The Tim Ferriss Show - #189: Shay Carl on Wealth, Parenting, and the Future of Video

Episode Date: September 27, 2016

This is another special in-betweenisode. It's a little shorter than the normal long-form episodes, and it features a Q&A with Shay Carl (@shaycarl). If you missed our first interview, Shay's story is incredible. He was a manual laborer for ages and uploaded his first YouTube video while on break from his job. Flash forward to today: His SHAYTARDS channel now has roughly 2.3 BILLION views. Celebs like Steven Spielberg have appeared alongside Shay and his family. He co-founded Maker Studios, which sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion. He has been married 13 years and has five kids. He has lost more than 100 pounds since his overweight peak. This time around, he answers listener questions in the way only he can, such as: How to grow a YouTube following from scratch. The future of ad revenue and sponsorship. How he balances capturing the moment vs. experiencing the moment. His greatest obstacles in life. Lessons learned as a father. And much, much more. I also wanted to announce my new book, Tools of Titans (Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Amazon). It's the culmination of the last two years of this podcast. It's made up of my favorite takeaways, the lessons I've learned, and the tools I've applied to my own life from all of the guests on this show, including some new guests you've not yet met. Consider it the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure guide to optimizing your life -- it's got everything from finance to physical performance! Please enjoy this round two with Shay Carl. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service led by technologists from places like Apple. It has exploded in popularity in the last two years and now has more than $2.5B under management. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and itís all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams. Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they'll show you for free the exactly the portfolio they'd put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Well worth a few minutes to explore: wealthfront.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Vimeo Business. Vimeo Business has all of the prior benefits of Vimeo Pro, including VIP support. Whether you make videos for a living, run your own company, or simply want to amp up your video marketing, Vimeo Business is here to help. It has more than 280 million creators and viewers worldwide and makes it easier to share your videos with a global audience and connect with professional video makers to bring your stories to life. Vimeo Business allows you to upload up to five terabytes and store your videos in one secure place, add up to 10 team members to your account for easy collaboration, and gather feedback with seamless review tools. You can even add clickable calls to action and capture email addresses directly in the player, which can help you generate leads and drive conversion for whatever youíre trying to optimize, such as a newsletter or a sales page. Check out vimeo.com/tim10 to save 10 percent on Vimeo Business. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and squirrels, everybody out there. This is Tim Ferriss.

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all types, whether they are chess prodigies, military strategists, entertainers, sports icons, or otherwise. This is an in-betweenisode, and that means that it is perhaps a little shorter than you would usually find my long-form interviews. And we have a Q&A with Shay Carl. But before we get to that, I wanted to... What did I want to do? Had a little Alzheimer's moment there. I wanted to share an announcement. If you missed the big news, I have a new book that is coming out. It is available on, you name it, barnesandnoble.com. You can go to booksamillion.com and of course, amazon.com.

Tools of Titans. The subtitle is The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. It is the culmination of the last two years of this podcast. It is my favorite takeaways, the lessons I've learned, the tools I've applied to my own life from all of the guests, including some new guests you have not met, new tips and tricks from past guests. It is the ultimate choose your adventure guide to optimizing your life, everything. I mean, finance, physical performance, wisdom. I know that's a little broad, but it's got everything in it. So check it out, please. Tools of Titans would love you guys to grab one for yourselves and for the holidays, maybe as a gift or two or three or 25. So check that out, Tools of Titans. Now back to this episode, Shay Carl. Shay Carl started off, I suppose you could say, as a manual laborer and he was working

on, I want to say, marble countertops or countertops when he started his YouTube channel. And his Shay Tarts channel now has more than 2.3 billion views. Celebs like Steven Spielberg have appeared alongside Shay and his family. He lives in Utah. He co-founded then Maker Studios, which sold to Disney for nearly $1 billion. He's been married 13 years, has five kids, has lost more than 100 pounds since his overweight peak. This guy knows a thing or two about how to radically change the direction and velocity of your life in the right direction. So we did a round two. The first podcast took place after spending two days with Shay here in San Francisco. It was a massive success and coming up on, I guess, a million downloads just for that episode alone,

left many listeners wanting more. So we solicited questions and your most popular questions were answered by Shay. He tackled them in the way only Shay can, and he covers many things, how to grow a YouTube following from scratch in 2016 or 2017, the future of ad revenue and sponsorships, how he balances capturing the moment versus experiencing the moment, something I've asked him about myself, his greatest obstacles in life, lessons learned as a father, the one person he'd love to record a video with, and much, much more. So two things, check out Tools of Titans on your retailer of choice. It is available right now.

And without further ado, as I always say, after a long-winded intro, please enjoy this round two with Shea Carl. All right, this is for Tim Ferriss, podcast round two. Our very first question is from Tony Lucas. Tony asks, if you were able to start fresh, no followers, no name for yourself, no previous knowledge, and you had to just start from scratch, do you think that you would still be able to make a business out of YouTube? I have thought about this question and have many times during panels said, no, I would not be able to recreate the amount of success I've had simply because I was lucky enough to be ahead of the curve. You know, in any industry or business or product, there's kind of

like a luck to just being there when it all happened. And if you feel like you weren't there when it all happened, I felt that way as well. I remember always feeling like, when is my thing going to come around? And it was like that scene from Dumb and Dumber at the very end when like the supermodels were asking for two oil boys to follow them around. And they're like, man, our opportunity will come one of these days. You just got to be like Lloyd and Christopher. What was their names? Your opportunity will come. What's the definition of success when preparation meets opportunity? So you kind of have to be looking for that. So if I had to start all over again, brand new on

YouTube, I don't think I would, you know, be able to build the business that I have built simply because, you know, I was there ahead of the, you know, the curve. But yeah, there's definitely a way that you can make money on YouTube. If you, you know, hate your job and you think that video production, uh, is the life for you, there's definitely a way to do it. There are people that I know that they only get 30,000 views a day, but they have a nice little income from sharing their life or their experience. I think, and this is another question. Corbin Smith asked, is the daily vlogger space now oversaturated? Yes. And it's really hard to stick out. It's really hard to be different. A couple of things. One, it's definitely oversaturated. Two, I know that marketers don't love the daily vlogging

setup. They can't package that. Advertisers can't, you know, sell that to a TV show. They can't be like, well, it's kind of a reality show, but there's not always like a story arc. It's just like this guy who like turns the camera on and it's him and his family for 20 minutes a day, but it gets a million views, but that's kind of hard to sell. So sale, sell. So they want more of like package programming where they can see, oh, this is a series or whatever. But what I do think is an untapped market in daily vlogging is specific life daily vlogging.

For instance, I would love to be able to wake up and say, I wonder what a gold miner does every day or what does a deep sea fisherman do every day? I think there are opportunities for daily vlogging in which you share a specific niche thing that not a lot of people get to see. So maybe you're a logger in Alaska. I know a guy, Mr. Safety, Corey Williams, SMP Films. He's been a YouTuber around for a long time. He now does daily vlogs living in Alaska. So if you're like, man, what would it be like to just pack up and move on out to Alaska? There's a guy doing that

and him and his wife just had a kid and they're living in Alaska and not like off the land or anything, but you kind of get an, you know, see what it's like to be in Alaska. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for that. So what do you do? What's different about your life? And you may say, well, nothing, I've got a boring life. Well, not everybody is the hash brown cook at McDonald's. And I love those hash browns. And I want to know the dude, when he woke up in the morning, what was he thinking before he went and cooked the best hash brown? This is not a sponsored deal, by the way.

But you have a unique experience and you just have to figure out what do I do that nobody else does. And that could be work at Staples. That could be, you know, you live in a different part of the world that you may think is average because you've just been there your whole life. But people want to know people. That's why people watch our videos. It's that voyeurism aspect of getting out of your own head.

It's why we go to movies and TV. And it's why art has been so popular over all of the species. Because we just want to kind of get out of our own experience and evolve that experience by allowing other experiences in. So I think daily vlogging, even though it's oversaturated and maybe a business that's going out, you still can build an audience. I still believe that YouTube is a cool place to meet fellow-minded people.

You don't ever have to feel lonely again because there's lots of different types of people. So if you are going to, you know, give a, give it a go, say, I'm going to try to make this YouTube business, my business. Like I want to, you know, be a YouTuber. I would say you definitely have to go and look at all the things that the, you know, career YouTubers are doing. Like, where do they put annotations? What's an annotation? Where do you put links in the video description? Where do they have their intro? Little, just little things like that,

that you could kind of mimic. And those are like marketing techniques and just ways to promote other, you know, projects that you're working on. But that's definitely something I would do is just do what the professionals are doing. That's, I think, the best life, well, some of the best life advice. If you want to be something, just do the same thing that a person that has what you want does.

So if you want to be a fat, lazy person, do what fat, lazy people do and vice versa. All right, Good questions. Alexander Coffee asked, recently, a number of high profile vloggers have been having issues with detrimental effects on their social and or relationship lives as a result of the excessive time that is consumed by producing daily vlogs. Have you ever experienced anything like this? If so, what are your methods of dealing with it? And how can they be applied to non-vloggers?

Well, you know, this is a question, you know, it's a tale as old as time. People break up. And recently there's been some high profile vloggers that have broken up. And I don't think that's specific to vlogging. Is vlogging detrimental on your relationship? It can be. Anything can be. I listened, I said this somewhere before, I can't remember where, but I basically listened to everything my wife says twice because she says it and then I edit it.

And if you're not too friendly with your spouse, that could get annoying really fast. And you really, those little, we all have them, idiosyncrasies that are all part of our personalities, whether it be loud and obnoxious like me, or maybe you know, maybe you say something the same way, or you fold the toothpaste tube in a awkward direction, whatever

it is, those things come out when you daily vlog, because you start to see those things, not only, you know, when you're like trying to vlog things all the time, but when you're editing, you're just like speech impediments that you have. I've noticed I've tried to take out the ums and the all that kind of stuff. So I think vlogging is actually therapeutic. I think it can be helpful in a self-examined life. I think it helps you to kind of like look at your own personality and see, is that exactly how I want to be? Am I obnoxious sometimes? Or do I need to be more patient or whatever? So it can be good or it can like really bring out those annoying aspects of your significant other. So it's just, it's love. Love is a verb. This is the best advice I have for relationships. You got to serve the other person. Love doesn't come

from a magical song from a movie. It comes from service. So if you think about what a verb is, you know, that's an action word. It means you got to, man, you got to buy flowers. You got to write notes. You got to like put the note underneath the windshield wiper of your, you know, wife when she's like parked somewhere. You got to stalk her. No, don't do that. But remember like I was, I was given a lesson yesterday about marriage and it's like, remember what you did when you were trying to get that girl to marry you so you could have sex with her? Why don't you, why don't husbands do that stuff anymore? You probably tried to get her to marry you for other reasons too, but you remember your primal motivation as dude. So think about that. Love is a verb. Do things, be kind, wash dishes, change diapers, and then you have a happy marriage, happy relationship.

Okay. Next question. Fadi Sala. Who knows? I can't pronounce words right. Asks for the vast majority of content creators, traditional monetization strategies like ad revenue and sponsorships, i.e. brand deals, seem unsustainable due to their low earnings per view. Yes, that is true. What do you think is the future of ad revenue and sponsorships? Do you think that will continue to be the primary monetization scheme for years to come? I don't know. Nobody knows. We're all trying to figure it out. We're all trying to say, where is this business heading? It is true that trying to make a living just off of monetizing your videos. And if you know, you're kind of listening to this,

like, what do all these words mean? If you make a YouTube video, you get paid on that video based on how many people watch that video. So I, as a YouTuber could have 1 billion subscribers and I go to upload a video. And hypothetically, that video is supposed to be sent out through YouTube's distribution platform to all 1 billion of my subscribers. And in a perfect world, all 1 billion of them will watch because, you know, they subscribe to my channel. So of course they want to watch every piece of content that I upload. But maybe only a thousand people watch that video that I uploaded. And I'm like, what happened to the other 999,900, whatever that number is. And I have a little video here with 1000 views on it. I'll make about two bucks on that video. They have a thing and this has been

explained a lot of times in different ways. I've done it in different places, but it's a CPM is what they call it cost per mil. Or in other words, how much money do you get paid on YouTube? I make about two bucks per thousand views. So if I was to give you this little piece of paper and say, hey, run out and show this to a thousand people and I'll give you two bucks. You can imagine how profitable that might be and how tiring that would be as well. So because of the internet and networking and the 8 billion people in the world, hopefully one of, they will all get the internet one day, but you're able to show these videos to thousands of people and make money through the CPMs, but you really have to be getting a lot of views every day in order to, you know, be able to make some money to live on YouTube.

So the other way that YouTubers have done it is through brand deals or commercials for big, you know, companies, whether it's Nike, Reebok, any big company you can think of with a brightly colored logo that you see driving down the main street of your hometown. They pay influencers, for lack of a better term, YouTubers, Viners, Snapchatters, people that have an audience, people that, you know, have people that are willing to listen to them, they'll pay them big bucks to promote their brand. And that's something that's brand new, where previously advertising was traditionally done through newspapers, magazines, you know, all the standard out, revenue out, what's the word I'm trying to say? Outlets. But now it's like this whole

internet thing has blown up and advertisers or owners of companies that are paying to get people to see their product are realizing that these YouTubers, these influencers, these people with audiences, their promotion is way more valuable than buying advertising time on a commercial of a TV show or before a movie or whatever. Because what is the very best form of advertising? I'm going to let you think about it in your brain for a minute. This is a multi, you got to think during this podcast. It's word of mouth, right? Any business owner will say, if I could get one of my customers to go tell their best friend about how great my business is, we've made it,

right? It's word of mouth. You want people to just be talking and being like, this is awesome. You got to go try Joe's Crab Shack. You got to go try, you know, whatever it is, whatever your business is, that has traditionally always been the very best way to grow a business is by having your customers tell their friends. And with a YouTuber like myself, for instance, who's been making a video every day for almost a decade, I've kind of created a pretty good relationship with these people who watch my videos. And so for a brand or an advertiser to say like, Hey, person that has 4 million best friends, could you go tell all of those best friends that really trust you because they've watched your dog die and watch you make two human people and birth them out of your wife? That sounded weird. Um, they're going to trust you. Will you go tell all these people to check out our product and we'll give you X amount of dollars. And of course, then you think, well, how the whole discussion comes

like, well, how do you put a value on that? How much, I know everybody's like, how much, how much, how much will a giant company pay a big YouTuber? And you can go to places like social blue book that have a proprietary algorithm that takes everything into account. This is more than views. Like, yeah, great, you got 1,000 people to watch your video. I mean, that's a measurable number you can look at right away. But there's other factors that advertisers

are really starting to look at more than just views and subscribers, and it's a thing called engagement. They wanna see that whoever's watching or being part of this community is thumbsing up, favoriting, commenting, what type of engagement are they touching the content in some way? Even if it's a skip ad, I have, I thought I've heard that, you know, you are even rewarded for somebody clicking that skip ad button because then the advertiser knows

that that person at least saw the product because they had to scroll their little mouse up there to click on the skip ad and they're more than likely to see whatever you're advertising there. So you know at least they saw the thing and had to click to say go away. So there's value there

where before you don't know if the person watching TV got up to go pee or to make some guacamole during the commercial break. So you have no idea if they saw the thing that you made went into their brain. But now even on the computer, if they say skip ad, like I don't want to watch this crap, they still saw the thing they're skipping, which still registers a, Oh, this is a product on the market that is available to me. So this is valuable. This is very valuable. And then you got to decide, well, how valuable is it?

And my job as a creator and as a friend of fellow creators is to say, hey, guys, let's make ourselves valuable because we've been working for 10 years to build these audience of people who trust us. And my job as a creator is one not to do a bunch of these brand deals like check this out, check this out, check this out. Because then all of a sudden I lose that value with my audience. They're like, man, this dude's just promoting everything. He must be making bank.

I don't want to buy any of this crappy schlinging. So as a creator, and I suggest this to other creators, is be careful. Only do brand deals for things that you really love. Wow, that was a long question too. How else can I get paid the money on the YouTubes? All right, next question. Alicia Mauer English asks, how did it feel to tell the truth about alcoholism on Tim's podcast last time? Healing or painful or both? Did you find that telling the truth is a healing practice? Yes. Like how daily writing has been studied and found to be healing physically and emotionally.

Yeah, anytime you can talk about your weaknesses or things that you're afraid of is ultimately gonna be hugely therapeutic and help you make leaps and bounds in your personal happiness and struggle if you feel like you can be in a place to talk about the things that scare you most because that's what we're all struggling with is that stuff that we're afraid of.

And you might be like, I'm not afraid of nothing. It's just because you haven't lived long enough and you haven't been faced with some realities that are part of your future that once you do gain a little age and experience, you'll be like, whoa, yeah, I guess I'm kind of afraid of that. But you'll see. It felt great. I wasn't planning on talking about that on Tim Ferriss' podcast. We were just sitting there in his kitchen and he gets you all loosened up by being all friendly and all of a sudden, you're sharing your Oprah story with him. I don't know how it came up. We were just talking and I told him that that was something that I had struggled with. I think that he had specifically asked what's something that you've struggled with. And that was something that I was like, I don't know though. Cause I've never

like expose that or told my audience about that. And he's, he was awesome. He said, well, if you feel like talking about it, that'd be great. Let's talk about it. But if not, you know, we can edit it out. He gives all of his interviewees the option, the, you know, final edit option. So they can be like, you know, I don't feel great about this. Will you take that out? But after I said it and it felt good and I just like, let's just get it out there. I was nervous, but then the feedback was awesome. And I feel like I encourage people to try to talk about their scars and about the things that are scary to them because they'll find that there is really a kind listening ear a lot of the times. And maybe not. Maybe people have tried to open up and, you know, but you have to do it.

Sometimes it's hard to open up to the ones that are closest to you, right? Because that's where those fights come. But yeah, Alicia, it did feel great. And we talked about recently on one of our podcasts with the writing example that you gave, a great way to practice this without the, you know, the fear of being judged by this person that you love is to try a practice of writing down all of your fears and everything that you're frustrated about and all that stuff on a piece of paper, knowing that you're going to destroy it. You're going to tear it up. You're going to burn it.

Nobody's ever going to see it. I think that is similar to, you know, being able to talk about these things, but without the repercussion and the fear of, you know, somebody judging you. So try that first, write it all down, man. Just say, I'm going to write down the scariest, most painful things that I keep inside, and I know I'm going to burn it. But it just, the actual act of writing it down and seeing those words can have a drastic impact on how you feel about them.

So give it a try. Nothing to lose except for a piece of paper, and that's not expensive. Okay, next question. Tim McGee asks, Shay, if you had two weeks to teach someone how to tell a better story on YouTube, what would that course look like? I don't know if I've ever actually thought of curriculum for what teaching a good storytelling class might be,

but I think it's a way of thinking. I just remember as a kid, my buddy would be telling me stories. I'd be like, and then what happened? And then what'd they say? And then it's all about details, you know, and it's about those little things that maybe when you're telling a story, you don't think of. I just, I learned storytelling from my grandpa. I think my grandpa was a great storyteller. And being a good storyteller is just the ability to help somebody become present in a different situation. You know, so how do you make a story exciting? You have to be passionate about it.

So you have to pick the stories that you tell, right? You have to think they're funny. I think you can't just, you know, try to tell a story that you're not passionate about because that definitely reads, but it's details. It's the little things like, and then she said this, but, you know, just looking past the storyline and trying to read the subtext of maybe what's happening underneath the surface. I don't know. I don't think I have a great answer to that question, but the details and emotion. So like, if you're telling a story,

a lot of times when I'm telling a story, I'll be like, and this happened, this happened, but here's the frame of mind that I was coming from. I was frustrated because this just happened. And because that just happened, I was worried about this happened. Anyways, here I was being, you know, and so it's like, you kind of have to have backstory. You have to have emotion attached to it. Why did this person feel like that? What was their motivation for feeling like that? Um, I don't know. That's, uh, that's something I would actually like to delve into because it is a very valuable thing being able to tell a story, just being able to communicate. I've always looked up to people who could do that well. I think that was the very first thing that attracted me to Philip DeFranco's videos.

I was like, dude, this guy can talk. And even if it is edited, it's jump cutty. The way that it was, you know, delivered or the way that it was created was entertaining. And it was like, I am laughing and learning at the same time. And to be able to do that is something that is a learned ability. You have to practice it. It's like your voice. I remember my dad and my program director from Z103 said that your voice is like a muscle. You can work it out. You talk to any voice actor, they can inflect and come down and do all these different, you know, characters and impressions simply because they practiced it. They talked a lot. I am able to communicate a lot better because I've just been doing it for 10 years. And if you look at Malcolm Gladwell's book,

he talks about how you become an expert is by simply doing a thing for 10,000 hours. Exactly. That's all it takes. So great question. Just tell stories, man. You become a better storyteller. Amy Gilligan asks, other than having better shoes, how has money changed you, if at all? What does that mean? You like my shoes, Amy? I have been buying Jordans. I got somehow into the shoe game. I don't know. I've always liked Jordans.

I thought they were cool. And apparently there's Jordans out there. They're like $600. It's ridiculous. I have fallen into that a little bit. I would like to say money has not changed us. If I'm honest, the reason I started YouTube wasn't for the pursuit of money, but the reason that I've kept going so long is because of money. Like when I first found YouTube, it was simply like an avenue of escape. It was like this whole other

world where I could type in anything I wanted. Green Day concert, Glenn Plank skiing, whatever I thought was cool. And it would pop up. And the communication just like, man, I can talk to people. Just that first realization that I had when 200 people subscribed to my videos. And I was like, 200 people. These are real people with hands and opinions and favorite colors and dislikes and food. And who are these people? That first realization of I'm hanging out with other people on the internet. Like we are transcending geographical boundaries just because we're not in the same room. Doesn't mean that we're not actually really hanging out here. So the first time I realized that that was the addicting thing. But then once I found out you can make money,

I was like, oh, I got kids, man. I gotta, I gotta pay for these kids to do stuff. And money was never the goal. It was just freedom. I never wanted to be like, I want to be rich so I can have all this stuff. I just wanted to be able to not go to work. Right. I just wanted to be able to tell the guy who I called my boss that, Hey, guess what? I'm going to not go to work, right? I just wanted to be able to tell the guy who I called my boss that, hey, guess what? I'm going to actually go water skiing with my family today just because we decided we wanted to. And I know that I'm supposed to be in at work, but like, I just, I hated that. I hated feeling like I was being controlled by a dude that I was tied to $11 an hour to. It's like, man, this guy can tell me

how to live my life for 11 bucks an hour? Is that what I'm worth? So it was never about the money. It was about the freedom. And I tell this story, like the day that Maker Studios sold, the day that I, for all intents and purposes, became a millionaire,

I remember like looking in our account and it was like, oh, geez. And then it was like, I remember Colette, my wife called me on the phone and I said to her, I said, did you see the account? She's like, yes. And I'm like, isn't that cool? She's like, yes. And then I was like, what's for dinner? Because like nothing changed. It was like, we still had to like feed the kids instead of brush their teeth, change their diapers. You know, it wasn't like, and I guess we could have, I guess we could have said, all right, get on a yacht. We're out of here. But we didn't get that much money. I think a lot of

people think that we got like hundreds of millions of dollars. We did not. So money just makes you more of who you already are. Right. So sometimes you see that people that win the lottery, for instance, they'll just like run their life into the ground because all of a sudden they're like, you know, just buying all the,, like, I'm definitely motivated by it, but I'd like to think that it hasn't changed me. And I, you know, I try to be aware of that because I don't want it to, right? So I don't want to just say money hasn't changed me. I'm still me. But maybe it has, maybe it has in ways that I don't realize, but I don't want it to. So therefore I'm conscious of like, don't do or say things that might make you seem like just a money greedy jerk.

And it's not like I am that secretly and I don't want to reveal it. It's just like, you decide what kind of person you are. And so if you see stuff like that coming out in you, you can be like, whoa, I don't, that's not how I want to be. Like, let me rethink about that. So my goal is to not

let money change me and just to use it for good, to use it to help others. And I know that sounds like, oh, that's good for you. Yeah, I'll buy some cool shoes too. And a water ski boat. I'm gonna go on vacation. And I don't look at the prices of things. The only time I ever look at the price of something is if I like, I want quality, I'll just like, what's the most expensive one. That must be the best one, which isn't always necessarily true, but sometimes it's a pretty good, uh, you know, indicator of what is the best when I'm looking for my new camera or skateboard or whatever. Um, so yeah, I follow Dave Ramsey still. I do not borrow money. I pay cash for everything.

That's how I got to where I'm at. I decided to stay out of the rat race. I cut up my credit cards. I didn't listen to this 90 days same as cash. And I know people are like, well, you're rich now. That's easy. Well, I started off broke. I was like making 20 grand a year, but I just followed these rules.

There's certain specific things that you can do that if you just follow these rules, you can't help but to become rich. Save 10% of your income, no matter what. A lot of people have this 10, 10, 80 rule, 10% to tithing. If you don't believe in God or tithing, you don't have to pay that. Pay yourself 20%. But a lot of people do 10% to tithing, 10% to themselves, and then 80% goes to everything else. So right away, The Richest Man in Babylon is a little book, maybe like 100 pages I read when I was a kid. The number one principle in that book was

pay yourself first. You get a paycheck, whether it's a small paycheck, a big paycheck, whatever, you get paid somehow. Salary, allowance,

maybe your mom and dad give you a few nickels to rake the leaves. I don't know what you do to get your money, but you do something. Whatever that money is, you take 10% off the top right away and you say, I'm paying me first. Like, what do you mean? That paycheck is all mine. No, it's not. It's going to gas and groceries and food and you owe your buddy five bucks because you lost the fantasy pool draft, whatever you do. But always, as a rule, any money you ever get, say 10% of that is future mine, like retired mine,

like sitting on a beach somewhere and not have to worry about all this SHIT mine. So if you follow that rule, from when you're like 12, 13, 15, 16, first time you ever get your job, you always save 10% of everything, that money's gonna grow. Little soldiers, little soldiers out there fighting for you. And that's how the richest man in Babylon talks about this money that you set aside these 10%, these little soldiers that got in work for you and invest those and stuff like that. So

what was the question? How much money do I have? Not a lot, but I'm rich in blessings. All right. Next question, Amy. Thanks for the last one. Appreciate it. Thomas Owen, Thomas, I'm assuming that's Thomas Owen asks, right? Thomas, Thomas, Thomas Owen asks, what do you do to overcome doubt? That's a tough one because you go in fits and bouts with doubt, depending on the morning, depending on the mood, depending on the, oh, it's Monday. You do doubt. I mean, and it's different for different people. I think it starts at your upbringing. You know, what did your mom and dad tell you? Did your mom and dad tell you you could do it? Or did they tell you you couldn't do it?

I think a lot of it, more than we would like to admit, comes from our upbringing. The personal internal struggles that we have, and that might like feel bad to some moms and dads out there, but a lot of the kind of crap that we carry around, like self-doubt, inferiority, anxiousness, all that, I think, stems from those developmental years of being a kid. And that's why families are so important. That's why moms and dads are so important. Because we carry around a lot of this baggage for the rest of our lives. So how do I get over doubt? Some days you don't.

You know, it's like a battle. Everything's a battle. Happiness is a choice is a battle. Being confident in what you're saying and what you want to do is a battle. And a lot of the times it's a fake it till you make it kind of mentality where it's like you, there's not a good tip or trick other than just do it. Other than just like you have to tell yourself, do not doubt, believe, just hope for good things to come. I love, you guys know I'm always quoting Andy, what's his name? Shawshank Redemption.

My favorite, one of my favorite movies, Shawshank Redemption. I said at the end, hope is a good thing. And it's maybe one of the best of things. Because without hope, there's darkness. You know, you think about concentration camps. I remember I was talking about that book the other day, like the only thing sometimes you can have is hope. And Andy Dufresne said it. And that's what you have to do to overcome doubt. You just have to say, and I always go back to this, I think it's like a little jarring for people or, but I'm just like, you're going to die. If you have this healthy realization that you will lose the opportunity to have effect on the world, because your body will pass away. It will give you,

I think, hopefully not an anxiousness, but, you know, kind of a sense of, not anxious, and I don't want to use that term, of proactivity, hopefully, where you realize it's, you know, we have limited amount of time and regret is such a painful thing. So just go for it. What do you got to lose? Like, you have to look at failures as just stepping stones because people are always like, what if I mess up? What if I fail? What if I lose everything? Then that's like, so what? Like, start over. You think about, you know, the guy who invented electricity what i don't know all the statistics are they failed thousand times you know it's all about how you get up you know those little cliches are true so it's sometimes just gritting through it and i'm sorry i don't

have any better tips and tricks for you but uh it's up to you, Thomas. My Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.