, Ben. But you have the Daily Stoic, which is awesome. But you have this new-ish thing that seems to be like working out really well. And honestly, I think could be like one of your bigger businesses. I also think it could be bigger because you could sell it because it's not exactly like the Ryan show.

But it's called the Daily Dad. Is that right? Yeah, so I do two daily emails slash podcasts, Daily Dad and Daily. Stoke. Who's writing all the Daily Dads? I write them all. I write Daily Dad and Daily Stoak. What?

How big is that business? Or how big is the email? Daily Dad is like 60,000 people, I think. It's weirdly not as big as I want it not just want it to be, but I actually thought it would grow faster than Daily Stoak did. And it's actually been a little bit slower. But how big is still Daily Stoic?

400. Oh my gosh. Really? Holy shit. Do you advertise to grow these? Are you just through content and you capture, you make videos and stuff like that? I make content. Social drives a lot of the signups.

And then the book, I mean, the book sold, you know, well over a million copies. But yeah, so I write both of them. And then it's mostly organic. But I'm trying to, I'm having to get more serious about sort of, I think some of the low-hanging fruits probably been picked. So I'm having to start to think more seriously about. about it as a business, not just a content that I make. Man, you, you, you, you, oh my God, you're killing me.

Why weren't you advertising like three or four years ago? It was so much cheaper. You could go to acquire email for $1.50. Now it's like $5, $6, $7. I should have asked you. So you, you're hanging out with people all the time that are, you know, super successful. I know a bunch of people who know you. And I think you're respected in the kind of like the business world,

an entrepreneurial world. but I feel like the Matthew McConaughey world I feel like you are pretty grounded and you're I don't get the vibe from you that I get from a lot of people I hang out with which is just like more more not enough I'm not there yet I gotta go bigger bigger and and really it's just kind of like

I haven't succeeded enough yet I haven't earned enough yet I want more money more success and I don't get that vibe from you are you just hiding it or is that the case? I mean, I definitely have, there's definitely a part of me that's in that. I mean, I've written 12 books in 10 years. If I was just like, oh, I'm good. You know, like, clearly there's a drive there or even some might say a compulsion.

I think, so there's a part of it, but I have, so I've been with my wife since I was 20. So we met, like, right as all this stuff was happening. And so, and then I had kids five years ago. So I've always been a little bit more of like a normal person. I don't mean that in like a fucked up way, but I haven't been like, oh, I'm a digital nomad or like, you know, I'm, I'm going to go live in Puerto Rico for two years. Like, you know, like I've been more of just like a regular like, I don't want to say a nine to five person, but like I've just been like more rooted in like regular people life than I think a lot of like creative entrepreneurial people I know who I tend to find are a bit. more like chaotic it sounds judgmental but just it's a different lifestyle and so i think that's i think that's a part of it no i know what you mean like for example right now a whole bunch of my friends are

either you know like you say they're crypto rich moving to puerto rico so i don't pay taxes they're going to miami because i heard the actions there right now doing this doing that and i'm just like but you know like i just got i have two little babies and i'm like the idea of moving like i mean The idea of like getting the kids into the car to go to the park is like overwhelming, let alone like uprooting my life in some way in any way. Taking like massive risks now just is not like appealing to me in the same way. Like when I was 24, I remember I moved I moved to Silicon Valley. I didn't know what I was going to do. But I was like, this is where the action is.

So I'm just going to move to Silicon Valley. And then I ended up getting this job working with this like billionaire dude. And the office, he had this dope office. and I remember I slept in the office like 232 days out of the 365 days. And I was just loving it. I wasn't like I was being forced. Nobody was forced you to work. The office had an apartment, right?

Don't feel bad for it. It was like it had like $2 million with the furniture. It was a lovely. It was a billionaire. Imagine Peter Thiel's office. Yeah, I wasn't sleeping in a garage. Like the bathroom floor was heated in the morning. So your feet weren't your toesies weren't cold.

So, you know, it wasn't super rough. But nonetheless, I basically was choosing to obsess. and like go all in in a way. I was like excited about that and able to do it in a way that I couldn't as real life stuff layered on like relationship and kids and things like. I remember when Clubhouse blew up like a couple months ago or six, I was like, what?

Like I was like, I don't even want to go to a real conference, let alone be in like an internet room conference. Like it was just totally inconceivable to me that anyone would want to do it, have the time to do it. So that's sort of not been, like, I actually like writing. You know what I mean? So the other part of it is not just like the sort of wanting to have more of a normal sort of rooted life.

Although I feel like I do weird, unusual. I take risks in other ways, living on this farm and stuff. But it was also like for me, like I writing to me is a calling that's a little bit different than, I don't know, making money in crypto or something. Like it's a blessing in a curse, right? It's a blessing in that it's fulfilling. It gives you purpose. It's artistic.

It's like a thing you master. There's also, I think, a ceiling on it, you know? And like you can be good at it. There's obviously the J.K. Rowlings of the world. But like, you know. But there's not a ceiling to being famous. I mean, you know, we're both friends with Tim Ferriss and like his fame allowed him. I don't know what he's worth, but he's probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars because of his investment.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's not a ceiling on being well known and getting asked. No, but I mean, you sort of, you end up in different niches, right? If you're called to be a poet, obviously it'd be more lucrative to write business books, but like you are where you are. You know, there's a certain amount of, like, you don't choose what muses visit you. I know that sounds a little mystical, but like, sometimes people have been like, oh, he's writing about stoicism to get rich, which I always laugh at because like, again, I, if I, if being rich was what was motivating to me, I would do literally anything but this, right? Like, this is the world.

possible of the things to have picked. But I guess my thing is, like, I really like the routine and the ritual of sitting down to write, which is also, I think, inherently a bit grounding in a way that, like, some of these other pursuits maybe aren't. What does your normal workday look like? I mean, are you doing, like, a nine to five? Not nine to five. Like, I wake up early.

I go for a run or a walk with the kids, whether we're at my farm or my place in town. I don't check my phone in the morning I don't eat in the morning I usually journal in the morning and then I write usually for two or three hours and then the rest of the day after that is business other work stuff and I'm done by four almost every day

so I'm probably work 830 to 4 seems like a good asses I like it I try to but I like it's important there are also I don't know to me Being really great at what you do and somehow managing to be like a somewhat normal person, to me is actually like a rarer thing to do than to just be great at what you do. Like I think if anyone decided to be like Tom Brady's Tom Brady, but there's a cost to being Tom Brady.

But like if you choose to be that singularly dedicated to what you do, it's easier to be better. at what you do than to say, like, I'm going to work nine to five and be, like, great at what I do, if that makes sense. So you used to work for Tucker Max. You then became buddies with them and you had a business together. But I've never asked either of you about this. You've probably, based off of some of the stances, I know that you've seen, you've written some great stuff about, like, a letter to your dad about voting for Trump.

I know that you're against, like, some of a lot of these statues. and you've donated money to that. And Tucker, I think, has gone the other way where, I don't want to call it the opposite, because, of course, he's probably against a lot of the things or for a lot of things you are, but maybe different. And he actually recently came out this article that Sean and I talked about. It's called Doomsday Optimism.

And it's about how very bluntly, but he's such a good writer that everything he writes, it seems like convincing. But basically he talks about how he thinks, like the American government is basically going to collapse in two to four years and how he's preparing for Doomsday. And it was like crazy fascinating. But what is your opinion on that?

I've been eager to ask you what you think about that and what if you have an opinion on it. Tucker was very good to me early in my career and set me up for the success that I've had. So I feel very grateful for that in a lot of ways. He and I live in very different realities now. I think, I don't know exactly. what caused that or what the driving force of that is. I mean, I have some theories, but a lot of that stuff that I see and read, I think it probably has nothing to do with whatever he's talking about. It strikes me as driven by something else, which I've seen a lot of, like, I think the

pandemic brought it out in a lot of people that probably we both know, but I've noticed a kind of a radicalization or an untethering from people that otherwise I would have assumed we're in alignment on. I've just noticed an untethering that I don't know where it's going, but it certainly worries me. is that a diplomatic answer? Yeah, and I don't really like that answer because I understand what you're trying to do. I think you could, you could not agree with his opinion and still be respectful towards them,

but I understand that you're trying to like keep it, you know, be cool. But like, in one regards, I could be like, well, I, I understand. I actually could see Ryan thinking almost something similar because he lives in the country and he likes privacy and, like, you know, you're like so high IQ that high IQ people typically are like, quirky and have like weird opinions. But then on the other side, I know like some of the things that you stand for. And I could see you just laughing at that being like, what are you ridiculous?

But it's, it's weird. I've noticed this sort of trend in like sort of tech entrepreneurial people where, I don't want to say fads, but it's almost like these idea viruses sort of enter the community. And some people end up taking them to like very strange extremes. So like polyamory was one a few years ago. And then crypto is one. I have like I'm not anti-crypto. I think there's a lot in crypto.

I'm invested in it too. But then then in the pandemic there was like then there was this sort of anti-vax, anti-lockdown, anti-COVID denialism. That was one. And then I'm very alarmed by some of the people that I know in that space that are now going in sort of like a, it's worse than a Trumpian direction. It's more of like a January 6th, like, end of the government, like a, like a toxic, like, we got to buy guns. And I have guns, but there's this like almost like, like, like, doomsday, like disaster cultish direction that it's going in.

And I don't, it strikes me as coming from somewhere other than like what they're actually saying. coming about. Does that make sense? And by that do you mean the belief is coming from some other like kind of reasons or the motives meaning like they're trying to make money? Yeah, like if we perpetuate this we'll get more notoriety, we'll get more money, we'll get more attention

like you know there's some people like clickbait is in general is that right? Like I may not believe this like if you watch a sports talk show on ESPN they don't necessarily think that LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan, but they know if they say it, it gets clipped and it gets shared. And so there's like this, yeah, I do. I perform versus, like, do you think that the belief has come from somewhere or the motive might be driving them to extreme, you know, radicalize the point of those things. So I think number one, all these people are very smart, right? And so if you've built your whole career being smart

and being a contrarian, it can put you in an uncomfortable position where you're like rejecting things that make sense because that's instinctively where you go. Like, this is what happened with Dove at American Apparel. His whole, everything he did was fucking insane. I'm going to start a USA apparel company. I'm not going to use professional models. I'm going to pay a living wage. None of that makes any sense.

All of those individually are very bad ideas. But he somehow built a billion dollar company out of it. So then when people were like, you need to hire a professional operator inside, you know, you need to hire a real CFO and a real CMO and all this stuff. He was like, no, right? So he just got used to rejecting everyone's advice. And it led to this downward spiral. So I think there's a little bit of that.

I think there is this sort of as people become like, I think there's, you know what audience capture is where you sort of get used to telling the audience what they want to hear? And so the algorithm is very seductive. It tends to reward like obviously controversial things. It rewards, you know, polar. things. And so I think what happens as certain people's relevance slips, they are more prone to,

it's like, you know, you're always putting stuff out. And if what you've put out in the world hasn't been working, and then suddenly you like, you chance upon something as as compelling as like anti-vax or this or that, then it's like you're getting, it's like a blast from the past. You're like, fuck, this is it, right? So I think there's some of that that's spiraling people. I also think just the pandemic fucks with people's head. It's been a lot like we're not meant to live like this. I think it's that. The other thing like in like a Joe Rogan or some of the intellectual dark web people, I'm also noticing that just like when you've been very mistreated by like, say, the media

or just like elite culture, it's very hard for you to agree with those people, even when they're right. So you end up going back to the contrarianism, you end up like going against things that ordinarily you wouldn't agree, you would totally agree with. But from a tribal perspective, you know, you, it's imagine if Trump had gotten reelected, like how many liberals would have trouble with the vaccine, because you would have to then agree with a Trump thing. I think, I think we're seeing that I think this is why in a lot of, of men who have been sort of not media darlings are going towards some of the direction of things we're talking about. It's just to sort of like, I'll die before I agree with those

people on anything. Right. There's a, there's this chart I saw that was amazing. It was in a crypto annual report and it said, you know, what is, what are some of the underlying things that drive this like, crypto's like a religion? It's like a cult. It's like, you know, this very, very strong. It's not just the same as like, I like, I like this. business I'm going to invest in this asset you know people don't feel the same way about bitcoin as they do you know a piece of property in Dallas and so it's it was this chart and the chart basically was on the on the on the on the on the on the axis it was like do you believe it was about institutions are like credible or not credible meaning like are they honest

or dishonest is i think the way they put it and then on the other side was they are they competent or incompetent and it's like rank these institutions it was like the u.s government it's like dishonest, not competent, incompetent. And then it was the CDC. And it showed how they've been moving over time. And basically every institution that you could think of, whether it's universities, whether it's health organizations, the NIH and WHO and CDC, whether it's the U.S. government, they are all sort of traveling towards dishonest and incompetent as the general public

viewpoint of them. And this has a bunch of implications. It's like, well, so people, so the things that reject. institutional beliefs. So you see Joe Rogan just explode and popular. You know, his show is bigger than quote unquote mainstream media. He is more mainstream than mainstream media, but his brand is not an institution and he doesn't look like them.

He doesn't read off a teleprompter. And so he's got this like appearance of higher honesty, higher competency. And so the same thing is true with crypto, which is non-government money and blah, blah, blah. And so all these things are like on trend right now. And that doesn't necessarily make them more honest and competent, but it's, but it is the perception that's going on. Yeah, and when I was listing the different things, the other one I'd put in there is I think,

like psychedelics is another one where it just becomes like this idea virus. And I'm not saying I have a disagreement about it. I'm just, it's very interesting how these things just sort of infect these different subgroups and become almost a new, it's their identity is primarily in that the, the, the, it's like,

it's very tempting to fall into a thing where you're smarter or better than other people, that sort of outsider mentality. And so I think I'm very wary of how that's affected people that I know. And I'm worried it's taking some of the more fragile people into a dark, potentially dangerous direction where they're just, they're fucking with things that once you fuck with, they're very difficult to unfuck. And speaking of psychedelics, and we'll wrap up in a second here. I saw, I follow, so we've talked about Aubrey Marcus on the podcast because Aubrey has a crazy story because his dad, like, like invented like the fleshlight and then he like kind of parlayed that into building this awesome

supplement empire but i got this instagram ad or maybe i just saw on his page so sean i don't know if you saw this albri marcus the guy we talked about yeah he has this documentary where somewhat recently he spent i think seven days in complete darkness like and and i heard maybe it was in sarah gordo am i getting the details no it's definitely not at sarah gordo oh i know she has a ranch I thought it won't. Maybe it was there. Okay. Well, for some reason I thought it was that yours. Okay, I'm wrong then. But did, did, did, did, did, did, did. Am I right though? And that it was like five or three or seven like a multiple days. I had complete pitch dark. I have, I have, I have not heard about that. But I am, uh, oh man. I like Aubrey alive.

I, I, I, I'm a little worried about him. He, he, he, he's a wild man. Sean, you didn't see this. So what was the idea? Why did he do? Okay. So I, I, I, so. I, I, so, so basically. So basically. he had a night vision camera looking at him, and he was in a small room with a bed and basically pitch dark. And after 24 hours or something like that, he kind of starts hallucinating and kind of goes crazy. And he's talking to himself. And the whole documentary is basically showing the night vision camera of him talking to himself.

And then like a voiceover and some flashbacks of him talking like what he was experiencing to that point. And he was trying to go through like, oh, almost a psychedelic experience because I guess there's something where I don't know the science where you're in the dark for a long time. You start going nutty and have some realizations. I don't know if it's true or not. But it was fucking insane. It was crazy. I mean, the way that I see it is like, to me, it's like, I don't care if I'm an outdoorsman. If I see a huge epic mountain, I'm going to be in awe. And that's how I was with Aubrey Marcus in this documentary. I'm like, I don't care about drugs. I don't care about this guy that much.

You watched the documentary or you just saw the ad. I just saw, I watched parts of it. I started watching parts of it because he released like five minutes at a time on his Instagram and I started watching parts of it. He is, it's the fucking craziest thing I've ever seen. The guy's insane. Uh, you have to watch this shit. It is wild. Does he come out okay at the other side or you haven't gotten to the end? Well, this was filmed like a year ago.

So we assume it all worked out. Okay. Well, I, the reason I didn't buy it is it, I'm afraid. I'm kind of afraid to watch it. But like, he's wild, man, because I watch his Instagram and I see some of the shit he does. And I'm like, this is. I'm just, So I'm very concerned that these people are messing with their brain chemistry in a way that it's hard to come back from.

And, you know, I am not a fan of this sort of like prescribed medicine for yourself to heal unnamed traumas. Like, I think it's going to end very badly. Maybe I'm a little conservative and I'm missing out on something, but I don't think you should fuck with your brain the way some of these people are. are fucking with their brains. And I think it's going to, I think we're starting to see some of the ramifications of it with some of the stuff we're talking about here. But I think this is hard to put back in the bottle. Yeah, this is wild.

Are you looking it up? Yeah, I'm reading about it right now. What does it say? Is it seven days? It was like days. So like, okay, there's a part of this I can get behind, which is like, you know, people, whether they go try to climb Mount Everest or Wimhoff getting in a cold, black cold bath every day to like you know challenge themselves to like uh like it's a you know

there's a form of meditation for example so he said my thinking was this if the prospect of sitting in the dark with just your own thoughts frightens you maybe that's exactly where you need to be oh my god no rattlesnakes scare me too i don't need to get bit by rattlesnake and so on it for me there's a part of this that i actually like i get part of that which is like um i think the more comfortable you could be with yourself and by yourself and not need stimulation, not need others, not need constant entertainment. I do think that that is like a direction, personally, that I would like to go in where I can be at peace and happiness without something going on.

Now, in this, and this one I think is less, to me, it's less scary than like being like, yeah, I'm going to start microdosing LSD or like, I'm going to go on this ayahuasca trip in the fucking forest because I heard Joe Rogan say that it was transformational. to me that's like way higher risk and maybe not necessary compared to you know i guess this darkness thing is a little bit less permanent feeling for me but that's what they do to people in interrogation to like break them i don't think it's something you want to be messing but again yeah maybe it is like deeply traumatic i'm not sure hey you know what the phrase is whatever doesn't kill you makes you weaker seriously man i don't i don't know i whatever doesn't kill you fucks you up really bad i always read these

is to me these are like, these are content stunts, right? This is no different than jackass and a bunch of other things. Like, maybe some people come from a good place and I'm just kind of skeptical about all the stuff. Like, for example, I'll give you, Ryan, I'll make it personal for you,

which is like, when I saw the Daily Stoke, I was like, oh, that's smart. Stoicism is this growing trend. He probably likes stoicism, but like you can like it without having to do all the work of creating a daily email and content around it.

Like, that is the opportunistic side of this kind of cool niche thing that's clearly growing. And I don't know you, right? So I'm just thinking from afar, I'm thinking, oh, that's smart. And, you know, he probably recognized this growth and said, okay, I could build a cool brand around this thing that I like and I see is growing. And so when I see, and, you know, so, for example, if I see you making a TikTok every day about stoicism,

I think to myself, well, you know, I don't know how much of that is like, well, this content is going to work. so I'm going to do it versus I really just needed to get this off my heart and share this with the world. So similarly, when I see, you know, these stunts, I think to myself, well, they know this is content that's going to hit and they can get a bunch of attention from it. And like, did he really need to do this and want to do this? I'm not sure, right? Those motivations get mixed. I know for myself, they get mixed because, you know, if I've had a bunch of tweets go viral.

You know, I added 200,000 Twitter followers last year is very addictive. And in, I don't know if you saw his, the stand-up special that Hussein is doing right now. Did you see him when he was in Austin? He has this part in it. Did you see when he was in Austin? I saw him in San Francisco. I live in San Francisco. So I saw him when he was here.

And he's got this whole part where he's basically like, you know, he's like, I challenged, you know, this dictator who was doing this thing. And then boom, that clip goes viral. I made fun of Trump at this thing. Boom, that clip goes viral. The likes, the views, the followers, the comments. And he's just like, fucking inject this into my veins. I need that next hit. So I went after the next big dictator and then the next big fish.

And then all of a sudden, like, you know, there was a price to be paid for it. He talks about how he received something in the mail that was like, you know, some like anthrax looking thing. And it got on his kid. And it turned out to be all okay. But like, his wife was like, dude, you have to figure out how to keep that on a leash. It's really important. And that's kind of what you're talking about, right? You got to figure out how to keep that on a leash.

And I think about that a lot. And I think about it, you know, even with what I do. I remember I was on some big morning show. And I remember thinking, like, there's a, I know what I could do to make this, like, national news. Like, I know I could, I've got, you know, an audience of several million people right now. And then just going, like, life is too fucking short. And also, I want to continue to live in reality. And so I think what happens is certain people get desperate or maybe their judgment is not good or they don't have someone in their

life that's like, eh, you know, that could work, but what about this, this, this, this and this, as a consequence. And you can, you can become unhinged very quickly, especially if there is any also, you know, comorbidities with like a mental illness or, you know, like, and so most of the people who want to be in the public eye, you're already a little, you know, like that. And so you've got to be really, really careful. And I'm worried about. where some people I know are going. Yeah, Sam, as a fitness influencer, I've been wanting to talk to you also about your excessive exercise

and what this might be leading to. You might spend three days in darkness only doing squats just to, you know, hit those views. I'm in a good place, my friend. I'm doing everything right at the moment. We'll see how long like it lasts. Ryan, this has been awesome, man. I appreciate you coming on.

This is fun. Thanks for coming. And we didn't even say the name of the book. Courage is calling, right? It's awesome. I've not read that one yet, but I'm going to buy it. I've read everything else. Perennial seller, Obstacles Away,

I guess I've read four. Conspiracy and trust me, I'm lying. And then the middle two, our... There's the stillness one. I haven't read that one. Stillness is the key, and then ego is the enemy. It's the one I think they're missing. The ego is very good.

And Obstacles Away is very good. Those are both great. And you're awesome. I appreciate you. Thanks, coming.