5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires

Sam Parr

Alright, 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.

Shaan Puri

Of course, he came on the pod. He's awesome.

Sam Parr

I was hanging out with him the other day, and he said something to me in person. He had previously mentioned this on the podcast that we had; I think he's been on twice. He made a funny comment, saying, "Most authors say they make more money through speaking than they do actually selling their books." Those people just didn't sell a lot of books. However, Ryan has sold a ton of books; we know that for sure. He also mentioned to me that his other ventures, like *The Daily Stoic*, which is his daily newsletter, have been quite profitable. Ryan Holiday wrote a book on stoicism and has written six or seven now. But he has this other property, *The Daily Stoic*, where they sell coins, merchandise, and advertisements. He told me that this has made more money for him than selling books, which is crazy because that's what he's known for as an author. So, what I wanted to talk to you about today is that I went down this huge rabbit hole where I found ways that authors are making money other than just writing a book.

Shaan Puri

Well, you... you gotta 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.

Sam Parr

Ryan Holiday's whole schtick is **stoicism**. It's a philosophy that is fairly useful, focusing on how to deal with hardship in your daily life. For some reason, he decided to come up with a coin. This coin has a Latin inscription that translates to something like "You're going to die" or "Today's one of your last days alive"—some inspirational phrase, but it's in Latin, so I'm not exactly sure what it says. A coin is a great product to sell because it costs $25 to sell, but only about $1 to make. It ships for whatever a stamp costs—two stamps, so however much that is, around 80 cents. There are no returns, no sizes; it's just the easiest thing ever to sell. On the podcast, I don't remember if he said the exact number, but I believe he mentioned tens of thousands of coins, which is 1,000,000. And 1,000,000 dollars—was that what he said?

Shaan Puri

He did say that. He also mentioned that he works with some mint in the United States. I guess it's one of the old famous coin mints. I think he was like their biggest customer. Also, he's like they're minting more of his *memento mori* coin than they are of anything else.

Sam Parr

So, what I want to do—and this was surprising to me—I had an inkling, and then he kind of revealed that it is true. He made more money not from selling books. I went down this rabbit hole, and what I want to do is show you three people who are making significantly more money than you would think. They are doing it in ways other than just writing one book and making whatever 10% of the revenue from that. Alright, so we're going to start with the first one. Sean, do you know who James Patterson is?

Shaan Puri

I do not know who James Patterson is. Who is James Patterson?

Sam Parr

I did not think you.

Shaan Puri

Sounds like I did sandwiches. Maybe a former baseball player? Who are we talking about here?

Sam Parr

You’re very smart. You’re a very high IQ smart person.

Shaan Puri

Oh God, here it comes.

Sam Parr

The fact that you don't know some of the most basic things, like pop culture... 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.

Shaan Puri

Is he the vampire in *Twilight*? Yeah, it's gonna be... what the heck is this?

Sam Parr

No, okay. Your second guess was a lot further away from the first guess. So listen to this: Have you ever heard of the Stratmeyer Syndicate? You probably haven't, right? Of course, if you haven't heard of James Patterson, you also probably haven't heard of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Have you heard of those things?

Shaan Puri

Who are those that write murder mysteries? They write mystery novels, right? For kids or...?

Sam Parr

Something... yeah, yeah, yeah. So, they are the main characters in murder mystery novels. The way it starts is in the 1930s. There was this thing called the Stratmeyer Syndicate. It was this one guy who came up with this company in the thirties where he was like, "Hey, not a lot of people are writing children's books. I'm gonna go ahead and start publishing children's books." Then he thought, "You know what? I need to write more books, but I don't feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these authors who are just a pain in the butt to deal with. All I care about is making kind of cookie-cutter novels that children like." So, what he did was say, "I'm gonna actually just come up with these characters." Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and he had a variety of other series. He decided to have these authors write these books, but he was just gonna say it was written by the same author every single time. He wasn't going to give a person their little bit of fame. He was going to pay them a fair rate, but they were going to follow his rules. Maybe eventually, they would become a famous author, but for now, they were just going to follow his rules. And that's what he did. There was that one...

Sam Parr

Where, like, every kid in America could name Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, things like that.

Shaan Puri

**Strathmayer Syndicate**—what a name! So, wait, sorry, the syndicate is... I think I missed something here. The syndicate is the set of novels.

Sam Parr

The syndicate was the name of his company. He called it a syndicate, which sounds like a drug syndicate; it sounds like something illegal. However, this was just the name of his company. It was a legitimate company; this wasn't anything shady. Although he did a bad job of naming it, it would be like naming your children's book "Warm Candy and Vans" or something like that. He did a very bad job of naming his publishing company "The Syndicate." Kinda weird, gotcha. 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 of what happened in the previous books." He just had this outline of how to make hits. Well, fast forward 70 years, there's this guy named James Patterson. Now he's 75 years old. He started in advertising in New York for the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm, just some huge firm. But on the side, in his late twenties and early thirties, he starts writing novels. They do okay; they're not that big a hit, but he keeps at it. He's a workaholic and he keeps going. 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.

Sam Parr

For about 20 years, he’s finally starting to see success. The whole premise of his novels is that they’re thrillers. Some people might say they’re kind of like trash, formulaic thrillers, but the thing is, people love them. At this point, he has sold something like 500 million copies of his books. At one time, he accounted for 6% of all hardcover novels sold in America. So, the guy's a hitmaker; he sells a ton of them. But here’s the craziest part: since he started writing about 48 years ago, he’s published, on average, 7 books a year. 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?

Sam Parr

To be doing that, it's ridiculous to be doing that at a young age. It's even more ridiculous to be doing it in the seventies.

Shaan Puri

Well, more than a book every two weeks.

Sam Parr

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 has actually only written about 20%—solely written—of the books that his name is credited with. The way that he does it is by having a team of co-authors. What he does is pay 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 writes notes in the margins. Then he gives it back to them, and they kind of flush it out. At this point, he's done it so much that you'll see James Patterson with Dolly Parton, I think there's a James Patterson book with Bill Clinton, and then the other co-author, who is like the person doing the actual work, is listed below it. This has been so successful that, at this point, he's made something like $800 million.

Shaan Puri

What?

Sam Parr

Yes, that's how rich this guy is. He owns like 3 or 4 homes, each of them worth $40,000,000. He's donated something like $50,000,000, according to his website, to small bookstores. This has been a smashing success. I'm shocked you've not heard of James Patterson.

Shaan Puri

I think I have seen the name. What's like his most famous book?

Sam Parr

I don't even know the name of his books, but he's almost like... do you know Tom Clancy?

Shaan Puri

Yes, okay. He's like Tom Clancy. Does Tom Clancy do the same thing, or does he write all his own books?

Sam Parr

No, Tom Clancy would write them, but James Patterson does not write as much. You know, like James Patterson at this point is sort of like Tom Clancy, where you're like, "Oh, it's a Tom Clancy novel." I don't even know what Tom Clancy novels I can name, but I know it means it's like a spy novel.

Shaan Puri

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?

Sam Parr

So, over the last 20 years, he’s been killing it. 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. He learned early on, he was like, “Well, I don’t know if any individually are gonna be a hit, but I’ll just make a ton of them.” So, he discovered early on in his career that they were going to focus on quantity. He says that for the last 40 years, he’s worked something like 70 hours a week and he writes all day. 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 gonna do quantity. We’re gonna pump these babies out.” So, Jim Patterson, he’s a face, he’s a guy, he’s a real person, but it’s almost like a brand. He gets these authors to come under his brand. He makes jokes, but he’ll say things like, “They should pay me to be a co-author because I’m teaching them so much and they’re giving their name out there.” He actually gives them press, so they’re able to list. But it’s almost like the way the music industry works, like having Nicki Minaj coming on your song. You have to pay Nicki Minaj, you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

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? To me, one thing I like is that I feel like he broke the precious rules of writing. Being an author is usually seen as a high-prestige, low-volume labor of love. You know, it almost never makes money, and if it happens to make money, you kind of got lucky with this one smash hit. The honor is in slaving away at this novel for four years. It 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 who are going to write these books. Let's scale this baby up." No individual... we're hitting singles and doubles, baby! We're not going for home runs necessarily because these will all add up. The cool thing is that this guy almost productized this type of book and treated it more like a businessperson than an artist.

Sam Parr

Well, in reality, what he is... he's an... he was the CEO of the Thompson Agency Group. That's part of a huge corporation. He's basically an advertising executive turned author, and he brings some of that pizzazz to being an author. It has worked really well. So, he's both a business person and an advertising person. Alright, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's easy because I'm going to show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say "I," I mean not my team; I mean I'm the one who actually made it. I've got this company called Hampton. You could check it out at joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders, and one of the ways that we've grown is by creating these surveys. We ask our members certain questions that a lot of people are afraid to ask. So, things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these interesting questions. Then, we'll put it in a survey. I went and made a landing page, so you can check it out at joinhampton.com/wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. The hard part with this is that with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of higher-end customer, sort of like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So, I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates; that's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy. They have this drag-and-drop version of their landing page builder, and it's super simple. I'm not technical, and I'm the one who actually made it. Once it's made, I then shared it on social media, and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. I can then see over the next handful of weeks how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from: it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever. I can actually go and look at it and say, "Oh, well that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that, do less of that." If you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it, but you could check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. Alright, now back to MFM. 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 kind of all the rage right now.

Shaan Puri

I've heard the name, but I haven't read anything. No.

Sam Parr

Alright, so Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL. He served in the Navy SEALs from 1996, I think, to 2016. He started writing these books; the first one was called *The Terminal List*, which came out in 2018. 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. It has tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of reviews and it's rated around 4.5 stars. I read one of them two weeks ago; I think I even suggested that you read it. It's really great. It's basically like the equivalent of a romance novel for a woman; it's like James Bond for a man. The story follows a guy who goes through all these hardships. He's an ex-Navy SEAL, his family gets hurt, and he's got to save them and get revenge—it's all that epic man stuff. However, I started reading his book and I noticed something really interesting: he names products and brands like crazy in his books. I'll give you an example. Here’s an excerpt from one of the books where he talks about reaching inside and removing the 9 millimeter Smith & Wesson M39 from his chest, better known in the SEAL teams as the MK 22 Hush Puppy. Then he goes on to say he grabbed a box of his 9 millimeter Supervel subsonic ammunition that was sitting next to his Yeti cooler. I swear to God, he'll talk about things like...

Shaan Puri

He sipped his Athletic Greens.

Sam Parr

He names brands like crazy. There was one where he was talking about how he needed the best, most durable equipment. So he started using a **Hill People** fanny pack or something like that. I'm like, "What?" And I'm thinking, "Dude, can we carry them?"

Shaan Puri

He put on his headphones and turned on "My First Million," his go-to for all types of entrepreneurial inspiration on Thursdays. And then, dude...

Sam Parr

He went to war and named stuff like crazy. The main character, his name's James Reese. He's like a James Bond type of guy where he does a lot of bad stuff, but you really like him and you kind of want to be like him. He just names all of the products that he uses, and it's crazy. So I was interested. I'm like, "Why is this guy naming all these products?" I go to his website, I Google "Jack Carr brands." I just Google that, and he's got this whole website. I think it's just jackcarr.com, but if you Google "Jack Carr brands," what you'll see is he has jackcarr.com. He creates, do you know that website Uncrate or Gear Patrol? He basically has created his own version of that where he has all these gift guides. 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. In fact, oftentimes on jackcarr.com, he sells his own stuff. One of the main parts in the 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. It's a really high-quality tomahawk. Well, jackcarr.com sells that exact same tomahawk. I thought this was brilliant because when reading these stories, he talks about the cars that he's in. The type of car that he's in is 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 jackcarr.com, and I could buy all of this stuff. It's amazing! I love this strategy.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is brilliant. I never would've thought that product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does, but that makes perfect sense. This is his Feastables, this is his Prime Tomahawk.

Sam Parr

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. If you go to his Amazon page, he even has this cool feature where it lists all of the products in the books... No, I'm confused, I think.

Shaan Puri

This is just like, you know, for example, a lot of people ask us a bunch of questions about "Oh, what do you use for this?" or 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. I know that a bunch of podcasters do this, but it's like small income. It's side income, it's not their main thing. Do you think this guy is... he's gotta be making more off of his books than he is off of this Amazon affiliate thing, right?

Sam Parr

I think he's making more off his books, but my third example is... I'm gonna show someone who's making way more off this side 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 many things, including the cool types of gear they have. You see what they're wearing and 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... Here's the thing, right? I mean...

Shaan Puri

He says, "In his cardigans," as he walked around.

Sam Parr

His home wearing Birkin socks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Does JC Penney like sell really good boxers or something? I could talk about the third one. Steve Rinella, have you heard of Steve Rinella?

Shaan Puri

Who is Steve Rinella?

Sam Parr

Okay, this one is... I would not think you would know who this guy is. He originally starts as a magazine article writer for *Outdoor Magazine*. He's from Michigan, went to school in Montana, and he loves the outdoors. He also loves writing. So, he starts as a freelance journalist, working for *Outdoor Magazine* and *Men's Health*, where he can talk about the outdoors. They pay him a small amount of money. His first book is about foraging. It sounds silly, but it's actually awesome. He wanted to write about how he went and hunted and foraged his own Thanksgiving dinner. In doing that, you find the meaning of life and see the history of food and the outdoors. It's awesome. The second book he wrote is called *American Buffalo*. It's an amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history. If you're not into that, you're not into it, which I don't think you are. But for the people who are...

Shaan Puri

What gave it away? Yeah, this is like... 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. I'm wanting to leave. No, no, no. Thanks foraging for my food? No thanks, I'm out of here. Would you like a free copy of my book? It's signed. Nope.

Sam Parr

Yeah, you're not into this guy, but you're gonna be into what I'm about to explain. So he writes this book, *American Buffalo*. It gets pretty popular. Then he creates this website called MeatEater.com. Have you ever heard of MeatEater?

Shaan Puri

I've heard of MeatEater, yes.

Sam Parr

So, MeatEater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on this thing called the Outdoor Sports Channel, something like that, and it starts working out well. Eventually, Churnin, I think, you know, Churnin, they invest into it. As of 2023, MeatEater is a website where Steve Rinella blogs about the outdoors. He publishes books under the MeatEater name. He has recipe books, more podcasts, and newsletters. They went and bought a bunch of brands; they bought a duck call business and a clothing line. Now, in 2023, they announced that they did $100,000,000 in revenue from selling all of the products on MeatEater.com. His kind of claim to fame, or at least where he gets a lot of the traffic from, is his books and his podcasts. 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 products that he talks about in the books or selling the lifestyle. Those guys are super fascinating.

Shaan Puri

Dude, going from "American Buffalo" - a book about buffalos in America or whatever - to having $100,000,000 in revenue on your business is like... that's not the American dream, but it's *something*. It's someone's dream somewhere.

Sam Parr

It's an American dream.

Shaan Puri

Yes, that is... I can't believe that happened. That's insane! Churnin is so smart, by the way. They took this one thesis of "content to commerce." They were like, "Hey, anybody whose world classic content is not valued properly in the market..." because media is such a bad business. They're valued as a media business, but if you can flip their business model from content to commerce, then this thing is gonna take off. It's gonna take off in the same way that our YouTube subscribers are gonna take off. When you go to YouTube and you say to yourself, "Goddamn, I'm learning a lot from Sam today about meat eaters and about authors and about all these people," you're gonna go to "My First Million" and you're gonna click subscribe because you love us so much. Thank you very much! That's the plug.

Sam Parr

That was good, right?

Shaan Puri

Pretty seamless.

Sam Parr

Right, good job. I think if I had to make a prediction, I think that MeatEater will be worth many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion dollars in the next 10 years.

Shaan Puri

I believe these lifestyle brands... Once you get into it, there is no niche too small with these lifestyle brands. MeatEater is actually pretty big compared to some of these lifestyle brands, like Hodinkee, the luxury watch brand, right? Or there are things for, you know, how people get when they're into biking, they become like...

Sam Parr

Lamer

Shaan Puri

They start dressing like Spongebob... Yeah, spandex and like clip-ons, and then they walk into a coffee shop after like a 90,000-mile ride that morning. Those people are super valuable as an audience, and they need content that's... like, so lame that it's the thing that they care about. So there's like an endless niche of these 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 Rinella, you know, came from that space, which is pretty cool.

Sam Parr

You wanna know the... here's a curveball to the situation: he lives in Brooklyn.

Shaan Puri

It's for real. He lives in 4 Green, Brooklyn.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I well, he lives in Brooklyn. I was doing research on him and he's from Montana. He's like, "I know Montana better than anywhere else in the country."

Shaan Puri

I knew enough to get the hell out of there.

Sam Parr

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 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. I'm not sure if you paused it or if you...

Shaan Puri

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, they might have some food there, but that doesn't mean that's why you go. And so, I don't think making money is the reason to write a book. If you want to make money and you're smart about marketing and all that, there are 100 times easier ways to make money.

Sam Parr

Did you just make up that analogy? That was a really good analogy!

Shaan Puri

I did my morning routine today, so you know the brain is awake. The thing that I've looked into is how much these authors make. So, there's like tiers to this. If it was 10 tiers, the first five tiers, you know, of tier 10 through 5, is just all of them made no money. Actually, maybe tiers, you know, like 10 all the way to number 3, all made no money. But a couple of interesting data points that are in our world. I think the top tier is like the J.K. Rowlings of the world, J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, which is like you actually are mainstream canon, right? You are a part of the meta. You became the equivalent, you know, you're going to get a Netflix show type of thing.

Sam Parr

So that's... Have you ever thought about, by the way, J.K. Rowling and how she invented an entire universe? She made up rules for a game and a language that people refer to now. Like the word "muggle" - I actually just thought of that word.

Shaan Puri

At least twice a week, you know how 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 to see.

Sam Parr

If it's a little bit more...

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's weird to me.

Sam Parr

If that, when I think about that, I'm just like, "That's so odd."

Shaan Puri

No bullshit, what percentage of you is like "might be real"? Is there any part of you that's like, "Well... I'm just a muggle. How would I know?"

Sam Parr

The way that I think about it is... she is *so good* at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it. She's just telling a true story, like, you know what I mean? It's just impossible to think that one brain... like, our brains are each 6 pounds, but that came out of hers. I don't understand how that happened.

Shaan Puri

Dude, I've been at an airport where you have the smart cart thing. I'm walking between, you know, 9 and 10. I don't run at it, but I take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little give in that wall. You know, I'll play... I'll see. So there's 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 off of a single book.

Sam Parr

That's a lot. I would say more like 20.

Shaan Puri

So James Clear, I think... I don't know how many he's sold now. It's 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: - First year: maybe like 100,000 - Next year: 200,000 - Third year: 1,000,000 - Fourth year: 4,000,000 - Fifth year: 15,000,000 And he's just gone up and up and up. I think now he's sold basically... I don't know, 20,000,000 copies or something like that worldwide. And so you don't have to...

Sam Parr

Really? That many? 20,000,000? Yeah.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, his book is like... it's like a runaway train, basically. So I think I'm pretty sure his book has grossed like $150 to $200 million. Probably $150 million worldwide is my guess. I mean, you know, I might be off by $30 million in either direction, but I'm not off by half, you know.

Sam Parr

And he's just a guy in Ohio, I think. Like, he's just a guy. I knew him before Theo. I talked to him before the book, and he was just like a blogger in Ohio. It didn't seem particularly fancy, and then...

Shaan Puri

He doesn't talk to me. Years... I knew him before he stopped talking to me. Yeah, so I think though that's like the next tier. David Goggins' book, I think, has done like $35-40 million in sales, and he did it through Scribe. So he kind of like owns more... owned a...

Sam Parr

Lot of it.

Shaan Puri

Tim Ferriss surprisingly didn't sell that many copies of *The 4-Hour Workweek*. I thought *The 4-Hour Workweek* was, to me, a huge book. It obviously did super, super well, but I think it sold 2,000,000 copies. So, 2,000,000 versus 20,000,000... right? Ten times more for *Atomic Habits*, which is pretty crazy. A fun one is Eric Jorgensen. So, you know Eric Jorgensen? He was like a startup growth guy. He lives in, I don't know where, maybe Kansas City or something like that. Eric Jorgensen wrote *The Almanack of Naval Ravikant*, which is basically him saying, "Yeah, Naval's tweets are the shit. What if I printed them out?" Basically, 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 study Naval's life and write a biography. He didn't create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval's existing wisdom, which was super fragmented, and packaged it up into a really easy-to-use book. And then, he actually gives away the ebook for free, I think, online. I'm pretty sure Eric has never told me this; this is my guesswork based on some back-of-the-envelope stuff. I'm pretty sure Eric has made like $3 to $5 million off of *The Almanack of Naval Ravikant* himself.

Sam Parr

No way! I don't believe that. That is so much money! It really is.

Shaan Puri

82% confident that that's a real number.

Sam Parr

Dude, if you're even half right, I would be... he's.

Shaan Puri

Definitely made more than **$1,000,000**. I think it's like **$3,000,000** to **$5,000,000** off the Navalny Act.

Sam Parr

Okay, well, that's insane. Does Naval get anything?

Shaan Puri

Naval got distribution. I don't think he gives Navalny money from it. I don't know.

Sam Parr

You’re famous, baby! You’re gonna be a superstar. That’s what I’m gonna tell you. I’m gonna create the Sean Shawna Mac.

Shaan Puri

Dude, you said that way too naturally. That was not the first time you said that. Is that what you told Trung?

Sam Parr

That's insane! The concept is ridiculous, right? I mean, it's good.

Shaan Puri

The concept is genius. He took somebody else's genius that was fragmented and thought, "Why would I write my own book? Nobody wants to read the Eric Jorgensen book." But a lot of people want to read the Naval book. Naval is kind of open source with it. He has said this many times: "The best thing you could do is let other people reshare your ideas." They're not stealing your ideas; they're really propagating your ideas. It's one of the highest compliments and one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution. So, you know, I think he was happy that Eric put in a lot of effort into it. It took him like a year.

Sam Parr

Not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up with the content.

Shaan Puri

Well, Naval has made $500,000,000 in his life, so I think he's done fine too, right? That's the whole idea.

Sam Parr

No, and Eric, by the way, I think Eric's now the CEO of Scribe, the company that did David Goggins' book. So, and the company that I think you might be using.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, not yet. But, okay, so another crazy story. I've never heard of this book, and I doubt you have either. Are you a sci-fi reader?

Sam Parr

Not exactly. Only like the most famous ones.

Shaan Puri

So, have you ever heard...?

Sam Parr

Of this book called *Wool*, no talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison.

Shaan Puri

You know.

Sam Parr

What I mean...

Shaan Puri

It's going very far. The conversation's got a lot of dead ends.

Sam Parr

That's a hard yes.

Shaan Puri

Well, basically, here's the idea. I was looking at the charts and I saw all of the *Game of Thrones* books. 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 are five of his books, and there was one book on top of it called *Wool*. I was like, "I have never heard of this book. What is this book?" So, I went and researched it. The author, this guy Hugh Howey, which sounds like a fake name—might be, I don't know—his origin story is that he's living in North Carolina. He's broke and 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." Basically, at some point, he's unemployed and he's like, "You know what? I'm going to write a book." His wife is kind of supporting the household, and he's like, "I'm going to write a book." She's like, "Okay, honey, great. Sure, you don't want to get out there with the old resume?" And he's like, "No, no, I'm going to write a sci-fi book." The idea was something like, "What if aliens and this flying car?" or whatever. I don't know what it was—some crazy idea.

Sam Parr

Heh, this conversation could go way different. It'd be like, "Hey, by the way, I know that you love having these action figures in the plastic still, but can we make a little bit of room for the baby?"

Shaan Puri

"Oh, you're gonna write a book? I'm gonna go find another husband." So yeah, he puts the book out. He sells less than $1,000 of the book. Okay, so first try at it failed. Most people would obviously quit.

Sam Parr

Strike 1.

Shaan Puri

He's like, "Oh, I'm just getting warmed up." He said, "That was good, but I can do better." And he still has no job. He needs to start, you know, paying the bills a little bit. I love this part of the story: he gets a job, but he's trying to find not the highest paying job. He's looking for 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 to 30 hours a week. It pays only $10 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 he can spend all of his free time doing this. He also doesn't want a good job that'll make it hard to quit later because he wants to be an author. He's not going to trap himself in a job that's hard to leave. Then he changes his schedule. He's like, "I'm going to wake up at 2 AM every day. I'm going to write before my job, during my lunch break, and after dinner." It became a compulsion for him. In three weeks, he writes this book. Three weeks! So, just like James Patterson, who wasn't precious about the whole idea of writing books, this guy was like, "Three weeks, not three years." So, he bangs out this book, puts it on Amazon for 99 cents, and sells like 1,000 copies. He's like, "Boom! $1,000. Alright, love it!" And he's like, you know, his small reader base is kind of like YC. They say you want a small number of people. You'd rather have 1,000 people that love you than 100,000 people that just kind of like you. So, he had 1,000 people that really loved the book, and they were like, "Dude, you gotta write a sequel." So, the very next month, before they get cold, he writes a sequel.

Sam Parr

By the way, *Wool* is 530 pages. He did that in 3 weeks.

Shaan Puri

So then he writes a sequel a month later, or like, you know, two months later, whatever it is, and he sells 3,000 copies of that one. He's like, "Alright, I gotta keep going." So he writes two more and sells 10,000 copies. Finally, he puts out the collection of all five of the books that he's written in a very short period of time. In the first month, he sells 23,000 copies of the set, and now he's selling it for $6 instead of 99¢. He makes basically $140,000 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% or maybe 15% of it. All of a sudden, the months roll by, and he's now sold 500,000 books before you know it, which is a significant amount of books to sell. That's like, you know, you're in the top, top percentage of authors at that stage. He's getting approached by publishers, and they're like, "Okay, what's the deal?" They're like, "We'll give you $250,000." He's like, "I'm already making $250,000." They're like, "Okay, we'll give you more money." He's like, "Why would I take some money today and give up all my upside?" They're like, "Well, we can help you get distribution." He's like, "I've sold 500,000 copies myself." They're like, "How the hell did you do that?" His strategy, his guerrilla tactics to get his book out there, were, "Alright, I need to influence the influencers." So he sent copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads—not like influencers, but book influencers, so people who review books at Goodreads, like high-ranking Goodreads people. Then he's like, "Alright, that's good. Next step." He goes on Reddit and does an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for 12 hours. So he's just like, "I'm just gonna soak up all the Reddit love for this day." After that, he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art, whereas most authors are pretty precious about their intellectual property. They try to take down anybody who writes 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." He would incentivize people to design alternative book covers for it, so now their little audience, that artist's audience, would see them designing a book cover for this book called *Wool*, which was pretty cool. He picks 30 of the die-hard readers and says, "Okay, how do I get my die-hards to help me and become super evangelists?" So he made them beta readers. Again, everybody's so precious; they keep everything under lock and key. He took his superfans and was like, "You're gonna be readers of the early editions of new books before they come out." He did a bunch of community-building stuff—essentially things that don't really scale. Each one individually wasn't a game changer, but if you add up that and the 20 other things that he did, you could see how he started turning the crank. At the beginning, the crank is pretty hard to turn, but eventually, if you power through that first part of the crank, it'll start to move on its own. That's basically what happened for this guy. Then someone comes up to him and says, "Look, I don't think you should sell your book rights, but I do think you should sell your film rights. You're not gonna make a film yourself." So he sold his film rights and kept his book rights as an independent person for a while. I think maybe he sold it now; I'm not sure. He also met George R.R. Martin once. He went to a book signing for George R.R. Martin and said, "Hey George, it's me, Hugh Howey." The guy's like, "Never heard of you." He's like, "I'm the number 6 guy on the sci-fi list; it's your five books and I'm number 6." George R.R. Martin signed his book and said, "To number 6, keep trying." Then a couple of months later, he actually hit number 1. So it's just a pretty cool story of a self-published author who really made it happen—an entrepreneurial hustle story.

Sam Parr

That's a great story. Do you use Goodreads? Do you know anything about Goodreads?

Shaan Puri

I've used Goodreads. Yeah, I met the founders of Goodreads.

Sam Parr

And I was like, "Yeah, Otis Chandler."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they're really cool people. Really nice people. It's a cool product, but it's old now. It's been around for a long time.

Sam Parr

But it's got a great... I can tell you a little bit about Goodreads. This guy, Hugh Howey, he has... So, I use Goodreads religiously. It's where my library is; I keep everything there. This guy has 750,000 ratings, which is huge. If you're in the hundreds of thousands of ratings and you have over a 4-star review, you're like the best of the best. He has a 4.15 review out of 5 for almost a million reviews. It's amazing!

Shaan Puri

Yeah, and it 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 like an author would.

Sam Parr

He's like the blue-collar version of sci-fi. This guy's like the Larry Bird of sci-fi.

Shaan Puri

You know what I mean? Like, from French Lick, Indiana. Yeah, dude, how insane is it that Larry Bird was so amazing and would just literally drink beers on the bus to the game? People used to smoke cigarettes at halftime of those games. Isn't that absolutely insane? Now, LeBron James sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber, but the guy who was basically LeBron James of his time was literally just downing Bud Lights after games.

Sam Parr

And he was like so skinny and so pale, had the worst haircut, the shortest shorts, and... yeah, the best mustache. But he kind of looked like a human version of Big Bird, and he just *killed* it. He's considered one of the top five. Yeah, that guy's amazing.

Shaan Puri

He... he...

Sam Parr

He gives the weirdos hope. This story is amazing. Hugh Holly, that's a good story. Do you want to do one or two more things?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, my shill: use Shepard. 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 Shepard. How's that?

Sam Parr

Alright, there, that's perfect.

Shaan Puri

Thrilled in that chill, but I kept it short.

Sam Parr

Do you have one more thing?

Shaan Puri

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 discuss.

Sam Parr

Andrew Wilkinson put out this tweet where he said: > We partnered 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.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it's... what about just something completely different? It's just a social media app. This is a network; it's a photo-sharing app that they...

Sam Parr

Just created some, like, stupid game. It's like they recreated Snake from Nokia.

Shaan Puri

That's so funny.

Sam Parr

I don't know.

Shaan Puri

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 lots of habits apps, but they're not made by James Clear, so I think this is like a no-brainer idea.

Sam Parr

They could just create anything that was a habit, like just some supplement or drug. Like, "I'm gonna get you addicted. We're gonna make this a habit."

Shaan Puri

Watch this.

Sam Parr

We're gonna call it **crack**.

Shaan Puri

So, I think it's a genius idea by him, and maybe a 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; he launched the yerba mate drink with Huberman, which I think is also a genius idea. What Andrew is doing now is the new playbook of what Churnan did. Remember I was saying like Churnan's playbook with the content to commerce? They did it with Barstool, they did it with Eater, and they did it with a bunch of these 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. He's partnering with these experts and authorities, and he's like, "Look, I already have Metalab that can do the design and 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, and you just have to promote it." It's a perfect fit with what you do. I think it's just 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 he likes and respects. He's got a cool cocktail story of being like, "Oh yeah, we built the James Clear app, we did the Huberman drink, we did the whatever." They've done a bunch of these apps now. So, I just think it's an awesome win all around. I'm really happy for him.

Sam Parr

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. Yeah, like it's *significantly* cooler. It won't make as much money, but it's way cooler... like to be able to...

Shaan Puri

I think this thing's gonna make a lot of money. Why do you think this is not gonna make money?

Sam Parr

Well, I just think that his other stuff does so much better. If I had to guess, I think the...

Shaan Puri

The can do like 100 of millions on meditation. I'm pretty sure that you can get like $30 to $40 million of ARR on a habit app.

Sam Parr

I think maybe you can, but Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like the 1,000th most popular agency, and they also make many, many tens of millions of dollars a year in profit.

Shaan Puri

No, no. If you add them all up, they do, but each individually does not. Right? Like if...

Sam Parr

You add them all up. They do his... yeah, but his agency.

Shaan Puri

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, those are going to add up to be much bigger. The Huberman drink is a brilliant idea; that is an absolutely brilliant idea. The James Clear app—he's getting the right type of things. You don't necessarily want the A-list celebrity because for every George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds that you get who has a hit, there are tons of others who don't really care about promoting it. They're too busy, and it's not a fit. They don't have a direct relationship with their audience because they're actually in Hollywood; they don't have a direct channel through social media. The people that he's finding are meaningful for them. It's a perfect fit; they have a direct relationship with their audience, and they have love from their audience. It's not just people who are fans of them; it's people who have deep trust in them. I think that he is picking the right influencers for these shows. 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 $300 million prize.

Sam Parr

I guess we'll have to have him on and ask him about it. He's like a spider-man, or like an octopus. He has his tentacles all over the place. I see this and I'm like, "How the fuck did you weasel your way into that thing?" He just... he knows everything. Well, not knows everything, he knows *everyone*. I don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things. I'll be like, "Check your email," hey.

Shaan Puri

Where's our email? We're influencers, Andrew. Where are you at? Well, where's our offer?

Sam Parr

He also plays dumb with me all the time. I'd probably be like, "Hey, have you heard of this guy named Huberman? I've been loving his podcast." And Wilkinson will be like, "Yeah, I think it's a nice podcast. I also enjoy it." Then weeks later, I'll be like, "Yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company 18 months ago." I'm like, "Okay..." He does that kind of on a regular basis with me where I'll be like, "Have you heard of this thing? It's kinda neat." And he'll be like, "Yeah, I agree. That is neat."

Shaan Puri

He is a super networker. He is absolutely an incredible networker. I admire his networking skills. 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's my hero. Years later, I'm having dinner with Charlie Munger, and he's offering me, you know, X, Y, Z. It's like he is really able to, when he puts his mind to it, meet who he wants to meet. He is able to make that happen. 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 just begging for, 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.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's fascinating in the way that he's able to... But he also turns a weird networking opportunity into 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."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, this is awesome, right? High five! Yeah, that's like where my brain is.

Sam Parr

Stops. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

What a guy.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he is. Yeah, that's like, I'm literally exactly how I am.

Shaan Puri

You know, *Dumb and Dumber*, when he's walking out of the 7-Eleven, he's like, "Big gulps, yeah! Alright, catch you later." That's like me at every networking event.

Sam Parr

Same. That's exactly how I am. Where it starts and ends, right there. It's just like a passing memory. And yes, Andrew somehow makes it into money and turns it into dollars. I don't know how he does it, but he's very good at it.

Shaan Puri

Well, he told one story on the podcast where he was like, "I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert. I met Dan Gilbert, and then they had this challenge with this... or he had a product." I have a design agency, so we just made him a website for free. That was really nice because he'll use that as his currency to, you know, [say] "Hey, I think you're awesome and we did this thing. This is awesome, right?" Oh, it's because my agency's awesome, because I'm awesome. He just uses it to sort of open the door. He'll put in the work, basically. And he'd be like, "Oh, whenever you're free, I'll fly there and let's... you know, I'll make the effort to come make this happen."

Sam Parr

And is it to have an agency? Do you then have like an agency or like a sick house? It's like, "Oh, you're in town, come stay in my home." And then, right? You know what I mean? Like, you have to have some awesome exchange.

Shaan Puri

Do that anytime someone's trapped. I'm like, "Oh, do you want to stay in my house?" and I just rent an Airbnb that they can stay in. They're just absolutely indebted to me.

Sam Parr

Well, it's kind of a good tactic. Chris Sacca said that he had this house in Truckee, and you know, he would like... "lure" (sounds weirder than it actually is, right?) He would lure these interesting founders to his house in Truckee. "Yeah, come to my [house]," he'd say.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I got AWS credits. Come over.

Sam Parr

And he would get these guys to come up and become friends with them. It was like, they're like, "Well, I would love to hang out in Truckee," and just so happens you have a house. And that's how we became friends with them. But maybe having a...

Shaan Puri

A great line about that: I guess when I lived in San Francisco, I was just constantly getting meeting requests or event invitations. It was a good problem to have, but it was still a problem. He said, "I was playing defense. I was just reacting to whatever was going on." When he moved to Truckee, he played offense. He figured out who he actually wanted to spend time with and then proactively planned and set it up. For example, he invited Travis Kalanick to come for the weekend and stay with him. He said, "We're not going to just get coffee; we're going to hang out for a weekend." He emphasized that for every 50 coffee meetings, doing just one weekend is so much more powerful than 50 coffee meetings. So, they hung out, spent time together, met his family, chilled in the hot tub, and brainstormed in the morning. Later that evening, a new idea would come up, and he was just very helpful for these people. That's how he did his Uber investment. He did the same thing with the founder of Instagram. He invited Kevin Systrom to come stay at his place in Truckee, and he stayed there for whatever it was—a few days or a week. By the end of that time, they were kind of bonded. I think that was one of the cool things Korsaka did, and that's definitely one of them.

Sam Parr

I don't know if a three-bedroom place in the suburbs is going to do the trick. I think both of us are going to have to step it up.

Shaan Puri

Can I interest you in Walnut Creek? Yeah, we'll go the same way. We'll come back.

Sam Parr

Like, the only appeal you have is marble countertops? I got marble countertops. Like, alright, is that it? Is that the pod?

Shaan Puri

That's the pod.