Sam walks through five unconventional ways authors make money beyond selling books — Ryan Holiday’s coin business, James Patterson’s co-author factory, Jack Carr’s affiliate gear site, Steve Rinella’s $100M MeatEater empire, and Hugh Howey’s self-publishing hustle. The conversation expands into James Clear’s habits app, Andrew Wilkinson’s influencer partnership playbook, and a digression on Chris Sacca’s Truckee networking strategy.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Ryan Holiday and the Daily Stoic Coin Empire [00:00:00]
Sam: All right, we’re live. Shaan, I’ve got a few stories — it starts with a person I hung out with the other day. You know Ryan Holiday, right? The author?
Shaan: Of course. He came on the pod, he’s awesome.
Sam: I was hanging out with him the other day and he said something — he’s actually said this on the podcast, I think he’s been on twice — he made this funny comment. He’s like, “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.”
Shaan: Ha.
Sam: Ryan has sold a ton of books, we know that for sure. But he also mentioned to me that his other properties — like the Daily Stoic, which is his daily newsletter — has made more money for him than selling books. Ryan Holiday wrote a book on stoicism, he’s written six or seven now, but he has this other property called the Daily Stoic where they sell coins and merch and ads. He’s told me that has made more money for him than selling books. Which is crazy, because that’s what he’s known as — as an author.
So what I wanted to talk about today: I went down this huge rabbit hole and found ways that authors are making money other than just writing a book.
Shaan: You got to tell the coin thing, because the coin thing is the perfect simple example of this.
Sam: I don’t know what he confirmed exactly, but explain the coin thing — I think it’s the perfect simple example of an author making money not off their book.
Shaan: Ryan Holiday’s whole shtick is stoicism. It’s a philosophy that’s fairly useful — basically how to deal with hardship in your daily life. And for some reason he decided to come up with a coin. It’s a coin that in Latin says something like “you’re going to die” or “today is one of your last days alive” — some inspirational thing, but in Latin. I’m not exactly sure what it says.
A coin is a great product to sell because it costs $25, it costs like a dollar to make, ships for whatever a stamp costs — 80 cents — there are no returns, there are 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 said tens of thousands of coins, which is millions and millions of dollars.
Sam: That’s what he said. He also said he works with some mint in the United States — one of the old famous coin mints — and he was their biggest customer. He’s minting more of his Memento Mori coins than they are anything else.
That was surprising to me. I had an inkling, and then he kind of revealed that it’s true. He made more money not from selling books. So I went down this rabbit hole and I want to show you three people who are making significantly more money than you’d think, doing it in ways other than just writing one book and keeping whatever 10% of the revenue.
James Patterson: The Co-Author Factory [00:06:00]
Sam: All right, so we’re going to start with the first one. Shaan, do you know who James Patterson is?
Shaan: I do not know who James Patterson is. Who is James Patterson? A former baseball player?
Sam: You are very smart, you’re a very high-IQ person — the fact that you don’t know some of the most basic things about pop culture, it’s beyond pop culture at this point. These are things you see all over bookstores. It shocks me.
Shaan: Is he the vampire in Twilight? Yeah, the boyfriend?
Sam: No. Okay, your second guess was a lot further away from the first. So listen to this. Have you ever heard of the Stratemeyer Syndicate?
Shaan: Of course not. If I haven’t heard of James Patterson, I also probably haven’t heard of the Stratemeyer Syndicate.
Sam: Have you heard of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys?
Shaan: I know who those are — they write murder mysteries, right? For kids or something?
Sam: Yeah. They’re the main characters in murder mystery novels. So here’s how it starts. In the 1930s there was this thing called the Stratemeyer Syndicate. This one guy came up with this company in the ’30s where he was like, “Not a lot of people are writing children’s books — I’m going to go start publishing children’s books.” Then he said, “I need to write more books but I don’t feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these artists-slash-authors who are just a pain to deal with. All I care about is making kind of cookie-cutter novels that children like.” So what he did was, he came up with these characters — Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys — and had a variety of other series. He had authors write these books, but he’d say it was written by the same author every single time. He wasn’t going to give each person their little bit of fame — he’d pay them a fair rate and they’d follow his rules, and maybe eventually they’d become a famous author, but for now they just follow his rules. And that’s what he did.
At one point every kid in America could name Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.
Shaan: Stratemeyer Syndicate — what a name. Sorry, what is the Syndicate exactly? Is it the set of novels?
Sam: The Syndicate was the name of his company. He called it a syndicate, which sounds like a drug syndicate, something illegal, but it was just the name of his legitimate company. He did a very bad job of naming it — it’d be like naming a children’s book company “Warm Candy and Vans” or something. Kind of weird. But basically he came up with these rules: 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 one-page summary of what happened in the previous books. He just had this outline of how to make hits.
Fast forward 70 years. There’s this guy named James Patterson. At this point he’s 75 years old. He started in advertising in New York at the J. Walter Thompson advertising firm — huge firm. But on the side, in his late 20s and early 30s, he starts writing novels. They do okay, not huge hits, but he keeps at it. He’s a workaholic. Eventually at age 47 he retires from advertising and goes all in on publishing these novels. He’s been doing it now for about 20 years and he’s finally starting to see success.
The whole point of his novels is they’re thrillers — some people might say they’re kind of formulaic thrillers. But people love him. At this point he’s sold something like 500 million copies of his books, and at one point he accounted for 6% of all hardcover novels sold in America. The guy’s a hitmaker.
Shaan: How does a guy do 30 books a year? That’s ridiculous at any age — it’s more ridiculous in your 70s. More than a book every two weeks.
Sam: Here’s how he does it. He has co-authors. And a little secret with James Patterson — he’s only actually written about 20% of the books his name is credited to. The way he does it: he has a team of co-authors, pays them out of his own pocket, comes up with a framework, they flesh it out, he reviews it almost like a movie script — writes notes in the margins, gives it back, they flesh it out again. At this point he’s done it so much that you’ll see James Patterson with Dolly Parton, James Patterson with Bill Clinton, and then the co-author who’s actually doing the work is listed below.
This has been so successful that at this point he’s made something like $800 million.
Shaan: What? Yes?
Sam: He owns three or four homes, each worth $40 million. He’s donated something like $50 million to small bookstores according to his website. I’m shocked you haven’t heard of James Patterson.
Shaan: I think I’ve seen the name. What’s his most famous book?
Sam: I don’t even know the names of his books. He’s almost like — do you know Tom Clancy?
Shaan: Yes.
Sam: He’s like Tom Clancy. You know what I mean — “a Tom Clancy novel” means a spy novel. You know the brand without knowing the title.
Shaan: Let me ask you a question. Did he start out writing all his books, then over the years thought “how do I scale this?” and discovered co-authors? Or was this the plan from the beginning?
Sam: Over the last 20 years that he’s been killing it, I don’t think individual books were consistently bestsellers. However, he’s been a bestselling author for many decades if you add up all his titles. He learned early on that he didn’t know if any one book was going to be a hit, so he’d just make a ton of them. He says for the last 40 years he’s worked something like 70 hours a week. He discovered early in his career: we’re going to be about quantity.
At this point Jim Patterson is a face, a real person, but it’s almost like a brand. He gets these authors to come under his brand. He makes jokes but says things like, “They should pay me to be a co-author because I’m teaching them so much and they’re getting their name out there.”
It’s almost like the music industry — having Nicki Minaj on your song. You have to pay Nicki Minaj to co-sign you.
Shaan: I like that. That’s the first one you went to — Nicki Minaj.
Sam: So what do you like about this guy?
Shaan: One thing I like is he broke the precious rules of what it means to be an author. Being an author is usually high prestige, low volume, a labor of love — it almost never makes money, and if it does you kind of got lucky with one smash hit. The honor is in slaving away at a novel for four years. He broke all those rules. He’s like, “Cool, let’s write books people want to read. Let’s make it formulaic. Let’s scale this up. No individual home runs — we’re hitting singles and doubles. They’ll all add up.”
And it sounds like he productized this type of book and treated it more like a business than an art.
Sam: In reality, he was the CEO of the J. Walter Thompson Group — part of a huge corporation. He’s basically an advertising executive turned author, and he brought that advertising mindset to publishing.
Jack Carr: Product Placement in Novels [00:20:00]
Sam: Have you seen these books lately written by this guy named Jack Carr? It’s kind of all the rage right now.
Shaan: I’ve heard the name but I haven’t read anything.
Sam: Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL. He served from 1996 to 2016 and started writing these books — the first one was called The Terminal List, came out in 2018. If you go look at it on Amazon, it’s one of the highest reviewed books I’ve ever seen given the quantity of reviews. 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 even suggested you read it. It’s really great. It’s basically like the equivalent of a romance novel for women — it’s James Bond for men. The story of a guy who’s an ex-Navy SEAL, his family gets hurt, he’s got to save them, get revenge, all that epic man stuff.
However, I started reading his book and I noticed something really interesting. He names products and brands like crazy. I’ll give you an example: “He reached inside and removed the 9mm Smith & Wesson M39 from his chest, better known in the SEAL Teams as the MK22 hush puppy.” Then he grabs a box of 9mm subsonic ammunition sitting next to his Yeti cooler. He’ll mention Athletic Greens. There’s a point where they need the best most durable equipment so they’re using a Hill People Gear fanny pack. He names stuff like crazy.
The main character’s name is James Reece — he’s a James Bond type of guy where he does a lot of bad stuff but you really like him and kind of want to be like him. He just names all the products he uses.
Shaan: I love this.
Sam: So I was interested — why is this guy naming all these products? I go to his website, I Google “Jack Carr brands.” He’s got this whole website — Jack Carr dot com — and he basically creates his own version of Gear Patrol, where he has all these gift guides: “Here’s all the gear that James Reece used in this book.” He has beautiful guides on his website. And if you hover over them, they’re affiliate links. And oftentimes on Jack Carr dot com he sells his own stuff.
One of the main parts in the first book I read — there’s this fancy tomahawk he uses to kill people, a really high-quality one. JackCarr.com sells that exact same tomahawk.
I thought this was brilliant. When reading these stories, he talks about the cars his character drives, the gear he uses — I want all this stuff because James Reece is so cool. All I have to do is go to JackCarr.com and I can buy all of it.
Shaan: Yeah, this is brilliant. I never would have thought product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does. But that makes perfect sense.
Sam: This is his Fabled tomahawk — it’s awesome. And by the way, I was just giving him a little grief — 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 that lists all the products in the books.
Shaan: It’s like a lot of podcasters do this, but it’s a small income stream — not their main thing. Do you think he’s making more off his books than off the affiliate stuff?
Sam: I think he’s making more off his books. But my third example is someone who’s making way more off the side thing. And I think there’s a world where Jack Carr makes way more off the product business than the original thing.
Shaan: When you think of a Navy SEAL you think of, among other things, the cool gear they use. You want to have that thing. It’s like cosplaying to be a tough guy.
Sam: As he walked around his home in his cardigan —
Shaan: Yeah, does JCPenney sell really good boxers or something?
Steve Rinella: MeatEater’s $100M Content-to-Commerce Playbook [00:28:00]
Sam: Have you heard of Steve Rinella?
Shaan: Three for three — no.
Sam: Okay, I wouldn’t think you would. So he originally starts as a magazine writer for Outdoor magazine. He’s from Michigan, went to school in Montana. He loves the outdoors and he loves writing. He starts as a freelance journalist — Outdoor magazine, Men’s Health — places where he can talk about the outdoors.
His first book is about foraging. He wanted to write about how he went and hunted and foraged his own Thanksgiving dinner, and in doing that you find the meaning of life and see the history of food. The second book he did is called American Buffalo — an amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history.
Shaan: My body language right now is the body language of a girl who’s about to get unwantedly danced on at a club. No thanks — foraging for my food? I’m out of here.
Sam: Would you like a free signed copy of my book?
Shaan: Nope.
Sam: You’re not into this guy. But you’re going to be into what I’m about to explain. So he writes American Buffalo, it gets pretty popular. Then he creates this website called MeatEater. Have you heard of MeatEater?
Shaan: I have heard of MeatEater, yes.
Sam: MeatEater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on the outdoor sports channel, it starts working out well. Eventually Chernin — you know Chernin? — they invest in it. In 2023, MeatEater is a website where Steve Rinella blogs about the outdoors, he publishes books under the MeatEater name, recipe books, podcasts, newsletters. But they went and bought a bunch of brands. They bought a duck call business, they bought a clothing line. In 2023 they announced they did $100 million in revenue from selling all the products on MeatEater.com — of which his books and podcasts are what drive the traffic.
This is an example of a guy who has made significantly more — or will make significantly more in enterprise value — from selling the products and lifestyle he talks about in his books than from the books themselves.
Shaan: Going from American Buffalo — a book about buffalo in America — to $100 million in revenue on your business. That’s someone’s American dream.
Sam: That’s insane. Chernin is so smart. They took this one thesis of content-to-commerce: “Hey, anybody who’s a world-class content creator isn’t valued properly in the market because media is such a bad business that they’re valued as a media business. But if you can flip their business model from content to commerce, this thing is going to take off.”
Shaan: I think MeatEater will be worth many hundreds of millions — maybe even a billion dollars — in the next ten years. These lifestyle brands, once you get them going, there’s no niche too small. MeatEater is actually pretty big compared to some. There’s the Hinck watch brand — luxury watches only. Or like, you know how people who get into biking start dressing like SpongeBob in spandex and clipping into coffee shops after a 90-mile ride? Those people are super valuable as an audience and they need content that’s laser-focused on that one thing they care about. There’s an endless niche of really hyper-specific lifestyle content brands that can be built — you just have to come from that space.
Sam: Here’s a curveball. He lives in Brooklyn.
Shaan: For real?
Sam: He lives in Brooklyn. I was doing research on him and he’s like, “I know Montana better than anyone else in the country — I know enough to know I should get the hell out of there.”
Shaan: Yeah, and now he lives in Brooklyn.
Sam: Kind of weird. But anyway, those are my three examples of strange ways these authors are making a lot of money. Shaan, I know you were thinking about becoming an author — does this change your mind? I think you’ve paused it?
Shaan: Becoming an author to make money is like saying, “I was hungry so I went to church.” Just because there’s some food there doesn’t mean that’s why you go. If you want to make money and you’re smart about marketing, there’s a hundred easier ways to do it.
Sam: Did you just make that up?
Shaan: That was a really good analogy.
Sam: I did my morning routine today, so the brain is awake.
How Much Do Authors Actually Make? [00:38:00]
Sam: The thing I’ve looked into is how much these authors actually make. There are tiers. Tiers 10 through 3 — basically all of them made no money. A couple of interesting data points from our world.
The top tier is the JK Rowlings and James Pattersons — you are mainstream canon. You’re a part of the culture. You’re going to get a Netflix show.
Shaan: Have you ever thought about JK Rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to a game, a language, that people refer to now? The word “muggle” — she just thought of that word. At least twice a week, I think about Diagon Alley, I think about Hogwarts. Someone made that up. That’s so odd to me.
Sam: What percent of you thinks it might be real? Is any part of you like, “Well, I’m just a muggle, how would I know?”
Shaan: The way 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. It’s impossible to think one brain — our brains each weigh six pounds — but that came out of hers.
Sam: Dude, I’ve been at an airport where it’s like you have the smart cart thing, and I’m walking between Gates 9 and 10, and I don’t run at it but I’ll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there’s a little give in that wall.
Shaan: God tier. Then there’s the James Clear, Atomic Habits, David Goggins, Mark Manson tier. I think those guys have cleared like $30 to $50 million off a single book.
Sam: More like $20 million. James Clear — I don’t know how many copies he’s sold now, but it’s escalating. He tweeted this recently: first year maybe 100,000 copies, next year 200,000, third year a million, fourth year 4 million, fifth year 15 million. Just going up and up. I think he’s sold something like 20 million copies worldwide.
Shaan: No way.
Sam: Really. His book is like a runaway train. I think it’s grossed like $150 million worldwide. I might be off by $30 million in either direction but I’m not off by half. He’s just a guy in Ohio. I talked to him before the book — he was just a blogger in Ohio, didn’t seem particularly fancy.
Shaan: Yeah, I knew him before he stopped talking to me.
Sam: David Goggins — his book has done like $35 to $40 million in sales and he did it through Scribe, so he owns more of that. Tim Ferriss surprisingly didn’t sell that many copies of The 4-Hour Workweek. I thought it was a huge book — it obviously did super well — but I think it sold two million copies. Two million versus 20 million for Atomic Habits is a 10x difference. Pretty crazy.
A fun one is Eric Jorgenson. You know Eric Jorgenson?
Shaan: Yeah.
Sam: He was a startup growth guy, lives in Kansas City or somewhere like that. Eric Jorgenson wrote The Navalmanac, which was basically — Naval’s tweets are amazing, what if I just packaged them up? Obviously he did more than that, but the core idea was he didn’t write the book himself, didn’t study Naval’s life and write a biography, didn’t create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval’s existing wisdom, which was super fragmented, and packaged it up into an easy-to-use book. He gives away the ebook for free online, I think.
My back-of-the-envelope guess — and Eric’s never told me this — is that Eric has made like $3 to $5 million off the Navalmanac himself.
Shaan: No way. I don’t believe that. That is so much money.
Sam: 82% confident that’s a real number. He’s definitely made more than a million.
Shaan: If you’re even half right, that’s insane.
Sam: Does Naval get anything?
Shaan: Naval got distribution. I don’t think Eric gives Naval any money from it.
Sam: The concept is genius. He took somebody else’s genius that was fragmented and packaged it up. Nobody wants to read an Eric Jorgenson book, but a lot of people want to read a Naval book. Naval is kind of open source with it — he’s said this many times: the best thing you can do is let other people reshare your ideas. They’re not stealing your ideas, they’re propagating them. It’s one of the highest compliments and one of the best distribution strategies.
Eric put a lot of effort into it — not nearly as much as the guy who actually came up with the content. But Naval’s made $500 million in his life, so he’s done fine.
Shaan: Eric by the way is now the CEO of Scribe — the company that did David Goggins’ book.
Sam: And the company I might be using.
Hugh Howey: The Self-Publishing Blue-Collar Sci-Fi Success [00:53:00]
Sam: Have you ever heard of this book called Wool?
Shaan: No. Talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison — it’s not going very far. That conversation’s got a lot of dead ends.
Sam: I was looking at the charts and saw all the Game of Thrones books — A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin, George R.R. Martin, George R.R. Martin — and there was one book on top of all of them called Wool. I’d never heard of it. So I researched it.
The author is this guy named Hugh Howey — which sounds like a fake name, might be — and his origin story is he’s living in North Carolina, he’s broke, doing odd jobs, roofing gigs, whatever. At some point he’s unemployed and tells his wife he’s going to write a book. She’s kind of supporting the household. She’s like, “Okay, honey. You don’t want to get out there with the resume?” He’s like, “No, I’m going to write a sci-fi book.”
He puts the book out. He sells less than $1,000 worth. First try, it fails. Most people would quit. Strike one. He’s like, “I’m just getting warmed up. I can do better.”
He still has no job, needs to start paying some bills. So here’s the part I love — he doesn’t go looking for the highest-paying job. He’s trying to find a job that will make a minimum amount of money with the maximum amount of free hours. He ends up finding a job he could do for about 25-30 hours a week, pays only $10 an hour, but there’s a lot of downtime where he’s just sitting there doing nothing — he can be writing during that time. And it’s only 30 hours a week so he can spend all his free time writing. He also didn’t want a good job that would be hard to quit later, because he was going to be an author and he wasn’t going to trap himself.
Then he changes his schedule. He’s going to wake up at 2 AM every day and write before his job, write during his lunch break, write after dinner. It became a compulsion. In three weeks he writes this book — Wool. Three weeks. Just like James Patterson wasn’t precious about the whole idea of writing books.
He puts it on Amazon for 99 cents and sells like 1,000 copies. He’s like, “Boom. A thousand bucks.” But like Wiz Khalifa says — you want a small number of people who love you rather than a million people who kind of like you. He had a thousand people who really loved the book, and they said, “Dude, write a sequel.”
So the very next month he writes a sequel. By the way, Wool is 530 pages — he did that in three weeks. Then a couple months later he writes another and sells 3,000 copies. He’s like, “All right, keep going.” He writes two more and sells 10,000 copies. Finally he puts out the full collection — all five books — and the first month he sells 23,000 copies of the set, now at $6 or $7.99. He makes basically $140,000 in gross revenue that month, and he’s self-publishing the whole thing, keeping 70% of it — whereas a normal author keeps maybe 10-15%.
All of a sudden he’s sold 500,000 books. Publishers are approaching him — “We’ll give you $250,000.” He’s like, “I’m already making $250,000.” They’re like, “We’ll give you more.” He’s like, “Why would I take some money today and give up all my upside?” They’re like, “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?”
Here’s his strategy — his guerrilla tactics to get the book out there. He needed to influence the influencers. So he sent copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers on Goodreads — not like celebrity influencers, but book influencers, people who were high-ranked on Goodreads. Then he does an AMA on Reddit for 12 hours. Then he starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art — whereas most authors are precious about their IP and try to take down anyone who writes variations, he said, “No, go crazy. I built the universe, you guys fill up all the stories.” He would incentivize people to design alternative book covers.
He picked 30 die-hard readers and made them beta readers. Again, most authors keep everything under lock and key — he took his super fans and said, “You’re going to read early editions of new books before they come out.” He did a bunch of community building — stuff that doesn’t really scale individually, but if you add up that and 20 other things like it, you can see how he turned the crank. The crank is hard to turn at the beginning, but eventually if you power through that first part it starts to move on its own.
Then someone came to him and said, “Look, I don’t think you should sell your book rights, but you should sell your film rights — you’re not going to make a film yourself.” So he sold the film rights and kept his book rights as an independent. And here’s the great capper — he went to a George R.R. Martin book signing. He’s like, “Hey George, it’s me, Hugh Howey.” And Martin’s like, “Never heard of you.” He’s like, “I’m the number six guy on the sci-fi list — you’ve got your five books and I’m number six.” Martin signed his book: “To number six — keep trying.”
A couple months later he hit number one.
Shaan: That’s a great story.
Sam: He’s the Larry Bird of sci-fi. From French Lick, Indiana. Do you know how insane Larry Bird was? He would literally drink beers on the bus to the game. People used to smoke cigarettes at halftime of those games. Now LeBron James sleeps in a hyperbaric chamber. But the guy who was basically the LeBron James of his time was downing Bud Lights after games, super skinny and pale, worst haircut, shortest shorts, best mustache — he kind of looked like a human version of Big Bird. And he just killed it. Considered top five of all time.
Shaan: He gives the weirdos hope.
Sam: Hugh Howey — great story. He’s got 750,000 ratings on Goodreads. If you’re in the hundreds of thousands of ratings with over a 4-star review, you’re among the best. He has a 4.15 out of 5 for almost a million reviews. Amazing. It all started with a standalone short story at the beginning — basically a prototype. He treated it like an entrepreneur would, not like an author would. The blue-collar version of sci-fi.
James Clear’s Habits App and the Andrew Wilkinson Playbook [01:10:00]
Shaan: Oh wait — James Clear just launched an app yesterday, which I think was the stimulus for this whole thing. Did you see Andrew Wilkinson put out this tweet? He said, “We partner with James Clear — Tiny owns 40%, James owns 60% — we made this app.”
Sam: I actually didn’t look at the app. It’s a productivity app or habit tracking app?
Shaan: Yeah. What if it was just something completely different — like a social media app, a photo-sharing app? Just some stupid game. Like they recreated Snake from Nokia.
Sam: That’s so funny. Okay, let’s talk about this. Great idea to release a habits app — you want an app to be habit-forming. That’s like literally what only successful apps are. Creating a habits app made by James Clear — there are lots of habits apps, but they’re not made by James Clear. No-brainer idea.
Shaan: I think it’s a genius idea by him. And maybe doubly genius by Andrew to pull this off. Andrew has now done this with Huberman too — he launched the yerba mate drink with Huberman, which is also a genius idea.
What Andrew is doing now is the new playbook of what Chernin did. Remember Chernin’s content-to-commerce playbook? They did it with Barstool, they did it with a bunch of media publications. That was a great model and it played out over the last ten years.
I think what Andrew is doing now is going to play out over the next ten years. He’s partnering with these experts and authorities and saying, “Look, I already have Metalab that can do the design and engineering. I have a portfolio of businesses. I’ve made a billion dollars doing this. 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.” It’s such a good model. And it’s fun for him — he gets to hang out with people he likes and respects. He’s got a cool cocktail party story: “Oh yeah, we built the James Clear app, we did the Huberman drink…”
Sam: I’m really happy for it. But my prediction is 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 significantly cooler.
Shaan: Why do you think it’s not going to make money?
Sam: I think his other stuff just does so much better. If I had to guess, you can do hundreds of millions on meditation apps, but maybe only $30 to $40 million ARR on a habit app. And Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that make many tens of millions a year in profit. Each one individually doesn’t make crazy money, but if you add them all up…
Shaan: But if you add up what he’s going to do with Huberman, with James Clear, in the next five years — those are going to add up to be much bigger. The Huberman drink is a brilliant idea. The James Clear app is brilliant. He’s getting the right type of people.
You don’t necessarily want the A-list celebrity because for every George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds who has a hit, there are tons where it doesn’t work — they’re too busy, it’s not a fit, they don’t have a direct relationship with their audience because they’re in Hollywood. They’re not directly channeling through social media.
The people Andrew is finding are like: this is meaningful to them, it’s a perfect fit with what they do, they have a direct relationship with their audience, and their audience doesn’t just like them — their audience has deep trust in them. He’s picking the right influencers. I would bet he’s going to make hundreds of millions off these plays. Add up three to five of them — that’s a $300 million prize.
Sam: We’ll have to have him on and ask him about it.
Shaan: He’s like a spider — he has his tentacles all over the place. I see this and I’m like, “How the hell did you weasel your way into that?” He knows everyone. I don’t know how he gets his fingers on all these things.
Sam: He plays dumb with me all the time. I’ll be like, “Hey, have you heard of this guy Andrew Huberman? I’ve been loving his podcast.” And Wilkinson would be like, “Yeah, I think it’s a nice podcast.” Then weeks later: “Yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company 18 months ago.”
Shaan: He is a super 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.” Or “Charlie Munger’s my hero” — years later he’s having dinner with Charlie Munger and getting offered XYZ. When he puts his mind to meeting someone, he is able to make it happen. And he does it in a way that’s mutually beneficial. It’s not begging for time or attention in a way that’s not additive to the other person.
Sam: He also turns a weird networking opportunity into a real business. Usually when I meet people I’m like, “That was nice to meet you, I’ll see you never again.” High five. That’s where my brain stops.
Shaan: That’s exactly how I am. It starts and ends right there. And Andrew somehow makes it into money. He told one story on the pod where he was like, “I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert — I met Dan Gilbert, and then he had this challenge with a product, and I have a design agency, so we just made him a website for free.” He used that as his currency — “Hey, I think you’re awesome, we did this thing, isn’t this awesome?” He uses it to open the door. He puts in the work. He’d be like, “Oh, whenever you’re free I’ll fly there — I’ll make the effort to come.”
Sam: The takeaway is: to have an agency, or a sick house. “Oh, you’re in town? Come stay in my home.” And then you know — they’re just absolutely indebted to you.
Shaan: It’s actually kind of a good tactic.
Chris Sacca’s Truckee Networking Strategy [01:23:00]
Sam: Chris Sacca said he had this house in Truckee, and he would — I know this sounds weird — he would lure these interesting people to come out. He’d get these guys to come up, become friends with them. “Come hang out in Truckee.”
He has this great line. He said when he lived in San Francisco he was constantly getting meeting requests and event invitations — a good problem to have, but 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’d figure out who he actually wanted to spend time with and then proactively plan it out. Travis Kalanick came for the weekend and stayed with him. He said, “We’re not going to just get coffee — we’re going to hang out for a weekend. For every 50 coffee meetings you do, one weekend is just so much more powerful.” You hang out, you spend time together, you meet my family, you chill in the hot tub, you brainstorm in the morning, and then that evening a new idea comes. He was 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 by the end of it they were kind of bonded. That’s how he did his Instagram investment too.
Sam: 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.
Shaan: Can I interest you in Walnut Creek? We’ll go to Safeway and come back.
Sam: I got marble countertops.
Shaan: All right, is that the pod?
Sam: That’s the pod.