Best of This Week: Feb 4th

Some of the best moments from this week of My First Million. ----- * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (00:50) - Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt, shares why he called out Stripe and YC (11:12) - Nathan Barry says how to become a billion dollar creator (24:00) - Ryan Holiday shares why he works with a traditional book publisher and how he stays a top-selling author ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:14Ben?

  Hey, welcome to another episode of My First Million Best of the Week Edition. This is Ben Wilson. This is just some of the best clips from our episodes throughout the week. If you've already listened to every episode, there's nothing new here, but it's just bringing out some of the best content in case you didn't get to listen to every second of every episode this week. We got a great one for you today. We had some really great guests on this week. To start off with, we're hearing from Ryan Breslow. Ryan is the founder of a payments company called Bolt. He has been in the news for writing a Twitter thread where he called out Stripe and Y Combinator. And then we had him on the show the day that he resigned as CEO of his company Bolt. And here's what he had to say about the whole controversy.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  Cool. And so let's talk about this Twitter thing. So you came out the other day and you basically said, look, you're like Bolt, you know, we've become successful now, but it wasn't without kind of some challenges. And there's like the normal business challenges and then there's sort of the like the challenges of the powers that be. And in Silicon Valley, there's two kind of like very powerful and in most people's minds, you, I think you picked a fight with people that very few people have bad things to say about Y Combinator and Stripe, right? Stripe is probably like the most beloved startup in Silicon Valley, respected, beloved, whatever. And NYC is also, you know, the most powerful sort of like a brand, you know, it's like

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  basically if you're going to pick on a college, you pick on either Stanford or Harvard if you were going for the top. And, and you basically told the story about them being the mafia. And so I want you to kind of quickly, can you quickly bullet point the, what your argument was for people who aren't nerding out on Twitter and aren't seeing it? Cause this, the audience we have here is not going to have seen it. So bullet point that, and then I got some questions for you.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the point is my motivation here was to open people's eyes to what goes down in Silicon Valley, where it's not all sunshine and rainbows. It is very fierce and there's fierce competition and there's also games that are played with powerful institutions and, you know, groups of people who, you know, help each other out. And so if you're starting a company, especially in payments, you've likely failed. There's, you know, the only ones that have been successful have been internationally. And we probably should have failed five times over with investors pulling out of term sheets

• 2:41Speaker 02

  when we were about to run out of money. And so we, I'd say Bolt almost didn't exist because of the powers that be, the powers that be. And, you know, I think there are a lot of other companies that would have existed today if it wasn't for the powers that be. And so, you know, now I don't blame these institutions.

• 3:04Sam Parr?

  But, but you're, I don't know if you're doing this on purpose to be kind, but you're kind of being vague. Is it possible that you, like, what does institution mean? And are you able to, like, actually?

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's separate out, right? There's, there's fair, fair, you know, fair business games, which is like, we're competing against somebody, that's fair. They can compete with us fiercely. There's investors just deciding, ah, this space is too competitive, or Stripe's gonna win, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna back away, right? So a perception thing, that's kind of like, nobody would say that that's unfair. Talk about the specifics of what you felt was unfair, or where, you know, some, some, there was some heavy-handedness to it.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when we would be pitching investors, they'd get interested, they'd say they want to invest, and then they would talk to somebody at Stripe, someone related to Stripe, and either be told they can't invest, or they shouldn't invest, or somehow the conclusion was they were dissuaded from investing.

• 4:13Shaan Puri?

  But how do you know that that's what happened, right? They might just come to you and say, we're not interested.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Told me Stripe would always come up somehow in that conversation. So many of them pulled me directly. I don't know if they say directly, I got a call by Stripe and they told me I can't invest in you guys.

• 4:30Sam Parr?

  Is that bad, though? I mean, what if they, if they were already an investor of Stripe? I understand that.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  I have a conflict of interest.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Right, but you know Stripe has like all the big names in Silicon Valley invested in them. And so they've intentionally put every single, you know, tier one firm on their cap table. And they even stuffed them with small checks. They're like, everybody's on their cap table. Right? And so, you know, for...

• 4:57Shaan Puri?

  And then they say, you're conflicted out, right? That's a competitor of ours. You're our shareholder.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. And I didn't even, you know, consider ourselves a direct competitor at the time. But I think they're very guarded about anything in their periphery. So I've heard the same story from companies, you know, doing card issuing. I've heard the same stories from companies doing subscription payments. And then Stripe would roll out their own product next. So it's almost as if they have these feelers out, anything that's tangential, they make sure that it doesn't get off the ground. And then they go and build it. And so...

• 5:33Sam Parr?

  Is there any, is there any side of you? So the way that you're phrasing it, and I would like to figure out what, what my opinion is. I don't have an opinion yet, is, is like, that's unethical. But one maybe could argue and be like, well, that was just a savvy strategic move to like get everyone on board. And you know, that's just like, that's just like, that's a, that's fair. Is, do you, do you see that side of it at all? Or do you think that like the way they went about it, their intentions were, the intentions matter here?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never pulled a single investor, you can't invest in somebody.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Right, so to me, like, everything is fair competition. And if someone wants to invest in a company tangential to me, I tell them, go for it. We've even invested in tangential. I invested in tangential. I think, you know, innovation is good. I have a very long-term perspective. So when you're calling, I say, you can't invest in this company. Like, even if they're not on the Stripe cap table, there's investors too, that are not on the Stripe cap table. To me, that's just not how I would do business. And I also want the next generation of founders to go into building with their eyes wide open. Because I invested eight years of my life into this business, not knowing about the games that go on.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Right, and so the most important thing I'm exposing here is if you're coming to Silicon Valley, you have an idea, you're quitting your job, putting a lot on the line, like, get ready for war. Like, it's, it's, it's serious. And there will be people who do not want you to exist, and you're gonna need to be ready to battle that.

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  And so, one of the things you say is that, which is, they basically hurt our ability to fundraise by telling, first, they, they kind of played good, good game theory, right? They, they got every investor, every big investor to get a little piece of Stripe, because every investor wants a piece of Stripe. And then they said, cool, now you're conflicted out of investing our competitors. Okay, some might say that's, that's shady. I personally, just, I'm an investor in you, right? I'm a fan of yours. I personally would just say, okay, there's nothing unethical about that. You may not like it, but that's competing, it's like a, it's a strategy. It's a harsh strategy. Okay, fair enough. In the same way that, like, I don't think it's cool that Mark Zuckerberg just copied stories or whatever. I don't think that's like, you don't get bonus points of respect from me, but I also

• 7:57Shaan Puri?

  don't think you did anything illegal or crooked, completely crooked, right? That's, that's, you copied something that was copyable. Okay, fair enough. The second thing you said is... That they that YC, which has a huge stake in Stripe,

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  controlled, they own Hacker News and that on Hacker News, people would be posting about Bolt. It would get some play, it would go up the ranks, but that somehow there's some editorial shenanigans behind the scenes where all of a sudden the post about Bolt would disappear or get de-ranked, and then a post about Stripe would be up higher. And so you posted some examples of that. Now, that I think, I think that's the summary of what you said. As that was happening, did you, is that a suspicion or you're like, I know that that's what happened?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure that's what happened. You know, because we had some posts, one in particular, that, you know, I'd written, catered to YC audience. It was unraveling of how we do fraud detection better and guarantee it with your payments, which was radical and new at the time. It had organically got in to number one, held there. We had a ton of comments on it, just like very active, people very interested. You can go read all my comments. And then Stripe's post, I don't know if those there before, it seems like they said it got posted technically before. But anyway, after it's got to number one, theirs started to rise, and ours just started to fall and then disappeared.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  And so, I don't know if those editorial, there's also this down vote functionality. And so you can also just have a bunch of your employees go and down vote or have a bunch of your friends. So, you know, whatever it is, they're able to get us off of there pretty quickly.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  The, the guys who started Stripe, the Collison brothers, I don't know them, but they seem, from the outside, like good dudes. Do you think that, is that?

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  Do you know them?

• 10:00Sam Parr?

  And is that, is that a characterization that you'd challenge?

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what I'm doing.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  So you know, they don't meet my standards for good dudes.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And so, you know, good dude is not what you say publicly, it's what you do privately.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And so.

• 10:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I just think that like, right now, you're like a loose cannon and I love it and I find it incredibly refreshing. Because from the outside, you've raised money from amazing people at a $14 billion valuation. You are like the guy right now and I'm just, I think it's cool and I'm shocked, but I think it's cool that you're, that you've just said that. I think that that's, I've never heard that before.

• 10:46Shaan Puri?

  Me and Sam both have definitely like a rebellious streak in us and we've told some stories on the pod about situations where, where we do kind of like not keep it muzzled.

• 10:57Ben?

  All right, next up, we have a segment from an interview with Nathan Barry. Nathan is the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, an email marketing platform. He was telling us about billion dollar creators, how to become one and how to just do a better job of monetizing your audience.

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  So you basically have these four rules of building a billion dollar audience. So I guess like first, why did you even want to do this? Like, kind of like, what got you interested in this? And then let's walk through the four.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  So the article asks a question, like the whole premise of it, and that is, what is the most profitable? Place to direct attention, right? So everything we do, right, we're recording a podcast now, whatever you're doing on, on TikTok or if you're a movie star, everything else, right? You have attention and brands want it, they're willing to sponsor, you know, all of this stuff. And so it's like, okay, you have the opportunity to point that attention somewhere. What's the most profitable way to do that long term? Cause you look at people. You know, maybe who are taking sponsorships, right? Five grand, you know, to sponsor the newsletter or, you know, 500 bucks for a sponsored Instagram post or anything like that.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  And that's actually not that profitable. And then we, when you dive in, you learn that the most profitable thing to do is to create your own product. And to drive that attention to something where you actually build equity long term. So it's like a longer article talking about that. But like the richest movie stars, you know, like take Jessica Alba, for example. Right? She has made a lot of money from movies, but the bulk of her wealth is from starting a company using, you know, being the spokesperson for her own company. And then my other favorite example would be Ryan Reynolds, who, you know, he's doing ads for other people and probably getting paid a million bucks here, $10 million there, you know, that kind of thing. And at some point he goes like, forget that.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  I'm going to buy my own companies with Mint Mobile and Aviation Gin. And I'm going to be my own spokesperson. So I don't get cash, I get equity. And so, you know, you just watch this process of people doing it over and over again. And that's actually my hypothesis with ConvertKit, right? Of I have attention on the internet through running a blog and a newsletter and all of that. Well, how do I want to monetize it? Sponsorships, ebooks, membership, a bunch of things. I'm like, nope, I want to monetize it through ConvertKit, building a SaaS company. Like that's my version of the billion dollar creator. So that's the whole premise of the article.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  And so you have, you have a couple of examples. So, okay, so rule number one is you have to build more than a personal brand. So what does that mean? You give the example of Jessica Alba, Mark from Primal Kitchen. So what, what is the nuance here? It's like, it's not just your face, your name. You need to actually create a brand around, around your lifestyle or your interests. Is that it?

• 13:54Sam Parr?

  By the, by the way, Sean, Primal Kitchen is the sugar-free ketchup company that I like. So this guy named Mark, he's like, kind of looks like the 65 year old version of me, but like even more jacked. And he like has a health and health blog and he starts selling ketchup and he sells that for like $300 million.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, what Mark did with, I mean, his blog was called Mark's Daily Apple. And it was like the leading, you know, like paleo kind of health blog in that space. And a blog like that, you know, when he was doing this, 2006, 2010, that kind of thing. You can make a million bucks a year off of that blog and he was, right? But you play that forward.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  And that's, it's all about him, all about his name, all that, right? His name is in the name of the site. But you can build substantial wealth that way. What he did instead is he started Primal Kitchen, you know, kickstarted this whole brand by saying like, I have the most popular site in the space. Let me, you know, make these paleo-friendly ketchup, mayonnaise, that kind of thing.

• 14:57Shaan Puri?

  You know how big his audience was?

• 14:59Speaker 04

  You know, a few years later.

• 15:00Shaan Puri?

  He had at the time or?

• 15:03Sam Parr?

  It wasn't huge, huge. Like it was no bigger than ours.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. A hundred thousand subscribers.

• 15:08Shaan Puri?

  A hundred thousand was the kind of like the audience size to kick, kick off this thing.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. You gotta remember audiences were a lot smaller, like even just 2015, 2012, like that kind of timeframe. But yeah, then he sells it to Kraft for $200 million. You can't sell a blog. To like a blog doesn't sell for 200 million, you know? Like all of these things. And the crazy thing is he still owns the audience, right? The thing that, that kickstarted this whole product, he still owns. He can sell off the, that whole brand, talking to him at a, at a conference. You know, he's just on to the next thing, figuring out what he wants to do next. He didn't have to sell his, his name and whole identity with it. So, and Kraft is.

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  Kylie cosmetics is probably the biggest one that people know about because you have tons of attention through Instagram, Tik Tok, whatever, the TV show, whatever.

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:59Shaan Puri?

  And instead of just saying, hey, I'll, you can pay me. People used to say, wow, you have to pay $25,000 for a tweet from Kim Kardashian or then that was 25,000, then it went up to like 250,000, then $2 million for an Instagram post from, it got, it got up to that range where it was like either hundreds of thousands or low millions to get like an actual like endorsement post from, from one of them. And, and so then, you know, cool, you can make a lot of money doing that, right? You can, you could stack up quarter million dollars at a time. But Kylie cosmetics was a billion dollar brand. So it was like, well, who wants to, who wants to pay me to promote their products? Well, it's mostly like skincare products, makeup products.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  Or for Kim Kardashian, it's her shapewear, like, you know, like and Khloe Kardashian, it was like, you know, fashion or whatever. So Khloe launches True American Jeans. Kim Kardashian launches, I think it's called, what was it? Shakes, Skims, Skims is like the shapewear brand?

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  Kyle, Kylie cosmetics, Kanye, Yeezy shoes, right, Larry's like, they all turned to say, whoever is the most willing advertiser, actually you become my competitor and I'm going to launch my own brand, my own equity and have my own equity in this thing. And there's a guy in the NBA who gets made fun of for this, which is this guy LeVar Ball. I don't know if you guys know this guy, but basically he has three sons, all three wanted to make it to the NBA and this guy's this like loud mouth guy. They got like a reality show around them because they're sort of like the like, you know, basketball version of the Kardashians. There's three brothers and like a kind of an overbearing parent who is like architecting their business strategy. And when they were gonna, the guy was gonna get picked second in the draft and Nike offered him a contract and Adidas and

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  instead he created big baller brand, you know, triple B. He created his own shoe line and like the shoes kind of sucked and like, you know, he didn't have the full business plan and people were making fun of him for like, oh, wow, you turned down a guaranteed $10 million from Nike to like, launch this thing, $10 million a year or whatever. And it's like, actually that was the right move. Now, maybe his execution was slightly poor, but it was actually the right move and a lot of these NBA players would have been better served had they done that themselves.

• 18:15Sam Parr?

  Well, how's it going?

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  So the shooting's not going good. Basically, the guy they had running it like was like kind of stealing from them. So they fired him. That was like a black mark on it. The second brother never made it to the NBA. That was like a little bit of an issue. The first brother kind of underperformed his potential at that time. And actually now that it would have worked because the youngest brother, the one who was like the, the one who's kind of like, he was kind of like a fuck boy a little bit. He was, you know, was like, had a gold, you know, like a diamond grill, had like a Lambo at 15 and was like, you know, he was kind of off the reservation. He actually turned out to be the best one. He's actually a star player. And if they had kind of built it properly around him, it probably would have done a lot better.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  So I, Nathan, you'll get a kick out of this. So like three or four weeks ago, we did this thing where we said, we're going to give five Gs to one or two, three people who take our clips, download it, post it on TikTok and get views. There's this kid who did it and I don't remember how many views he got, but like our hashtag, I think got 30 million views in like two weeks and this guy accounted for a lot of them. And multiple of his videos got a thousand, or sorry, a million views. One video got so big that we drove 35,000 new members to the subreddit Fat Fire and they like, and they complained. And I was like, reached out to this kid. I'm like, who are you? And he replies back with like, Michael at U Michigan.org or something like

• 19:40Sam Parr?

  that, or dot U or whatever it is. And I'm like, wait, dude, are you in college? And he calls me and I FaceTime with him and he's in his dorm room. And he's young. He's in still in college. He's in his university thing and, and he's really cocky, not in a bad way, but he's like, he's got chutzpah. And he goes, man, I knew I was going to do this. I wanted to prove to you guys that I could do it. I want you to pay me money to do this now and I'm going to do this for other people. And we're going to change the media game and I'm going to raise money. And I was like, okay, hold on, dude. Hear me out. And he goes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go raise money for this thing. Do you want to invest? I go, bro, listen, you do not want to raise money for this. Here's what you should do. You are so talented at this that don't raise money for this, but get it big and

• 20:22Sam Parr?

  start launching other stuff on top of it. And if you want to raise money, raise money for that stuff and own all, he owns this thing called like, I forget what it's called, Future, but he's got like eight handles now that have like a million something follow you followers. I'm like, no, no, no, don't raise money for this thing, man. Own that forever. And that's your piggy bank and your audience. Raise money for like this other thing that you want to do and funnel it through there. But don't sell that thing because I raised a little bit of money for my thing, which was like that. And I, I don't regret it because I got the outcome that I wanted, but I do regret it because it definitely, you're massively handicapped because of it.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and that's, I think such a good point because you can have that platform to launch whatever you want in the same way that, you know, Mark Sisson can use his platform to then go launch the next thing, right? He probably has contracts that say he can't compete in the exact same space, but he could do a fitness thing, or he could do Conor McGregor, right? You have the ability.

• 21:17Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna give you an example. Conor McGregor is doing this brilliantly in the UFC. So like, the UFC gets knocked a lot because of they have like low fighter pay, right? Like the, the percentage of revenue that they give to their fighters is way lower than other sports. NBA is 50%, NFL is like 50%, UFC is like, I don't know, 15 or 20%. So the fighters are, you know, they go out there, they get their, you know, face beaten in and they're, they'll make $20,000 off that fight, or $40,000, or $80,000. And then they only get to do that two or three times a year. So it's like a pretty brutal sport for low pay. What Conor McGregor did was, instead of selling the attention, trying to make money as his kind of like service fee, he created a brand around literally every part of his lifestyle.

• 21:58Shaan Puri?

  So he's like, all right, this thing's gonna get me famous, but then, okay, what am I famous for? People like my suits at the press conferences. Cool, I'm launching a suit brand. Okay, I'm Irish, I'm gonna launch an Irish whiskey. Irish whiskey, I think just sold for, I don't know if you know, say, 400, 500 million?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  He walked, yeah.

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Then he's like, cool, I'm super fit because I'm a UFC fighter, my body's amazing. Here's my P90X program, it's called McGregor Fast. You can, you can buy my program and subscribe to that and you can get fit with me. Oh, you're getting fit and guess what else do I do? I recover. Okay, here's a recovery spray that I spray on my leg that's like, you know, like makes my leg recover faster after workouts. And the guy is literally just selling like every piece of his lifestyle as a independent brand. Like, you know, I think at one point he was thinking about launching a sports betting exchange. It's like, what is the best business, like who's wants to pay me? Oh, DraftKings wants to pay me? Hmm. Maybe instead of DraftKings, it's McGregor Kings now. And I'll, I'll launch a competitor.

• 22:59Sam Parr?

  He just, he just opened up a bar called The Black Forge.

• 23:02Shaan Puri?

  I had good whiskey. What else do we do? Irish stouts. Okay, I'm gonna, so he bought a bar. Not that the bar is that good. It's like a bar in his hometown. A bar is not gonna make a ton of money. But then he used that bar as the like, basically the backdrop to film him creating a stout. And now he's gonna sell a stout as a new like alcoholic beverage brand. And it's kind of amazing. The guy's gonna become a billionaire. And fighting is gonna be the lowest part of his income stream is my guess, which is insane.

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  Well, I bet you, I bet you, Conor McGregor, I bet you.

• 23:35Shaan Puri?

  Well, he might make a billion. He might lose a billion.

• 23:39Ben?

  All right. Lastly, we're playing a clip from our interview with Ryan Holiday. You might know Ryan from his social media presence on The Daily Stoic, from his many appearances on The Tim Ferriss Show, or from one of his many books, like The Obstacle is the Way, Stillness is the Key, or Trust Me, I'm Lying. Here, Ryan talks about why he works with a traditional book publisher and how he manages to stay a top-selling author.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  From the outside, you know, I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel this way. It's like, oh, publishing, you know, record labels and book publishers, it's all just middlemen and they're, they take advantage and the authors see so little, you know, blah, blah, blah. And someone like you, you have a, a lot of business sense. B, you now have a track record. C, you have an independent audience you can sell to. So there must be some reason that you say, no, actually, people don't get it, that you do want to publish it for these reasons. What is that?

• 24:28Speaker 05

  I look at it on a case-by-case basis. You're just, you're really doing the math. Will the, what they're paying for it, plus the royalty, what are you thinking you will earn, you know, in a short amount of time, or, you know, in a certain amount of time? So I just do the math on each project. So every time I think about a book, just because I have a publisher, if, obviously, if no one was interested in publishing it, it would be a different story. But I, you know, I conceive of what the book is, and then I take it out. My publisher has a first look deal at my books. And I see what, you know, what they, what they think, what they're willing to pay. And then, you know, I have an agent, and so we obviously try to get that number up as high as possible. And then, once I had that number, then I think, okay,

• 25:13Speaker 05

  what would this look like if I did it myself? So what would it cost me to do it myself? What am I likely to sell myself? How much work is that going to be? How much of a distraction is that going to be? And 90% of the time, you know, the math, the math tends to go towards traditional publishing in my experience. The, the kids book that I did, the publisher just wasn't, it wasn't in their wheelhouse. They didn't totally get the project. So I did it myself. It's been great and really fun and artistically fulfilling, but also just an incredible amount of work. I mean, like the coins, I sell directly from my store. Right? The manufacturer makes them, they drop it off at the warehouse, they get shipped.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  Fulfilling books through Amazon is like, and then also the thousand independent retailers in the United States, plus every international edition, you know, is extraordinarily logistically difficult.

• 26:10Sam Parr?

  And I remember you, you gave this talk one time that was awesome, where you showed a chart of the sales of your book versus the normal book. So a normal book, you get a peak and then it pretty much is kind of goes away, but then for some of the classics, you get a peak and then it goes down a little bit, but then it kind of quickly comes up to the point, the word even, like it's pretty steady throughout, like a catcher in the rye or something like that, or even sometimes it'll, it'll, it'll suck early on and just slowly get better. Your books, if I remember correctly, they, they popped just like everyone else. They went down a little bit, just like everyone else, but then they like raise and were pretty steady with daily sales. And you're like, that's because I make shit that can last a long time. And this was actually for when you were running perennial seller. I think you were like proving this point. Is, is, is that still the case?

• 26:55Sam Parr?

  And considering all of your other businesses, is book, is making books still where you make the majority of your income? Or are you just using that because you love it and it happens to make money? And you, but you make the bulk of your money from other shit?

• 27:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's, most nonfiction authors make more money from speaking than from books. That's because speaking can be more lucrative, but it's also because most authors don't sell very many books. Right? So I'm in an unusual space where my books do sell consistently and I have a lot of them. So I make a good living from that, but probably make more money from stuff other than books than books.

• 27:34Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's crazy.

• 27:36Ben?

  That you're like the man and yet still it's like the other like.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  Well, that's that's another reason to traditionally publish, right? So so like you're a publisher does not take any percentage of speaking, does not take any film or TV adaptations, does not take any ancillary products, any merchandising, anything like that. So really, this, the book is, it's not a lost leader because people pay for books and books have value to people. But like, the the ideas in the book, everything else is downstream from whether that that takes hold or not. Does that make sense? So if the book doesn't land, all the other stuff, you know, doesn't really matter. But if the book works, all the other stuff happens and then the success of the book is slightly less significant.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  I think what my, so so in publishing, there's the front list and the backlist. Frontlist is anything within one year, that like the year of release, that's considered a frontlist title. And then it becomes a backlist title after a year. So most titles stop selling when they leave the backlist, when they leave the frontlist and become on the backlist. But almost all of the income in publishing is from the backlist.

• 28:52Ben?

  Wow.

• 28:53Speaker 05

  So so for me, it's about like, I've I've tried to create that in my own, my own catalog of like, titles that sell every year, as opposed to like, a big book that comes out, gets a lot of attention, then then three, four years later, I have to write another new book because the other one is like, not relevant.

• 29:13Ben?

  It's like, it's like Michael Buble or Mariah Carey writing a Christmas song. You know, you you want that Christmas hit, you want that annuity.

• 29:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, so so like, my book, The Daily Stoic, when when my agent was like, we should do a page, you should do a page a day about Stoicism. And I was like, I don't know. And he was like, it will be your bestselling book. And I was like, there's no way, that doesn't make any sense.

• 29:34Ben?

  Every New Year's.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Yes, it will. And he's like, it will. And he's right. The book sold more copies this already this January than last January.

• 29:44Ben?

  All right, that's it for the week. If you have any comments, you can tweet any one of us, tweet Sean at Sean VP, or Sam at TheSamPar, or me Ben at BenWilsonTweets. Thanks, everyone, and have a great weekend.