SPEAKER_02
All right, we're live. Sean, I've got a little bit, a few actually stories, but it starts with a person I hung out with the other day. You know Ryan Holiday, right? The author, Ryan Holiday.
Of course, he came on the pod. He's awesome. I was hanging out with him the other day, and he said something actually to me in person, but he previously said this on the podcast that we had, I think he's been on twice.
He said something about how he actually made a funny comment. He's like, most authors say they make more money through speaking than they do actually selling their books. Those people, they just didn't sell a lot of books.
However,
SPEAKER_00
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel never looking Ryan has sold a ton of books.
We know that
SPEAKER_02
for sure. But he also mentioned to me that his other things like the Daily Stoic, which is his daily newsletter. So Ryan Holiday wrote a book on stoicism.
He's written six or seven now at this point. But he has his other property. It's a daily newsletter called the Daily Stoic where they sell coins and merch and advertisements.
He has told me that that has made more money for him than selling books, which is crazy because that's what he's known as as an author. And so what I wanted to talk to you about today was I went down this huge rabbit hole where I found ways that authors are making money other than just like writing a book.
SPEAKER_01
Well, you got to tell the coin thing because the coin thing is the perfect simple example of this. I don't know what he confirmed exactly, but explain the coin thing because I think it's the perfect simple example of an author making money, not off their book, but a lot of money in some other way.
SPEAKER_02
All right. So here's the deal. Things are changing fast in the tech world and the internet marketing world.
And that's a big deal because you have to know which trends to stay on top of in order to market better in order to acquire customers for cheap. And so you can run your business as efficiently as possible. Staying on top of all those trends is a pain in the butt though.
And so the folks at HubSpot have made this amazing report. It has a very official sounding name because it is a very official document. It's the 2024 state of marketing report.
They've looked at millions, tens of millions of bits of data to find the top marketing trends that have the most immediate impact on your business. And so what HubSpot did was they surveyed over 1400 marketing pros from across the world and they looked at what are people using effectively, what's not working more importantly, and they've been able to compile it in a really easy to read document. So if you want to learn ways how to optimize for social or how to boost engagement or how to strike the right balance between privacy but still being personal with your customers, go to HubSpot.
com slash state of marketing to get the free copy or just Google HubSpot state of marketing and it will come up. Check it out. Ryan Holiday's whole shtick is stoicism.
It's a philosophy that is fairly useful and it's just like how to deal with hardship in your daily life. And for some reason, he decided to come up with a coin. And it's a coin that in Latin, it says like, you're going to die or like today's one of your last days alive or something like that, like some like inspirational thing, but it's in Latin.
So I'm not exactly sure what it says. And a coin is a great product to sell because it costs 25 bucks to sell. It costs like a dollar to make it ships for whatever a stamp, two stamps.
So however much that is 80 cents, there's no returns, there's no sizes. It's just like the easiest thing ever to sell. And on the podcast, I don't remember if he said the exact number, but I believe he said tens of thousands of coins, which is millions and millions of dollars.
Is that what he said?
SPEAKER_01
He did say that. And he also said that he works with some mint, some mint in the United States. And I guess it's, it's one of the old famous coin mints.
And he, I think he was like their biggest customer also. Like he's like, they're minting more of his momentum or coin than they are anything else.
SPEAKER_02
So what I want to do, and that was surprising to me, I had an inkling and then he kind of revealed that that is true where he made more money, not from selling books. But I had, I went down this rabbit hole and what I want to do is I want to show you three people who are making significantly more money than you would think. And they are doing it in ways other than just writing one book, making whatever 10% of the revenue that they, of which they sell.
All right, so we're going to start with the first one. Sean, do you know who James Patterson is?
SPEAKER_01
I do not know who James Patterson is. Who is James Patterson? I did not think you know who he was. Maybe a former baseball player.
Who are we talking about?
SPEAKER_02
You, you are very smart. You're a very high IQ, smart person. Oh God, here it comes.
The fact that you don't know some of the most basic things like of pop culture, like it's beyond pop culture at this point. These are things that you see all over bookstores or whatever. It shocks me that you don't know this.
SPEAKER_01
Is he the vampire in Twilight? Yeah. Who is this?
SPEAKER_02
No. Okay. Your second guess was a lot further away from the first guess. So listen to this.
So have you ever heard of this Stratmeyer syndicate? You probably haven't, right? Of course. If you haven't heard James Patterson, you also probably haven't heard of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Have you heard of those things?
SPEAKER_01
I know who those are. They write murder mystery novels, right? For kids or something.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they are the main characters in murder mystery novels. So the way it starts is in the 1930s, there was this thing called the Stratmeyer syndicate.
It was this one guy, he came up with this company in the 30s where he was like, Hey, not a lot of people are writing children's books. I'm going to go ahead and start publishing children's books. And then he was like, you know what? I need to write more books, but I don't feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these artists, authors who like are just a pain in the butt to deal with all I care about is making like kind of cookie cutter novels that children like.
So what he did was he goes, I'm going to actually just come up with these characters. So Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and he had a variety of other series. And I'm going to have these authors write these books, but I'm just going to say it's written by the same author every single time.
I'm not going to give a person like their little bit of fame. I'm going to pay them a fair rate, but it's in and they're going to follow my rules and maybe eventually they'll become a famous author. But for now they're just going to follow my rules.
And that's what he did. And there was at one point where like every kid in America could name Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, things like that.
SPEAKER_01
I admire Syndicate. What a name. So wait, sorry.
The Syndicate is, I think I missed something here. The Syndicate is the set of novels.
SPEAKER_02
The Syndicate was the name of his company. He called it a Syndicate, which sounds like a drug like a drug syndicate. It sounds like something illegal because usually said that was just the name of his company.
And it was a legitimate company. This wasn't like anything shady, although he did a bad job of naming it'd be like naming like your kids children's book like warm candy and vans or something like that. Like he did a very bad job of like naming his publishing company called the Syndicate.
It's kind of weird. But basically he came up with these rules where he was like, all books need to be part of a series. Every chapter needs to end with a preview of what the next chapter is going to be.
The beginning of each book needs to give a summary of only one page, what happened in the previous books. And he just had this like outline of how to like make hits. Well, fast forward 70 years.
There's this guy named James Patterson. At this point now he's 75 years old. He started in advertising in New York for the J Thompson advertising firm, just some huge firm.
But on the side in his late twenties and early thirties, he starts writing novels and they do okay. Like they're not like that big a hit. But he keeps at it and he's a workaholic and he keeps going.
And eventually at the age of 47, he retires from advertising and goes all in on publishing these novels. So he's been doing it now at this point for about 20 years and he's finally starting to see success. And the whole point of his novels is their thrillers.
Some people might say they're kind of like trash formulae thrillers. But the thing is, is people love them. And at this point, he's sold something like 500 million copies of his books.
And at one point, he accounted for 16% or sorry, 6% of all hardcover novels sold in America. So the guy's a hitmaker, he sold he sells a tongue of them. But here's the craziest part.
Since he started writing about 48 years ago, he's published on average seven books a year. And at this point, even though he's 75 or 74, he's doing something like 30 books a year. Now, how on earth does a guy do that? That's like ridiculous, right? At this point, to be doing that, it's ridiculous to be doing that a young age, it's more ridiculous to be doing 70s.
Well,
SPEAKER_01
more than a book every two weeks.
SPEAKER_02
It's ridiculous. Well, here's how he does it. He has co authors.
And a little secret with James Patterson, even though he's well loved in America, he actually has only written about 20% like solely written 20% of the books that his name is credited with as writing. The way that he does it, he has a team of co authors. And so what he does is he pays these guys out of his own pocket.
He kind of comes up with a framework, they flesh it out. He reviews it almost like a movie script. And he's like writes notes in the in the margins, and he gives it back to him, and they kind of flesh it out.
And at this point, he's done it so much that you'll see that there's James Patterson with Dolly Parton. I think there's a James Patterson, and then the co author is Bill Clinton, and then the other co author, who's like the person doing the actual work is listed below it. But this has been so successful, successful that at this point, he's made something like $800 million.
SPEAKER_02
Yes, that's how rich this guy is. He owns like three or four homes, each of them were worth 40 million bucks. He's donated something like 50 million according to his website, just small bookstores.
But this has been a smashing success. I'm shocked you've not heard of James Patterson.
SPEAKER_01
I think I have seen the name. What's like his most famous book?
SPEAKER_02
I don't even know the name of his books, but he's almost like a, do you know Tom Clancy?
SPEAKER_01
Yes. Okay, he's like Tom Clancy. Does Tom Clancy do the same thing? Or does he write all his own books?
SPEAKER_02
No, Tom Clancy would write them, but Jim Patterson does not write as much. But you know, like Jim Patterson at this point is sort of like Tom Clancy, where you're like, Oh, it's a Tom Clancy novel. And I don't even know what Tom Clancy, I can't even name his novels, but I know it's, it means like it's like a spy novel.
SPEAKER_01
Right. Okay. So let me ask you a question. Did this guy start out writing all his books? And then over the years was like, how do I scale? And he's like, what if I got another author? Or from the beginning, was he like, did he have this plan from the beginning? Or did this come about organically trying to scale up?
SPEAKER_02
So over the last 20 years that he's been killing it, I don't, I don't think one of his books, I'm not sure exactly, but most of his books have not themselves been bestsellers. However, he has been a bestselling author, if you add up all of his titles for many decades. And he learned early on, he was like, well, like, I don't know if any individually are going to be a hit, but I'll just make a shit ton of them.
And so we discovered early on to it on his career, he goes, we're going to be about quantity. And at this point, he says that for the last 40 years, he's worked something like 70 hours a week, and he writes all day. And when we talk about writing, it means working with a team and things like that.
But he discovered early on, he's like, we're just going to do quantity, we're going to pump these babies out. And so at this point, Jim Patterson, he's a face, he's a guy, he's a real person. But it's almost like a brand.
And he's like, gets these authors to kind of come under his brand. And he makes jokes, but he'll say things like, they should pay these like these referring to his co authors, they should pay me to be a co author, because I'm teaching them so much, and they're giving their name out there. And he actually gives them press.
So they're able to like list. But it's almost, it's almost like the boy, the music industry works have like have Nicki Monash, Nicki Minaj coming on your song, you have to pay Nicki Minaj, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01
I like that. That's the first one you went to Nicki Minaj. Alright, so this is interesting.
What do you like about this guy? You like that he basically, to me, what I like is I feel like he broke the like precious rules of like, like writing and book, like being an author is this like high prestige. Usually it's a high prestige, low volume, labor of love, you know, that may, you know, almost never makes money. And if it happens to make money, you kind of got lucky with this one smash hit.
And, you know, the honor is in slaving away at this novel for four years. And he sounds like he broke all those rules. He's not precious about it.
He's like, cool. Let's write books people want to read. Let's make it formulaic.
Let's make it so that I can hire people that are going to write these books. Let's scale this baby up. No individual, we're hitting singles and doubles, maybe we're not going for home runs necessarily, because these will all add up.
And it sounds like the cool thing is that this guy almost like productized this type of book and exactly like a businessperson than he did a artist.
SPEAKER_02
Well, in reality, what he is is he's he was he was the CEO of the Thompson Agency Group. That's like a that's part of a huge corporation. And he's basically an advertising executive turned author.
And he brings some of that pizzazz to being an author. And it has worked really well. So he's both a businessperson and an advertising person.
Let me give you two more that I think are even more interesting. Have you seen these books lately written by this guy named Jack Carr? It's
SPEAKER_01
kind of all the rage right now. I've heard the name, but I haven't read anything now. All right.
So
SPEAKER_02
Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL. He served in the Navy SEALs from 1996, I think to 2016. And he started writing these books called the first one was called The Terminal List.
It came out in 2018. And if you go to The Terminal List on Amazon, you'll see it's one of the highest reviewed books I've ever seen given the quantity of reviews that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of reviews, and it's like a 4.5. I read one of them two weeks ago. I think I even suggested that you read it.
But it's really great. It's basically like the equivalent of a romance novel for a woman. It's like James Bond for the man.
It's like basically the story of a guy who goes through all these hardships where he's an ex Navy SEAL, his family gets hurt, he's got to save them, he's got to get revenge, whatever, all that like epic man ship. However, I started reading his book and I noticed something really interesting. He names products and brands like crazy in his books.
And I'll give you an example. So this is a few excerpts or one excerpt from one of the books where he talks about he reached inside and removed the nine millimeter Smith and Weston M39 from his chest, better known in the SEAL teams as the MK 22 hush puppy. And then he goes on and saying he grabbed a box of his nine millimeter Super Vell subsonic ammunition that was sitting next to his Yeti Cooler.
I swear to God, he'll talk about things like for example, he'll talk about like sipped his athletic greens. He names brands like crazy. Like there was one point where he was talking about like, they're like, he needed the best, most durable equipment.
So we started using a hill person Fanny pack or something like that. I'm like, dude, can we get like my he's like, he
SPEAKER_01
put on his headphones and turned on my first million, his go to on Tuesdays and Thursdays all types of entrepreneurial inspiration. And then dude, he
SPEAKER_02
he names stuff like crazy. And the main character is James Reese. He's like a James Bond type of guy where he does a lot of bad stuff, but like you really like him and you kind of want to be like him.
And he just names all the products that he uses and it's crazy. And so I was interested. I'm like, why is this guy naming all these products? So I go to his website, I Google Jack Carr Brands.
I just Google that. He's got this whole website. I think it's just Jack Carr.
com. But if you Google Jack Carr Brands, what you'll see is he has Jack Carr.com and he creates, do you know like that website that's like, um, uncrate or, uh, uh, gear patrol, he basically has created his own version of that where he has all these gift guides, or he'll be like, here's all the gear that James Reese used in this book.
And he has these beautiful guides on his website. And lo and behold, if you highlight over a lot of them, they're all affiliate links. And in fact, and in fact, oftentimes on Jack Carr.
com, he sells his own stuff. And so one of the main parts in this first book that I read is he's got this fancy Tomahawk, which is basically like an axe. And he uses this Tomahawk to kill people.
And it's like a really high quality Tomahawk. Well, Jack Carr.com sells that exact same Tomahawk.
And I thought that this was brilliant because when reading these stories, he's talked about the cars that he's in, like the, the, the car that he's in is like a main part. I'm like, I want all this stuff because this character James Reese is so cool. All I have to do is go to Jack Carr.
com and I could buy all of this stuff. And it's amazing. I love this strategy.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this is brilliant. I've never, I never would have thought that product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does, but that makes perfect sense. This is his, this is his Feastables.
This is his prime Tomahawk.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, it's awesome. And by the way, I was just giving him a little shit. Not all of them are affiliate links, but a lot of them are.
And if you go to like his Amazon page, he even has this cool feature on his Amazon page where it lists all of the products in the books.
SPEAKER_01
Now, do you think this is just like, you know, for example, a lot of people ask us a bunch of questions about like, Oh, what do you use for this? Whatever. And it's like, sometimes writing the shit down is actually just, it's valuable to them. It's useful to me.
It saves me time. And I know that a bunch of podcasts do this, but it's, it's like small income. It's side income.
It's not their main thing. Do you think this guy's like, he's got to be making more off of his books than he is off of this, this Amazon affiliate thing, right?
SPEAKER_02
I think he's making more off his books. But my third example is I'm going to show someone who's making way more off this thing. And I think there's a world where Jack Carr will make way more off that side thing than the original thing.
Meaning when you think of a Navy SEAL, you think of like many things, including like the cool types of gear they have. And you like see what they're wearing, you're like, that's neat. I would love to have that thing.
Or, you know, it's like cosplaying to be a tough guy. There's a third, here's, right? He says in this cardigan. As he walked around his home wearing Birkin socks.
J.C. Penney like sell like really good boxes or something I could talk about. The third one, Steve Ronella.
Have you heard of Steve Ronella? Three for three, no. Who's Steve Ronella? Okay, this one is I would not think you would know who this guy is. So he originally starts as a magazine article guy for Outdoor Magazine.
So he basically he's from Michigan, went to school in Montana. He loves the outdoors. He also loves writing.
And so he starts as a freelance journalist. He works for Outdoor Magazine. He works for like men's healthy things where he's able to like talk about the outdoors and they pay him a small amount of money, whatever.
His first book that he writes is about foraging, which is basically just he wanted to create the book sounds silly, but they're actually awesome. He wanted to write about how he went and hunted and foraged his own Thanksgiving dinner. But like in doing that, you find like the meaning of life.
And you see like the history of food, whatever, and outdoors. It's awesome. The second book that he did is called American Buffalo.
And it's this amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history, whatever. If you're not into that, you're not into it, which I don't think you are. But for the people who are what gave it away? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You know, my body language right now is the body language of a girl who's about to get grinded on by a guy at the club unwinding leave. No, no, no, thanks foraging for my food. Would you like a free copy of my book? It's signed.
No.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, you're not in this guy, but you're going to be into what I'm about to explain. So he writes his book, American Buffalo, it gets pretty popular. So then he creates this website called meat eater.
com. Have you ever heard of meat eater? I've heard of meat eater. Yes. So meat eater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on this thing called the outdoor or the sports channel, something like that.
And it starts working out. Well, eventually churnin, I think you know churnin, they invest into it. And at this point in 2023, meat eater is a website where Steve Urnella blogs about outdoors.
He publishes books, his books under the meat eater name. He has recipe books. He has more podcasts, whatever newsletters.
However, they went and bought a bunch of brands. They bought a duck call business. They went and bought a clothing line.
Now in 2023, they announced that they did 100 million in revenue from selling all of the products on meat eater.com, of which his kind of claim to fame or at least where he gets a lot of the traffic from is his books and then his podcasts and things like that. And so this is an example of a guy who I think has made significantly more or will make significantly more in terms of enterprise value from selling the product that he talks about in the books or selling the lifestyle.
Those guys super fascinating.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, going from American Buffalo, a book about buffalos in America or whatever to having 100 million dollars in revenue on your business is like, that's not the American dream, but it's it's something. It's someone's dream somewhere.
SPEAKER_02
It's an American stream.
SPEAKER_01
That is, I can't believe that that happened. That's insane. Churnin is so smart, by the way, they took this one thesis of content to commerce.
So they were like, Hey, anybody who's world classic content, it's not valued properly in the market because media is such a shit business that they're valued as a media business. But if you can flip their business model from content to commerce, then this thing is going to this thing is going to take off. And it's going to take off in the same way that our YouTube subs are going to take off when you go to YouTube and you say to yourself, God damn, I'm learning a lot from Sam today about meat eaters and about authors and about all these people.
And they're going to go to YouTube. You're going to go to my first million and you're going to click subscribe because you love us so much. Thank you very much.
That's the plug. That was a good one. Pretty seamless, right?
SPEAKER_02
Good job. I think if I had to make a prediction, I think that meat eater will be worth many, many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion dollars in the next 10 years.
SPEAKER_01
I believe it. These these lifestyle brands, once you get like, there is no, no niche too small with these lifestyle brands. Meat eater is actually pretty big compared to some of these lifestyle brands like the Haudenosaunee, the watch brand, luxury watches only, right? Or there's things for like, you know how people, when they get into biking, they become like, you know, Lamer, they start dressing like SpongeBob, spandex and like clip-ons and they walk into a coffee shop after like a 90,000 mile ride that morning.
Like those people are super valuable as an audience and they need content that's like so lame. Like that. That it's the thing that they care about.
And so there's like an endless niche of these like really, really hyper specific lifestyle content brands that I think can be built. You just have to come from that space. It sounds like this guy, Steve Ranella, you know, came from that space, which is pretty, pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02
You want to know the, here's a curveball to the situation. He lives in Brooklyn. For real.
He lives in Brooklyn. Yeah. Well, he lives in Brooklyn. I was doing research on him and he's like from Montana and he's like, I know Montana better than anywhere on anywhere, anyone else in the country.
I knew enough to get the hell out of there. Yeah. And now he lives in Brooklyn, which is what I thought was kind of weird. But anyway, those are my three examples of strange ways or shocking ways that a bunch of these authors are making money.
I know that you are thinking about becoming an author. Does this change? But I think you've paused it. I'm not sure if you paused it or.
..
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think becoming an author to make money is just, that's like saying, you know, I was hungry, so I went to church. It's like, yeah, just because they have some food there doesn't mean that's why you go. And so like, I don't think making money is the reason to write a book.
If you're going to want, if you want to make money and you're smart about marketing and all that, there's a hundred times easier ways to make money.
SPEAKER_02
Did you just make up that analogy? That was a really good, that was a really good analogy.
SPEAKER_01
I did my morning routine today. So, you know, the brain is on. The brain is awake.
The thing that I've looked into is how much these authors make. So there's like tears to this. So if it was 10 tiers, the first five tiers, you know, of tier 10 through five is just all of them made no money.
Actually, maybe tiers, you know, like 10 all the way to number three, all made no money. But a couple of interesting data points that are in our world. So I think the top tier is like the JK Rowlings of the world, JK Rowling, James Patterson, which is like, you actually are mainstream canon, right? You are, you're a part of the meta, like you, you became the equivalent, you know, you're going to get a Netflix show type of thing.
SPEAKER_02
So have you ever thought about, by the way, have you thought about JK Rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to like a game or a language that people refer to now? Like the word muggle?
SPEAKER_01
I just thought of that word at least twice a week. You know, people do the Roman Empire thing. I don't give a shit about the Roman Empire.
But dude, I do think of like Diagon Alley. I think about Hogwarts. I think about all these places, right? Like I think about that twice a week.
How cool that is. Someone just made it up.
SPEAKER_02
It's weird to me that when I think about that, I'm just like, that's that's so odd.
SPEAKER_01
No bullshit. What percent of you is like, might be real? Is there any part of it? Well, well, I mean, I am just a muggle. How would I know?
SPEAKER_02
The way that I think about it is she is so good at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it. And she's just telling a true story. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just impossible to think that one brain, like our brains are each six pounds, but that came out of hers.
I don't understand how that happened.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, I've been at an airport where it's like, you have the smart cart thing. And I'm walking between, you know, nine and 10. I don't run at it, but like, you know, I'll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little give in that in that wall.
You know, I'll play. I'll see. So there's that that tier, right? That's like God tier.
Then there's the James Clear, you know, atomic habits, David Goggins, Mark Manson. I think these guys have cleared like 30 to 50 million dollars off of a single book.
SPEAKER_02
That's a lot. I would say more like 20.
SPEAKER_01
So James Clear, I think, I don't know how many he's sold now. It's his thing is escalating, by the way, which is really interesting. He tweeted this out recently, and it was something like, I'll try to find it, but it was basically like, he first year was like, you know, maybe like a hundred thousand.
And then the next year was like 200,000. The third year was a million. And then the fourth year was like 4 million.
And the fifth year was like 15 million. And he's just gone up and up and up. I think now he sold basically, I don't know, 20 million copies or something like that worldwide.
And so you know, 20 million. Yeah. His book is like a, it's like a runaway train, basically. So I think I'm pretty sure his book has grossed like 150 to 200 million dollars, probably 150 million dollars worldwide.
It's my guess. I might be off by 30 million in either direction, but I'm not off by half, you know.
SPEAKER_02
And he's just a guy in Ohio. I think like, he's just a guy. Like I knew him before the year I talked to him before the book.
And he was just like a blogger in Ohio. Like it didn't seem particularly fancy. And he doesn't know years.
SPEAKER_01
I knew him before he stopped talking to me. So, so I think that's like the next tier. David Goggins book, I think has done like 35, 40 million dollars in sales.
And he did it through Scribe. So he kind of like owns more. Tim Ferriss surprisingly didn't sell that many copies of four hour work week.
I thought four hour work week was like a, to me, it was like, that was a huge book. It obviously did super, super well, but I think it sold 2 million copies. Yeah. So 2 million versus 20 million, 10x more for atomic habits, which is pretty crazy. A fun one is Eric Jorgensen.
So you know, Eric Jorgensen, he, he was like a startup growth guy. He lived in some, I don't know where he lives. He lives in like Kansas City or something like that.
And Eric Jorgensen wrote the Navalman Act, which was basically he's like, yeah, Naval's tweets are the shit. What if I printed him out? Basically like, what if I printed it out and stapled it together? Right? Obviously he did more than that. But the core idea was he didn't write the book.
He didn't do a, he didn't study Naval's life and write a biography. He didn't create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval's existing wisdom that was super fragmented, packaged it up into a really easy to use book.
And then, and he actually gives away like the ebook for free, I think online. I'm pretty sure Eric, he's never told me this is my, my guesswork based on some back in the envelope stuff. Pretty sure Eric has made like three to $5 million off of the Navalman Act himself.
SPEAKER_02
No way. I don't believe that. That is so much money.
SPEAKER_01
I'm 82% confident that that's a real number.
SPEAKER_02
Dude, if you're even half right, I would be.
SPEAKER_01
He's definitely made more than a million dollars. I think it's like three to $5 million off the Navalman Act.
SPEAKER_02
Okay. Well, that's insane. Does Naval get anything?
SPEAKER_01
Naval got distribution. I don't think he gives Navalny money from it. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02
I'm going to make you famous, baby. You're going to be a superstar. That's what I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to create the Shauna, Shauna Mac.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, you said that way too naturally. That was not the first time you've said that. Is that what you told Trunk?
SPEAKER_02
That's insane. I, uh, that, that, basically the concept is ridiculous, right? I mean, it's good.
SPEAKER_01
The concept is genius is what it is. He took somebody else's genius that was fragmented. It was like, why would I write my, nobody wants to read the Eric Jorgensen book, but a lot of people want to write the Naval book and Naval is kind of open source with it.
He has, he's said this many times. It's like the best thing you could do is let other people reshare your ideas. They're, you know, stealing your ideas, but really they're propagating your ideas.
It's one of the highest compliments, one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution. And so, you know, I think he was happy that Eric, you know, and it took him like a year. You put a lot of effort into it.
SPEAKER_02
Not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up with the content.
SPEAKER_01
And the Vols made 500 million in his life. So I think he's done fine too. Right? That's, that's the whole idea.
SPEAKER_02
No. And Eric, by the way, I think Eric's now the CEO of Scribe, David, the company that I did, David Goggins book. So, and the company that I think you might be using.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, not yet, but, um, okay. So another crazy story. So I've never heard of this book and I doubt you have either because are you a sci-fi reader?
SPEAKER_02
Not exactly. Only like the most famous ones.
SPEAKER_01
So have you ever heard of this book called Wool?
SPEAKER_02
No. Talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about Bison.
SPEAKER_01
You know what I mean? It's going very far. That's a hard yes and well, basically here's the, here's the idea. I was looking at the, at the charts and I saw all of the Game of Thrones books.
So it's like, you know, a song of ice and fire and it's basically George R. R. Martin, George R. R. Martin, George R. R. Martin. There's five of his books and there was one book on top of it called Wool. And I was like, I've never heard of this book.
What is this book? So I went and researched it. So the author, this guy Hugh Howie, which sounds like a fake name, might be, I don't know. Um, his, his origin story is he's living in North Carolina.
He's broke. Uh, he was doing some odd jobs. He was like, Oh, there's a roofing gig.
Yeah, I'll go help you out. You know, I'm a technician. Sure. I'll help you out. And basically at some point he's unemployed and he's like, you know what? I'm going to write a book.
His wife was kind of supporting the household. He's like, I'm going to write a book. And she's like, okay, honey, great.
Uh, sure. You don't want to get out there with the old resume. And she's like, no, no, no, I'm going to write a sci-fi book.
Like it was like, the idea was like something like, what if aliens had this flying car or whatever? I don't know what it was. It's some crazy idea.
SPEAKER_02
His conversation could go away different. It'd be like, Hey, by the way, like, I know that you love having these action figures in the plastic still, but we make a little bit room for the baby.
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you're going to write a book? I'm going to find another husband. So he puts the book out, he sells less than $1,000 of the book. Okay. So first, first try and it failed. Most people would obviously quit.
Strike one. He's like, Oh, I'm just getting warmed up. He's like, that was, that was good, but I can do better.
And he still has no job. He needs to kind of start, you know, paying for the bills a little bit. So I love this part about the story.
He gets a job, but he's like, he's trying to find not the highest paying job. He's trying to find a job that will make a minimum amount of money that he needs to live with the maximum amount of free hours. So he ends up finding this job that he could do for about 25, 30 hours a week.
It pays only 10 bucks an hour. But he's like, I'll take it because there's a lot of downtime where I'm just sitting there not doing anything I could be writing during that time. And it's only 30 hours a week.
So I can spend all of my free time doing this. And I also don't even want a good job. That'll make it hard to quit later, because I want to be an author.
And I'm not going to trap myself in a job that's like, hard to leave. Then he changes his schedule. He's like, I'm going to wake up 2am every day.
I'm going to write before my job. I'm going to write during my lunch break. I'm right after dinner.
It became a compulsion for him. And in three weeks, he writes this book, wool, three weeks. So again, just like James Patterson wasn't precious about the whole idea of writing books.
This guy was like three weeks, not three years. And so he bangs, he bangs out this book, he puts it on Amazon for 99 cents. And he sells like 1000 copies.
He's like, boom, 1000 bucks. All right, love it. And he's like, and the but like, you know, his small reader base, it's kind of like YC, they say you want like a small number of people, you'd rather have 1000 people that love you than 100,000 people that just kind of like you.
So you had 1000 people that really loved the book. And they were like, dude, you got to write a sequel. So very next month,
SPEAKER_02
before they get cold, he writes a sequel by the way, wool, it was 530 pages. He did that in three
SPEAKER_01
weeks. Yeah. So then he, he writes a sequel a month later, he or like, you know, two months later, whatever it is. And he sells 3000 copies of that one.
He's like, all right, I got to keep going. So he writes two more. And he sells 10,000 copies.
And finally, he puts out the collection, all five of the books that he's written in a very short period of time. And the first month, he sells 23,000 copies of the set. And now he's selling it for $6 instead of 99 cents.
It makes basically 140 grand that in gross revenue that month. And he's self publishing this whole thing. So he's keeping 70% of it.
Whereas a normal author is going to keep 10%, maybe 15% of it. And all of a sudden, you know, the months roll by, he's now sold 500,000 books. Before, you know, before anybody knows it, which is a shit ton of books to sell.
That's like, you know, you're in the top, top, you know, percent of a percent that are of authors at that stage. And he's getting approached by publishers. And they're like, he's like, okay, what's the deal? And they're like, we'll give you, you know, $250,000.
Like, I'm already making $250,000. They're like, okay, we'll give you more money. He's like, well, I'm what, why would I give you why would I take some money today for like, now I give up all my upside.
And they're like, well, we can help you get distribution. He's like, I've sold 500,000 copies myself. And they're like, how the hell did you do that? And he's like, and so his strategy is like guerrilla tactics to get his book out there where he's like, all right, I need to influence the influencers.
So he sent basically like copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads. So not like influencers, but book influencers. So people who review books and Goodreads like high ranking Goodreads people.
So then he's like, all right, that's good. Next step, he goes on Reddit, and he's got he does an AMA on Reddit for 12 hours. And so he's just like, I'm just going to like soak up all the Reddit love for this day on on Reddit.
All right, does that. Then he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art, whereas most authors are pretty again, precious about like, it's my IP, they try to like, you know, take down anybody who writes like variations of their book, he's like, no, no, no, go crazy. I built the universe, but you guys can fill up all the stories.
And he would basically incentivize people to design other alternative book covers for it. So now their little audience would, you know, there are that artist audience would see them designing a book cover for this book called wool. That was pretty cool.
He picks 30 of the diehard readers. And he's like, okay, how do I get my diehards to help me and become like, you know, super evangelists. And so he made them beta readers.
Again, everybody's so precious. They keep everything under lock and key. He took his super fans and was like, you're going to be readers of the early editions of new books before they come out.
So he did a bunch of community building, essentially, like stuff that doesn't really scale that each one individually wasn't a game changer. But if you add up that and the 20 other things that he did, you can see how he like, that's not what made it successful, but he did start turning the crank. At the beginning, the crank is pretty hard to turn.
But eventually, you know, you if you power through that first part of the crank, it'll start to move on its own. And that's basically what happened for this guy. And so then someone comes up to him and they're like, look, I don't think you should sell your book rights.
But I do think you should sell your film rights. You haven't actually, you're not going to make a film yourself. So he sold his film rights.
And he kept his book rights as an independent person for a while. I think maybe he sold it now, I'm not sure. But he also met George R.
R. Martin once he went to a book signing for George R. Martin.
And he's like, Hey, George, like, it's me, you know, Hugh Howie, and the guy's like, never heard of you. He's like, I'm the number six guy on the sci fi list. Like, you know, it's your five books.
And I'm number six. And George R. Martin, he posted this thing that George R.
Martin signed his book and said, to number six, keep trying. And then a couple months later, a couple months later, he actually hit number one. And so just a pretty cool story of like a self published author that that really made it happen.
Like entrepreneurial hustle story.
SPEAKER_02
That's a great story. Do you use Goodreads? Do you know anything about Goodreads?
SPEAKER_01
I've used Goodreads. Yeah, I bet the founders of Goodreads. And I was like, yeah, Otis Chandler.
Yeah, they're they're really cool people, really nice people. It's a cool product, but but it's old now. It's been around for a long time.
SPEAKER_02
But it's got a great mo I can tell you a little bit about Goodreads, but this guy Hugh Howie, he has so I'm I use Goodreads religiously. I'm I'm that's kind of like my it's where my library I keep everything this guy has 750,000 ratings, which is huge. And if you're in the hundreds of thousands of ratings, and you have over a four star review, you're like the best of the best.
He has a 4.15 review out of five for almost a million reviews. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they'd all started with a standalone short story, basically, it wasn't even like a full book. It was like a short story that he published at the beginning of that first three weeks. But again, that's kind of what you want.
It's a prototype, right? He treated it like an entrepreneur would not
SPEAKER_02
like a author would. He's like the blue collar version of sci fi. This guy's like the Larry bird of sci fi.
You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00
French lick Indiana. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Dude, how insane is it that Larry Bird was so amazing and would just literally drink beers like on the bus to the game. And like, people used to smoke cigarettes at half time of those games. Like, isn't that absolutely insane now? Like, now LeBron James sleeps in like a hyperbaric chamber.
But like the guy who was basically the LeBron James of his time was literally just like downing Bud
SPEAKER_02
lights after games. And he was like so skinny and so pale, had the worst haircut, the shortest shorts, the best mustache, but he like kind of looked like a like a human version of like Big Bird. And he just killed it.
And he's considered one of the top five. Yeah, that guy's amazing. He gives he gives the weirdo's hope.
This story is amazing. Hugh Holly. That's a good story.
You want
SPEAKER_01
to do one or two more thing? Yeah. My shill. You shepherd.
It's great. You need to hire somebody. Go check it out.
It's how I hire a bunch of people. If you want to hire people like I do, use
SPEAKER_02
shepherd. How's that? All right, there. That's a thrill in that shill.
But I kept it short. Do you
SPEAKER_01
have one more thing? Oh, well, I guess we didn't talk about this. This is kind of cool. James Clear just launched an app yesterday, which I think was the stimulus for this whole thing that we didn't
SPEAKER_02
talk about. Andrew Wilkinson partnered. He Andrew Wilkinson, our friend Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, we partner with James Clear.
Tiny owns 40%. James owns 60%. We made this app.
I actually didn't look at the app. It's a productivity app or a habit tracking app.
SPEAKER_01
It's one of those just something completely different. It's just a social media app, just a network. It's a photo sharing app.
SPEAKER_02
Just something like a stupid game. It's like they recreated Snake from Nokia.
SPEAKER_01
By the way, okay, so let's talk about a couple things here. Great idea to release a habits app. You want an app to be habit forming.
Literally, that's like only successful apps are ones that you use habitually. So creating a habits app is a good idea. There's habits apps, but they're not made by James Clear.
So I think this is like no brainer idea.
SPEAKER_02
He just created anything that was a habit, like just like some supplement or drug, like I'm going to get you addicted. We're going to make this habit.
SPEAKER_01
We're going to call it crack. So I think genius idea by him, maybe doubly genius idea by Andrew to pull this off. I think it's amazing what he's doing.
He's done this now with Huberman. So he launched the Yerba mate drink with Huberman, which I think is also a genius idea. I think what Andrew's doing now is the new playbook of what churnen did.
Remember I was saying like churnen's playbook with the content to commerce. They did it with bar stool. They did it with eater.
They did it with like a bunch of these media media publications. That was a really good model. And it's played out over the last 10 years.
I think what Andrew's doing now is going to play out over the next 10 years, which is he's partnering with these experts and authorities. And he's like, look, I already have metalab that can do the design, the engineering. I own a portfolio of businesses.
I've made a billion dollars doing this whole thing. So let me find a CEO. We'll build the whole thing.
You just have to promote it. And it's a perfect fit with what you do. I think it's just like such a good model.
It's also really fun for him, right? Because he's going to get to hang out and rub shoulders with people who he likes and respects. He's got like a cool cocktail story of being like, oh, yeah, we built the James Clear app. We did the Huberman drink.
We did the whatever, right? They've done a bunch of these apps now. So I just think it's an awesome way and all around. Like I'm really happy for.
SPEAKER_02
We should have Andrew on to talk about it. But my prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that no one would ever talk about. But it's cooler than all of the other ones.
Like it's significantly cooler. It won't make as much money, but it's way cooler. Like to be able to like,
SPEAKER_01
I think this thing's gonna make a lot of money. Why do you think this is not going to make money?
SPEAKER_02
Well, I just think that it's his other stuff just does so much better if I had to guess. I think the
SPEAKER_01
up like can do like hundreds of millions on meditation. I'm pretty sure that you can get like 30 40 million of ARR on a habit app.
SPEAKER_02
I think maybe you can. But Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like the thousand most popular agency. And they also make many, many tens of millions a year in profit.
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no, if you add them all up, they do. But each individually does not, right? If you add them all up, they do his agency. If you add up what he's going to do with Huberman with James Clear and the next five that he's going to do like this, those are going to add up to be much bigger.
The Huberman drink is a brilliant idea. That is a absolutely brilliant idea. The James Clear app, like he's getting the right type of things like you don't want necessarily the A list celebrity because the A list celebrity for every, you know, George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds that you get that have a hit.
There's tons of others that they don't really care about promoting it. They're too busy, but it's not a fit. They don't have like a direct relationship with their audience because they're actually in Hollywood, they're not like have a direct channel through social media.
And so the people that he's finding are like, this is meaningful for them. It's a perfect fit with them. They have a direct relationship with their audience and they have it like they have like love from their audience.
It's not just like people who are fans of them, as people have deep trust in them. And I think that that is a, I think he's picking the right influence to these. I would bet that he's going to make hundreds of millions off of these plays.
If you add up the three to five that he's going to do in this category, I would bet that that's a three to three, like a $300 million prize.
SPEAKER_02
I guess we'll have to have him on and ask him about it. I'm he, he's like a spider man. He's or like an octopus.
He has his tentacles like all over the place. I see this. I'm like, how the fuck did you weasel your way into that thing? Like he just like, he knows everything.
Like, not knows everything. He knows everyone. I don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things.
I'll be like,
SPEAKER_01
I'll be like, Hey, where's our email? We're influencers, Andrew. Where are you at? Well, where's our offer?
SPEAKER_02
He also plays dumb with me all the time. I go like year, I would probably be like, Hey, have you heard of this guy named Hubert Minnan? I've been loving his podcast and Wilkinson will be like, yeah, I think it's a nice podcast. I also enjoy it.
And then like a week later, like, yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company. Yeah, we worked on this deal for 18 months. Yeah. I'm like, okay, like he does that. He does like kind of on a regular basis with me where I'll be like, if you heard of this thing, it's kind of neat.
And I'll be like, Yeah, I agree. That is neat.
SPEAKER_01
He is a super networker. He is a absolutely like incredible networker. I am, I am, I admire his networking skills.
Like he's like, cool, I like Bill Ackman. Now I'm friends with Bill Ackman and he's an investor in my company. Oh, Charlie Munger is my hero.
Years later, I'm having dinner with Charlie Munger and he's offering me, you know, XYZ. It's like he is really able to, when he puts his mind to it with who he wants to meet, he is able to make that shit happen. And I think he does it in a way that's mutually beneficial.
It's not like, you know, most people when they're like, Oh, I want to meet this person. It's like just begging for it, you know, time or attention in a way that's not additive to the other person. I think he does it in a good way that's additive to the other person.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, he's fascinating in the way that he's able to. But he also, he also turns a weird networking opportunity into like real businesses. Like usually more often than not, when I meet people, I'm like, that was nice to meet you.
I'll see you never again.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, awesome. Right? High five. That's like where my brain stops.
What a guy.
SPEAKER_01
Like I'm literally like, you know, dumb and dumber when he's walking out of the 7-Eleven, he's like, big gulps, huh? All right, catch you later. That's me at every networking event.
SPEAKER_02
Same. That's exactly how I am where it starts and ends right there. And it's just like a passing memory.
And yes, Andrew somehow like makes it into money and turns it into dollars. I don't know how he does it, but he's very good at it.
SPEAKER_01
Well, he told one story on the pod where he was like, I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert, I met Dan Gilbert, and then they had this challenge with this, like, or he had a product, I have a design agency. So we just made him a website for free. That was really nice.
Because I use that as his currency to like, you know, Hey, I think you're awesome. And we did this thing. This is awesome, right? Oh, it's because my agency is awesome.
Because I'm awesome. He just uses it to sort of like, open the door, he'll put in the work basically. And he's like, Oh, whenever you're free, I'll fly there and let's, you know, I'll meet you, you know, I'll make the effort to come to come make this happen.
SPEAKER_02
The takeaways to have an agency. Do they have like an agency or like a sick house? It's like, Oh, you're in town, come stay in my home. And then you know, and immediately you have to have like some like awesome.
SPEAKER_01
Should I do that anytime someone's traveling? Like, Oh, do you want to stay in my house? And I just rent an Airbnb. They're just absolutely indebted to me.
SPEAKER_02
Well, it's kind of a good tactic. Chris Saka said that he had this house in Truckee and you know, he would like lure, which sounds weird, more weird than it actually is. He would lure these like come to my bed.
And he would like get these guys to come up and to become friends with them. And it was like, they're like, well, I would love to hang out in Truckee and just what happens to have a house and that's how we become friends with them. But maybe having a great line about that.
SPEAKER_01
He goes, when I lived in San Francisco, I was just constantly getting like meeting requests or event invitations. And it was like a good problem to have, but it's still a problem. He's like, I was playing defense.
I was just reacting to whatever was going on. He's like, when I moved to Truckee, then I played offense. I would figure out who it is that I want to actually spend time with.
And then I would proactively plan and like set it up so that Travis Kalanick came for the weekend and stayed with him. He's like, we're not going to just get coffee. We're going to hang out for a weekend.
And like for every 50 coffee meetings I do, like one weekend is just so much more powerful than 50 coffee meetings. And so he's like, we hang out, we spend time together, they meet my family, we chill in the hot tub, we brainstorm in the morning, then later that evening, we have a new idea comes. And I'm just very helpful for these people.
That's how he did his Uber investment. He did the same thing with the founder of Instagram. That's how he did his Instagram investment too, was he invited Kevin Systrom to come stay at his place in Truckee.
And he stayed there for whatever, a few days a week or whatever it was. And by the end of that, like they were kind of bonded. And I think that was, Chris Sokka did a lot of cool things.
And that's definitely one of them.
SPEAKER_02
I don't know if a three bedroom place in the burbs is going to do the trick. I think both of us are going to have to step it up.
SPEAKER_01
Can I interest you in Walnut Creek?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. We'll go to Safeway. The only appeal, you like marble countertops? I got marble countertops.
All right, is that it? Is that the pod?